By Marina Malenic
Air Force engineers are assisting with major expeditionary projects in Afghanistan to prepare for the troop buildup in that country, the service’s top civil engineering officer said yesterday.
“It’s critical that we get engineering support over there as quickly as we can so that…with the decision to put 17,000 more troops in there, they can have a place to go and a forward operating base and that we can supply them,” Maj. Gen. Del Eulberg told reporters at a Pentagon briefing.
Eulberg noted that building airstrips–even very rudimentary, dirt strips in the “very austere locations” across the country–has been the first order of business.
“You have to have the airstrips before you can bring forces to bear,” he said. He noted that many of those landing areas will be used primarily for C-17 and C-130 airlift operations.
Air Force engineers have completed some $5.2 billion worth of reconstruction projects to date in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Eulberg. The vast majority of those efforts took place in Iraq and included repair or construction of some 4,700 schools, hospitals, airports, police stations and other public facilities.
Turning now to Afghanistan, Eulberg noted that the challenges in that country are very different given its low level of development.
“There’s $11 billion of reconstruction going on in Afghanistan” funded by the international community and various U.S. federal agencies, Eulberg said.
“That equals the annual gross domestic product of Afghanistan,” he added. “That’s not just the U.S.–that’s the international community going there and building roads and schools.”
The general added, however, that in both countries one of the primary U.S. military objectives has been to provide “basic security and the ability of the host nation to self- govern.”
“And in Iraq, it means something different than it does in Afghanistan,” he said. “They’re not the same countries, they’re not the same cultures. The idea is self-governance and the capacity to create and secure and economy where they can remain stable.”