Madagascar food crisis driven by climate change, WFP says, as millions globally risk famine

By Amy Cassidy, David McKenzie and Ingrid Formanek, CNN 

Climate change is the driving force of a developing food crisis in southern Madagascar, the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) has warned.

© Laetitia Bezain/AP Men dig for water in the dry Mandrare river bed, in Madagascar, Monday, Nov. 9, 2020. As a consequence of three straight years of drought, along with historic neglect by the government of the remote region as well as the COVID-19 pandemic,1.5 million people are in need of emergency food assistance, according to the U.N. World Food Program.(AP Photo/Laetitia Bezain)

The African island has been plagued with back-to-back droughts -- its worst in four decades -- which have pushed 1.14 million people "right to the very edge of starvation," said WFP executive director David Beasley in a news release Wednesday.

"I met women and children who were holding on for dear life, they'd walked for hours to get to our food distribution points. These were the ones who were healthy enough to make it," Beasley said.

"Families are suffering and people are already dying from severe hunger. This is not because of war or conflict, this is because of climate change. This is an area of the world that has contributed nothing to climate change, but now, they're the ones paying the highest price."An estimated 14,000 people are already in catastrophic conditions, according to the WFP, a number that is predicted to double to 28,000 by October. Thousands in southern Madagascar have left their homes in search of food, while those who remain are resorting to extreme measures such as foraging for wild food to survive, the WFP said.

"This is enough to bring even the most hardened humanitarian to tears. Families have been living on raw red cactus fruits, wild leaves and locusts for months now. We can't turn our backs on the people living here while the drought threatens thousands of innocent lives," said Beasley.

"Now is the time to stand up, act and keep supporting the Malagasy government to hold back the tide of climate change and save lives.''

The WFP needs $78.6 million dollars to provide lifesaving food in the next lean season and prevent a greater tragedy, it said.

Beasley's warning came a day after the WFP said 41 million people in 43 countries were now teetering on the edge of starvation, with 584,000 already experiencing famine-like conditions across Madagascar, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Yemen. This number has increased from 27 million in 2019.

Conflict, climate change and economic shocks are all driving the rises in hunger, the WFP said, with those pressures on food security compounded by steep price increases for basic foods this year.

"Global maize prices have soared almost 90% year-on-year, while wheat prices are up almost 30% over the same period. In many countries, currency depreciation is adding to these pressures and driving prices even higher. This in turn is stoking food insecurity in countries such as Lebanon, Nigeria, Sudan, Venezuela and Zimbabwe," said the WFP statement.

The WFP needs about $6 billion to provide 139 million people this year with life-saving food and nutritional assistance, it said, in what the UN agency describes as "the biggest operation in its history."

Fired Winnipeg lab scientist listed as co-inventor on two Chinese government patents

The high-profile scientist who was fired from Canada’s top infectious disease lab collaborated with Chinese government scientists on inventions registered in Beijing, but closely related to her federal job, intellectual property documents indicate.© Provided by National Post Xiangguo Qiu's ouster from the National Microbiology Laboratory remains cloaked in mystery and has been the subject of ongoing debate in Parliament.

Xiangguo Qiu, who’s also under investigation by the RCMP, is listed as an inventor on two patents filed by official agencies in China in recent years.

Qiu was a long-time federal civil servant when the patents were registered in 2017 and 2019 for innovations related to the Ebola and Marburg viruses, key focuses of her work at Winnipeg ’s National Microbiology Laboratory.

Qiu’s ouster from the lab remains cloaked in mystery and has been the subject of ongoing debate in Parliament, as opposition parties try, largely in vain, to obtain information on why she and husband Keding Cheng — another scientist at the lab — were let go.

Qiu had extensive dealings with China and Chinese scientists in recent years, including repeated trips to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a “level-four” disease lab like Winnipeg’s.

One of the patents listing her as a co-inventor — with five other people — was filed with the Chinese National Intellectual Property Administration by the country’s National Institutes for Food and Drug Control. It describes an “inhibitor for Ebola virus.” Qiu won fame in Canada for helping develop a treatment for Ebola, though the Chinese drug seems different.

The other patent that includes Qiu and six collaborators as inventors was registered by the Inspection and Quarantine Technology Center of Fujian province. It’s for a “detection method,” or test, for Marburg, a hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola.

Neither Chinese patent makes any mention of her Canadian government employer.

The federal Public Servants Inventions Act states that the federal government owns all inventions “made by a public servant that resulted from or is connected with his duties or employment.”

And the legislation says a government employee cannot file a patent outside the country without the minister’s permission.

Mark Johnson, a spokesman for the Public Health Agency of Canada, refused to comment on whether Qiu had obtained such permission.

Asked if the agency — which administers the lab — was even aware of the patents, he said, “We cannot comment on this matter.”

Qiu could not be reached about the issue, and did not respond to previous phone messages left by the Post.

Whatever the Canadian government’s involvement in its employee’s Chinese-government-owned innovations, the situation seems like a mess, said Mark Warner, a prominent trade lawyer and former legal director of the Ontario Research and Innovation Ministry.

“If her contract permitted it, that would be a scandal,” he said. “If the contract didn’t permit it and they ignored the contract, that would be a scandal. If the contract didn’t even turn its attention to this, that would be a scandal, too.”

© Provided by National Post The National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg where scientists Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng worked until they were escorted out in July 2019, and finally fired in January 2021.

It appears Qiu was either in violation of the inventions law or got permission from the minister, said Richard Gold, an intellectual property expert at McGill University.

Gold said he could only speculate on what happened but “this sounds very much like she did not get permission and that the government has a claim to the Chinese application.”

Canadian authorities have generally given short shrift to economic and national security issues when publicly funded researchers collaborate with foreign companies and governments, said Myra Tawfik, a University of Windsor professor specializing in intellectual property.

The case of Qiu’s patents, she said, “should be a cautionary tale.”

China’s aggressive attempts to lure scientific talent from the West have become an increasing concern for security agencies, with some researchers in the U.S. actually charged criminally with failing to divulge their Chinese paid work.

In most cases, the scientists recruited by Beijing have been academics or private-sector researchers, not direct government employees.

Johnson said national microbiology lab workers must abide by the inventions legislation. But asked if the Public Health Agency was concerned about one of its employees working with the Chinese government in such a way, Johnson said “open science and collaboration” are core to its work.

“The NML has policies and processes that allow for scientific collaboration and these are reviewed periodically as part of the Science Excellence initiative to adapt them as needed,” he said.

Qiu immigrated from China in 1996 with medical and immunology degrees and worked at the NML since at least 2003. With colleagues there, she helped develop an Ebola treatment based on so-called “monoclonal antibodies,” which became part of a drug called Z-Mapp. For that work she was awarded the Governor General’s innovation award in 2018 — the year between the two China patents.

But then in July 2019, Qiu, her husband and students from China working in her lab were escorted out of the facility . Their employment finally ended in January. The Public Health Agency has offered little explanation, saying initially the matter dealt with policy and administrative issues. Meanwhile, an RCMP investigation of the situation has languished for two years with no end in sight.

