Not with a bang, but a whimper...

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TheGreenGoblin
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Not with a bang, but a whimper...

#1 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Tue Jul 06, 2021 1:14 pm

Like heretics in the night... I feel extremely sorry for the Aghan commander and I wouldn't put much money on Bagram not falling very soon to the Taliban. Another superpower is bested in Afghanistan.
US forces shut off the Bagram airfield’s electricity supply and did not notify the base’s senior Afghan officer when they departed on Friday, prompting puzzlement and anger among Afghan soldiers there.

The airfield’s new commander, Gen Mir Asadullah Kohistani, only discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, he said on Monday.

The fresh details of the American forces’ stealthy nighttime withdrawal from the sprawling base near Kabul, where they had spent two decades, underlined the uneasiness with which US forces sometimes regarded their Afghan partners.

“We [heard] some rumour that the Americans had left Bagram … and finally by 7am we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left” Kohistani told Associated Press.

“We did not know of their timeline for departure. They did not tell us when they left,” added the commander during a tour of the evacuated and now-looted base for journalists.

Kohistani’s account appeared to contradict a statement issued last week by the US that its forces had co-ordinated their departure from various bases with Afghan leaders. In response to Kohistani’s account, US spokesman Col Sonny Leggett referred back to the statement.

With 3,000 troops under his command, Kohistani’s forces are far smaller than the US military presence at the base during its heyday when Bagram resembled a small, if heavily militarised, town with its coffee shops, sports facilities, fast food chains and even a cinema.

Commenting on the capabilities of Afghan forces in Bagram, who are expecting to be attacked by a resurgent Taliban, he added: “You know, if we compare ourselves with the Americans, it’s a big difference. But according to our capabilities … we are trying to do the best and as much as possible secure and serve all the people.”

Within 20 minutes of the US’s silent departure on Friday, the electricity was shut down and the base was plunged into darkness, said Abdul Raouf, a soldier of 10 years who has also served in Taliban strongholds of Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

The sudden darkness was like a signal to the looters, he said. They entered from the north, smashing through the first barrier, ransacking buildings, loading anything that was not nailed down into trucks.

“In one night they lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area,” another Afghan soldier told AP.

The new details of last week’s secretive withdrawal under cover of darkness came as Afghan authorities deployed hundreds of commandos and pro-government militiamen on Tuesday to counter the Taliban’s blistering offensive in the north, a day after more than 1,000 government troops fled into neighbouring Tajikistan.

Fighting has raged across several provinces, but the insurgents have focused primarily on carrying out a devastating campaign across the northern countryside, seizing dozens of districts in the past two months.

“We are planning to launch a big offensive to retake the lost territories from the enemy,” Fawad Aman, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defence, told AFP. “Our forces are being organised on the ground for this operation.”

Troops and pro-government militiamen were deployed in the northern provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan where the Taliban have captured swathes of territory at lighting speed, often without any fighting.

The US announced on Friday it had completely vacated its biggest airfield in the country in advance of a final withdrawal that the Pentagon says will be completed by the end of August.

The statement said the handover of the many bases had been in process soon after President Joe Biden’s mid-April announcement that the US was withdrawing the last of its forces.

Before the Afghan army could take control of the airfield about an hour’s drive from the Afghan capital, Kabul, it was invaded by a small army of looters, who ransacked barracks and storage tents before being evicted, according to Afghan military officials.

Kohistani insisted the Afghan forces could hold on to the heavily fortified base despite a string of Taliban victories on the battlefield. The airfield also includes a prison with about 5,000 prisoners, many of them allegedly Taliban.

The militants’ latest surge comes as the last US and Nato forces pull out of the country. As of last week, most Nato soldiers had already quietly left. The last US soldiers are likely to remain until an agreement to protect the Kabul airport, which is expected to be undertaken by Turkey, is completed.

Meanwhile, in northern Afghanistan, district after district has fallen to the Taliban. In just the last two days, hundreds of Afghan soldiers fled across the border into Tajikistan rather than fight the insurgents. “In battle it is sometimes one step forward and some steps back,” said Kohistani.

The general said the Afghan military was changing its strategy to focus on the strategic districts. He insisted they would retake them in the coming days without saying how that would be accomplished.

Kohistani said the US left behind 3.5m objects, all itemised by the departing military. They include tens of thousands of water bottles, energy drinks and military ready-made meals.

They also include thousands of civilian vehicles, many of them without keys to start them, and hundreds of armoured vehicles. Kohistani said the US also left behind small weapons and the ammunition for them, but the departing troops took heavy weapons with them.

The Afghan soldiers who wandered through the base that had once housed as many as 100,000 US troops were deeply critical of how they had left Bagram, going in the night without telling the Afghan soldiers who were patrolling the perimeter.

On Monday, three days after the US departure, Afghan soldiers were still collecting piles of rubbish that included empty water bottles, cans and empty energy drinks left behind by the looters.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... -departure
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Re: Not with a bang, but a whimper...

#2 Post by G-CPTN » Tue Jul 06, 2021 4:00 pm


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Re: Not with a bang, but a whimper...

#3 Post by AtomKraft » Sun Jul 11, 2021 11:05 am

Get the strategy wrong, and everything else will be wrong too.

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