by Nick Turse
Some go by names steeped in military tradition like Leatherneck and
Geronimo. Many sound fake-tough, like
Ramrod,
Lightning, Cobra, and
Wolverine. Some display a local flavor, like
Orgun-E,
Howz-e-Madad, and Kunduz. All, however, have one thing in common: they
are U.S. and allied forward operating bases, also known as FOBs. They
are part of a
base-building surge that
has left the countryside of Afghanistan dotted with military posts,
themselves expanding all the time, despite the drawdown of forces
promised by President Obama beginning in July 2011.
The U.S. military does not count the exact number of FOBs it has
built in Afghanistan, but forward operating bases and other facilities
of similar or smaller size make up the bulk of U.S. outposts there. Of
the hundreds of U.S. bases in the country, according to Gary Younger, a
U.S. public affairs officer with the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF), 77% house units of battalion size (approximately 500 to
1,000 troops) or smaller; 20% are occupied by units smaller than a
Brigade Combat Team (about 3,000 troops); and 3% are huge bases,
occupied by units larger than a Brigade Combat Team, that generally
boast large-scale military command-and-control capabilities and all the
amenities of
Anytown, USA. Younger tells TomDispatch that ISAF does not centrally
track its base construction and up-grading work, nor the money spent on
such projects.
However, Major General Kenneth S. Dowd -- the Director of Logistics
for U.S. Central Command for three years before leaving the post in June
-- offered this partial account of the ongoing Afghan base build-up in
the September/October issue of Army Sustainment, the official logistics journal of the Army:
“Military
construction projects scheduled for completion over the next 12 months
will deliver 4 new runways, ramp space for 8 C−17 transports, and
parking for 50 helicopters and 24 close air support and 26 intelligence
surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft. This represents roughly
one-third of the airfield paving projects currently funded in the
Afghanistan theater of operations. Additional minor construction plans
called for the construction of over 12 new FOBs and expansion of 18
existing FOBs.”
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Base Desires in Afghanistan
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American agenda, whether Washington likes it or not. It’s worth noting
that, despite this website's minimal resources, TomDispatch has worked
hard, month after month, to dig into the ignored realities of our second
Afghan War. Among many other subjects, thanks to reporter Anand Gopal,
TD had the first major piece anywhere on
American Special Operations forces and CIA night raids (and the secret
prisons that go with them). Only recently it featured a first-person account by Ann Jones, unlike any other you’ll read, about life on a U.S. forward operating base near the Pakistani border. It has followed the
CIA’s drone war in the Pakistani borderlands from its early days, and
today Nick Turse continues to explore the full scope of the American base-building surge in
Afghanistan. Your support helps make this sort of work possible. By
the way, the offer for Turse's book in return for a contribution still
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As we know from a single April 19, 2003 New York Times piece,
the Pentagon arrived in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq preparing for a long
stay. They already had at least four mega-military bases on the drawing
boards as they entered the country (all subsequently built).
“Enduring camps” they decided to call them, rather than the dicier
“permanent bases.” In the end, hundreds of bases were constructed in
Iraq, from the tiniest combat outposts to monster installations, to the
tune of untold billions of dollars. In the end, hundreds are now being
left behind to be stripped, looted, or occupied by the Iraqi military.
From Baghdad, the British Guardian’s correspondent Martin Chulov recently reported that part of the price Nouri al-Maliki seems to have negotiated (in Tehran,
not Washington) to retain his prime ministership may involve not
letting the Pentagon keep even a single monster base in Iraq after
2011. This was evidently demanded by former U.S. nemesis, rebel cleric, and now “kingmaker” Muqtada al-Sadr, whose movement controls more than 10% of the votes in Iraq’s new parliament. That can’t make the Pentagon, or the U.S. high command, happy -- and the Obama administration is already kicking.
However this ends for Washington, barely based or baseless in Iraq,
surely this was not the way it was supposed to happen, not when it was
still “mission accomplished” time and it seemed so self-evident that
American military power, obviously unchallengeable, would be deeply
entrenched on either side of Iran until “regime change” occurred there.
If you want a measure of how far the U.S. has “fallen” in Iraq, it
now has only 21 “burn pits” there -- places at U.S. bases where waste of
all sorts is incinerated, regularly spewing smoke filled with toxic
emissions into the air to the detriment of American soldiers (and
undoubtedly local Iraqis as well). On the other hand, according to a
Government Accountability Office report, there are now 221 such pits in
Afghanistan and “more coming.” Put another way, even as America’s
baseworld in Iraq dwindles, there seems to be no learning curve in
Washington. As Nick Turse suggests in his most recent TomDispatch
report, in Afghanistan we seem to be heading down the Iraq path on bases
with a special ardor. More than nine years after our “successful”
invasion, billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are still flowing into
constructing and upgrading the massive base structure in that country --
and yet, there are never enough of them.