Adding another wrinkle to the saga, Qiu was involved in a shipment of samples of Ebola and another lethal virus to the Wuhan lab in 2019, though the agency says that episode was unconnected to her removal.

The Globe and Mail reported recently that Qiu was barred from the lab after she and Cheng failed to pass screening by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, but that has not been confirmed by the government. The Globe also detailed her work with Chinese scientists, including a military researcher who worked for a time at the Winnipeg lab.

Qiu is listed as an inventor of the monoclonal antibodies for Ebola and Marburg i n patents filed in Canada and the United States. But it appears that versions of the two Chinese patents have not been registered anywhere else.

The Ebola “inhibitor” is based on a “bicyclic amine compound,” different technology than used in Z-Mapp. It’s unclear where the invention is at in development.

The Marburg test is touted in the patent as having high specificity in detecting the virus, being easy to use and fast, producing results within 90 minutes.

Qiu is listed as an author of several papers dealing with Marburg while working for the government, the most recent published this May.

THEY HAVE DONE THE SAME IN CANADA

UK Tory austerity wrecked our education system – the term ‘white privilege’ has nothing to do with it

Diane Abbott
Tue, June 22, 2021

THE INDEPENDENT

‘It is the Tory government that has cut per-pupil funding in real terms’ (Getty)

Today’s Education Select Committee report on the position of white working-class children shows just how ruthless the Tories are prepared to be in pursuance of electoral advantage through divisive “culture wars”.

Tory MPs have hijacked the education committee and its report in order to continue fighting these wars. It is a crude and partisan attempt to distract from the effects of the Tory government’s underfunding of education and its failure to address so many of the serious issues in the school system.

This report frequently quotes Tony Sewell’s discredited Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report. To me, the fact that it quotes this, rather than any serious work on race and education, is a clue that its motivation is about party politics rather than a meaningful effort to raise the achievement of all working-class children.


The Tory MPs on the committee call for an end to the use of the term “white privilege”. This is completely gratuitous. No serious academic discusses education policy in terms of “white privilege”, and in my view, anyone who believes the problems of working-class children – including those who are white – are caused by too much education about racism needs to reconnect with planet Earth.

The reality of course is that the education system has failed whole cohorts of pupils because of factors including austerity, underfunding, and efforts to homogenise the curriculum, as well as the underpayment and mistreatment of hardworking teachers and staff.

It is galling to hear Tory MPs talk about poor outcomes. But they only seem concerned about poor outcomes for white working-class children. Yet it is the Tory government that has cut per-pupil funding in real terms. The Conservatives also cut the lifeline that was the educational maintenance allowance (EMA), and trebled tuition fees, as well as cutting funding for libraries.

When they had an opportunity to level up educational outcomes, they chose to direct the money to their own constituencies in more prosperous areas. They have also presided over a surge in unemployment among younger workers during the pandemic. This is the party that recently mounted a huge defence of its disgraceful policies on free school meals. It clearly does not have the interests of working-class children at heart, of whatever colour.

Instead, this aspect of the report fits in with its denial of the existence of institutional racism. Today is Windrush Day. It is absolutely obvious that institutional racism does exist and the Windrush scandal is a product of it. But, for me, the government’s denial means that ministers feel under no obligation to tackle it. At the same time, as a recent Tory adviser confirms, this government promotes “culture wars”, which include overt racism, purely for electoral purposes.

It appears to me that this is an abuse of the committee system and its reports. Usually, these committees try to gather, sift and weigh evidence objectively. Their purpose is to improve policy and, if necessary, hold the government to account. Frequently they arrive at recommendations by consensus. But not a single Labour member voted for the report. It is extremely rare to divide a committee in this way, and I pay tribute to my excellent colleague Kim Johnson, in particular, for offering an alternative and for drawing attention to the Tories’ determination to cherry-pick data.

Education, with its vital role for our children’s future, is of the utmost importance. The government is failing on this issue, as on so many others, and must not be allowed to fuel “culture wars” as a distraction from that.

Read More

We must never allow this government to divide us with their ‘culture wars’

Of course ‘white privilege’ exists – you can even see it in the playground

‘It’s heartbreaking’: CDC ban could separate US troops from the dogs they rescue during deployments

BY J.P. LAWRENCE • STARS AND STRIPES • JUNE 18, 2021

A U.S. soldier who adopted Abu while deployed to Jordan said she is concerned she will not be able to bring the dog home after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a temporary ban on imports of dogs from 113 countries at high risk for rabies. (Courtesy photo)


A new U.S. health rule means troops could lose what a soldier described as “that one good thing” that happens during deployments — the dogs they meet and forge deep bonds with in places like Jordan, Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It’s heartbreaking that the CDC would opt to take that one good thing away from soldiers,“ a service member deployed to Jordan said after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week declared 113 countries to be high-risk areas for rabies and temporarily banned dogs from those countries from being brought into the U.S.

Afghanistan, Djibouti, Georgia, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya and Saudi Arabia are on the list.

“Deployments are very tough and having the opportunity to adopt a true friend I’ve made here has meant the world to me,” said the soldier in Jordan, whose dog, Abu, won’t have all the vaccinations it needs to be able to go to the U.S. before the ban takes effect on July 14. The soldier asked not to be named to avoid repercussions; troops are not authorized to have pets while deployed.

The CDC could grant a waiver to people wanting to bring a dog into the U.S. from a high-risk country, but will only do so in “extremely limited” cases if permission is requested at least 6 weeks before the dog enters the United States, the disease prevention agency says on its website.

“Dogs that arrive from high-risk countries without advance written approval from CDC will be denied entry and returned to the country of departure at the importer’s expense,” the CDC warns.

Abu sleeps against the leg of the U.S. soldier who adopted her while deployed to Jordan. A rule announced June 14, 2021 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will ban soldiers from bringing dogs into the U.S. from 113 countries at high risk for rabies, including Jordan. (Courtesy photo)


Several soldiers said the ban, which will run for one year, will most likely force them to say goodbye to the dogs they formed bonds with on deployment — dogs like Pepper, who was skin and bones when she was found three months ago by a U.S. soldier on patrol in Jordan.

“I want nothing more than to bring her home and show her a better life,” said the soldier, who also asked to remain anonymous. “This ban will make me have to leave her here.”

The temporary ban was driven in part by a sharp rise in the number of dogs whose humans tried to bring them into the U.S. with “improper” rabies certificates, CDC spokesman Dave Daigle said in an email. Some of the dogs’ rabies certificates were outright fakes, media reports have said.

At the same time, the coronavirus was sweeping the world, stretching global health care resources thin.

The temporary dog import ban seeks to minimize the risk of rabies being reintroduced in dogs in the U.S., at a time when the world's focus is on tackling the coronavirus, the CDC said.

“A rabid dog importation would detract resources from the COVID-19 response efforts,” Daigle said.

Rabies in dogs was eliminated in the U.S. in 2007 following an extensive pet vaccination effort.

