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.

Rekha Basu: Afghan native's help to U.S. 'overwhelmingly unimpeachable,' yet we'd turn him over to Taliban

Zalmay Niazy of Iowa Falls helped interpret for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But after six years in Iowa, his plea for asylum has been denied for a ludicrous reason as the law allows.

Rekha Basu
Des Moines Register



From Afghan translator to small-town Iowa handyman


If you’re not convinced we need to revamp U.S. laws on who gets to enter, work, live and find legal sanctuary in this country, look at the crisis facing Afghan-born Iowa Falls resident Zalmay Niazy. His plight sharply illustrates how our decisions to wage war thousands of miles away can endanger allies' lives at the other end. And it cries out for fixing the fact that service to our nation by foreigners living under terrorism is too often punished rather than rewarded.

Niazy, who goes by Zee, was born to professional parents, and educated in private schools to serve as an English-language interpreter. During “Operation Enduring Freedom” — the Bush administration’s military response in Afghanistan and elsewhere to the Sept. 11 attacks — he interpreted for our forces. Beginning at age 19 in 2007, he spent three years helping them fight the Taliban by scanning radio signals, writing up reports on their internal communications, and translating for coalition forces. That put him in life-threatening situations and led to injuries and threats from the Taliban, which also killed his uncle, his Des Moines lawyer says.


Zee later got other employment, which led to his attending a conference in Washington, D.C. in 2015. While here, he applied for political asylum under a program created especially for foreign interpreters for U.S. military. He learned the Taliban was tracking him abroad with threats and his parents feared he’d be killed if he returned home.

Political asylum is selectively awarded to foreign nationals who can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in their homelands based on their political affiliation or membership in a marginalized group. Applicants are allowed to stay in the U.S. while awaiting a decision. In Zee’s case, that took four years to come, from the time he was granted an interview after appealing for Sen. Chuck Grassley’s intervention at a 2017 town hall.

In the meantime, Zee created and runs a handyman business, and he bought and renovated a home.

Yet last month the Department of Homeland Security denied him asylum, for a reason so unfair it’s almost laughable. As his lawyer Keith Herting tells it: “When he was 9, the Taliban came to his home. They threatened to burn his house down if he didn’t give them food, (so) his mom gave him bread to take to the fighters.” In his interview with Homeland Security officials, Zee told about that incident in answer to a question on whether he had ever had direct contact with the Taliban.

They used it against him, claiming it showed he’d been “providing material support to terrorists.” They also said he had shown no real threat of persecution, he said in a June 10 interview on Iowa Public Radio’s "River to River":

“I said, ‘I fought this group. How can I be engaged in their activities?’”

The material-support statute, elements of which were in the 1990 Immigration and Nationality Act signed by Bill Clinton, were barely invoked until passage of the 2001 USA Patriot Act. It makes it illegal to provide assistance to any group the U.S. government considers a foreign terrorist organization. But the precedent-setting asylum denial came in 2018 under the Trump administration, after Trump had campaigned pledging to use it more broadly. “In the Matter of A.C.M.” involved a Salvadoran woman who was enslaved by a paramilitary group and escaped, says Herting:

“The Department of Justice said while she was enslaved, she cooked and cleaned for the terrorists,” concluding she provided them material support, he said. That concept has since been applied in a number of other cases, as documented by the New Yorker magazine.

“His story is so overwhelmingly unimpeachable,” said Herting of Zee, “that I would hope there would be some decency or rationality. But I haven’t seen a ton of evidence to suggest that exists.”

More:Basu column: An Iowa City 'Documented Dreamer' tells a U.S. House panel about her plight, shared by 200,000 others

Herting challenges Grassley's contention that he can do nothing because it’s a law. The senator can push to change the law, he says.

Zee will appear June 28 before an immigration appeals court in Omaha to plead his case. A GoFundMe account has been set up for his legal fees.

More broadly, Congress must immediately set about getting rid of or modifying the material support law. That, by the way, doesn’t apply to domestic terrorist groups revealing its underlying bias. Donald Trump leaned on it to ban travel from Muslim countries. He also made asylum the only grounds for foreigners presenting at the border to seek permission to stay, and reduced the number of refugees permitted in annually. Some of his moves have been relaxed under Joe Biden, but there’s much more work to do on immigration law.

