US abandons aircraft and helicopters

The US military left behind so many aircraft, helicopters and armoured vehicles at Kabul international airport that soldiers had to spend hours during the final days disabling them to prevent the Taliban from acquiring more trophies to add to those already captured from the Afghans. General Frank McKenzie, commander of US Central Command, admitted that 73 aircraft – both fixed-wing and helicopters – had had to be abandoned. A spokesman for Central Command would not provide a detailed list of the aircraft remaining at Kabul. However, they are understood to include both American and US-supplied Afghan planes and helicopters, such as UH-60 Black Hawks, A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft, C-130H Hercules transport planes and Mi-17 helicopters. General McKenzie promised that none of the abandoned aircraft would fly again. He said some of them were already in a state of repair. Among the other equipment left and disabled included 70 mine-resistant ambush-protected armoured vehicles (MRAPS) and 27 Humvees. The Chinook and Apache attack helicopters used by the US during the evacuation operation are all believed to have been withdrawn. The last piece of equipment to be disabled and abandoned was the counter-rockets, artillery and mortars (C-RAM) air defence system which knocked out at least one rocket fired by Isis on the airport from a vehicle outside the perimeter. Two of the anti-rocket systems had been deployed to Kabul airport. The Taliban had captured a number of Black Hawks and Super Tucanos as they advanced across Afghanistan and forced Afghan security force units to surrender or flee. They have already tried to fly a Black Hawk but only managed to lift briefly into the air.

The final countdown in Afghanistan

US military commanders at Kabul airport are engaged in an elaborate choreography to complete America’s final troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by midnight tomorrow (Tuesday). The priority has been to keep hundreds of Marines, soldiers and special operations troops in place for as long as possible to ensure the safe evacuation of the last Americans and Afghans with immigration visas before the deadline passes. At the same time they have had to put enough troops on C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft and C-130 Hercules planes starting at least 48 hours before the deadline is reached to guarantee every one of the 4,000 service personnel who were still there at the end of last week are removed on time. US defence officials have acknowledged that with time pressing it may be impossible to remove all the helicopters and other equipment on the remaining flights because of the excessive space they will take up in the cargo bays. The US military has already destroyed a large amount of assault rifles and ammunition supplied to the Afghan national security forces. The CIA has also demolished a building outside the airport used for training Afghan intelligence agencies in counter-terrorism. Codenamed Eagle Base, it housed sensitive equipment. However, there is no evidence that the US has yet had to destroy or disable any helicopters, all of which have been vital during the evacuation operation. At least a dozen Chinook, Black Hawk, Apache and special operations-adapted Little Bird helicopters are on the list for withdrawal but some may have to be left behind. US defence officials have indicated they could be destroyed in an airstrike before the midnight deadline. However, those used by the US Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment known as the Night Stalkers can be flown out of Kabul individually because they have an air-refuelling capability. For the troop airlift choreography, the commanders have had to draw up flight manifests based on the requirement to continue checking visas of Afghans and securing the airport. The 5,800 troop total was cut to 4,000, helped by a decision to close some of the airport entry gates and all the roads around the perimeter. This enabled Marines of 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (24th MEU) and soldiers from 82nd Airborne Division, both responsible for perimeter security and checkpoints, to start withdrawing. The 2,000 Marines from 24th MEU had originally been airlifted from ships in an amphibious ready group in the Gulf to Kuwait before being flown to Kabul. They will return to their ships via Kuwait although, sadly, without 11 of their comrades who were killed in the suicide bombing at Kabul airport. Among the last to leave Kabul will be several hundred US special operations troops who are expected to be on the final flights out in the hours before midnight tomorrow. They will be accompanied by the last-remaining CIA paramilitary officers. Green Beret soldiers of the US Army’s 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) and CIA members of the intelligence agency’s special activities division were the first to arrive, covertly, in Afghanistan in 2001 after the 9/11 al-Qaeda terrorist attacks. The first in, they will now be the last out when the final chapter of America’s campaign in Afghanistan comes to an end tomorrow.

Picking Isis off one or two at a time

Revenge in some US president's minds means full-scale invasion wtih hundreds of thousands of troops and tanks and artillery fire and B-52 bombers. Thus George W Bush cited as one of the reasons for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 the fact that Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate his Dad, George HW, during a state visit to Kuwait in April 1993. By the time the invasion was launched in March 2003, the bigger reason was Saddam's alleged ownership of weapons of mass destruction. But the "he tried to kill my Dad" came up several times. Then George took revenge on al-Qaeda by invading Afghanistan where the plotting and training for 9/11 took place. Obama did his own bit of revenge for the same reason by killing off Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. Now it's Biden's turn. For the death of 11 US military servicemen and two servicewomen at Kabul airport along with 170 poor Afghan souls, Biden mounted two, so far, Reaper drone strikes, one early Saturday morning, killing two Isis "planners and facilitators" and today launching a similar strike on a vehicle packed with explosives and Isis militants. It's precision stuff, especially when you hear that the weapon used was an RX9 Hellfire missile that consists of six mightily sharpened blades that twirl like a whirling Dervish slicing through everything from a vehicle's bodywork to the bodies of those inside without a sound. There is no explosive involved. For a president who wanted to end forever wars he has found that it's not quite possible. There are too many evil people around intent on killing Americans. I suspect that if George W or Donald Trump were still president they would have launched a mighty strike against the whole lot of them where they hide out in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. But I guess picking on those planning the next bomb outrage is probably more effective at least in the short term. Once the US military have left Afghanistan by midnight on Tuesday, Biden should be able to rest easy. If Isis attacks the Taliban, he won't need to launch any Reaper drone strike with their Ninja weapons.

Biden had a mass of military strike options and chose a single drone attack!