But Puppy Rescue Mission, which arranges medical care for dogs and cats adopted by deployed soldiers and helps transport the pets to the U.S., said the ban is too broad and would have severe consequences on the abandoned animals and troops.

“We will be forced to tell our service members to leave behind their best friend to suffer a short, pain-filled life of torture and abuse,” PRM’s founder, Anna Cannan Chiasson, said in a statement. “This will be devastating to morale, both on the battlefield and when they return home.”

lawrence.jp@stripes.com

THEY CLAIM IT HAD NO ECOLOGICAL IMPACT
Explosion Triggered Near New US Navy Aircraft Carrier During Shock Trials Registered as 3.9 Magnitude Earthquake

The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) completes the first scheduled explosive event of Full Ship Shock Trials while underway in the Atlantic Ocean, June 18, 2021. The U.S. Navy conducts shock trials of new ship designs using live explosives to confirm that our warships can continue to meet demanding mission requirements under harsh conditions they might encounter in battle. (Jackson Adkins/U.S. Navy)

20 Jun 2021
Business Insider | By Ryan Pickrell

The U.S. Navy triggered an explosion near its new aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, off the U.S. East Coast on Friday during shock trials, and the big blast registered as a 3.9 magnitude earthquake, USNI News reported, citing U.S. Geological Survey data.

The U.S. government agency recorded the activity as an "experimental explosion" about 100 miles off the coast of Florida, where a Navy spokesperson confirmed to Insider the Ford is undergoing shock trials.

Shock trials test a ship's ability to withstand brutal battle conditions, specifically the detonation of ordnance nearby. By setting off controlled explosions near Navy ships, the Navy can identify critical shock-related vulnerabilities.

The Navy released video footage of the explosive shock trials from different angles. The Navy video, which appears to have been taken from aboard the Ford, shows the intensity of the nearby explosion.

USS Gerald R. Ford, a first-in-class vessel and the Navy's most advanced aircraft carrier, was "designed using advanced computer modeling methods, testing, and analysis to ensure the ship is hardened to withstand battle conditions, and these shock trials provide data used in validating the shock hardness of the ship," the service said.

 

 Carrier passes explosive 'shock trial,' US Navy says The U.S. Navy conducted a first “Full Ship Shock Trial” for its new first-in-class aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford. (Credit: US Navy via Storyful) 

Commenting on the results of the first explosive event, posts on the Ford's official social media pages said that "the leadership and the crew demonstrated Navy readiness fighting through the shock, proving our warship can 'take a hit' and continue our mission on the cutting edge of naval aviation."

 The Navy explained in a Facebook post on the testing that it "conducts shock trials of new ship designs using live explosives to confirm that our warships can continue to meet demanding mission requirements under harsh conditions they might encounter in battle."

 Shock trials were born from observations during World War II, a 2007 Navy-sponsored study said. During the war, the Navy discovered that while "near miss" explosions did not severely damage the hull or superstructure of ships, the shock from the blast would knock out key system and cripple the vessels. In response, the study explained, the Navy created a "rigorous shock hardening test procedure" known as shock trials. 

 The latest shock trials involving the Ford are the first aircraft carrier trials since those involving the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in 1987. 

 The Navy said that the trials are being conducted in a way that "complies with environmental mitigation requirements, respecting known migration patterns of marine life in the test area." The service also stated that it "also has employed extensive protocols throughout [full-ship shock trials] to ensure the safety of military and civilian personnel participating in the testing evolution."

The service also stated that it "also has employed extensive protocols throughout [full-ship shock trials] to ensure the safety of military and civilian personnel participating in the testing evolution."

Asian powers plot to fill US vacuum in Afghanistan

From Beijing to Ankara, the race for influence in Kabul is underway

A U.S. Marine shouts as he tries to protect an Afghan man and his child after Taliban fighters opened fire in the Helmand Province town of Marjah in Afghanistan in 2010. 

 © Reuters 

A PHOTO WOPTHY OF A FRANK CAPRA

WAJAHAT KHAN, Nikkei staff writer

June 17, 2021


NEW YORK -- Forty-eight hours after meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Brussels, U.S. President Joe Biden met Wednesday with another leader of a country Washington has thorny ties to: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

As with Turkey, Biden seeks to build a constructive relationship with Russia as he tries to reestablish America's international alliances and partnerships. He also wants to clear his desk while setting his sights on China, Washington's primary "strategic competitor." But an additional factor driving Biden to push for normalized ties, even cooperation, with Ankara and Moscow is the increasingly fraught situation in Afghanistan.

Biden's decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan has spurred internal instability in the country, where violence is escalating as the Taliban score more battlefield victories against the Afghan government and foreign forces disengage. But Washington's decision to pull out has also triggered a regional power play, with different actors -- from China to Turkey, from Russia to India -- looking to take advantage of the diplomatic power vacuum in Kabul.


Afghanistan's political, economic and military dynamics have long been influenced by larger and more powerful neighbors Pakistan and Iran. But one regional player, Turkey, is positioning itself in a key security role after the Americans withdraw.

While other NATO members will have fully pulled out their forces by Sept. 11, 2021 -- the U.S. Central Command said last week that it had completed more than 50% of the "retrograde process," the Pentagon's version of withdrawal -- Ankara has announced that its forces will stay.

Turkey is not an immediate neighbor. It does not share a border with landlocked Afghanistan but lies further west, past Iran. But analysts see Turkey spotting a dual opportunity in Afghanistan. First, Ankara seeks to leverage some goodwill in its soured relationship with the U.S. by offering to protect Kabul's Hamid Karzai International airport, a crucial link to the world. The move, which came in the lead-up to Erdogan's Monday meeting with Biden in Brussels, also fits into Ankara's playbook of increasing its role on the international stage while positioning itself for a more influential role in Afghanistan.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, meets with U.S. President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Brussels on June 14. © Reuters

The military presence of Turkey -- NATO's sole majority-Muslim member -- would seem more "benign" and a good fit to "straddle the sensitivities" of locals, according to Galip Dalay, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Doha Center.

But the Taliban think otherwise.

Shortly after Turkey made its proposal, a Taliban spokesman sent a warning to Ankara, saying though Turkey is a "great Islamic country," it is still part of NATO and therefore obliged to withdraw from Afghanistan under the 2020 peace deal with the U.S.

Turkey is hardly alone in seeing the promise as well as the peril of stepping into the vacuum left by the U.S.

China, which shares a border with Afghanistan, has long had its eye on the country as an economic partner, one that could be a lucrative corridor for its Belt and Road infrastructure-building initiative as well as a source of minerals, according to Jason Campbell of Rand Corp. But Afghanistan's lack of security has proved a problem for Chinese investment.

In contrast to America's goals of securing Afghanistan and nation-building there, Beijing sees Afghanistan as an economic opportunity. But the experience of the U.S. and NATO since 2001 will give any country pause before becoming heavily involved, Campbell said.

A Royal Air Force C-130J cargo plane is refueled in Kabul, Afghanistan.

 (Photo courtesy of the U.K. Ministry of Defense)

"There's no other country that's going to want to 'own' Afghanistan to nearly the degree that the U.S. and NATO have over the last 20 years," he said.