In a pointed CNN commentary about Vice President Kamala Harris’ visit to Central America to address the issues that prompt people to leave their countries, Mari Aponte, a former ambassador to El Salvador, wrote:

“The enforcement-first immigration strategy has failed us in the past. Instead of a heated rhetoric that paints immigrants as dangerous, we need real, evidence-based solutions that get at the heart of why migrants leave their homes and make the trek to the U.S.”

That would surely apply to Zalmay Niazy, whose home country the U.S. has had its fingers all over for decades. Now we're pulling out, leaving many who supported us at risk of reprisals from the Taliban. If his plight matters to you, stand up and support Zee’s claim for asylum, and ask Grassley and Sen. Joni Ernst to do the same — and then change the law.

Commentary
America Shall Be Judged By How We Leave Afghanistan — By Allies, Foes, and History
By Sen. Angus King (I-MAINE)

Tue Jun 22 2021 03:00 AM

With the help of an interpreter, Cpl. Devon Sanderfield, a squad leader with Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, speaks with a villager in the town of Changwalok, Afghanistan. (Cpl. Zachary Nola, Marine Corps). (U.S. Marines)

In less than three months, the United States will withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan, ending our engagement in the longest war our nation has ever fought.

Over the course of nearly 20 years, war in Afghanistan cost thousands of American lives — but that number would undoubtedly have been higher without the support and sacrifice of tens of thousands of Afghan nationals who served as interpreters, translators, and guides for our military personnel or provided additional aid to the U.S. government. These Afghan citizens helped the United States at great personal risk — and in return, relied on us for protection. As the United States winds down its military operations in Afghanistan, our moral and strategic responsibility to protect them is more important than ever.

To recognize the service of our Afghan allies, in 2006 the U.S. created a special immigrant visa (SIV) program for those who assisted in America’s military efforts. The program has already issued tens of thousands of visas to Afghan nationals who aided the U.S. and their families. But now, as our military presence draws down and with the Taliban waiting in the wings, there is a backlog of about 18,000 Afghan nationals waiting for their SIV applications to be processed. This slowdown won’t just be an inconvenience; continued delays could very well be a death sentence for those who put their lives on the line to help the United States.

The moral necessity of protecting our Afghan friends from the Taliban and extremist threat is obvious: America made a commitment to protect those who worked with us, and we, as a nation, must live up to that commitment. Inaction would also create a national security risk — because if America’s moral leadership is degraded and our word is devalued, then who on earth would stand beside us in foreign theaters in the future? We absolutely cannot send a signal to current and future allies and partners that when the going gets tough, the United States abandons its friends.

Unfortunately, we’re running out of time. The United States is less than 90 days away from withdrawing the last of our troops; in contrast, a recent report from the Departments of State and Homeland Security estimate that the average processing of an SIV application takes 996 days — roughly the difference between three months and three years. This is a full-fledged emergency, and the Biden administration cannot settle for business as usual.

We need to cut down on this nearly 1,000 day wait, while still prioritizing homeland security through a sound vetting process. The most effective way we can safely fulfill America’s commitment is by speeding up our existing efforts to process SIVs and expanding the number of visas available for eligible applicants. To its credit, the administration is working cut down on this wait time by drastically increasing the amount of staff responsible for reviewing these applications. We can also simplify or streamline the paperwork needed, given the exigent circumstances, to further expedite the process.

While a larger staff, fewer forms, and more visas would make a real dent in the outstanding backlog, we know that the large number of outstanding applications and challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic make it all but impossible to complete this process by the time U.S. forces are fully withdrawn. This poses a severe problem in a land-locked country like Afghanistan – because once American forces are out, a return rescue mission, most likely conducted by air, becomes increasingly difficult. Given the timeframe and the obstacles, it is obvious that we cannot rule out any feasible solution that gets our partners to safety sooner rather than later.

Fortunately, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Beyond the procedural changes that we could be making, there are also historical precedents for contingency plans that bring our wartime allies to a safe location, while ensuring that the State Department and interagency has time to do its diligence on each applicant. Following the end of the Vietnam War, Vietnamese citizens who had worked with the United States during the conflict were initially relocated to Guam, before the large majority were eventually resettled in the U.S. This sort of ‘waystation’ — whether it be a U.S. territory, a location in the region, or another possibility — meets our moral obligations and our national security concerns. With less than 3 months before withdrawal, the administration should be looking seriously at this idea.

