NATO Mulls Another Afghan Surge for ‘Drawdown’

Needs More Troops Just to Deal with Shipping Containers

The occupation of Afghanistan continues to get more complicated all the time, and even as officials are hyping a drawdown and “irreversible” transition to hand portions of the nation over to the Karzai government, they are discussing a massive escalation of manpower in the nation.

11 years into the occupation, Afghanistan has sort of become like one of those “storage hunter” shows on basic cable, with hundreds of thousands of shipping containers full of god-knows-what.

So the plan under consideration is to send significant amounts of new troops to Afghanistan “temporarily” to go through those shipping containers and figure out what to keep and what to get rid of, and then to pack it up in new shipping containers and ship it back to its nations of origin.

“Experience has shown us that for many of the troop-contributing nations, their troop levels will actually experience a slight increase as they bring in extra forces to prepare their equipment for redeployment,” confirmed Lt. Col Colin Richardson, a Canadian logistics expert.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.