So China is treading carefully, teaming up with strategic ally and "iron brother" Pakistan, which exercises considerable influence over the Taliban, and has embarked upon a separate trilateral dialogue with Kabul and Islamabad to secure and develop Afghanistan, vowing to fight terrorist groups that threaten all three countries, while pushing to enter via Belt and Road, also engaging in parallel diplomatic contact with the Taliban.

Toward Afghanistan's north, across the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, where Moscow still wields influence, analysts see Russia as relieved that the U.S. will no longer have a major military presence near its southern flank but also worried that the American failure to secure Afghanistan could lead to further instability, even an Islamist movement that could seep into its own backyard, according to Vinay Kaura, a nonresident scholar of the Middle East Institute.

Much as the Soviet Union trained Afghan security officials in the fight against Afghan mujahedeen in the 1980s, Russia is now training Kabul security force cadets while also considering a more robust defense relationship with the Afghan government, which has requested the purchase of Russian weapons as well as upgrades and maintenance for its military helicopter fleet.

For Shiite-majority Iran, the uneasy relationship with the Sunni Taliban has been mollified by a common adversary in the U.S. With the Americans out of the picture, and the Taliban gaining ground in Afghanistan, Iran has been practical about doing business with the insurgents. Earlier this year, the Taliban were invited to Tehran to meet with Iranian officials and discuss the Afghan peace process.

Toward the east, India, which has long supported the government in Kabul with diplomatic support and investment, has reportedly reversed its long-standing policy of not dealing with the Taliban and is now engaging in direct talks with the insurgent group's leadership.

But Indian involvement in Afghanistan has long been countered by the presence of the one country that will have to pick up most of the pieces America leaves behind, whether it wants to or not: Pakistan.

A U.S. Marine has a close call after Taliban fighters opened fire near Garmsir in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2008. Today, most of Helmand is under the control of the Taliban. © Reuters

For decades, the Pakistanis have suffered both the brunt of and the blame for the conflict in Afghanistan.

Islamabad has implemented an open-border policy with its landlocked Western neighbor, allowing an estimated current population of more than 3 million Afghan war refugees and others to flow into mainland Pakistan.

The Pakistani military, initially with and then without American backing, has influenced the conflict in Afghanistan since the 1980s, first training and equipping sections of the Afghan mujahedeen with American support, and eventually backed various Taliban groups, into the 2000s and 2010s.

This involvement in the war has hyphenated Pakistan with the conflict in Afghanistan while alienating it from segments of the Afghan population. But now, as the power vacuum increases next door, Pakistan seems to be reimagining its own role in the region. National security adviser Moeed Yusuf calls Pakistan's new strategic policy "a shift of the imagination, pivoting from the geostrategic use of our vital position in the region, to geoeconomics," which includes a "core of economic security" and a "pillar of regional connectivity."

So the Pakistanis, often blamed for supporting insurgents in Afghanistan, are now asking for regional powers to share the burden of the expected collapse of the Afghan economy and state in the coming months. In the absence of a unified approach from neighbors, Islamabad is also bracing for impact for what is being perceived by its leaders as a turning back of the clock to the days before the 9/11 attacks on the U.S.

"There is going to be a vacuum, especially the way the Americans are conducting their pullout," said a senior security official on condition of anonymity.

"We had been warning about this very moment. This is not a responsible withdrawal. Let's not pretend this is not like the mistake made in the '90s," said the official, referring to the period of what many analysts in the region simply refer to as "abandonment" -- the disengagement from Afghanistan by Washington after the Soviet withdrawal.

U.S. Marines fill sandbags around their light-mortar position on the front lines of a Marine Corps base in southern Afghanistan in late 2001 as a cardboard sign warns that Taliban forces could be anywhere. © Reuters

That period led to the evolution of the Taliban, who rose from the ranks of the CIA-backed, anti-Soviet mujahedeen, or holy warriors, and also created a governance vacuum in Afghanistan that allowed for the rise of al-Qaida and other terrorist groups -- a crucial development that led to the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The U.S. said, 'Never again,' and yet, they're doing it again," the Pakistani official said of the American pullout.

"We bore the brunt that time. We will be unable to ignore it this time. But let's not look at Pakistan and say, 'You didn't do enough.' It's the Americans who are upping and leaving."

But Asfandyar Mir, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, doubts Islamabad's claims.

"Pakistan remain[s] enormously influential, due to its support for the Taliban. It wants to see the Taliban return to power," he said.

"For now, Pakistan is walking the tightrope of retaining influence on the Taliban while avoiding an adverse fallout" with the West, Mir said.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani gestures during Afghan New Year celebrations in Kabul on March 21.

Madiha Afzal, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, fears that the power vacuum will be widened by a civil-war-style faceoff between the Taliban and the government in Kabul, even as the regional players move in.

"The key dynamic, at least initially, will not be one of the external players jockeying for influence and control -- but the Taliban and Kabul fighting it out," she said.

"Each of these external players [China, Russia, Iran, India and Turkey] has some skin in the game and some moves up its sleeve," Afzal said.

"We've seen Turkey assert its role in recent days, and India change its tack and reportedly initiate discussions with the Taliban," she said. "Pakistan is perhaps in the strongest position, given its location and the history with the Taliban. Yet any role it plays will certainly be contested -- by Kabul, by the Taliban, and by other players."

"Afghanistan is making countries in the region and beyond nervous," Stanford's Mir said. "Yet instead of coming together and offering a coherent international response, they are pursuing independent tracks and further aggravating the crisis," he said.

"China, Russia, Iran, India and Turkey are jostling to become major players in a post-American Afghanistan with a hedging strategy," he said. "They are all engaging with the Taliban under the assumption that a Taliban reemergence is only a matter of time."

"To be sure, their appetite to do business with the Taliban is different -- Russia is much more open to the Taliban than, say, India," Mir said. "But some of these countries are strongly encouraging various Afghan actors to prepare for an anti-Taliban resistance movement -- especially if the Afghan government and security forces start to fold."

But what about Washington? Which country would it prefer to fill the expected vacuum?

"For the U.S., its main concerns will be around Russian and Chinese influence, and that of Iran -- or Pakistani hegemony," Afzal said. "It will accept a degree of Pakistani influence and will prefer that it is contained -- likely by Indian influence and a Turkish role," she said.

Additional reporting by Jack Stone Truitt in New York.

Afghanistan's air force is a rare U.S.-backed success story. It may soon fail

Nabih Bulos

LOS ANGELES TIMES

FRIDAY JUNE 18,2021

ICONIC PICTURE AMERICAN TROOPS EXITING

ANOTHER VICTORYLESS WAR

LIKE VIET NAM, CAMBODIA, LAOS

A soldier surveys the terrain out the window during a resupply flight on a UH-60 Black Hawk toward an outpost in the Shah Wali Kot district north of Kandahar, Afghanistan, on May 6. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)More

The UH-60 Black Hawk plummeted like a roller coaster from 10,000 feet — safe from whatever the Taliban was firing at it — all the way down to 50 feet, its nose almost licking the sun-scorched terrain of Shah Wali Kot.