An extension of this approach could be to work with the NATO nations who fought beside us to also address this challenge. Just as our NATO allies continue to play an important part in the War in Afghanistan and the withdrawal, they also relied upon the contributions of Afghan nationals. As the administration continues to explore options, it can and should consult with NATO allies to see if these nations could temporarily house or relocate some percentage of these visa applicants.

The best solutions are not fully clear yet — but what is clear is that time is running out to fulfill America’s duty to our friends. Nations are judged by the manner and care with which they leave the field of battle — not just by future foes and prospective allies, but also by the eyes of history. The world is watching to see what we do — or don’t do — for our Afghan allies in this life-or-death moment. Inaction is unacceptable; I urge the administration to redouble our efforts before it is too late.

Senator Angus King (I-Maine) serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he Chairs the Senate Strategic Forces Subcommittee, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In addition to also serving on the Energy and Natural Resources, and the Rules Committee, King is the Co-Chair of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, an initiative tasked by the 2019 NDAA with crafting the United States’ 21st century cyberdefense posture as hacks and attacks become a weapon of choice of rogue nations and criminals worldwide.

Editor’s note: This is an op-ed and as such, the opinions expressed are those of the author. If you would like to respond, or have an editorial of your own you would like to submit, please contact Military Times managing editor Howard Altman, haltman@militarytimes.com.

Junkyard of empires: Afghans sift through leftovers of US occupation



 

Junkyard of empires: Afghans sift through leftovers of US occupationThe Pentagon is vacating Bagram air base as part of the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, and tons of civilian equipment is being scrapped

Anne Chaon and Mushtaq Mojaddidi
Tue, June 22, 2021, 9:26 PM·4 min read


Squatting in the dust by the main road to Afghanistan's biggest air base, Mir Salam sifts through a pile of broken electronics in front of him, salvaged from departing US troops.

All around are heaps of junk and scrapped equipment -- ranging from telephones and thermos flasks to computer keyboards and printer cartridges.

"This is what the Americans do," the 40-year-old told AFP. "They destroy absolutely everything."




The Pentagon is vacating Bagram air base as part of its plan to withdraw all forces by this year's 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States, and it could be completed by the end of the month.

Military gear is being taken home, or given to Afghan security forces, but tons of civilian equipment must be left behind.

The result is a booming scrap business that is making money for some, but leaving many resentful.

"They blow it up or are burning it," says Salam of the equipment being discarded.

"There were lots of new things in this base -- enough to rebuild Afghanistan 20 times -- but they destroyed everything."

For two decades, Bagram served as the nerve centre for US operations in Afghanistan.

A sprawling mini-city visited by hundreds of thousands of service members and contractors, it boasted swimming pools, cinemas and spas -- and even a boardwalk featuring fast-food outlets such as Burger King and Pizza Hut.

It also has a prison that held thousands of Taliban and jihadist inmates over the years.

Bagram was built by the United States for its Afghan ally during the Cold War in the 1950s as a bulwark against the Soviet Union in the north.

Ironically, it became the staging point for the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, and the Red Army expanded it significantly during their near decade-long occupation.

When Moscow pulled out, it became central to the raging civil war -- it was reported that at one point the Taliban controlled one end of the three-kilometre (two-mile) runway and the opposition Northern Alliance the other

- Nothing goes to waste -

In recent months, Bagram has come under rocket attacks claimed by the jihadist Islamic State.

If the Taliban capture the base, it would be a significant step -- perhaps even the decisive one -- towards seizing control of Kabul itself.

Salam pays 1,000 afghanis ($12) a month to rent a modest fenced plot on the Bagram road, where he stores base scrap that he searches for nuggets to sell to specialised dealers.

The road to the base is lined with dozens of similar enterprises -- some ramshackle, but others featuring imposing warehouses with armed guards.

The big players have contracts to remove the scrapped equipment, which they cherry-pick for items that can be repaired.

Anything they don't use is left for smaller dealers such as Salam.

Cables are stripped for copper, circuit boards broken down for rare-earth metals, and aluminium collected to be smelted into ingots.

