President Obama will again huddle with his national-security team on Wednesday to decide how many more troops — if any — to send to Afghanistan. But making the decision will be the easy part, the real challenge will be getting those extra boots onto the ground. If he ends up embracing Army General Stanley McChrystal's call for 40,000 more soldiers, deploying them in Afghanistan will take up to a year.
The first bottleneck between the Oval Office and Afghanistan is the country's lack of sea ports (the nearest harbor is some 400 miles away) and a dearth of airports. Beyond geography, the flow of troops is limited by the U.S. military's requirements for training and dwell time — R&R at home, between deployments. And then, perhaps most critically, there is the enemy. The Taliban's lengthening shadow across Afghanistan is making it increasingly difficult to supply the 65,000 troops there now or to send in reinforcements.
"We're resupplying between 30% and 40% of our forward operating bases by air because we just can't get to them on the ground," says a senior Army logistician, speaking on condition of anonymity, referring to the roughly 180 U.S. outposts around the country. That's because the Taliban control much of the "ring road," a circular route that links Afghanistan's few major cities. "Trucking contractors trying to supply some of them aren't making it," he adds. "The Taliban are just wiping them out." Such constraints will limit the flow of troops to Afghanistan to about one brigade — some 4,000 troops — a month.
Excerpt from article at TIME:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1930097,00.html
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