America in Afghanistan: Filling stations in the sky

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

HIGH above the border province of Paktika, in eastern Afghanistan, NATO airwaves crackle and shriek. “Kandahar this is Card Shark Seven-Eight at ten”, a Texan twang rings over the radio. An Australian dispatcher guides a different aeroplane: “Charlie Lima approved for niner zero”. “Pyramid One-One are you on this frequency?” bellows another American.

Unplug the radio and, from cruising altitude aboard an American refuelling aircraft, Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan seems calm. But NATO air traffic tells a different story.

One after another, fighter jets connect to the KC-135 Stratotanker to guzzle 5,000lb (2,300kg) of fuel before returning to their patrols below. American officials say the round-the-clock refuelling missions allow the F-16 fighter jets and A-10 Warthog ground-attack aircraft to reach any point in Afghanistan within a few minutes. The crew calls their Stratotanker a “flying gas station”.

A dozen of these sorties depart daily from the Manas airbase outside Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, accounting for about 30% of all refuelling missions over Afghanistan. The American base spends over $200m on jet fuel a year (mostly paid to a subsidiary of Gazprom, Russia’s energy giant). By next summer, six months before the last NATO combat troops are due to leave Afghanistan, each grey goliath will quit Manas and move elsewhere, because Kyrgyzstan has asked them to go (see next story).

The Stratotanker takes off with up to 200,000lb of fuel—enough to fill over a thousand sports-utility vehicles. The technology is as impressive as it is old. Boeing designed the planes in the 1950s to refuel B-52 bombers. America keeps over 400 of them in service—more than the commercial fleets of the airlines KLM and Air France combined.

Look carefully out of one of the small windows, and other tankers are circling below, camouflaged by the pale folding hills. The mission loops around a wide swathe of Pushtun country for over six hours. This air support may continue after 2014—if Afghanistan signs an agreed bilateral security agreement with America. As the sun fades, lights pop on in the mountain valleys, an unknown sight when the NATO-led invasion began a dozen years ago. The jets’ navigation lights fill the sky. How much will change if they go out is anyone’s guess.

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