Nothing goes to waste, says Haji Noor Rahman, another scrap merchant.

"Anything re-usable, people buy it," he told AFP.

His warehouse is like a department store for scrap, with the floor covered by an astonishing array of items -- broken chairs, busted TV screens, rusting gym equipment, an electronic piano keyboard, artificial Christmas trees and other festive decorations.

First aid kits have been gutted, spilling bandages and IV bags.

Picking through the selection is Abdul Basir, who came from Kabul with a friend and snapped up six warped metal doors for around 8,000 afghanis.

Elsewhere, a young man unearthed a pair of branded shoes that still appeared to have a few miles left on them.

Another browser bought a teddy bear and a mini rugby ball

- 'Pessimistic' future -

It isn't just equipment that will be left behind when the Americans pull out -- Bagram is surrounded by satellite communities that rely on the base for employment.

"The withdrawal of American troops will have a bad impact on the economy of the country and that of Bagram," district governor Lalah Shrin Raoufi told AFP, adding he was pessimistic for the future.

"Their presence here has provided jobs for thousands and thousands of Afghans," he said, ranging from mechanics to bakers.

"I met the employees of a company that provided basic food... they are afraid of losing their jobs."

Raoufi said everything is being done to take charge of the base and its security when the last US forces leave.

"We are working with the police, the army and the NDS (intelligence services)," he said.

"We have started to recruit soldiers... We will take those who meet the criteria."

Meanwhile, the clear-out continues.

"They came to rebuild our country but now they are destroying it," says Bagram resident Mohammad Amin, looking over a pile of scrap.

"They could have given us all this."

ach-mam/fox/jds/gle/qan

JUST LIKE AFTER RUSSIA LEFT

Militias in Afghanistan’s north are taking up the fight against the Taliban

BY PAMELA CONSTABLE AND EZZATULLAH MEHRDAD•

 THE WASHINGTON POST • JUNE 22, 2021

KABUL — A sweeping Taliban offensive across northern Afghanistan, unchecked by overstretched government forces, has triggered a sudden resurgence of anti-Taliban militias in half a dozen provinces, raising concerns that the country could plunge into a prolonged civil war.

President Ashraf Ghani, scheduled to visit Washington on Friday to meet with President Joe Biden amid growing concerns here about the withdrawal of U.S. forces, has endorsed the sudden call to arms by former ethnic rival groups and shaken up his top security team, in hopes of stemming the Taliban onslaught and calming public panic.

In a meeting Monday with influential former anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban militia leaders, Ghani called on them to create a “united front” and support the Afghan security forces to “strengthen peace” and “safeguard the republic system.” The Taliban rejects the current democratic governing system and seeks to install an Islamic one.

During a separate ceremony, the newly appointed acting defense minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, called on “my patriots and people everywhere to stand alongside their security and defense forces.” He said the government is “ready to provide them with all equipment and resources.”


The Ghani government hopes the added support will shore up the beleaguered national defense forces, which have struggled to send reinforcements and supplies to troops facing repeated Taliban attacks.

But the prospect of unleashing a hodgepodge of rogue warriors to repel their old enemies also raises the specter of civil war, a state of violent anarchy that Afghans remember all too well from the 1990s. And although the armed groups have pledged to coordinate with government forces, it is also possible that effort could unravel into confused, competing clashes among purported allies.

“The surge in militias is a recipe for disaster and a repetition of a dark history,” said Tamim Asey, chairman of the Institute of War and Peace Studies in Kabul. “It will enlarge ethnic fault lines and undercut government legitimacy.” He said that relying on the militias is a “poison pill” that might give Ghani short-term relief but will ultimately “kill his administration.”

Atta Mohammed Noor, a northern warlord and former governor, posted a tweet Monday calling for a “national mobilization” of former anti-Soviet groups to fight Taliban aggression. He called on all northern factions to “stand alongside” state forces, and in a separate Facebook post he asked their leaders to join in the fight without creating separate “islands of power.”

In the past several days, fighting has been reported in nine provinces across the north, and armed militias or civilian groups have formed to repel the insurgents, often fighting alongside state forces. All are loyal to local leaders from minority Tajik, Uzbek or other ethnic groups that have no love for Ghani, a member of the dominant ethnic Pashtun group based in southern Afghanistan.

