USA TODAY: Moving the mountain of U.S. military gear out of Afghanistan after more than a decade of war will cost billions of dollars and prove far more difficult than last year’s withdrawal from Iraq, the Pentagon’s No. 2 official said Tuesday…
The pace of withdrawal is picking up: About 20,000 U.S. servicemembers and their gear will be coming home by October. There are about 88,000 American servicemembers there now. All U.S. combat forces are to leave by 2014. Meanwhile, the main overland supply route through neighboring Pakistan reopened last week. It had been closed since November after U.S. forces mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani troops on the border.
“It’s a very austere logistics environment to transport anything,” [Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter] said. “Combat is still going on. Terrible terrain. Narrow roads. Long way to a seaport. Afghanistan is orders of magnitude more challenging for …(withdrawal) than was Iraq.” … (more)
EDITOR: We initially succeeded in kicking out Al Qaeda by bribing the tribal chiefs. Then “W” decided to turn Afghanistan into a modern day democracy… mission creep! What were we thinking of when we introduced massive amounts of our army? Didn’t the White House have access to a topographical map? What do we say to the young men who have lost limbs and suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder? And how about those who never came back?