President Biden has at his disposal a massed array of firepower already in position within striking distance of known Isis hideouts in Afghanistan when he seeks to implement his pledge to take revenge on the Kabul suicide bombers.However, many those assets, including a carrier strike group, warships and submarines armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles-, special operations forces and B-52s, are currently focused on a single mission: to ensure the safe evacuation of American nationals and allies and Afghans whose lives are at risk from the Taliban. The Pentagon has to draw up military options for Biden while at the same time attempt to complete the evacuation mission without any further loss of life. The Pentagon’s list of options for a revenge attack is therefore limited in the short term . Until the August 31 deadline for the withdrawal of US troops and equipment is reached, the forces on the ground in Kabul will need to be “laser-focused”, as the military call it, on the extraction mission and preventing another Isis attack. However, the US forces at Kabul airport include the very assets which Biden would like to turn to were he to decide to go for the riskiest military option: a helicopter-borne special operations assault team to fly to the eastern province of Nangarhar where Islamic State Khorasan Province (Isis-K) is based. These Kabul-based forces include elite troops from US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) such as navy Seals and the army’s Delta Force, an army aviation unit called Night Stalkers equipped with specially-adapted Black Hawks and Chinooks, and a CIA paramilitary team. All of these specialist assets, plus other aircraft currently at Kabul, including more Black Hawks and Chinooks, several AH-64 Apache attack helicopters and MQ-9 Reaper drones , are supposed to be withdrawn by the August 31 deadline, along with more than 5,000 troops, counter rocket and mortar systems defending the airport and light armoured vehicles. So, as things stand, they cannot be used in any revenge attack on Isis before August 31 because they are needed for the protection of the evacuation mission and countering any further threat from Isis suicide bombers. The Apaches and Reapers, fitted with advanced thermal and optical imaging systems , are being used to monitor all movements around the airport. F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets from the carrier, USS Ronald Reagan, off the Pakistan coast, are also flying over Kabul with surveillance systems. However, the Pentagon will include a ground-based assault mission as one of the military options post-August 31, either from Kabul but that would require an arrangement with the Taliban, or from the Gulf. In addition to counter-terrorist special operations forces on permanent standby in the Gulf region, the Pentagon could also turn to the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), part of the US amphibious ready group (ARG) based around the Wasp class assault ship USS Iwo Jima. The ARG has AV-8B Harrier jump-jets. Many of the Marines from 24th MEU are now serving at Kabul airport but after August 31 will have returned to their ships. Any ground commando-style assault would be dependent on intelligence to help pinpoint Isis positions in Nangarhar. The vast network of US military and CIA intelligence-gathering systems on the ground, however, including classified computer data bases, have been or are in the process of being removed from Afghanistan to meet the Biden deadline. The Pentagon still has, however, surveillance aircraft based in the Gulf which with air-refuelling can keep a constant watch over eastern Afghanistan prior to any assault. This includes a US Air Force RC-135W Rivet Joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft currently based at al-Udeid airbase in Qatar and flying missions over Kabul. The Rivet Joint, built by Boeing, can intercept and monitor communications across a wide area, and will even now be attempting to pinpoint electronic exchanges between Isis fighters. The other Pentagon options would involve less risky missions and are likely to head up the list of alternatives for Biden. All would involve precision-guided bombing. *The Tomahawk option: The USS Ronald Reagan carrier strike group is currently off the Makran coast, a coastal region of Baluchistan in south west Pakistan. The strike force includes three warships equipped with Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles: USS Shiloh, a guided-missile cruiser, USS Halsey, a guided-missile destroyer, each of which can carry 154 land-attack Tomahawks, and USS Georgia, an Ohio-class nuclear-powered submarine. *The bombing option: B-52H Stratofortress bombers, F-15 Strike Eagles, F-22 Raptor stealth bombers and armed Reaper drones are all available at the al-Udeid base in Qatar, along with a large number of KC-135 refuelling tankers. All these aircraft have been used in the 20-year war with the Taliban and also against al-Qaeda and Isis in Afghanistan. USS Ronald Reagan, normally based in Japan but moved to the Gulf region for the evacuation operation, has 90 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters on board. The F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets could be used in a support, surveillance or ground-attack role for the bombing option. Since Biden announced the troop-withdrawal programme in April, the Pentagon has been working on developing an “over-the-horizon” capability in the Gulf to be able to launch attacks on al-Qaeda or Isis or other terrorist groups in Afghanistan without any ground back-up, including forward air controllers, left in the country. Top US commanders have warned that a capability based 1,000 miles away would pose a challenge for any future operations in or over Afghanistan. With the added distance and the need for air-refuelling, such operations would take longer and cost more. However, if Biden is intent on pursuing those responsible for the Kabul airport terrorist atrocity, the Pentagon will have a full range of contingencies available to meet his promise to exact revenge. The key will be the intelligence available to uncover which Isis unit was responsible. “If we can find who is associated with this [attack], we will go after them,” General Frank McKenzie, commander of US Central Command, said. “We’ve been clear all along that we’re going to retain the input to operate against Isis in Afghanistan and we’re working hard to determine attribution [for the attack]. 24/7 we’re looking for them,” he said.

Biden's disastrous decision gets worse and worse

As the casualty toll rises every hour - now nearly 200 - after the suicide bombing at Kabul airport, it must be difficult for Joe Biden to sleep at night. Every time he goes to the microphone he sounds older and more croaky. The way democracy works is that the president of the United States and commander-in-chief gets advice from everyone he needs to get advice from and then makes the big decision. But in this case Biden had already made up his mind to get all US troops out of Afghanistan by midnight August 31 and no later whatever the situation on the ground. So when every single military commander and the defence secretary advised him to keep a troop presence in Kabul as a deterrent to the Taliban he listened but his ears were effectively blocked. He never thought it was a good idea to have so many troops in Afghanistan - 100,000 at the peak period - and decided that Trump was right and it was time to end the "forever" war. So he rejected the advice of all his military advisers and went for the troops-out deadline. That decision has now shown to have been cataclysmic. The bad guys took advantage of the decision and exploited it to the full. First, the Taliban, and now Isis. One former senior Pentagon official put it like this to me: "This is the sloppiest execution of a major policy decision I have ever seen in my caree." I agree.