In Kunduz province, a strategic area near the northern border with Tajikistan, several officials there said Tuesday that insurgents were fighting against local forces inside the provincial capital city and were either attacking or in control of most rural districts. They also seized a dry port on the border. The Taliban has tried several times in the past to take over Kunduz city and held it briefly in 2015. If the group was to take over the city, it would be a major turning point in the 20-year conflict.

“The city is under attack,” said Ghulam Rabani, a member of the provincial council, reached in Kunduz city on Tuesday evening. He said that local fighters and government forces were defending the city and had recaptured one rural district but that “all others are now ruled by the Taliban.”


Since May, the Taliban has seized more than 50 of Afghanistan’s 370 districts. On Tuesday, the U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan, Deborah Lyons, told the U.N. Security Council that many of those districts surround provincial capitals, suggesting that the insurgents are “positioning themselves to try and take those capitals once foreign forces are fully withdrawn.” Across the nation, scattered fighting has been reported this week in 20 provinces.

The Taliban, historically based in the parched southern region that includes Kandahar, Helmand and Uruzgan provinces, has repeatedly tried to capture major cities there in the past several years. The group’s attacks in the north have greatly intensified in recent months, taking advantage of the relative lack of government forces. At the same time, Taliban peace talks with Afghan leaders in Qatar have stalled.

The most significant confrontation this week has come in Mazar-e Sharif, the country’s fourth-largest city and the capital of Balkh province, long impregnable to Taliban threats. Insurgents breached the city Monday and were pushed back by a mix of local militias and national forces, but area residents remained frightened, and the insurgents posed for videos just outside the city gates.

“People here have enjoyed a peaceful life for 20 years. Now they are very worried,” said Mohammad Afzal Hadid, head of the Balkh provincial council, noting that seven districts in the province had fallen to the Taliban in the past month. “Government forces lost morale. Bases were falling one after another.” He said that public fear had died down after local militia members came to reinforce government troops, and that hundreds more were preparing to join the fight.

A former Balkh council member, Mohammad Khairandesh, dismissed concerns about the private militias going rogue, saying they were now defending the state rather than themselves. The public, he added, accepts them as a lesser evil. “People now prefer militias over the Taliban,” he said. Without their help, he said, “there is a possibility that Mazar may fall.”

In Baghlan province, where the Taliban captured six districts in the past three weeks, officials blamed poor management and leadership of government forces but said that former militia members are preparing to fight. One provincial council member, Ferozuddin Aimaq, said people are “mobilizing to support government forces” but will “rise up against the Taliban if the government collapses.”

Ahmad Zia Massoud, a former vice president and younger brother of the slain anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, posted a Facebook message Tuesday calling on “all political leaders” in the country to “join the front lines alongside the people and public uprising forces.”

Meanwhile, on the front lines of Baghlan’s Tala Barfak district, Naimatullah Pajwalk, the district chief, spent Tuesday shoring up checkpoints. He said the area had been attacked five times by insurgents in the past 10 days.

“It is chaos, but here the people and the forces are mobilized,” he said. “The Taliban are trying hard to capture this district because it would give them connections to other provinces.”

Pajwalk said that the attackers had Humvees and heavy weapons seized from surrendering government troops, and that they had spread false rumors that he and other officials had fled.

“We are under immense pressure,” he said, “but we will stay with our people until the last drop of blood.”

The Washington Post’s Sharif Hassan contributed to this report.

Attacked and Vulnerable, Some Afghans Are Forming Their Own Armies

David Zucchino and Fatima Faizi
Tue, June 22, 2021

People perform a funeral ceremony on May 9, 2021, for a girl killed in powerful explosions outside a high school in a predominantly Hazara neighborhood in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Kiana Hayeri/The New York Times)

KABUL, Afghanistan — The slaughter of students, mostly teenagers, at a tutoring center. The deaths of young athletes in a suicide bombing at a wrestling club. Mothers shot dead with newborns in their arms.

These relentless killings of Hazaras, a persecuted minority in Afghanistan, finally proved too much to bear for Zulfiqar Omid, a Hazara leader in the central part of the country.