Blitzing at 115 mph, the helicopter swooped just beyond the battle barriers of an Afghan army base, its two onboard gunners arcing their M240 machine guns as they scanned for any Taliban fighters nearby.

The outlook for Afghan's air force is in doubt now that the U.S. and NATO are pulling out of the country. A UH-60 Black Hawk passes Arghandab Dam after a mission north of Kandahar, Afghanistan. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)More

When the Black Hawk landed, five soldiers — two wounded, all terrified — were dragging a sleeping bag with their belongings down the hill through the desert underbrush. They were almost at the helicopter when the gunners let loose a burst of bullets toward a dull-brown knoll. The soldiers threw themselves onboard, one of them frantically pointing at an unseen enemy to the left and begging the crew to take off quickly.

The door closed. The pilot punched the throttle. The Black Hawk lunged forward, then knifed up into the afternoon sky to the drumroll of another M240 salvo.

Soldiers dragging a sleeping bag with their belongings run toward a waiting UH-60 Black Hawk under fire from the Taliban in the Shah Wali Kot district of Kandahar, Afghanistan. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Before takeoff hours earlier, Capt. Rezaye Jamshid had explained — a wan smile through his thick beard — that he would descend fast “because of the situation.”

“But don’t worry,” he said, soothingly.

Bravado? Not really. More a curt acknowledgment of what had become the lethal, daily reality confronting Jamshid and the rest of the Afghan pilots. The Taliban forces were resurgent. The Americans, along with NATO troops and their hardware — the F-18s, Reaper drones, C-130s and hundreds of other aircraft — were leaving. The Afghan air force, which the U.S. and its partners have nurtured to the tune of $8.5 billion since 2010, would now be the government’s spearhead in its fight against the enemy.

But the American pullout was revealing that the very viability of that air force was in question. And it was all getting worse.

Soldiers, some wounded by Taliban gunfire, leave the Shah Wall Kot outpost in Kandahar, Afghanistan, aboard an UH-60 Blackhawk. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Since May 1, the original deadline for the U.S. withdrawal, the Taliban military has overpowered government troops to take at least 23 districts to date, according to local media. That advance has further denied Afghan security forces the use of roads, meaning all logistical support to the thousands of army and police outposts and checkpoints — including resupplies of ammunition and food, medical evacuations or personnel rotation — must be done by air. The result is an operational tempo the pilots can’t sustain; their aircraft routinely exceed the maximum number of hours they’re allowed to fly.

And the war means there’s plenty to fly for an air force that includes the A-29 Super Tucano, a single-propeller weaponized plane and a mix of American and Russian helicopters. The Kandahar air base alone runs at least 50 to 70 missions a day, said Gen. Fazal Karim Faqeer, head of base operations.

“The Taliban are waiting for you. They're shooting different kinds of guns, RPGs, rockets… everything is ready for you,” said Capt. Mohammad Akbar, the pilot on one of two Black Hawks on a second mission that day.

It began uneventfully. The Black Hawks dropped by a nearby base to pick up bags of onions, tomatoes, flour, cooking oil, cartons of eggs (“Homeland’s product, homeland’s pride,” was printed on the side). The freight also included a surprisingly serene sheep and a few soldiers they would deliver to army outposts. Swinging toward the northwest, the Black Hawks were joined by a pair of MD530s, bumblebee-esque light-attack helicopters that would secure the perimeter.

Fields, trails and irrigation channels flashed below in the desert. The blue Arghandab reservoir glinted in the afternoon sun.

Then came the plunging descent, a dust-swirled rush to the ground and the panicked chucking of supplies out of the side door before that switchblade-fast takeoff. Though it was all done in under a minute, there was still enough time for a Taliban sniper to put a round in a soldier’s leg; the crew had to drag him into the helicopter.

During a resupply mission, a second UH-60 arrives at an outpost in the Shah Wali Kot district north of Kandahar, Afghanistan. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

“The only reason we’re alive is because the UH-60 is so fast,” Akbar said later, after the helicopters had landed back at the Kandahar base, which the Americans refer to as KAF. Yet they hadn’t been fast enough to escape taking hits; a bullet had punched a hole through the horizontal stabilator of one of the Black Hawks, and shrapnel pitted the fuselage of another.

Both of them were out of commission until they could be repaired.

That would take some time. The American withdrawal means U.S. troops “have gone to zero,” and so have the contractors who maintain the Black Hawks. The dwindling number of UH-60 maintenance contractors, who have pulled back entirely from Kandahar, means the helicopters have to fly to Kabul for repairs and upkeep.

Soldiers board a UH-60 Black Hawk for a resupply mission to an outpost north of Kandahar, Afghanistan. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

But there is a deeper problem: Over the last two decades the U.S. has built an army in its own image, with Afghan security forces relying on some 18,000 contractors for everything from buying fuel and bullets to doing payroll to the critical tasks of maintaining the 162 aircraft used by the AAF and training the pilots who fly them. Since late 2019, 94% of U.S. forces involved in training and advising the air force have left, so contractors have taken on almost all roles. Without continued contractor support, according to a Defense Department inspector general's report earlier this year, those warplanes would be combat-effective for only a few months.

“We don’t know when the contractors are going to leave here. When they do, it’ll be very bad,” said Col. Salim Razmendah, who runs UH-60 operations in north and east Afghanistan out of Kabul air base.

Officials with the Afghan National Security Council insist they can "Afghanize" the army, meaning Afghans can take on more logistics roles or at least renegotiate terms with contracting companies for significant savings. But the air force is different — maintenance contracts account for more than half of its budget.

Training a routine-level aircraft maintainer takes 18 months; an advanced-level one more than seven years. Though Afghans were dispatched to Slovakia for nine months to learn how to maintain the UH-60, the pandemic meant contractors gave no hands-on training when the students returned to Afghanistan.

An airman checks for damage caused by gunfire from the Taliban on the UH-60, an aircraft lauded by crew for its speed and survivability. But with the U.S. pulling out of Afghanistan, maintaining the aircraft is becoming more difficult. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

There have been frenetic efforts to change that. A few days after that early May mission, the two Black Hawks were in Kabul, one of them swarmed by a gaggle of uniformed Afghans working with a contractor in de rigueur khakis.

Razmendah, who was standing nearby with his helmet under his arm, said, “The Afghan maintainers, they’re working hard. But it’s very hard for them to do in two months what takes two years.”

One potential solution, officials say, is to transfer contract maintainers to a nearby country such as Uzbekistan and bolster nearby bases in Afghanistan like the one in Mazar-i-Sharif, 20 minutes away. No neighboring government has accepted. Another contractor with a braided beard added there were plans to run trainings with Zoom or virtual reality, but everyone acknowledges there’s no substitute for on-site training. Meanwhile, of the 47 Black Hawks with the AAF, 10 were due for inspections.