Explosion at Kabul will accelerate evacuation

It's too early as I write to know how bad the explosion at Kabul airport is and how many casualties there are. But the attack, predicted with unnerving accuracy by US, UK and Australian intelligence agencies, will have a number of consequences: it will encourage Joe Biden to wrap up the evacuation on the dot of midnight on August 31, tens of thousands of Afghans who had hoped to leave will be abandoned and the Taliban now knows that it will face its own insurgency from experienced and fanatical terrorists who will feel they have a better chance to exert their power and brutality on Afghanistan once all American and other foreign troops have gone. Not a civil war as such, as predicted by some analysts, commentators and military commanders, but a permanent and increasing presence of a group of extremist militants who will not allow the Taliban to get on with the job of tryng to govern the country. Afghanistan is and always has been a hopeless case, even when the US and the international community was ploughing funds into the government coffers. In the end all that investment to turn the country into a stable and democracy-loving nation is summed up by this explosion today. There will always be violence and killings in Afghanistan and the potential for tragedy, disaster and mayhem will never go away. In a strange way this might help Joe Biden who will feel his deadline of August 31 was right.

Chinooks or Afghan evacuees?

MY PIECE TODAY: US military commanders have only days to decide whether to prioritise multi-million dollar Chinooks and other helicopters over Afghan evacuees in the last flights out from Kabul before the August 31 deadline. President Biden’s insistence that all US troops and as much equipment as possible have to be out of Afghanistan by next Tuesday has posed an uncomfortable dilemma for the military top brass. The commanders in charge of the evacuation will have to choose between reducing the number of Afghan evacuees in the final days to make room for these helicopters inside the giant C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft or sacrifice the prize military assets to provide maximum space for people desperate to leave the country. The Pentagon has acknowledged that if there is no room for the helicopters and other equipment, they may have to be destroyed. “Obviously there is a strong bias to be able to get our materiel out with our people [troops]. [But] if there needs to be destruction or other disposition of equipment at Hamid Karzai international airport, then we will do that and do it appropriately,” John Kirby, Pentagon press secretary said. More than a dozen helicopters are currently at Kabul airport engaged in security missions and evacuations beyond the airport. They include CH-47F Chinooks, UH-60 Black Hawks and AH-64 Apaches. Three Chinooks were involved in evacuating 169 American diplomatic staff to Kabul airport. In addition, the US Army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, also present at the airport, has its own modified versions of the Chinook and Black Hawk as well as A/MH-6 Little Bird light helicopters. The standard Chinooks, Black Hawks and Apaches cannot be refuelled in flight and have to be transported by aircraft. However, the Chinooks and Black Hawks adapted for special operations do have midair refuelling capabilities. The C-17 Globemaster which , in one notable flight, carried 830 Afghan men, women and children from Kabul to al-Udeid airbase in Qatar, will play the key role in shipping military equipment back to the US. A C-17 can carry a single Chinook in one flight, or two Black Hawks or two Apaches. In wartime, and emergency situations, troops could also be packed in around the helicopters. But for safety reasons it seems unlikely US military commanders would risk having Afghan evacuees on the same flight as helicopters and other equipment. A spokesman at US Central Command which has overall charge of operations in Afghanistan, said:”We’re not going to be drawn on the disposition of our assets at Kabul airport or our plans for them.” When the US military abandoned Bagram airbase north of Kabul which had been one of the main centres of operations against the Taliban and al-Qaeda over the years, a large amount of equipment was either destroyed or disabled. But all helicopters at the base were extracted. The only helicopters known to have been destroyed so far in the US retrograde programme to meet the August 31 timetable have been seven CH-46E Sea Knights used by the state department at the American embassy in Kabul. These helicopters, belonging to the state department air wing, along with several light armoured vehicles at the embassy, were disabled or destroyed after the 4,000 staff had been evacuated. The White House said yesterday that around 19,000 people were flown out of Kabul in a 24-hour period between 3am August 24 and 3am August 25. Forty-two military flights involving 37 C-17s and five C-130s carried 11,000 evacuees, and 48 coalition flights took 7,800 people. Since August 14 when the evacuations began after the Taliban took control of Kabul, about 82,300 people have been flown out of Kabul, the White House said.

CIA chief in secret mission to Kabul

The head of the CIA was sent on a secret mission to Kabul on Monday by President Biden to meet the de facto head of the Taliban regime, US sources have confirmed to The Times. William Burns, a career diplomat appointed by Biden to be director of the CIA, flew to the Afghanistan capital and held discussions with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Taliban co-founder who was one of the principal negotiators in the talks with the US in Doha, Qatar that ended with a signed agreement on February 29 last year. Baradar was released from the US Guantanamo Camp detention centre in Cuba in 2014 after being imprisoned for eight years as a suspected “war combatant”. He was one of five former Guantanamo detainees to be in the Taliban negotiating team in Qatar. One of the key clauses in the Doha agreement was a pledge by the insurgents to give up all links with al-Qaeda which, during the Taliban rule from 1996-2001, had enjoyed safe sanctuary in Afghanistan and established terrorist training camps. In return the then Donald Trump administration confirmed it planned to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan by May 1 2021. It is believed that Burns would have raised this issue with Baradar with a message from the Biden administration to remind the Taliban leader of the promise made in Qatar and the importance of relinquishing all assistance and refuge to al-Qaeda. The US sources said that the decision to send Burns to Kabul was made at the highest level. He was effectively acting as a special envoy from the president to the Taliban leadership. His arrival in Kabul would have been pre-arranged with the Taliban and Burns’s movement from Hamid Karzai international airport to the presidential palace in the capital would have been protected by US special operations troops and CIA paramilitary officers. Burns is the highest-ranking US official to meet with the Taliban since the insurgents took over Kabul and the country ten days ago. However, the Pentagon has confirmed that senior commanders in Kabul have been in regular contact with the Taliban during the current mass evacuations of Americans and Afghans who had worked for the US during the 20-year war. The arrival of Burns in Kabul on Monday was 24 hours before the G7 was due to meet by video link to discuss the possibility of extending the troop withdrawal deadline of August 31 set by Biden by a few more days or weeks to allow the evacuations to be completed. Burns warned in an interview last month that he was concerned about a resurgent al-Qaeda in Afghanistan if the Taliban seized power. He told US National Public Radio that although al-Qaeda didn’t pose the same threat as 20 years ago when they launched the terrorist attacks in the US on 9/11, there was a danger the organisation could be “reconstituted” in Afghanistan. “We have to stay sharply focused on it,” he said. Other senior US figures who have in the past travelled to Qatar to confront the Taliban negotiators, including Baradar, with warnings about continuing to support al-Qaeda, included General Mark Milley, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff and General Frank McKenzie, commander of US Central Command. The CIA declined to comment on the report first published in The Washington Post that Burns had met with Baradar in Kabul.

