Austin American-Statesman
The Bush administration’s muted reaction to the dictatorial rule of Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf has nothing to do with its stated goal of promoting democracy in Asia and the Islamic world. Instead, it’s all about fuel supplies in Afghanistan. Without the Pakistanis, the 24,000 U.S. troops who are stationed in Afghanistan would likely run out of fuel within a matter of days.
The U.S. military is burning about 575,000 gallons of fuel per day in Afghanistan, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the Defense Energy Support Center, the Defense Department agency that manages the U.S. military’s fuel supplies. And about 80 percent of that fuel comes from five refineries in Pakistan.
Without the support of Musharraf and the Pakistani military, U.S. forces in Afghanistan would have to rely on a precarious logistics line that extends more than 1,000 miles from northern Afghanistan all the way to refineries in Baku, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan.
The U.S. military’s fuel vulnerabilities in Afghanistan were made clear last year during the Defense Energy Support Center’s bi-annual conference. During a briefing on the fuel operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Army Col. Dan Jennings, who was overseeing fuel delivery for Afghanistan and southern Iraq, told a group said that “fuel support for Afghanistan operations is what keeps me up at night.”
Standing in front of a PowerPoint map of Afghanistan, Jennings said the agency was hauling hundreds of thousands of gallons of jet fuel per day to America’s main bases in Afghanistan. Some 700 tanker trucks were being used to deliver the fuel and some of the trucks were taking a month or more to make a round trip delivery. According to Jennings, on some occasions, the U.S. military had as much as 4.7 million gallons of motor fuel in transit between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In addition to the sheer volume of fuel, Jennings and his team were dealing with pilferage, accidents, trucker strikes and cultural barriers.
“We’ve had trucks show up as much as 90 days after they were initially loaded,” he said.
Despite the problems, Jennings was relentlessly upbeat, particularly about the opportunities in the fuel supply business in Pakistan and Afghanistan. “There will be a military requirement in this area for a long time to come,” he said. “Things are changing in this region. This is the land of opportunity.”
Perhaps, but Jennings was also careful to point out that the logistics line that carries fuel from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan into Afghanistan is somewhat precarious. The fuel from the refinery in Baku is loaded on rail cars, then put on barges that traverse the Caspian Sea. When they land in Turkmenistan, they follow a circuitous rail route through Uzbekistan before they arrive at the Afghan border where the fuel is then transferred to trucks.
The long supply lines to the Caspian Sea underscore the importance of Pakistani fuel. By mid-2006, the total fuel storage capacity for forces operating out of the air bases at Kabul and Bagram was less than 3 million gallons. Though a contractor working for the U.S. military is building another 3 million gallons of storage capacity at Bagram Air Base, if the flow of fuel from Pakistan is cut off, American forces could be running on fumes within a fortnight.
Greg Wilcox, a retired Army officer who has written extensively on military tactics and operations, says that if the fuel from Pakistan gets cut off, the United States would have to try flying fuel into its bases in Afghanistan and that, he believes, would be “mission impossible.” Wilcox told me that when it comes to the Pakistan, “We don’t have any choice. We got kicked out of Uzbekistan so we don’t have any bases there. We can’t survive in that region without Musharraf. We are tied to him whether we like it or not.”
Don’t expect any tough rhetoric from the Bush administration when it comes to Pakistan. Thousands of American lives depend on the continued flow of fuel from that country.
