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-- it ignored warnings about protection racket payments and the effects on its operations.
In addition, Afghanistan's location and environment present enormous challenges. The country is landlocked, the terrain unforgiving, including desert sandstorms in summer, floods in spring, impassible mud at times, and mountain roads leaving no room for error. Summer heat reaches 120 degrees. Winters are usually snowy and frigid cold. Avalanches often block the only tunnel linking Kabul to the north. Routes can stay closed for days. Poor infrastructure, including few paved roads, creates more hazards, exacerbated by easily planted and concealed explosives along supply routes as well as regular insurgent attacks - "the harshest logistics environment on earth," according to one US official on the ground.
According to General Duncan McNabb, head of US Transportation Command, "....what I worry (most) about at night (is) our supply chain....always under attack," compounded by all the above obstacles and limited processing capacity at distribution hubs. Iraq, by comparison, is easy with its "decent infrastructure," manageable terrain, and access to the Persian Gulf.
Subcommittee chairman Rep. John F. Tierney (D. MA) said the Pentagon "would be well served to take a hard look at this report and initiate prompt remedial action," affecting "a good portion of a $2.16 billion contract's resources into a corruptive (fog of war) environment," lacking oversight to fund warlords and insurgents, what David Petraeus now confronts as commander, a man New York Daily News writer James Gordon Meek said (on June 24) the Taliban "endorses," calling him a wimp after his fainting spell before Congress, no smarter than McChrystal, his firing a "divine victory," according to its spokesman, in a war no US president or general can win.
A Final Comment
After nearly nine futile years, Afghanistan looks less winnable than ever, one of many signs the rising NATO death and injury toll, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman downplaying it saying:
"We have more forces in Afghanistan, ISAF and US forces, than at any other time. The level of activity is high, so as we conduct our operations and engage with the enemy, the opportunities for hostile contact are going to go up."
In fact, escalation strategy was stability. Instead, spiraling violence intensifies, what Petraeus won't likely curb better than McChrystal, sacked not for deriding his superiors, for his leadership, growing popular resistance, and for losing an unwinnable war, one more Afghan deaths can't win.
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