An Afghan air force UH-60 crew inspects the tail rotor during preflight check at Kabul Airbase in Afghanistan. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

None of this comes as a surprise. That the Black Hawk was even part of the Afghan air force’s assets was more a political than a practical decision, even though U.S. commanders once touted it as the silver bullet against the Taliban. Fast and survivable, the Black Hawk was preferred by crews over the Russian-made MI-17, once the backbone of the Afghans’ rotary wing.

But U.S. sanctions on Russia meant a moratorium on importing MI-17 parts. The goal was to phase them out with refurbished UH-60s as part of a decade-long transformation plan ending in 2023, said Gen. John Michel, a retired U.S. Air Force general who oversaw the NATO mission to build a modern Afghan air force and is now an executive in the aviation industry.

“We introduced a complex system late in the game, and now we’re ending it three years early," he said. "So you have a system not as well suited for the mission set."

The MI-17, he added, was an aircraft the mechanics knew since the Soviet era and could handle more than 80% of its maintenance. (They have zero maintenance capability so far on the UH-60, the inspector general report noted.) Besides, the MI-17 was better for battles, Michel said.

“It’s a tractor with a rotor, a U-Haul truck, and it has a lot of inherent agility. You could drop that thing on the pavement,” Michel said

Michel expected the Pentagon to keep the Mi-17s in operation for longer and reduce the number of aircraft to a more manageable amount.

But it’s unclear what reductions can happen with an already overstretched air force. At KAF, Gen. Faqeer, a burly, clean-shaven Afghan flyboy with the strut to match, spoke glowingly of his A-29, a single propeller warplane equipped to drop guided bombs and the pilots under his command. (He rhapsodized over his time training in the U.S., professing his love for guacamole.)

“When you bring a soldier back for medical treatment, you’re like an angel,” he said.

Hosy Andar, deputy governor of Ghazni province, top left, and soldiers, some wounded, are transported from at an outpost in Ghazni province to Kabul Airbase in Afghanistan. Taliban road closures mean nearly all logistical support to thousands of outposts, including resupplies of ammunition and food, must be done by air. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

But he acknowledged that the 10-minute response time troops seeking air support could expect when NATO was around was long gone.

“We have what we have right now. With NATO allies, they would just shift the plane from one spot to another. For us, we have to receive a cipher… it goes to the Operations Information Center, and then the pilot has to fly,” he said.

Ground commanders complain that can take an hour and a half, if strike aircraft come at all. The response time is also likely to get worse. Pilot training is afflicted by problems, including attrition. Five UH-60 pilots left in the last three months due to Taliban threats, officers say; in January, a pilot was killed in a drive-by shooting. Though there are 150 cadets in the pipeline, Razmendah said, he and other active-duty pilots were too overstretched to prepare them for missions.

“Before, a company did this. Now it’s gone. There’s no training at all for the UH-60,” he said.

Jack McCain, a former advisor to the Afghan air force who helped with UH-60 training, said the pace was “not sustainable.”

“You’re going to burn your people and your aircraft out if you don’t prep their replacements and get them out of the fight,” he said, adding that flying in Afghanistan was akin to “flying in Vietnam every single day and with nowhere else to go.”

Despite those issues, few dispute that the AAF gives the government a crucial edge over the Taliban — or that it’s a relative success story in an overall spotty U.S. record.

A UH-60 Black Hawk prepares to land at an outpost near Kandahar, Afghanistan. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

“The Afghans did something the U.S. would never ask of their own pilots: from never touching a Black Hawk to flying operational missions in under a year, which is flabbergasting,” McCain said.

The AAF, Michel said, was “the single most important capability that we have done in our investment of people and resources.”

But the air force is under constant threat. On Wednesday, an antitank missile slammed into the side of a Black Hawk near the airport in Ghazni, a stop that pilots had been forced to make every day to replenish fast-depleting ammunition stores. The pilots survived. The Black Hawk couldn't be repaired; 46 remain.

Special correspondent Abdul Matin Amiri in Kandahar contributed to this report.

AND THE WINNER IS GENERAL ATOMIC
As Afghanistan war nears end, details emerge on how Predator drone revolutionized warfare

MQ-1 Predator is shown during post-flight inspection at dusk from Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, Calif., Jan. 7, 2012.
(US Air Force Defense Visual Information Distribution Service )

The General Atomics unmanned aircraft has been a catalyst for extraordinary growth and change in the world of unmanned aerial vehicles

By GARY ROBBINS

JUNE 20, 2021 5:50 AM PT

“We’ve got him! Mission accomplished!”

Alec Bierbauer could hardly believe his eyes as he stood before a floor-to-ceiling TV at CIA Headquarters in Virginia, watching live video stream from an outpost in Afghanistan. He was transfixed by footage of a tall man in a white robe.

A fragile, camera-toting surveillance drone built by San Diego’s General Atomics was stalking Osama bin Laden as it quietly looped over his compound near Kandahar on Sept. 28, 2000.

The remotely-operated drone had a fearsome name — Predator — and it had unexpectedly found the terrorist leader during an experimental flight whose historic importance wouldn’t be fully realized in the moment.

The elation was quickly erased by exasperation.

The Predator had yet to be equipped with missiles. And it was unclear whether the U.S. had the legal authority to kill him. The al-Qaeda leader got away, and a year later the terrorist group attacked the World Trade Center and other targets in the United States, killing nearly 3,000 people.

The 9/11 attack triggered the war in Afghanistan, where upwards of 2,400 American troops have died, including at least 191 service members from San Diego County.

But as the war nears its 20th anniversary in October — and the Biden administration works to pull out all U.S. troops as early as next month — it is clear that Bierbauer was right to marvel at what he’d seen years earlier, and to shake his head at the naysayers who said that drones would never amount to much.

In a defining moment, a slow, propeller-driven plane that resembles an upside-down ice cream scoop showed with great clarity that it could quietly loiter high in the sky, find and monitor people, share full-motion video with allies around the world, and set the stage for precision attacks.

Or to use a less polite term, targeted killings.


A Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field in southern Afghanistan on a moon-lit night in 2010.
(Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP)

And, it could do so from afar. The Predator team that found bin Laden involved CIA, Air Force and General Atomics operators who weren’t directly in harm’s way.

The mission was secret, so only a handful of people knew this. But the scope of the drone’s abilities wouldn’t remain unknown, especially after the war started. A Predator later made it possible for a Marine jet fighter to kill Mohammed Atef, the military chief of al-Qaeda. It was part of a larger, successful effort to strike al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Few people better understand how this all unfolded than Bierbauer and retired Air Force Col. Mark Cooter, who helped carry out some of the Predator’s first missions in Afghanistan, with the aid of General Atomics.

They provide an insider’s account in their expansive new book, “Never Mind: We’ll Do It Ourselves: The Inside Story of How a Team of Renegades Broke Rules, Shattered Barriers, and Launched A Drone Warfare Revolution.”

Calling it a revolution isn’t mere hyperbole. The Predator has been a catalyst for extraordinary growth and change in the world of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs.

The U.S. Department of Defense now operates thousands of drones across all of its major services, using them for everything from training operators to conducting surveillance, reconnaissance and intelligence gathering, which can lead to airstrikes and other forms of attack.