In a recent Wall Street Journal piece on
an unexpected surge of Taliban successes in northern Afghanistan, Army
Colonel Bill Burleson, commander of the 10th Mountain Division, among
the relatively modest U.S. forces in the northern part of that country,
is quoted as saying somewhat desperately of Taliban gains in the region:
“In order to deny that terrain to the enemy you’d have to have people
all over Afghanistan in combat outposts.” Good point, Colonel. Why
stop now? Tom
Digging in for the Long Haul in Afghanistan:
How Permanent Are America’s Afghan Bases?
by Nick Turse
If Dowd offered the barest sketch of some of the projects planned or
underway, a TomDispatch analysis of little-noticed U.S. government
records and publications, including U.S. Army and Army Corps of
Engineers contracting documents and construction-bid solicitations
issued over the last five months, fills in the picture. The documents
reveal plans for large-scale, expensive Afghan base expansions of every
sort and a military that is expecting to pursue its building boom
without letup well into the future. These facts-on-the-ground indicate
that, whatever timelines for phased withdrawal may be issued in
Washington, the U.S. military is focused on building up, not drawing
down, in Afghanistan.
Jobs on FOBs
A typical forward operating base set to undergo expansion is FOB
Salerno, a post located near the Afghan city of Khost, not far from the
Pakistani border. According to documents from the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers, plans are in the works for an expansion of that base’s fuel
facilities. Estimated to cost $10 million to $25 million, these upgrades
will increase fuel storage capacity to one million gallons to enhance
land and air operations, and may not be completed for a year and a half;
that is, until well into 2012.
In
June, work was completed on a new, nearly $12 million runway at Forward
Operating Base Shank, near the city of Puli Alam in Logar Province,
south of Kabul. The base was formerly accessible only by road and
helicopter, but its new 1.4-mile-long airstrip can now accommodate large
Lockheed C-130 Hercules and Boeing C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft,
enabling ever larger numbers of personnel to be deployed to the site.
Not surprisingly, government documents released in August show that
FOB Shank is also set for a major boost in troop housing. Already home
to approximately 4,500 military personnel, it will be adding a new
two-story barracks, constructed of containerized housing units known as
“relocatable buildings” or RLBs, to accommodate 1,100 more troops.
Support facilities, access roads, parking areas, new utilities, and
other infrastructure required to sustain the housing complex will also
be installed for an estimated $5 million to $10 million. In addition,
the Army Corps of Engineers just began seeking contractors to add
452,000 square feet of airfield parking space at the base. It’s meant
for Special Operations Forces’ helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. New
aircraft maintenance facilities and 80,000 square feet more of taxiways
will also be built at the cost of another $10 million to $25 million.
Documents reveal that this sort of expansion is now going on at a
remarkably rapid pace all over the country. For instance, major
expansions of infrastructure to support helicopter operations, including
increased apron space, taxiways, and tarmac for parking, servicing,
loading, and unloading are planned for facilities like FOB Tarin Kowt in
Uruzgan Province, FOB Dwyer, a Marine base in Helmand Province, and FOB
Sharana, a Paktika Province base near the Pakistani border, where the
Army also announced plans for the construction of an ammunition supply
facility, with storage space for one million pounds of munitions, and
related infrastructure.
In late August, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reported that construction was slated to begin on at least three $100 million base projects,
including FOB Dwyer, that were not “expected to be completed until the
latter half of 2011.” In addition to enhancing helicopter operations
infrastructure, plans were also announced for the construction of a new,
large-scale wastewater treatment facility at Dwyer, a project estimated
to cost another $10 million to $25 million and, like so much of what is
now being built by the U.S. military in the backlands of Afghanistan,
it is not expected to be completed and put fully into use until well
into the second half of 2011, if not later -- that is, after President
Obama’s theoretical due date for beginning to lessen the mission in that
country.
And whenever you stumble upon a document indicating that work of a
certain sort is taking place at one FOB, you can be sure that, sooner or
later, you will find similar work at other FOBs. In this case, for
example, FOB Frontenac in Kandahar Province and Tarin Kowt, north of
Kandahar, are, like Dwyer, slated to receive new wastewater plants.
Much of this work may sound mundane, but the scale of it isn’t.
Typical is another of the bases identified by Pincus, FOB Shindand in
western Afghanistan, which is to receive, among other things, new
security fencing, new guard towers, and new underground electrical
lines. And that’s just to begin the list of enhancements at Shindand,
including earthen berms for four 200,000-gallon “expeditionary fuel
bladders and a concrete pad suitable for parking and operating fourteen
R-11 refueling vehicles” -- tanker trucks with a 6,000-gallon capacity
-- as well as new passenger processing and cargo handling facilities (an
$18 million contract) and an expansion of helicopter facilities
(another $25 million to $50 million).