Biden will have to delay troop withdrawal

I don't know what Biden is going to do about his August 31 deadline. Right now there are 5,800 US troops at Kabul airport, all playing a vital role in securing it from the Taliban and helping thousands of Americans, Afghans and others to fly out of the country. There is no way that these 5,800 troops can continue with the mission in hand AND exit Afghanistan by August 31. In order for them to meet that deadline they will surely need at least two if not three days to get out the country. That means they would have to start pulling out by Sunday August 29, leaving thousands of people, including Americans, stranded. Biden has pledged that ALL Americans will be evacuated, so if he is going to keep to that he will have to extend the deadline and the Taliban have already warned that can't happen. Well I say to hell with the Taliban. They haven't kept to any of their promises surprise surprise, so Biden should do the right thing and keep the troops there for another 11 days at least to meet his original deadline of September 1 and if the Taliban try to move into the airport and start firing their guns the reaction should be overwhelmingly bad for them. If they have any sense they will whinge and threaten but do nothing. After all they are in charge of Kabul and can wait a few more days. Whatever Biden decides it won't look good for him politically.

I'ts all too late to learn the lessons from the Afghanistan fiasco

It still staggers me that the mighty United States with all of its huge panoply of intelligence-gathering systems, human and technical, was totally caught out by the Taliban's final 11-day rush to Kabul. Ok, so the vast majority of the surveillance apparatus had been removed from Afghanistan as part of the US retrograde programme. That would have made the job of monitoring the Taliban's progress towards the capital a helluva lot of easier. But among the 4,000-strong US embassy in Kabul there was a very large contingent of CIA intelligence officers and Defense Intelligence Agency staff who presumably had their ways of keeping tabs on what was going on in the country. Would they not have realised that after seizing Kandahar, Helmand and Mazar e-Sharif the Taliban would soon be on the outskirts of the capital because the fightback by the Afghan national security forces had been minimal. But no such warning came because General Mark Milley, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, told reporters the Pentagon was still working on the assumption, based on intelligence, that a Taliban takeover of the whole country could take weeks or months or up to two years. Blinding naivity!! The Taliban had worked out what the whole of the US and military community had failed to predict which was that the Afghan security forces without the Americans holding their hands would give up. They knew that, so all they had to do was keep up the momentum and go all the way to Kabul as fast as possible. Just like the US military did in Iraq in 2003 when they swept into Baghdad in days. Two different types of shock and awe! The Pentagon talks about the need to learn lessons. But the lessons should have been learned years and years ago. It's all too late now.

Arms and the Taliban

MY PIECE IN THE TIMES TODAY The Taliban were never short of weapons during the 20-year war with the United States and coalition allies but now they have a well-stocked air force, more armoured vehicles than they need and hundreds of thousands of assault rifles, machineguns and an armoury of ammunition. As part of their retrograde programme, the US military removed or destroyed all their warfighting assets to prevent the Taliban from acquiring them. But everything provided to the Afghan national security forces, $29 billion of dollars worth of equipment, was left behind, and is now in the hands of the insurgents. Between 2003 and 2016, the US supplied the Afghan military with 208 aircraft, 75,898 vehicles, 599,690 weapons, including M16 assault rifles and M4 carbines,and howitzers, 162,643 pieces of communication equipment and 16,191 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance equipment systems, a 2017 US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report revealed. In addition, according to John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, between 2017 and 2019, the US provided the Afghans with 4,702 armoured Humvees, 7,035 machineguns, 20,040 hand grenades, 2,520 bombs and 1,394 grenade launchers. The list also included 16,000 night-vision goggles, a game-changing piece of battlefield kit, and dozens of drones. The Taliban never had an air force when they were in power between 1996 and 2001, just a handful of inoperable Soviet helicopters and transport planes. Under American guidance, training and generosity, a modern air force was built. It included 25 A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft, built in Brazil but modified in the US with American-made weapons and sensors, 45 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, ten AC-208 Combat Caravan counter-insurgency planes and 45 Russian-made Mi-17 and 49 MD-530 helicopters. Not all the aircraft are at the Taliban’s disposal. At least 46 of the Afghan air force assets were flown to safety in Uzbekistan, including some Super Tucanos and Black Hawks. A number of Black Hawks are also back in the US for maintenance. Plans to hand over more Black Hawks to the Afghans are now on permanent hold. However, the unpredicted collapse of the Afghan national forces in the final 11 days of the Taliban offensive meant the US was unable to make any plans to remove the advanced aircraft and helicopters from Afghanistan before the insurgents arrived in Kabul. US defence officials said that if any attempt had been made to fly out the aircraft as the Taliban approached the capital, it would have spurred on the insurgents and removed any motivation left in the Afghan military to put up a fight. It was a Catch 22 situation and it has left the Pentagon with a challenge it seems in no hurry to resolve. General Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said the priority task at present was to evacuate all Americans and Afghans who worked for the US military. The question of what to do about the aircraft, helicopters and other equipment left behind would be a matter to consider at a later date, he said. Meanwhile, US officials have pointed out that although the thousands of M16s and M4s, plus howitzers and armoured vehicles would give the Taliban a significant advantage in suppressing any resistance to their regime, the captured air force assets would largely be trophies of war. Without pilots and maintenance know-how, the aircraft and helicopters would sit unused in their hangars. The officials also said none of the aircraft were fitted with sensitive technology, so even if the Taliban were to share their spoils with the Chinese or Russians, no military secrets would be revealed.

Will the US try to recover or destroy all those Afghan planes?