The drones range from the new 1.16-ounce Black Hornet, a palm-size vehicle that can carry supplies, to the well-established RQ-4 Global Hawk, a nearly 48-foot long high-altitude, long-duration surveillance aircraft developed by San Diego’s Northrop Grumman division.

Drones are especially popular with the Air Force, which has been expanding its drone program so fast it doesn’t have enough pilots to operate them all, according to a 2020 report by the Government Accountability Office.

The Navy also broadly uses drones, including flying them off its speedy littoral combat ships to perform reconnaissance. It’s also developing unmanned “ghost” ships, some of which operate at the surface and others, like the new Echo Voyager mini-sub, that move below it.

Death from above

Adding missiles to the Predator and its larger, more capable successor, Reaper, engendered fierce criticism and raised questions about the morality of death by remote control. They became widely used in the Middle East, where air strikes have killed many civilians, defense analysts say.

Those ethical questions become even more tangled as the command-and-control concept behind the early Predator — with a “pilot” calling the shots from afar — moves toward more autonomous operations involving artificial intelligence, which could eventually make decisions without human input.

The issue worries Bierbauer, who told the Union-Tribune that the decision to use weapons “is a weighty and hard thought matter that needs to keep humans in the process.”

There are more drones to come, and soon.

Boeing is testing Loyal Wingman, a drone that is meant to shadow and shield a manned fighter aircraft. And design work is beginning on LongShot, an air-launched drone that will be packed with weapons. General Atomics and Northrop Grumman are among the early contractors.

Drones also have seeped into everyday life in a big way, especially in San Diego County, a historic leader in “fly tech.”

Chula Vista Police Department officers use a drone to investigate a report of a domestic violence in the parking lot of a retailer.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

The Chula Vista Police Department dispatches drones on 911 calls to help size up problems. San Diego Gas & Electric uses them to inspect its power lines, as does Caltrans with bridges. U.S. Customs and Border Protection also has been using drones for surveillance along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Predator “changed the way we wage war, altered the military, altered the CIA, reshaped the defense and aviation industries and is spreading in the civilian world faster than the Federal Aviation Administration can govern it,” renowned British historian Richard Whittle told CNET in 2014.

With another 20 years of technical advances, drone operators could largely replace human pilots in broad swaths of aviation.

“Some day soon we will have remote-operated passenger planes, air-taxis, even more automated farms, swarms of planes for fire fighting,” said Henrik Christensen, director of the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego.

A U.S. Air Force pilot and a sensor operator prepare to launch a MQ-1B Predator from a ground control station at a secret air base in the Persian Gulf region in 2016. The U.S. military and coalition forces used the base to launch drone airstrikes against ISIL in Iraq and Syria.
(Getty Images)


‘Persistent stare’

Cooter and Bierbauer’s book, which underwent a national security review that took more than three years, is part war story, part political thriller, and part tutorial on military drones, a technology little understood by the public.

Both men were mid-level insiders in an effort by the U.S. in 2000 to quickly transform General Atomics’ modest Predator drone into a robust spy-in-the-sky that could gather “actionable intelligence” against bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the source of escalating attacks against American interests.

At the time, Cooter was an Air Force officer and intelligence expert who had experience flying Predator. Bierbauer was an intelligence operations officer for the CIA. They came from different cultures but were both pro-drone, partly because there was little alternative.

As many authors have noted, the U.S. wasn’t willing to place large numbers of troops in Afghanistan in 2000. Satellites were helpful but couldn’t linger overhead. Nor could high-altitude reconnaissance planes. And it was hard to cultivate a ground network of informants. Most of Afghanistan was controlled by the Taliban, which had given al-Qaeda safe haven. The U.S. did pick up some information about bin Laden’s movements, but it wasn’t timely enough to act on.

The solution seemed to be remotely-operated drones, a fairly primitive technology that had been developed in fits and starts over decades. But drones had cameras that could fix on people and places for hours. The military calls it “persistent stare.”

The CIA and Defense Department wanted to move things forward. To do that, they turned to General Atomics, whose owners, brothers Neal and Linden Blue,were working on drones in Poway, at the company’s aeronautical systems division. And they loved to push the envelope.

‘Flying Blue Brothers’

General Atomics workers experienced a “can they be serious?” moment in 1986, shortly after the brothers purchased the company, which had long focused on the peaceful use of atomic energy.

Neal floated the idea of having General Atomics develop drones that could be sent on kamikaze missions against Nicaragua’s gasoline infrastructure. This appears to have been tied to long-term political issues he had with the Central American country’s leadership.

The enterprise was given a name — Predator — and quickly fizzled. But the Blues’ interest in drones was real, and they had a lot of credibility when it came to aviation.

Neal, left, and Linden Blue in 1961.
(Denver Post/Denver Post via Getty Images)

The rich, Yale-educated siblings learned to fly when they were young and indulged their wanderlust. In the 1950s, they squeezed into a tiny plane and explored South America on a perilous 22,000-mile journey that was featured on the cover of Life magazine with the headline, “The Flying Blue Brothers.”

More adventure followed for Linden. In 1961, a Cuban jet fighter forced him to land on the Caribbean island apparently due to a misunderstanding about whether he had permission to be in the area.

He was jailed for 12 days then expelled from the country, shortly before chaos struck. A group of CIA-trained Cuban refugees made a failed attempt to topple President Fidel Castro during the infamous the Bay of Pigs invasion.

The brothers went on to serve in the Air Force, where Linden joined the Strategic Air Command at an important moment: it was developing cutting-edge reconnaissance aircraft to use against the Soviets.

The Blues turned out to be savvy observers when it came to talent, technology and opportunity.

In the early 1990s, they bought the assets of Leading Systems, an Irvine-based company which had been developing a line of small, reliable, affordable drones. The company was run by Abe Karem, a revered aeronautical engineer who had few peers when it came to building unmanned aircraft.

Karem believed he was on the verge of selling lots of drones to the U.S. military. But interest waned. With their strong pilot cultures, the Air Force and Navy were built around the idea of putting people in cockpits, not taking them out. Karem ended up going bankrupt. Neal and Linden ended up with his airframes, which evolved into today’s Predator.



Linden Blue, co-founder of General Atomics, right, talks with Bill Sadler of Sadler Aircraft, who is in one of his light aircraft in 1988.


A dubious spy

In early 2000, President Bill Clinton was upset by the lack of progress the U.S. was making in tracking down bin Laden, who had been involved in the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998. The attacks killed more than 200 people.

Clinton basically gave the CIA and Pentagon nine months to solve the problem. And they decided that upgrading the Predator had to be part of the solution.

It was a daunting task.

The Predator had been used in Bosnia and Kosovo. But “according to conventional wisdom, one would have been hard pressed to imagine a contraption less suited for the modern battlefield,” Cooter and Bierbauer say in their book.

Cooter told the Union-Tribune the plane “only had a max speed of about 120 knots, it normally flew at about 70 knots. It didn’t have any self-protection, like a receiver that would have warned if it had been picked up on radar. And it couldn’t talk to other planes.”

