Uh-oh in Afghanistan - David Wood

Apparently it wasn't Napoleon who said an army travels on its stomach. But surely the necessity of providing appropriate gear, food, water and other basics to troops was clear after his troops, freezing and dropping from starvation, staggered in retreat after the disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia. Of the 680,000 men Bonaparte took with him, fewer than 100,000 returned.

Perhaps nothing that dramatic is about to happen in Afghanistan. But the warning signs of impending trouble are clear: the $57 billion U.S. investment in Afghanistan's security forces is at risk because the Afghans cannot supply, or resupply their troops, can't prevent their weapons and vehicles from breaking down and can't fix them when they do.

And it's not clear that the 10,000 American troops President Obama has authorized to stay on the ground in Afghanistan can fix this against the deadline of steadily encroaching Taliban forces.

From what I've seen in Afghanistan, the men (and women) of the Afghan National Army and National Police are credible and often heroic fighters, especially given the circumstances of fighting for a distant government that pays only intermittent attention to their well-being.

Much of the failure lies instead with the Pentagon and its coalition partners in Afghanistan, who poured billions into buying fancy stuff for the Afghans "without building the entire end-to-end logistics system down to operational and tactical levels." That's the sorry admission contained in the Defense Department's most recent report on the state of the 13-year war in Afghanistan.

One result: Over the past 24 months the United States delivered tons of costly new equipment to the Afghan army's combat engineers. These are the folks who sniff out and disarm the roadside bombs, set by the Taliban, that disproportionately kill a growing number of Afghan civilians.

The Pentagon hired contractors to do the maintenance on the equipment. But the contracts ran out before the end of fiscal 2014, last October, and so did the contractors. Now, 80 percent of the new equipment is non-operational, according to anew report by the Defense Department's Inspector General, because no one's been around to maintain it.  Read More at Huffingtonpost