Call me naive but I truly didn't understand the level of commitment made on behalf of the American taxpayer by the military. US$54 billion of army property will be removed when the US finally leaves. The logistics alone are paralysing, let alone the quantities involved.

Here's a link to an interesting article from the Huffington Post http://www.lifehack.org/articles/mis...the-world.html

And a clip:

For all the sand Iraq did have, from the point of view of the U.S. military it didn’t have the perfect type for making the miles of protective “blast walls” that became a common feature of the post-invasion landscape. So, according to Stephen Farrell of the New York Times, U.S. taxpayer dollars floated in boatloads of foreign sand from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar to create those 15-ton blast walls at $3,500 a pop. U.S. planners are now evidently wondering whether to ship some of the leftover walls thousands of miles by staggeringly roundabout routes to Afghanistan at a transportation cost of $15,000 each.