Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Thursday, March 28th, 2024

U.S. Mapping Out Afghanistan Exit

U.S. Mapping Out  Afghanistan Exit

WASHINGTON - The U.S. military will need to ship about 2,200 containers and vehicles out of Afghanistan every month for two years to get all of its equipment out of Afghanistan, with about 500 of those passing through Central Asia, according to U.S. Central Command. Of that, 400 are slated to go by rail through Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia and another 100 by truck through Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and the Caucasus.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the slide is the map pictured here, depicting all the various routes that cargo can take out of Afghanistan. The "Russian route" via rail also includes Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and the KKT truck route, interestingly, doesn't go through Russia but takes the somewhat longer route to the Caspian Sea port of Aktau, across the sea to Baku, and then through the Caucasus and Turkey en route to Europe.

It's also interesting that the multimodal facilities that the U.S. and NATO have set up in Eurasia -- like Baku, Ulyanovsk (Russia) and Constanta (Romania) -- appear to be low priorities, with pretty large volumes instead going through Dubai and Jordan. Those Middle Eastern hubs are set to get as much traffic as Central Asia, in spite of the fact that things will have to be flown some distance there. As the slides say, the goal is: "Redundancy, Flexibility, No Single Point of Failure!" (Agencies)