Multiply this, FOB by FOB, the length and breadth of Afghanistan, and you have a building program fit for a long war.
Permanent Bases?
This building boom has hardly been confined to FOBs. Construction
and expansion work at bases far larger than FOBs, including the
mega-bases at Bagram and Kandahar, is ongoing, often at a startling
pace. The Army, for example, has indicated it plans to build a 24,000
square-foot, $10-million command-and-control facility as well as a
“Joint Defense Operations Center” with supporting amenities -- from
water storage tanks to outdoor landscaping -- at Bagram Air Base. At
bustling Kandahar Air Field, the military has offered contracts for a
variety of upgrades, including a $28.5 million deal for the construction
of an outdoor shelter for fighter aircraft, as well as new operations
and maintenance facilities and more apron space, among a host of other
improvements.
In June, Noah Shachtman of Wired.com’s Danger Room reported
on the Army’s plans to expand its Special Operations headquarters at
Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan and cited documents indicating
that construction would include a “communications building, Tactical
Operations Center, training facility, medical aid station, Vehicle
Maintenance Facility... dining facility, laundry facility, and a kennel
to support working dogs.” A contract for that work, worth $30 million,
was awarded at the end of September.
Similarly, according to a recent article in the Marine Corps Times,
Camp Leatherneck, which expanded in late 2009 from a 660-acre facility
to 1,550 acres, or approximately 2.4 square miles, is slated to add
three new gyms to the one already there, as well as a chapel complex
with three separate buildings (one big enough to accommodate up to 200
people), a second mess hall (capable of serving 4,000 Marines at a
time), a new PX housed in a big-top tent, with 10,000 square feet of
sales space -- the current base facility only has 3,000 square feet --
and the installation of a $200 million runway that can accommodate C-5
cargo planes and 747 passenger jets.
Despite a pledge
from the Obama administration to begin its troop drawdowns next July,
this ongoing base-construction splurge, when put together with recent
signals from the White House, civilians at the Pentagon, and top
military commanders, including Afghan war chief General David Petraeus, suggests that the process may be drawn out over many years. During a recent interview
with ABC News Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent Martha Raddatz, for
instance, Petraeus affirmed the president’s July 2011 timeline, but
added a crucial caveat. “It will be a pace that is determined by
conditions,” he said.
Almost a decade into the Afghan War, he claimed, the U.S. military
had “finally gotten the inputs right in Afghanistan.” Raddatz then
asked if the “counterinsurgency clock” had just restarted -- if, that
is, it could be another nine or ten years to achieve success. “Yeah,”
replied Petraeus, hastening to add that American soldiers killed there
over the previous nine years had not simply died for nothing. “But it
is just at this point that we feel that we do have the organizations
that we learned in Iraq and from history are necessary for the conduct
that this kind of campaign.”
The building boom occurring on U.S. bases across Afghanistan and the
contracts for future construction being awarded at the moment seem to
confirm that, whatever the White House has in mind, the military is
operating on something closer to the Petraeus timeline. The new Special
Operations base at Mazar-e-Sharif, to take but one of many
examples, may not be completed and fully occupied for at least a year
and a half. Other construction contracts, not yet even awarded, are
expected to take a year or more to complete. And military timelines
suggest that, if the Pentagon gets its way, American troop levels may
not dip below the numbers present when Obama took office, approximately
36,000 troops, until 2016 or beyond.
At the moment, the American people are being offered one story about
how the American war in Afghanistan is to proceed, while in Afghanistan
their tax dollars are being invested in another trajectory entirely.
The question is: How permanent are U.S. bases in Afghanistan? And if
they are not meant to be used for a decade or more to come, why is the
Pentagon still building as if they were?
Recently, the Army sought bids from contractors willing to supply
power plants and supporting fuel systems at forward operating bases in
Afghanistan for up to five years. Power plants, fuel systems,
and the bases on which they are being built are facts on the ground.
Such facts carry a weight of their own, and offer a window into U.S.
designs in Afghanistan that may be at least as relevant as anything
Barack Obama or his aides have been saying about draw-downs, deadlines,
or future withdrawal plans.
If you want to ask hard questions about America’s Afghan War, start with those bases.
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. His latest book, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books), which brings together leading analysts from across the political spectrum, has
just been published. Turse is currently a fellow at Harvard
University’s Radcliffe Institute. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook. His website is NickTurse.com.
Copyright 2010 Nick Turse