FULLER VERSION OF MY STORY IN THE TIMES TODAY: Nearly a third of the Afghan air force’s operational light attack planes and helicopters are parked at an airport in Uzbekistan after a last-minute flight across the border. US-supplied A-29 Super Tucanos and Black Hawk helicopters are among the most prized possessions of the Afghan air force and some of these advanced aircraft are now safely in neighbouring Uzbekistan. However, unless Afghan pilots manage to fly out more aircraft over the next few days, the Taliban will still have acquired about 121 planes and helicopters of mixed capabilities and of different origins, many of which require maintenance and refurbishment. Satellite imagery shows 46 Afghan air force aircraft lined up at Termez airport of which 22 are fixed-wing and 24 helicopters. The government in Uzbekistan confirmed their arrival. The fixed-wing aircraft safely over the border include six A-29 Super Tucanos, five Cessna 208B Caravans and 11 Pilatus PC-12NG surveillance planes. An additional Super Tucano flew into Uzbekistan but crashed , apparently after running out of fuel, although initial reports claimed it had been shot down. Helicopters at Termez airport appear to include at least half a dozen Black Hawks and up to 20 Russian-made Mi-17 Hips. The size of the Afghan air force in terms of aircraft assets varies according to different estimates. However, recent US official figures claim there were 167 planes and helicopters available for use at the end of June, although many were under maintenance. There are a further 44 airframes but not in an operational state. Before the departure of 46 aircraft and helicopters to Uzbekistan, the air force included 25 Brazil-made Super Tucanos, 33 Cessna Caravans, 18 Pilatus surveillance and reconnaissance planes , 11 Black Hawks and four C-130 Hercules transporters. So far the Pentagon has given no indication whether it plans to take steps to recover or destroy the multi-billion dollar aircraft and helicopters supplied to the Afghan air force. In the weeks leading up to the Taliban take-over of Kabul, US air force B-52s, AC-130 Spectre gunships and armed Reaper drones, all flying from Qatar, targeted a number of American Humvees and artillery captured by the insurgents. But none of the captured Afghan air force aircraft or helicopters were bombed. With the fate of the 300,000-strong Afghan national security forces uncertain, the Taliban have now taken over an impressive inventory of weapons and armoured vehicles as well as the aircraft assets. The US-provided armoury now in their hands includes 104,000 M16 assault rifles, 10,000 M4 carbines, 7,000 or so Humvees, 170 M113 armoured personnel carriers and 155 mine-resistant MRAP armoured vehicles.

No US airstrikes while Taliban seized Kabul

NOT USED IN THE IMES : The Pentagon decided against bombing the Taliban as they took the first steps towards overrunning Kabul, even though they arrived in the capital in American armoured Humvees captured on the battlefield. In recent US strikes much of the targeting was against Taliban-seized American military equipment. Officials from the White House and the Pentagon had indicated in June that the imminent fall of Kabul to the insurgents would likely be the trigger for US intervention. The Pentagon began drawing up plans for bombing operations to prevent the Taliban seizing control of the capital. However, the speed of the Taliban advance and the growing sense in the Pentagon that Kabul could not be saved appear to have been the primary factors behind the absence of US firepower over Kabul in the days before the insurgents took control. “No strikes have been conducted in the last 24 hours,” Major-General Hank Taylor, the Pentagon’s director of current operations on the joint staff, said. Yet US Central Command had launched airstrikes, using B-52s, AC-130 Spectre gunships and Reaper armed drones, to attack the Taliban and destroy captured Humvees and artillery at other cities including Herat, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah. The lack of any American bombing presence to save Kabul is proof that the Pentagon was forced to accept that last-minute targeting of the Taliban was not going to make any difference and might lead to civilian deaths. General Taylor insisted that the US commander on the ground in Afghanistan – now Rear Admiral Peter Vasely – continued to maintain the airstrike capability “if required to do so”. However, the new reality in Afghanistan means that any form of US bombing intervention from now on will be strictly limited to targeting al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups posing a potential threat to the US. One consequence of that new reality is that the Taliban will be able to keep the mass of American equipment they seized over the years or more recently had been handed over to them by surrendering Afghan army units. As for the future and potential airstrikes against any sign of a resurgent al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, the Pentagon says the US military has “robust” over-the-horizon capabilities in the Gulf – principally in Qatar and United Arab Emirates – and carrier-borne strike assets. “There is not a scrap of the earth we can’t hit, “ John Kirby, Pentagon press secretary, said. However, he admitted: “Is it more difficult to do counter-terrorism strikes over the horizon? You bet.”

Can the Taliban ever be trusted?

Afer the nightmare come soothing words from the Taliban. Promising that there will be no revenge, that women can work and go to school and university and all government workers should stay in their posts and carry on as if nothing has happened. They will set up a new government if they know how to do it and turn the country into a strict Islamic state. Which means whatever women think they will be allowed to do if the Taliban think it doesn't conform to Islamic law, they will be barred. The Islamic thought police will be on the prowl. No wonder tens of thousands of Afghans are trying to leave the country. The only good thing is that the war is for the moment over. No sign as yet of the threatened civil war which everyone was talking about not so long ago.

An Afghan tragedy unfolding

There are no positives to elicit from the disaster that has befallen Afghanistan. Joe Biden and Boris Johnson and a host of other western government types are looking earnest and saying how important it is to get everyone out of the country as quickly and as safely as possible but no one in power seems yet ready to admit that they have been responsible for one of the great strategic failures of modern times or acknowledge deep concern that the decision to pull out all troops and abandon the Afghans to Taliban brutality has given the people of that country a bleak and scary future. Biden owes the US people and the Afghan people an explanation and although he won't apologise for what he has done, at least an acknowledgement that his policy hasn't quite worked out the way he hoped or expected. There are now more foreign troops in Afghanistan than at any time in recent months but they are all at Kabul airport guarding the place as thousands of people desperately try to get on planes out of Afghanistan. It's a sorry sorry sight and a tragedy of appalling proportions.

