Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases

Press TV
January 3, 2011

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government has strongly rejected the notion of establishing permanent US military bases in Afghanistan.

Chief presidential spokesman Waheed Omar said during a press conference in Kabul on Monday that the issue has never been discussed in meetings between officials of the two countries.

“We have announced earlier that we are in touch with United States on the issue of long-term strategic partnership but not on the possible establishment of a permanent US base in Afghanistan,” he said.

The remarks come after a senior congressman called for permanent US military bases in the war-ravaged country.

Senator Lindsay Graham said on Sunday that American air bases in the war-torn country would benefit the US and its Western allies, if maintained by the US military.

“We have had air bases all over the world and a couple of air bases in Afghanistan would allow the Afghan security forces an edge against the Taliban in perpetuity,” Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.

“It would be a signal to Pakistan that the Taliban are never going to come back. In Afghanistan they could change their behavior. It would be a signal to the whole region that Afghanistan is going to be a different place.”

About 150,000 NATO troops are currently fighting in Afghanistan with plans to stay in the country beyond 2014.

This is while US President Barack Obama had pledged a major drawdown from Afghanistan by July 2011. Experts have described the new transition dates as a devastating truth for Americans. …

www.presstv.ir/detail/158511.html

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Associated Press
January 2, 2011

A leading GOP lawmaker on U.S. military policy says he wants American officials to consider establishing permanent military bases in Afghanistan.

Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina says that having a few U.S. air bases in Afghanistan would be a benefit to the region and would give Afghan security forces an edge against the Taliban.

Graham tells NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he wants to see the U.S. have “an enduring relationship” with Afghanistan to ensure that it never falls back into the hands of terrorists.

President Barack Obama plans to begin drawing down American forces in Afghanistan next year and hand over security to Afghan forces in 2014.

Obama has talked about an enduring presence in Afghanistan but not exactly what that would entail. …

www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iFZIGlR7kMiiDL7-4oUyJcofOoNg?docId=cea6b988bdbd46b9b0a7e03a8cc3d4a5

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ABC Online
November 7, 2010

Defence Minister Stephen Smith discusses Australia’s role in Afghanistan and the strengthening of military ties with the US.

STEPHEN SMITH: … the NATO ISAF summit in Lisbon later this month will be dealing very directly with the transition in Afghanistan.

So we’re obviously part of the 47 country international security assistance force. Everyone has agreed we have got to transition to Afghanistan security competence and responsibility. And so Lisbon is a very important both NATO and ISAF summit to start mapping out the transition to Afghan responsibility.

We continue to be of the view that we can do our bit, our job in Oruzgan on the next two to four years training the Afghan National Army and police in Oruzgan province. …

we’ll be saying to the rest of the international community that we are committed to transitioning to Afghan-led security in Afghanistan, that whilst we can’t leave tomorrow, we can’t be there forever.

So we have to train the Afghan National Army, the Afghan national police and the local police forces to be in a position to manage security arrangements themselves.

And this is the strategy and the approach that we have outlined.

BARRIE CASSIDY: Not there forever but you will be there for at least 10 years?

STEPHEN SMITH: Well our current training mission we see being done in two to four years which is consistent with the timetable set by the Afghanistan conference in Kabul earlier this year.

But after that we do envisage the capacity for us to be there in some oversight or embed capacity. Time will tell what the detail and circumstances of that are. …

the United States is conducting what’s called a force posture review, looking at how it positions its forces throughout the world.

It has bases in other countries – Japan for example. It has a presence in the Republic of Korea. And in Australia, of course, we have joint facilities.

So in the course of the United States considering its force posture review, the possibility arises that the United States could utilise more Australia. And that’s very high on the agenda for AUSMIN today. …

… the United States is a significant power. It conducts strategic reviews from time to time as we do. And so you look to the future.

But it’s also making changes to the disposition of its forces throughout the Asia-Pacific, reducing, for example, the number of forces it has in Japan. So it’s looking at those matters.

But we welcome it very much because we want to see the United States engaged in the Asia-Pacific. That’s very important to Australia. It’s very important to stability in our region. We’ve had that stability since the end of World War II, largely as a result of United States presence.

So an enhanced engagement is something we very strongly support, whether that’s, for example, through the United States joining an expanded East Asia Summit or the United States taking part, as Australia did, in the ASEAN Plus defence ministers’ meeting.

All of these things are unambiguously good things for our region and also for Australia.

It’s certainly in our national interest to be very positively disposed to enhancing our engagement in that military and defence cooperation sense.

