This one map shows how difficult it is to wage war in Afghanistan. It comes from a NYT piece that discusses the challenges of moving much of the stuff out of Iraq and a fair amount of it to Afghanistan. Two decisions are driving this--the implementation of the Status of Forces Agreement [SOFA] with Iraq and the Obama surge into Afghanistan. The US has to halve its commitment to Iraq as there are about 100k troops there now, and they need to get down to 50k, while Obama is reinforcing the US commitment to Afghanistan with an additional thirty thousand troops, in addition to reinforcements Bush and then Obama already sent.
Oy! And it gets worse. That is, the US military feels very committed to the US Congress not to waste anything. One of the key memories I have of my time on the Joint Staff was a base closing in Bosnia. We, the JS folks, wanted to leave equipment in place to encourage the Bosnian militaries (one for each ethnic group, more or less at the time) to work together as a single army. The US Army folks wanted to rip pretty much everything out of the ground except the concrete and bring back home, as part of their obligation not to waste taxpayer dollars. This was just one base, as US forces reduced from perhaps five digits to four. But moving from surge levels of 150,000 to 50,000 troops in Iraq requires a great deal more effort, taking apart that which was built up over six years or so. This effort would be challenging enough without the additional requirement of moving some of it to Afghanistan. The good news is that the roads of Iraq are much safer now than they were a couple of years ago. The bad news is that the roads of Afghanistan are much more dangerous.
I just wanted to highlight this story to indicate the complex processes imposed by politicians whose timelines are more focused on things like elections.
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