Joe Biden can't blame Trump

It is perfectly accurate to say Donald Trump was responsible for a terrible strategic decision by effectively handing Afghanistan to the Taliban after telling them he wanted to pull out all US troops by the end of May 2021. All the insurgents had to do was bide their time till then. But that was the decision of Trump and his administration. Joe Biden has been in power since January 20 and he decided, he alone, to carry on with the Trump error but the only difference is he set a new timetable for withdrawal. That's all he did. What he didn't do was say Trump was so wrong he was going to scrap the agreement made in Qatar on February 29 last year. So he can't now claim, as he has done, that it was all Trump's fault that we are in the mess we are now in, with the Taliban back in control of the country. Biden is the president of the United States and commander-in-chief. He can do what he wants and he wanted to leave Afghanistan. So the buck stops with him and him alone.

Taliban leaders responsible for today's mayhem

The Taliban leaders who have waged war for most of their adult life have been plotting their return to power ever since they were toppled in 2001. Their founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar, died in April 2013 and his successor, Akhtar Mansour, was killed in a US drone strike near the Afghan-Pakistan border in 2016. The third figure to take control of the Afghanistan Taliban has been remorseless in his aim to defeat the US-led coalition and to bring the Taliban back into power. The leader for the last five years who, like his predecessors, is rarely seen in public, is Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada. About 60 years old, he is known as the Leader of the Faithful. An Islamic legal scholar he rules over all the group’s political, religious and military activities, and is believed to be in hiding in Quetta in Pakistan. Other key members of the top echelon of Taliban leaders include Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of the co-founders of the Taliban and deputy leader in charge of the group’s political office. He is a member of the negotiating team which led to the ill-fated deal between the insurgents and the US, signed on February 29, 2020 in Doha, capital of Qatar. Two other deputy leaders are Mullah Muhammad Yaqoob, the son of the late Mullah Omar, in his 30s, who is in charge of military operations, and Sirajuddin Haqqani who is head of the Haqqani terrorist network which is allied to the Taliban. Mullah Abdul Hakim, a former chief justice in the Taliban courts, is the head of the negotiating team in Dohaand is one of the most trusted associates of the overall Taliban leader. The biggest coup for the Taliban leadership came in 2014 when the US agreed to release five of their most experienced figures from the US Guantanamo detention centre in Cuba where they had been held without charge as suspected “war combatants”. They won their freedom in return for the release by the Taliban of the US Army’s Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, the only American soldier taken prisoner by the insurgents. The five former Guantanamo detainees, Khirullah Sai Wali Khairkhwa, former interior minister in the Taliban government, Mohammad Fazi, ex-Taliban army chief, Norullah Noori, a former provincial governor, Abdul Haq Wasiq, ex-deputy chief of intelligence, and Mohammad Nabi Omari who is closely linked to the Haqqani network, were selected to join the negotiating team in Doha.

Why it went all wrong in Afghanistan

MY ANALYSIS IN THE TIMES TODAY: The Taliban have taken the Pentagon and the White House by surprise by the speed with which they have overrun Afghanistan since American and coalition troops began withdrawing to a timetable set by President Joe Biden. From talking peace and power-sharing to American negotiators in Qatar early last year, the Taliban have reverted to type and demonstrated their dependence on brutality and unrelenting ferocity to try and snatch back the country they lost in 2001. The insurgents are at the gates of Kabul while the US, Britain and other coalition countries rush to evacuate their diplomats and civilian workers, sending thousands of troops to ensure their safety. And yet this scenario was inevitable. It is almost beyond comprehension that anyone, let alone those in power in the West, should be surprised by what is happening in Afghanistan. The Taliban promised peace solely in order to win a commitment from the US to withdraw all troops by May 2021, under President Trump’s timetable, subsequently changed to September 11 by President Biden and then revised to August 31. The date of the final withdrawal didn’t matter to the Taliban. They had the green light to launch an offensive, provided they didn’t attack US forces, and did so with their own version of America’s “shock and awe” tactics. As John Kirby, chief spokesman for the Pentagon said yesterday: “No one’s pleased to see.....that the Taliban continues to act as if they believe the only path to governance is through violence and brutality and aggression and force.” On the face of it, in sheer numbers, the Taliban were facing poor odds, with 75,000 fighters under their command up against 350,000 Afghan troops and police. But the Taliban were always going to win because once the American and coalition troops and advisers and firepower had left the country, there was no one in charge in Kabul capable of masterminding a battle plan to stop the insurgents from seizing districts and cities. Afghan special forces, easily the best-trained and most capable fighters, were deployed to defend the cities but they lacked the reinforcements and logistical back-up so desperately needed to continue the fight. Retreat became the only option. The Pentagon and White House have repeatedly stated in recent weeks that it was now up to the Afghan government to demonstrate leadership and use the advantages the US-led coalition had provided at such financial and human cost. But the sacking this week of the Afghan army chief said everything. The Kabul government has nothing left in its locker. While this may grievously disappoint all the US military commanders who tried to nurture their Afghan counterparts to take charge of an anti-Taliban force, it should never be forgotten that Afghanistan’s security forces have suffered an appalling attrition rate at the hands of the insurgents. President Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan leader, revealed in 2019 that 45,000 members of the security forces had been killed since 2014 when he took power. Since then the Kabul government has refused to issue casualty figures but in recent days the toll has been devastating. Biden was advised by all the top US military chiefs, including the two most intimately involved in Afghanistan - General Frank McKenzie, commander of Central Command, and General Scott Miller, the last leader of US forces there - to leave 3,500 US troops in the country as a safeguard and deterrent. Not to continue waging war but as a strategic presence to back up and motivate the Kabul government. Biden rejected the advice and now his political legacy will be damaged by the mayhem that decision has created.

Total appalling disaster in Afghanistan

I can hardly bear reading and seeing what is going on in Afghanistan. The Taliban are the most brutal vengeful alleged human beings on the planet. Tens of thousands of Afghans are fleeing from the Taliban-controlled towns and cities and arriving in Kabul with nowhere to sleep, no food and no water and the Adghan government is hopeless and can't cope. Afghan males related to Afghan soldiers are being killed, children are being killed, women are being beaten for not wearing the right headgear. The Taliban are seizing cities every day and the US military now fears Kabul could fall in 90 days. The withdrawal of all US and coalition troops was wrong, strategically, morally, humanely. The world should be angry. Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, warns the Taliban that if they take control of Afghanistan they will never be recognised by the international community. Ha!! Really?!! And President Joe Biden declares that he has no regrets about withdrawing all US troops from Afghanistan and feels it's time for the Afghan government to stand on its own two feet. The tragedy is getting worse by the day and it makes me both angry and tearful!

