As the Bush administration built the world's largest – and shoddiest -- embassy in Baghdad, our own mother ship, mission control center for the region, and modern ziggurat, so now, the Obama administration is about to do the same (at approximately the same startling cost) in Islamabad, Pakistan, as a monstrous mission control center for the Af/Pak theater of operations.
Tom Dispatch carries a report regarding our base-building operations in Afghanistan.
While the United States officially insists that it is not setting up permanent bases in Afghanistan, the scale and permanency of the construction underway at Bagram seems to suggest, at the least, a very long stay.[...]
Nowhere has the building boom been more apparent than Bagram Air Base, a key military site used by the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. In its American incarnation, the base has significantly expanded from its old Soviet days and, in just the last two years, the population of the more than 5,000 acre compound has doubled to 20,000 troops, in addition to thousands of coalition forces and civilian contractors. To keep up with its exponential growth rate, more than $200 million in construction projects are planned or in-progress at this moment on just the Air Force section of the base.
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In the near future [...] "the military is planning to build a $30 million passenger terminal and adjacent cargo facility to handle the flow of troops.
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The base's population will also increase in the near future, thanks to [...]the MILCON Bagram Theatre Internment Facility (TIF) currently being built at a cost of $60 million by a team of more than 1,000 Filipinos, Indians, Sri Lankans, and Afghans. When completed, it will consist of 19 buildings and 16 guard towers designed to hold more than 1,000 detainees on the sprawling base.
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In March, according to Pentagon documents, Contrack was awarded a $23 million contract for "the design and construction of [an] Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance ramp, Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan."
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It seems that no one outside the Pentagon knows just exactly how many U.S. camps, forward operating bases, combat outposts, patrol bases and other fortified sites the U.S. military is currently using or constructing in Afghanistan.
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In Helmand, as well as Farah, Kandahar, and Nimruz provinces, between June and September the Marine Expeditionary Brigade-Afghanistan alone established four new forward operating bases, "10 combat outposts, six patrol bases, and four ancillary operating positions, helicopter landing zones and an expeditionary airfield."
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In March, the Army reported that, in accordance with President Obama's spring surge of troops, Regional Command East in Afghanistan had tasked Fluor to expand four existing forward operating bases and, if need be, build another eight new ones.
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The company is "simultaneously constructing and managing the expansion of eight Forward Operating Bases[...] in Southern Afghanistan.
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Another key indicator can be found in a Pentagon contract awarded in late September to SOS International, Ltd., a privately owned "operations support company" that provides everything from "cultural advisory services" to "intelligence and counterintelligence analysis and training" to numerous federal agencies. That contract, primarily for linguistic services in support of military operations in Afghanistan, has an estimated completion date of September 2014.
Hey, wait. I thought we were to begin pulling out troops in 2011.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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