In April, Omid began mobilizing armed men into militias to defend Hazara areas against the Taliban and the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan. He said he now commands 800 armed men at seven staging areas mustered into what he calls “self-protection groups.”

“Hazaras get killed in cities and on highways, but the government doesn’t protect them,” Omid said. “Enough is enough. We have to protect ourselves.”

As U.S. and NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan, and talks falter between the Taliban and the American-backed government, ethnic groups across the country have formed militias or say they plan to arm themselves. The rush to raise fighters and weapons evokes the mujahedeen wars of the early 1990s, when rival militias killed thousands of civilians and left sections of Kabul in ruins.

A concerted and determined militia movement, even if nominally aligned with Afghan security forces, could fracture the unsteady government of President Ashraf Ghani and once again divide the country into fiefs ruled by warlords. Yet these makeshift armies may eventually serve as the last line of defense as security force bases and outposts steadily collapse in the face of a fierce onslaught of attacks by the Taliban.

Since the U.S. troop withdrawal was announced in April, regional strongmen have posted videos on social media showing armed men hoisting assault rifles and vowing to fight the Taliban. Some militia leaders fear the flagging peace talks in Doha, Qatar, will collapse after foreign troops depart and the Taliban will intensify an all-out assault to capture provincial capitals and lay siege to Kabul.

“For the first time in 20 years, power brokers are speaking publicly about mobilizing armed men,” the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a research group in Kabul, wrote in a June 4 report.

Hazaras have the most to fear from a return to power by the Taliban, which massacred thousands of the predominantly Shiite group when the Sunni Muslim militants governed most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. The Taliban consider Hazaras heretics.

The most prominent Hazara militia commander is Abdul Ghani Alipur, whose militiamen in Wardak province, a mountainous area that borders Kabul, have clashed with government forces. Alipur had been implicated in the shooting down of a military helicopter in March. In an interview, he denied any involvement, although an aide said at the time that Alipur’s militiamen had shot at the aircraft.

“If we don’t stand up and defend ourselves, history will repeat itself and we will be massacred like during the time of Abdul Rahman Khan,” Alipur said, referring to the Pashtun “Iron Emir” who ruled in the late 19th century, massacring and enslaving Hazaras. Afghan folklore says he displayed towers built from severed Hazara heads.

“They forced us to pick up guns,” Alipur said of the government, which has failed to protect Hazaras. “We must carry guns to protect ourselves.”

Over the past two decades, Hazaras have built thriving communities in west Kabul and in Hazarajat, their mountainous homeland in central Afghanistan. But with no militias of their own, they have been vulnerable to attack.

Hazara demands for an army escalated after up to 69 schoolgirls were killed in a bombing in Kabul on May 8. Less than a month later, three public transport minivans were bombed in Kabul’s Hazara neighborhoods, killing 18 civilians, most of them Hazara. Among them was a journalist and her mother, the police said. Since 2016, at least 766 Hazara have been killed in the capital alone in 23 attacks, according to New York Times data.

“Tajik have weapons, Pashtuns are armed,” said Arif Rahmani, a Hazara member of parliament. “We Hazaras must also have a system to protect ourselves.”

Mahdi Raskih, another Hazara member of parliament, said he had counted 35 major attacks against Hazaras in recent years — a campaign of genocide, he said. He said he had lost patience with government promises of protection for Hazara schools, mosques and social centers.

“If they can’t provide security, be honest and admit it,” Raskih said. “People believe the government feels no responsibility for them, so our people must pick up guns and fight.”

Hazara soldiers, police and intelligence officers have quit or have been forced out of the security forces because of discrimination, Raskih said, providing militias with a valuable source of trained men. Many Hazara politicians, including Ghani’s second vice president, Sarwar Danesh, have called on the government to stop what they call a genocide of Hazaras. Hundreds of Hazaras have taken to Twitter, at #StopHazarasGenocide, to demand government protection.

Even as some Hazaras mobilize, some Tajik and Uzbek groups never completely disbanded the militias that helped U.S. forces topple the Taliban in 2001. Other ethnic commanders have recently begun forming militias as the Taliban continue to overrun government bases and outposts.

Many of these power brokers are locked in an enduring struggle with the Ghani administration, vying for control, while trying to gain the upper hand in a post-withdrawal Afghanistan.