Andrew Cuomo does the right thing for once

When facing a barrage of sexual harassment allegations going back years, it doesn't matter who you are, you should either resign from the job where the alleged offences took place or get arrested. Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, had resisted resignation despite a mass of accusations coming from women who claim to have been sexually abused. Now he has at last resigned. It is extraordinary in this day and age for a man in a position of power to treat women badly and believe he can get away with it. Even more shocking than the alleged Cuomo transgressions was the statement by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democratic Representative for New York, that she feared she was going to be raped and killed during the terrifying riot inside the Capitol on January 6. It still seems staggering to me that there are still Republican senators who try to claim that January 6 was just a boisterous event and neither a riot nor a coup attempt. Yet here we have an elected member of the House of Representatives saying she feared for her life. It does make you wonder whether a woman will ever be elected president in the United States. I hope I'm wrong.

Collapse of the Afghan national security forces

FULLER VERSION OF MY TIMES STORY: The rapid Taliban advances and collapse of part of the Afghan national security forces were the direct result of a “strategic error” by the US, a former American commander in Afghanistan told The Times. “For the United States, the strategic cost of potentially losing Afghanistan will be significant, but for ordinary Afghans, the impact will be deadly and utterly catastrophic,” said Lieutenant-General David Barno, commander of US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. “The rapidly unfolding tragedy in Afghanistan is a direct result of an unforced strategic error, started by President Trump ‘s administration and continued by President Biden, to pull the small number of US troops and American contractors out of the country,” Barno said. “The results have been predictable: rapid Taliban advances, rising murders and atrocities and a worrisome collapse of parts of the Afghan national security forces which relied upon US and Nato support to continue to effectively battle the Taliban,” he said. He warned: “This deepening conflict now has the potential to be a major foreign policy disaster for the Biden administration, and one which was wholly avoidable.” “The benefits of sustaining even a small US presence are now obvious, whereas the cost of withdrawing those forces are going to play out for years to come,” Barno said. His grim warning of the future facing the Afghan people was echoed by Andrew Krepinevich, a former senior Pentagon official and colonel in the US Army. He said the US had failed to prevent the return of “a hostile radical Islamist regime that suppresses many basic rights, especially women’s rights”. He accused the US of “walking away” from this objective which had been accomplished until the decision to pull out all troops. “While China continues to place new pieces on the international chessboard in the form of base and port development in the Indo-Pacific, we are instead abandoning a key square on the geostrategic chessboard .” he said.

Donald Trump "still leads" the Republican Party

Most people this side of the Atlantic will probably not have heard of Ronna McDaniel but she's the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee and therefore she is a big influencer. She says Donald Trump is still very much the boss of the Republican Party and the party's heaviest hitter and donation attraction, and so everyone has to acknowledge it. It's true because he has just helped get donations for the party of more than $100 million, every time he goes out to speak all his voter fans are there to hear him and whatever he says makes big headlines. Can anyone else in the Republican Party match all that? The answer is no, but yet again it underlines the dire straits the party is in if no one but Trump is their future. McDaniel said in a commercial radio interview that Trump was the most popular Republican in the country and therefore remained the leader. Full stop. On that basis, Trump almost has an obligation to stand for president again, if the chairwoman of the national commitee believes there is no one else to touch him. Trump I'm sure will be delighted by her words but his potential would-be rivals for the top job will no doubt be fuming.

What is Biden going to do about Afghanistan?

Do Joe Biden and his national security team have something up their sleeve to end this daily slaughter in Afghanistan? It just can't go on like this, with the Taliban now seizing control of cities. Perhaps Biden knew this was what was going to happen and made the decision that it was no longer of concern to the United States, never mind the likelihood that women in Afghanistan will have no future and that life will be an appalling nightmare for all Afghans if the Taliban seize power. Biden will be blamed, so what is he going to do? I fear the answer is: nothing, apart from authorising more and more airstrikes. It seems very much like a last gasp from the United States. A big gasp, however, since both B-52s and the fearsome AC-130 Spectre gunships are back in action, both of which the Taliban have learned to dread over the years. But they know this is an act of desperation by the Americans and it cannot go on for ever. Peace, in the meantime, is on the back burner.

Biden needs his infrastructure bill done and dusted

A huge amount rests on Joe Biden's ability to get his $1 trillion infrastructure programme passed by the Senate because right now his honeymoon period is over and a lot of things are going wrong. It sounds as if he is in luck because there should be enough Republicans ready to get his programme through the Senate in the next day or so. He needs a success more than ever because his most important policies are falling apart. Only now has he persuaded 70 per cent of the population to get vaccinated - his original promised date was July 4th. And while his vaccination programme is being challenged, Delta variant infection rates are climbing alarmingly and there's talk of lockdowns reemerging. The other big issue going nowhere is immigration. Unprecedented numbers of people are queuing up to get over the Mexican border and the Biden administration does not appear to have a clue what to do about it. Certainly Kamala Harris, vice president who was handed immigration as part of her portfolio has come up with nothing of note. And then there's Afghanistan. The withdrawal of US troops is leading to appalling atrocities by the Taliban, with the killing of hundreds of civilians. So the infrastructure legislation is all he has to revive his popularity. Yes indeed the honeymoon is truly over.

Please talk peace with the Taliban, says US secretary of state.

