Battleland

Bus Station for Afghanistan: Coming and Going…Now Going, For Good

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Air Force (left) and Getty Images (right)

When the troops at Manas are headed to or from home, they fly in commercial jets (left). But to or from Afghanistan, they board C-17s (right)

The Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan has been the Greyhound Bus terminal for U.S. troops flowing in and out of Afghanistan for the past decade. But that’s coming to an end in two years. Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev told Susan Elliott, the deputy assistant U.S. secretary of state for South and Central Asia, earlier this week that the “foreign military contingent should not be in Manas Civil Airport after the summer of 2014.”

Both the Kyrgyz and Russians have begun fretting publicly that the U.S. military could use the base to attack Iran. “It cannot be ruled out that this facility could be used in a potential conflict with Iran,” a Russian foreign ministry spokesman says. Maybe so, but if it were to happen – and there is no indication from U.S. sources that Manas would be used in such an endeavor – it would likely happen long before mid-2014.

You can always tell which way the troops tramping through Manas are headed: if they’re flying into or from Afghanistan, they’re aboard C-17 cargo planes. If they’re coming to or from home, they fly commercial.

“Even the Kyrgyz are preparing for the departure of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2014,” former DIA analyst John McCreary notes on his NightWatch blog. “This is another manifestation of regional awareness that the end game has begun.”