U.S. Supersizes Afghan Mega-Base as Withdrawal Date Looms

[cory777]

Source: Wired

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — Anyone who thinks the United States is really going to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011 needs to come to this giant air base an hour away from Kabul. There’s construction everywhere. It’s exactly what you wouldn’t expect from a transient presence.

Step off a C-17 cargo plane, as I did very early Friday morning, and you see a flight line packed with planes. When I was last here two years ago, helicopters crowded the runways and fixed-wing aircraft were –- well, if not rare, still a notable sight. Today you’ve got C-17s, Predators, F-16s, F-15s, MC-12 passenger planes … I didn’t see any of the huge C-130 cargo haulers, but they’re here somewhere.

More notable than the overstuffed runways is the over-driven road. Disney Drive, the main thoroughfare that rings the 8-square-mile base, used to feature pedestrians with reflective sashes over their PT uniforms carrying Styrofoam boxes of leftovers out of the mess halls. And those guys are still there.

But now the western part of Disney is a two-lane parking lot of Humvees, flamboyant cargo big-rigs from Pakistan known as jingle trucks, yellow DHL shipping vans, contractor vehicles and mud-caked flatbeds. If the Navy could figure out a way to bring a littoral-combat ship to a landlocked country, it would idle on Disney.



Read more: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/u-s-afghan-mega-base/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

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[mattvermont]

1. a staging base...

for Iran?

[ConsAreLiars]

2. Only the most pathological and delusional 'masters of the world' since Calligula

could have this and imagined it meant fulfilling some destiny or obligation or duty or anything less than pure evil of the most loathsomely arrogant variety. A serial mass murderer carving its initials on yet one more nation whose people it slaughters.

[ixion]

3. Indeed. Well said.

[indepat]

6. And someone surely needed to say it loudly, unmistakably, eloquently, and succinctly

:P

[formercia]

4. Disney Drive?

You can't make this shit up. :rofl:

[Karmadillo]

5. Kick

nt