The only images coming out of Afghanistan are violence violence violence. There is nothing to stop the Taliban rampage, apart of course from the 350,000 or so Afghan troops and police, and Afghan Air Force and US airstrikes from afar, but so far nothing has stopped the insurgents from making their relentless way towards Kabul. So the plea by Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, to President Ghani,the Afghan leader, to accelerate peace talks with the Taliban is pretty meaningless because there is absolutely no chance that the Taliban will stop fighting, lay down their arms, and talk seriously about peace. They have no reason to because they are making so much military progress that they have no time or interest in reawakening the peace talks which have dried up in Doha, Qatar. Both Blinken and Ghani, in a chat on the phone, condemned the Taliban violence. But the Taliban won't care about that either. They have basically taken no notice of anyone else in 20 years, especially not the Americans, so they are hardly going to react positively to pleas for peace when they haven't finished their fighting and killing. Blinken said if they didn't stop the violence they would be isolated from the international community. But do they care? I don't think so.They have already got the Chinese sidling up to them and promising support - as you would expect from the ever-conspiratorial Beijing - so I'm afraid with the US troops now 95 per cent pulled out of Afghanistan, the Taliban are not going to bother to listen to Blinken or anyone else from the US. That's just the way it is and it's a tragedy.

US artificial intelligence experiment to predict enemy's next move

The Pentagon is testing ways to forecast the future using artificial intelligence and cloud computing resources which could uncover an enemy’s next move days before it actually happens. Predicting the future is normally “a mug’s game” but advances in computer technology and the increasing focus on using robotic brains to replace humans to assist decision-making have opened up science-fiction possibilities for warfighting. The US defence department has created a new acronym for the computerised crystal ball gazing, calling it GIDE or global information dominance experiments. The aim is to achieve “decision-making superiority”, said General Glen VanHerck, commander of Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) both of which protect the US homeland from every form of enemy attack. “What we’ve seen is the ability to get way further what I call left, left of being reactive to actually being proactive, and I’m talking not minutes and hours, I’m talking days,” he said at a Pentagon briefing. America’s peer competitors - Russia and China – “hold the homeland at risk in every vector and every domain”, he said. In the latest of three experiments carried out by the Pentagon and all 11 combatant commands, one of the focuses was on envisaging a threatened takeover of the Panama Canal “by a peer competitor”, disrupting a crucial line of communication for US military logistics, the general said. During the experiment, artificial intelligence systems exploited a mass of data beyond any human ability to absorb to predict how the enemy might react by examining patterns and changes. Once alerted to anything significant, commanders fed the information to geospatial intelligence satellites (GEOINT) which can examine human activity on Earth, in order for them to “take a closer look at what might be going on in a specific location,” VanHerck said. “The ability to see days in advance creates decision space,” he said. In the past, secret information provided by the intelligence services could take a long time for an analyst to pore over. “Now the machine can take a look and tell you exactly how many cars are in a parking lot or how many airplanes are parked on a ramp or if a submarine is getting ready to leave or if a missile’s going to launch. Where that may have taken days before, or hours, today it can take seconds or less than minutes,” he said. The project outlined by the general which has now been researched for about a year, echoes the Hollywood film, Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg. In the 2002 film, future technology makes it possible for the police to catch criminals before they have committed a crime. VanHerck said: "Decision space for me as an operational commander [is] to potentially posture forces to create deterrence operations [for] the secretary [of defence] or even the president." It represented "a fundamental change in the way we use information and data" to accelerate decision-making at the tactical and strategic level at a time when both Russia and China were challenging the US on a daily basis, he said. The project was not about new ways of gathering data. “This information exists from today’s satellites, today’s radar, today’s undersea capabilities, today’s cyber, today’s intelligence capabilities,” he said. “What we’re doing is making that data available and shared into a cloud where machine learning and artificial intelligence look at it and they process it really quickly and provide it to decision makers,” he said. “This gives us days of advanced warning and ability to react. Where in the past, we may not have put eyes on with an analyst of a GEOINT satellite image, now we are doing that within minutes or near real-time,” VanHerck said.

The scramble to get out of Afghanistan

Before the Taliban takes over most of Afghanistan there is a mad scramble by the US to get thousands of Afghan interpreters and their families out and into safety in America. These Afghans were paid well and their role was vital during the 20 years of the US-led campaign but they risked their lives and those closest to them, never more so than now as the Taliban takes over more and territory. But the evacuation is taking a long time. The first 200 or so interpreters and families have arrived in the US and are being looked after and processed at Fort Lee army base in Virginia. But there are at least 1,700 interpreters to bring to the US and now the State Department has announced that thousands more Afghans who worked for American organisations in one form or other in Afghanistan are also to be allowed to leave for the US. Except there's a nasty stipulation. They have to leave on their own steam, no special flights for them, so queuing up for flights out of Kabul is going to be a high-risk move. It all looks like last-minute panic on the part of the US administration as they watch all the hard-won towns and cities during the 20-year campaign falling to the Taliban. It's a period of terror for anyone who threw his or her lot in with the Americans, attracted by the money and guaranteed job. Right now it's a mess but the US has without question a moral obligation to get them out of Afghanistan and into safety. It's increasingly looking like another Saigon evacuation.

Iran and the hidden truths

The outgoing Iranian president Hassan Rouhani has come up with a wonderful tautological definition of truth. He is reported to have said that during his eight years in office: "What we told people was not contrary to reality, but we did not tell part of the truth at times". By way of explanation he said he didn't think the whole truth would have been helpful and that it might have harmed national security. That old chestnut. Anything unhelpful or embarrassing or tricky can always be explained away as potentially a national security mattter. Well I guess if he was referring to Iran's nuclear research programme, his government wouldn't have wanted anyone to know about it, let alone the Iranian electorate. But Rouhani is leaving office knowing what he knows about what the US and Israel say is a clandestine, although not so clandestine nuclear weapons programme and is feeling a little guilty about it obviously because the Iranian people have been told what Tehran has been telling the rest of the world, that the nuclear programme is only about civilian nuclear power and nothing to do with bombs. There are all kinds of ways of not telling the truth or lying or at least not giving the full picture, the most popular of which is to "omit" the full truth and just give the basics. This is prettty well what Rouhani has admitted to. Then there was the exquisite phrase used by Kellyanne Conway, counsellor to Donald Trump. In giving a different perspective on what press secretary Sean Spicer had claimed about the size of the crowd who came to Trump's inauguration, she referred to the evidence of "alternative facts". Little has been said to improve on that phrase since then. But Rouhani had a go.