Predator also didn’t have a big history of doing time-sensitive surveillance, which would be required for missions into Afghanistan. A large team of analysts was needed to evaluate data quickly and determine where the drone should go and what it should do.

“Afghanistan is huge. You can’t just aimlessly fly around,” Bierbauer said.

The U.S. also could not launch and land Predator from inside Afghanistan. It would have to create a forward operating base in a neighboring country to avoid detection, reprisals and political turmoil.

Solutions fell into place, including one that enabled the drone’s operators to eavesdrop on Taliban air defenses.

But it was a tense time. There was so much concern that the forward operating base in Uzbekistan would be discovered that a decision was made to fly the drone only at night. Trouble quickly followed.

In late summer, on the first test flight, the Predator crashed and was destroyed. The drone’s operators didn’t have access to all of the data they would have during a daytime flight, leading to an operational error.
Successful science project

The team had a second Predator, which began secret surveillance flights on Sept. 7. Three weeks later, the drone discovered a man believed to be bin Laden outside Kandahar, during Friday prayers.

“I think everybody’s collective reaction was we got him, this is it,” Bierbauer told the Union-Tribune. “It was probably 20, 30 seconds of just jaw-hanging disbelief and then, ‘Now what?’”

The U.S. had the ability to launch an airstrike from submarines in the Indian Ocean. And that appeared to be the plan. But it didn’t happen.

There were legal questions about whether the U.S. had the right to essentially assassinate bin Laden, analysts say. There also was concern about the blowback that would occur if such an airstrike went awry in any way.

A Predator drone, armed with a missile, sits on the tarmac of Kandahar military airport.
(MASSOUD HOSSAINI/AFP/Getty Images)

Cooter says he isn’t sure who made the final decision in the matter, but he’s unhappy about how things turned out.

“It’s like you’re on a football team and you draw up a play and you know your responsibility, but the play doesn’t work because someone doesn’t do what you thought they were going to do,” he said.

But he also draws positives from that moment, adding, “The team put eyes on bin Laden and brought the Predator home safely. We did what we were supposed to do. We went from humble beginnings to where we are now with unmanned aerial vehicles in the U.S. arsenal.”

As Afghanistan war nears end, details emerge on how Predator drone revolutionized warfare - The San Diego Union-Tribune (sandiegouniontribune.com)

REKHA BASU My mother warned that America's 1980s allies threatened women in Afghanistan. They've continued to, as our enemies.

While working for Afghan women, Rasil Basu predicted no good could come of U.S. military involvement for women or the country.

Rekha Basu
Des Moines Register

As the second Mother’s Day without my mother approached, Rasil Basu reappeared via an unexpected Google alert.

U.S. historian and writer Noam Chomsky and Indian counterpart Vijay Prashad had resurrected my late mother's prophetic warnings from the late 1980s about the plight of Afghan women and girls under our proxy war with the Soviets.

Chomsky and Prashad examine the legacy of America's two decades of war in Afghanistan, now set to end by Sept. 11 under President Joe Biden's order. (In a rare instance of agreement, Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, had planned on a pullout.) But the authors, who have long argued against a U.S. military presence in favor of our brokering political talks between factions, are concerned about the impact of still leaving several thousand U.S. troops and contractors there. As Politico reported, top military leaders advocate keeping them "to keep the Taliban in check and prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a haven for terrorists."

MORE COMMENTARY: I became a quadruple amputee in Afghanistan. It's time for America to leave.

Chomsky and Prashad argue the U.S. military presence has just piled civilian (71,000) and troop (over 2,000) casualties atop destruction of the country's physical infrastructure and social bonds. On the other side, the decision to pull out has raised warnings of a security gap from current and former U.S. military brass. David Petraeus, the former U.S. troop commander in Afghanistan, believes the Taliban will probably take over again and allow al-Qaida and the Islamic State to reconstitute.

This leads to my mother's warnings, back in the late 1980s and again in 2001, when the current war began. From 1986 to 1988 she worked in Afghanistan under a contract with the United Nations as senior adviser to the Afghan government on women’s advancement. Having observed progress for women under the Soviet occupation, she worried about a Taliban-type Islamist government repressive to women if the U.S. continued to fund and support Taliban precursors against the Soviets.

Chomsky and Prashad recall my mother telling them that the Afghan Constitution of 1987 specified equal rights for women "which allowed women’s groups to struggle against patriarchal norms and fight for equality at work and at home. Because large numbers of men had died in the war, Basu told us, women went into several occupations. There were substantial gains for women’s rights, including a rise in literacy rates."

Thanks to the link they provided, you can read Rasil Basu's perspective in her own words, written after the U.S. invasion following Sept. 11, 2001. She wrote that, though "unjust patriarchal relations still prevailed in the workplace and in the family, women had made great strides under the Soviet occupation with illiteracy declining from 98% to 75%." They had been granted equal rights to men in civil law.

All that progress, argue Chomsky and Prashad, "has been largely erased during the U.S. war over these past two decades."

My mother was unsuccessful at getting her piece published in major U.S. media. Titled "The Rape of Afghanistan," it began, "An unexpected fall-out of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon was the sudden concern of the American and other governments with the plight of Afghan women."

George W. Bush had declared war on Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden and then sough to justify it to skeptical observers by pointing out the ruling Taliban's mistreatment of women. To that end, the seldom-heard-from Laura Bush was deployed to give a speech on U.S. forces arriving to liberate Afghanistan's suffering women.

But, as my mother had tried warn in the 1980s, the U.S. had, at the time, supported precursors to the Taliban in its proxy war against the then Soviet occupation: men like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who reportedly threatened to throw acid in the faces of women who publicly dressed in Western clothes instead of hijab. As she wrote, "Ironically, the U.S. favored the three fundamentalist resistance groups … over the more moderate mujahideen groups."

And now that same Hekmatyar, identified as a Hezb-e-Islami leader, reportedly wants to form and lead a government in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the U.S. has agreed to the Taliban having a role in a new government.

At any rate, even though the U.S., NATO allies, and the Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces killed tens of thousands of its forces during the war, the Taliban shows no sign of going away. As The Nation put it, "The Taliban, which has battled the world’s most fearsome military machine for two decades, remains standing, and continues to expand its control in rural areas."

“The U.S. has spent $6.4 trillion on the war on terror since 2001," according to Stephanie Savell of the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute. That includes caring for veterans and interest on money borrowed to fund the wars. Yet there are more terrorist groups than there were in 2001, recruiting more people in more regions of the world. It all comes back, Savell rightly observed, to the fact that terrorism isn't a problem wars can solve.

Just two days after Chomsky's and Prashad's piece was published, a bombing near a girls’ school in Afghanistan’s capital claimed up to 85 victims, mostly female. The Taliban has denounced it and no group has claimed responsibility, but similar attacks in the area have been attributed to Islamic State in Afghanistan.

That was the day before Mother's Day, making an already sad day a tragic one. And there is reason to fear that the damage done in a tragic decades-long legacy of our involvement in Afghanistan won't quickly reverse course.