Nationally, one prominent leader to maintain a militia is Ahmad Massoud, 32, son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a charismatic commander of the Northern Alliance that helped U.S. forces rout the Taliban in late 2001.

Ahmad Massoud has assembled a coalition of militias in northern Afghanistan. Calling his armed uprising the Second Resistance, Massoud is purportedly backed by a few thousand fighters and about a dozen aging militia commanders who fought the Taliban and the Soviets.

Some Afghan leaders say Massoud is too inexperienced to effectively lead an armed movement. But some Western leaders view him as a valuable source of intelligence on al-Qaida and Islamic State groups inside Afghanistan.

Elsewhere, the roll call of regional leaders who appear to be mobilizing reads like a who’s who of the country’s civil war in the 1990s. But their forces are nowhere near as commanding now.

Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a brutal Uzbek strongman, has long maintained a private army of thousands from his base in Jowzjan province. Dostum, who has been accused of war crimes and sodomizing an Uzbek rival with an assault rifle, would nonetheless be a central figure in any armed uprising against the Taliban.

Another power broker whose actions are being watched closely, Atta Muhammad Noor, is a former warlord and commanding figure in Balkh province, which includes Afghanistan’s commercial hub, Mazar-i-Sharif. He said Tuesday that he would mobilize his militia forces alongside government troops to try to retake territory that had fallen to the Taliban in recent days after the insurgents’ rapid offensive in the north.

In Herat province in the west, former Tajik warlord Mohammed Ismail Khan, another Northern Alliance commander who helped defeat the Taliban, recently broadcast a raucous gathering of armed men on his Facebook page.

Khan told supporters that a half-million people in Herat were poised to take up arms to “defend you and keep your city safe” — a clear signal that he intended to mobilize his militia if peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban collapsed.

Also in Herat, Kamran Alizai, a Pashtun who leads the provincial council, said he commanded a large number of armed men ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice.

If government forces were unable to hold Herat, Alizai said, “We will stand by them and fight the Taliban.”

The Afghanistan Analysts Network reported that Abdul Basir Salangi, a former militia commander and an ex-police chief in Kabul, said in a speech in January that militias were forming in the Salang district in north-central Afghanistan in case talks collapsed. “Such talk has become more blatant since the U.S. troop withdrawal announcement,” the report said.

For Hazara militias, a wild card are thousands of Hazara former fighters of the Fatemiyoun Division, trained by Iran and deployed to Syria in 2014 through 2017, ostensibly to protect Shiite Muslim religious sites from the Sunni Muslim-dominated Islamic State. Others were sent to Yemen to fight alongside Houthi rebels against the Saudi-backed government.

Many Fatemiyoun fighters have returned to Afghanistan, raising fears they will be incorporated into Hazara militias, providing Iran a proxy force inside the country. But analysts and Hazara leaders say former Fatemiyoun have been turned away because of their Iranian ties and potential prosecution by the Afghan government.

In Kabul, many Hazaras say they are ready to take up guns. Mohammad, a shopkeeper who like many Afghans goes by one name, said he crossed a ditch flowing with blood when he ran from his shop to help after explosions rocked the neighboring Sayed Ul-Shuhada high school on May 8, killing the dozens of schoolgirls as they left for home.

“I’m 24, and there have been 24 attacks in my lifetime” against Hazaras, he said.

Mohammad said several of his friends have recently joined militias led by Alipur and Omid.

“If this situation continues,” he said, “I’ll pick up a gun and kill whoever kills us.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2021 The New York Times Company

Elite Afghan troops were left to die in battle with Taliban, officials say

BY J.P. LAWRENCE AND AND ZUBAIR BABAKARKHAIL•

 STARS AND STRIPES • JUNE 21, 2021

 Mourners remember the life of Maj. Sohrab Azimi, an American-educated Afghan commando, in a funeral in Kabul, Afghanistan, June 19, 2021. (Afghan Ministry of Defense)

KABUL, Afghanistan — At least 21 members of Afghanistan’s special forces died fighting the Taliban last week after Afghan reinforcements failed to show up when the commandos were surrounded by the enemy and pounded by mortar fire, military and government officials said.

Most of the 170 troops who were supposed to back up the elite fighters during a battle in the northern town of Dawlat Abad stayed put out of fear that the operation had been leaked to the Taliban, an Afghan military official with knowledge of the operation said.

