After 11-plus years of war in Afghanistan, the US Army faces a difficult task in getting more than 600,000 pieces of equipment out of a landlocked country with bad roads, The New York Times reported on Friday.
At the same time, the newspaper said the US hopes to move 60 percent of its accumulated military hardware worth about $28 billion through the once-blocked Pakistani land routes, as American troops begin their withdrawal from Afghanistan.
US President Barack Obama ordered that the US Afghan contingent is to be cut by half over the next year and troops can be flown home, but large pieces of equipment must go by sea, it said. “Afghanistan is not Iraq, and it’s harder,” Lt Gen Raymond Mason, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for logistics, was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
“Number 1, it’s landlocked. And we have no Kuwait. We have no ‘catcher’s mitt,’ no shock-absorber. In Iraq, on the last day, you could still send stuff across the border into Kuwait, and absorb it there.” General Mason said re-establishing with certainty a pair of ground crossings into Pakistan would allow a larger volume of equipment to make a faster exit from Afghanistan.
In the US arsenal in Afghanistan are systems that always present challenges to international shipping, including MRAP mine-resistant troop transports and Stryker infantry fighting vehicles, each built with tons of armour, and heavy tractor-trailers and tankers, the dispatch said.