Posted on 06/04/2014 10:02:20 PM PDT by wetphoenix
MANAS TRANSIT CENTER Kyrgyzstan (Reuters) - The United States on Tuesday handed back its only Central Asian airbase to the government of Russia's close ally Kyrgyzstan, as President Barack Obama winds down U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Moscow makes a comeback in its old imperial backyard.
In a move aimed at pleasing its former overlord Russia, parliament in Kyrgyzstan voted a year ago to give Washington until July 11 to vacate the Manas Transit Center, which has served U.S. operations in Afghanistan since 2001.
The base, at the main civilian airport in the former Soviet republic, moved more than 5.3 million servicemen in and out of Afghanistan and handled tens of thousands of cargo shipments and refueling missions.
"We were known as the gateway to Afghanistan on freedom's frontier," Colonel John Millard, commander of the 376th Air Expeditionary Wing and Manas base head, told a group of visiting media on Monday.
"We offloaded more than 1 billion liters of fuel to 136,000 coalition aircraft ... We like to say we fueled the fight."
On Tuesday Millard handed over a symbolic golden key to the base to Colonel Mirbek Imayev, deputy head of Kyrgyzstan's elite National Guard.
With Obama now planning to withdraw all but 9,800 American troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year and to pull out the rest by the end of 2016, the importance of Manas to Washington would have been greatly diminished.
But the base closure still has symbolic importance in a week when Obama and Putin, both attending World War Two commemorations in France, will encounter each other for the first time since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis.
Obama is beset by foreign policy difficulties, from Ukraine to Syria, while Putin is riding high with the Russian public after annexing the Ukrainian
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
AFAIK, Pakistan is a single ‘friendly’ way out right now.
I’ve been saying it from the beginning. It is a grave mistake to dismiss Obama’s policies as stupid, inept, or incompetent, a la Jimmy Carter. The driving force behind his policies is malice. Sheer malice. A cold, calculated, profound hatred of the USA specifically and of the West in general.
Active duty ping.
Not overland. Only possibly by air. The Pakis stopped overland convoys.
the Russians will be back on that base within the month.
I wonder if this somewhat sudden pull out of Afghanistan is part and parcel of Obama capitulating to Russia and China.
Don’t get me wrong, I would want to pull out too, but perhaps things of sped up a bit from outside pressure.
Heck I would have just kept this a short punitive military expedition.
Oh, I don’t know. I suppose he could flood the money supply with fiat money so as to debase the currency and start hyper-inflation and there by destroy the economy.
Oh, wait! Dame it!
The pivot to Asia is fake. I’m worried about the unspoken pivot to Africa.
Russia and China have rightly figured that baraq is more interested in destroying his internal political enemies then anything that happens overseas. So they are taking advantage of the situation. They are probably ramping up the pressure because they know that he is legally the president for just another two years. Make hay while the sun shines.
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