DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Afghanistan's base
bonanza By Nick Turse
Afghanistan may turn out to be one of the
great misbegotten "stimulus packages" of the
modern era, a construction boom in the middle of
nowhere with materials largely shipped in at
enormous expense to no lasting purpose whatsoever.
With the US military officially drawing down its
troops there, the Pentagon is now evidently
reversing the process and embarking on a major
deconstruction program. It's tearing up tarmacs,
shutting down outposts, and packing up some of its
smaller facilities. Next year, the number of
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)
coalition bases in the southwest of the country
alone is scheduled to plummet from 214 to 70,
according to the New York Times.
But
anyone who wanted to know just what the Pentagon
built in
Afghanistan and what it
is now tearing down won't have an easy time of it.
At the height of the American occupation
of Iraq, the United States had 505 bases there,
ranging from small outposts to mega-sized air
bases. Press estimates at the time, however,
always put the number at about 300. Only as US
troops prepared to leave the country was the
actual - startlingly large - total reported.
Today, as the US prepares for a long drawdown from
Afghanistan, the true number of US and coalition
bases in that country is similarly murky, with
official sources offering conflicting and
imprecise figures. Still, the available numbers
for what the Pentagon built since 2001 are nothing
short of staggering.
Despite years of talk
about American withdrawal, there has in fact been
a long-term building boom during which the number
of bases steadily expanded. In early 2010, the
US-led International Security Assistance Force
(ISAF) claimed that it had nearly 400 Afghan
bases. Early this year, that number had grown to
450. Today, a military spokesperson tells
TomDispatch, the total tops out at around 550.
And that may only be the tip of the
iceberg.
When you add in ISAF checkpoints
- those small baselets used to secure roads and
villages - to the already bloated number of
mega-bases, forward operating bases, combat
outposts, and patrol bases, the number jumps to
750. Count all foreign military installations of
every type, including logistical, administrative,
and support facilities, and the official count
offered by ISAF Joint Command reaches a whopping
1,500 sites. Differing methods of counting
probably explain at least some of this phenomenal
rise over the course of this year. Still, the new
figures suggest one conclusion that should
startle: no matter how you tally them, Afghan
bases garrisoned by US-led forces far exceed the
505 American bases in Iraq at the height of that
war.
Bases of confusion There is
much confusion surrounding the number of ISAF
bases in Afghanistan. Recently, the Associated
Press reported that as of October 2011, according
to spokesman Lieutenant Colonel David Olson, NATO
was operating as many as 800 bases in Afghanistan,
but has since closed 202 of them and transferred
another 282 to Afghan control. As a result, the AP
claims that NATO is now operating only about 400
bases, not the 550 to 1,500 bases reported to me
by ISAF.
This muddled basing picture and a
seeming failure by the US and its international
partners to keep an accurate count of their bases
in the country has been a persistent feature of
the Afghan conflict. Some of the discrepancies may
result from terminology or from the confusion that
can result from communications in any
international coalition. ISAF, NATO, and the US
military all seem to keep different counts.
Mainly, however, the incongruities appear to stem
from fundamental issues of record-keeping - of, in
particular, a lack of interest in chronicling just
how extensively Afghanistan has been garrisoned.
In January 2010, for example, Colonel
Wayne Shanks, an ISAF spokesman, told me that
there were nearly 400 US and coalition bases in
Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating
bases, and combat outposts. He assured me that he
only expected that number to increase by 12 or a
few more over the course of that year.
In
September 2010, I contacted ISAF's Joint Command
Public Affairs Office to follow up. To my
surprise, I was told that "there are approximately
350 forward operating bases with two major
military installations, Bagram and Kandahar
airfields." Perplexed by the apparent loss of 50
bases instead of a gain of 12, I contacted Gary
Younger, a public affairs officer with the
International Security Assistance Force. "There
are less than 10 NATO bases in Afghanistan," he
wrote in an October 2010 email. "There are over
250 US bases in Afghanistan."
By then, it
seemed, ISAF had lost up to 150 bases and I was
thoroughly confused. When I contacted the military
to sort out the discrepancies and listed the
numbers I had been given - from Shanks's 400 base
tally to the count of around 250 by Younger - I
was handed off again and again until I ended up
with Sergeant First Class Eric Brown at ISAF Joint
Command's Public Affairs Office. "The number of
bases in Afghanistan is roughly 411," Brown wrote
in a November 2010 email, "which is a figure
comprised of large base[s], all the way down to
the Combat Out Post-level."
If the numbers
supplied by Olson to the Associated Press are to
be believed, then between November 2010 and
October 2011, the number of foreign military bases
in Afghanistan nearly doubled, from 411 to about
800. Then, if official figures are again accurate,
those numbers precipitously dropped by nearly 350
in just four months.
In February of this
year, Lieutenant Lauren Rago of ISAF public
affairs told me that there were only 451 ISAF
bases in Afghanistan. In July, the ISAF Joint
Command Press Desk informed me that the number of
bases was now 550, 750, or 1,500, depending on
what facilities you chose to count, while NATO's
Olson and the Associated Press put the number back
down at the January 2010 figure of around 400.