View a video of this interview or read the transcript here:
www.abc.net.au/news/video/2010/11/07/3059281.htm

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tampabay.com
By William R. Levesque
November 27, 2009

With President Barack Obama poised to ramp up troop levels in Afghanistan, U.S. Central Command planners are in the midst of the military’s biggest logistical challenge since the Vietnam War.

How do you marshal billions of dollars in equipment to escalate one war in Afghanistan while scaling back another in Iraq? …

In a wide-ranging interview with the St. Petersburg Times this week, [Army Maj. Gen.] Dowd said landlocked Afghanistan presents greater difficulties than Iraq with its fewer routes of supply.

CentCom is now conducting an assessment of air strips in Afghanistan, and Dowd said engineers will have to expand them in order to resupply larger numbers of troops by air.

“I’m a little concerned about” airfield capacity, Dowd said. “We’ve got to expand and make it better.” …

Obama is expected to announce next week an escalation of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan that will send as many as 30,000 additional troops on top of the 68,000 already there.

Much of the U.S. equipment in Iraq will never return to the states.

Often, it isn’t cost-efficient to do so, planners say.

Much of it will be sold to Iraqi security forces, Dowd said. Other gear not sent to Afghanistan after refurbishment in Kuwait might be placed in storage somewhere in CentCom’s area of responsibility, which includes 20 nations in the region. …

www.tampabay.com/news/military/war/centcom-planners-study-massive-move-of-equipment-to-afghanistan/1054693

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Americans Seek Up to 7,000 Extra NATO Troops for Ramp-Up in Afghanistan

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com)
By Peter Spiegel and Stephen Fidler
November 23, 2009

The Obama administration is in advanced talks with its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies for a coordinated rollout of a new Afghan war strategy, which U.S. officials hope will include a commitment by European allies to send several thousand additional troops.

U.S. and European estimates of the new troops they may get from NATO allies vary from 3,000 to 7,000. Those would complement the additional U.S. forces Mr. Obama is considering; those options range from 10,000 to 40,000, but U.S. officials have said a combination of combat troops and training forces totaling 35,000 has gained the most momentum. …

According to people briefed on U.S. plans, the Obama administration is targeting six European allies to contribute battalion-sized units, generally about 500 to 1,000 troops. Officials say they are most hopeful they can get commitments from Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Italy, which has 2,800 troops in Afghanistan, has signaled it would be willing to keep deployed the 400 added soldiers it sent as part of stepped-up security surrounding the August Afghan elections. An Italian official declined to comment. U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown likewise has signaled intention to send 500 more troops, and Turkey has recently announced it is doubling its current complement from 800 to 1,600.

Both Germany and the United Kingdom could find it politically difficult to commit more troops — at least in the coming weeks. …

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125875420517357953.html

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The Wall Street Journal
Alan Cullison
November 17, 2009

Pentagon Pledges Improved Transparency and Plans Open Hearings in a Move to ‘Increase Credibility’

Officials unveiled a new $60 million detention facility at the main U.S. air base in Afghanistan and promised greater transparency at a prison where Afghans have long suspected hundreds of their countrymen are being held for dubious reasons.

The new prison and the pledge to open the inmate review process come as the Department of Defense worries that abuses and militant recruiting within Afghan prisons are helping strengthen the Taliban. A Pentagon review earlier this year called for a broad overhaul of the Afghan penal system, as well as of the U.S.’s prison at Bagram Air Base.

The old Bagram prison is housed in a Soviet-era machinery hangar. Critics of the old prison, where two inmates died after being interrogated in 2002, have referred to it as “Obama’s Gitmo.” …

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125832165575649413.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

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PRESS TV
October 18, 2009

While Washington is weighing its options on sending more troops to Afghanistan, the US army is spending billions of dollars on upgrading its bases in the war-torn country.

The Washington Post said on Sunday that the US military has wanted to spend 1.3 billion dollars on more than one-hundred military projects across Afghanistan.

Based on the report, 30 million dollars of the money will be spent on the main US base located near the northern Afghan city of Bagram.

The move is aimed at ensuring that Afghanistan’s infrastructure can support US and NATO forces for years to come.

The US military has already spent roughly 2.7 billion dollars on construction in the last three years.

This comes as Washington says it closed its 2009 fiscal year with a record 1.4 trillion dollar budget deficit.

The report comes as US President Barack Obama is weighing a request for the deployment of an additional 40,000 troops in Afghanistan.

www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=109029&sectionid=351020403

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