TomDispatch did not receive a response to a
request for further clarification from a spokesman
for US Forces-Afghanistan before this article went
to press.
Reconciling the numbers may
never be possible or particularly edifying.
Whatever the true current count of bases, it seems
beyond question that the number has far exceeded
the level reached in Iraq at the height of the
conflict in that country. And while the sheer
quantity of ISAF bases in Afghanistan may be
shrinking, don't think deconstruction is all
that's going on. There is still plenty of building
underway.
The continuing base
build-up In 2011, it was hardly more than
an empty lot: a few large metal shipping
containers sitting on a bed of gravel inside a
razor-wire-topped fence at Kandahar Air Field, the
massive American base in southern Afghanistan.
When I asked about it this spring, the military
was tight-lipped, refusing to discuss plans for
the facility. But construction is ongoing and
sometime next year, as I've previously reported,
that once-vacant lot is slated to be the site of a
two-story concrete intelligence facility for
America's drone war. It will boast almost 7,000
square feet of offices, briefing and conference
rooms, and a large "processing, exploitation, and
dissemination" operations center.
The
hush-hush, high-tech, super-secure facility under
construction is just one of many building projects
the US military currently has planned or underway
there. While some US bases are indeed closing down
or being transferred to the Afghan government, and
there's talk of combat operations slowing, as well
as a plan for the withdrawal of American combat
forces, the US military is still preparing for a
much longer haul at mega-bases like Kandahar and
Bagram, a gigantic air base about 40 miles (64.3
kilometers) north of Kabul. "Bagram is going
through a significant transition during the next
year to two years," Air Force Lieutenant Colonel
Daniel Gerdes of the US Army Corps of Engineers'
Bagram Office told Freedom Builder, a Corps of
Engineers publication, last year. "We're
transitioning ... into a long-term, five-year,
10-year vision for the base."
According to
contract solicitation documents released earlier
this year and examined by TomDispatch, plans are
in the works for a Special Operations Forces'
Joint Operations Center at Kandahar Air Field. The
3,000-square-meter facility - slated to include
offices for commanders, conference rooms, training
areas, and a secure communications room - will
serve as the hub for future special ops missions
in southern and western Afghanistan, assumedly
after the last US "combat troops" leave the
country at the end of 2014.
Thus far in
2012, no fewer than eight contracts have been
awarded for the construction of facilities ranging
from a command and control center and a dining
hall to barracks and a detention center at either
Kandahar or Bagram. Just one of these contracts
covered seven separate Air Force projects at
Bagram that are slated to be completed in 2013,
including the construction of a new headquarters
facility, a control room, and a maintenance
facility for fighter aircraft.
Improvements and expansions are planned
for other bases as well. Documents examined by
TomDispatch shed light on a $10 to $25 million
construction project at Camp Marmal near
Mazar-e-Sharif in Balkh Province on the Uzbekistan
and Tajikistan borders. Designated as a logistics
hub for the north of the country, the base will
see a significant expansion of its infrastructure
including an increase in fuel storage capacity,
new roads, an upgraded water distribution system,
and close to 150 acres (60.7 hectares) of space
for stowing equipment and other cargo. According
to David Lakin, a spokesman for US
Forces-Afghanistan, a contract for work on the
base will be awarded by the end of the year with
an expected completion date in the summer of 2013.
Base world Even before the new
figures on basing in Afghanistan were available,
it was known that the US military maintained a
global inventory of more than 1,000 foreign bases.
(By some counts, around 1,200 or more.) It's
possible that no one knows for sure. Numbers are
increasing rapidly in Africa and Latin America
and, as is clear from the muddled situation in
Afghanistan, the US military has been known to
lose count of its facilities.
Of those 505
US bases in Iraq, some today have been stripped
clean by Iraqis, others have become ghost towns.
One former prison base - Camp Bucca - became a
hotel, and another former American post is now a
base for some members of an Iranian "terrorist"
group. It wasn't supposed to end this way. But
while a token number of US troops and a highly
militarized State Department contingent remain in
Baghdad, the Iraqi government thwarted American
dreams of keeping long-term garrisons in the
center of the Middle East's oil heartlands.
Clearly, US planners are having similar
dreams about the long-term garrisoning of
Afghanistan. Whether the fate of those Afghan
bases will be similar to Iraq's remains unknown,
but with as many as 550 of them still there - and
up to 1,500 installations when you count assorted
ammunition storage facilities, barracks, equipment
depots, checkpoints, and training centers - it's
clear that the US military and its partners are
continuing to build with an eye to an enduring
military presence.
Whatever the outcome,
vestiges of the current base-building boom will
endure and become part of America's Afghan legacy.
What that will ultimately mean in terms of blood,
treasure, and possibly blowback remains to be
seen.
Nick Turse is the
associate editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow
at the Nation Institute. An award-winning
journalist, his work has appeared in the Los
Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at
TomDispatch. He is the author/editor of several
books, including the recently published
Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone
Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Tom Engelhardt).
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