“The army did not come, police did not come, NDS did not come,” said the official, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak to the media. NDS is the acronym for the country’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security.

“The other forces betrayed the commandos,” he said.

The caskets of Afghan elite soldiers killed in a battle with the Taliban are carried during a funeral in Kabul, June 19, 2021. One of the three soldiers remembered at the funeral was Maj. Sohrab Azimi, who was trained and educated by the United States. (Afghan Ministry of Defense)

The failure to provide air and ground support to their own soldiers underscored fears that the Afghan military will struggle to hold off Taliban attacks when the U.S. completes its withdrawal from the country.

One of the soldiers who died was Maj. Sohrab Azimi, a decorated, U.S.-trained Afghan special forces officer who directed airstrikes on operations around the country. Azimi was posthumously promoted to brigadier general, a statement by the Afghan Defense Ministry said.

Azimi and the other troops were fighting to retake Dawlat Abad, a district center in Faryab province.

The battle plan, which was included in documents reviewed by Stars and Stripes, was to have 50 commandos recapture the town, after which troops from the army, police and intelligence agency would arrive to secure it and fend off counterattacks.

The special forces defeated a small Taliban force and captured the district center around 6 a.m. Wednesday, the military official said.

But a much larger Taliban unit surrounded Dawlat Abad soon afterward and shelled the commandos, destroying their Humvees with mortar fire, he said.

The trapped soldiers called for ground and air support, but neither materialized, the official said.

While 50 of the soldiers and police who were supposed to provide backup tried to reach the commandos, the large number of Taliban in the town forced them to retreat, he added.

U.S. Forces – Afghanistan declined to say whether they had received requests for air support or if they attempted to help the commandos.

Without backup, the soldiers were as good as dead, said two provincial council members for Faryab.

“How can you send only a unit of 50 commandos to an area which is under 100% control of the Taliban?” asked one of them, Abdul Ahad Elbek.


The military official and Elbek said they believe someone had informed the Taliban about the operation before it happened.

Afghan forces recaptured Dawlat Abad after the battle but pulled out soon afterward. As of Saturday, Dawlat Abad was back under Taliban control, Elbek said.

A funeral was held Saturday in Kabul for Azimi and two other soldiers who died in the fighting in Faryab.

Maj. Sohrab Azimi, a decorated Afghan special forces officer trained and educated by the U.S., looks over a valley in the northeastern province of Kapisa, Afghanistan on March 6, 2021. Azimi died fighting the Taliban in Faryab province on June 16, 2021. (J.P. Lawrence/Stars and Stripes)

His father, retired general Zahir Azimi, told Stars and Stripes a day earlier that unlike most of the children of Kabul’s generals and government ministers, his son had chosen to risk his life in combat to defend his country.

Images he saw of his dead son showed that he had died “fighting face-to-face with the enemy, not running,” he said.

Sorhab Azimi told Stars and Stripes in March that he believed he was deterring global terrorism by fighting in Afghanistan.

The Sunday before the attack, he sent a text message to friends, saying he was back in Kabul for some rest after battling the Taliban in Faryab for 50 days without a break.

BUY PHOTOMaj. Sohrab Azimi, a decorated Afghan special forces officer, looks over a valley in the northeastern province of Kapisa, Afghanistan, in March 6, 2021. Azimi was killed fighting the Taliban in Faryab province on June 16, 2021. (J.P. Lawrence/Stars and Stripes)

But three days later, he was ordered to return to the front.

“Back to Faryab,” he said in a text message before leaving for what would be his final fight.

The special forces deaths came amid reports of districts falling to the Taliban and hundreds of Afghan troops surrendering during weeks of fighting around Afghanistan. The country’s president, Ashraf Ghani, announced Saturday that he will replace his defense and interior chiefs.

Air support for Afghan troops could become a rarity once U.S.-funded contractors are gone, as foreign forces pull out of the country by a Sept. 11 deadline. It could be a matter of months before Afghanistan’s fleet is grounded due to a lack of maintenance, a report in The New York Times said Saturday.

U.S. officials are in talks to keep the Afghan air force flying, the report said. The U.S. is also considering delaying its withdrawal from Bagram Airfield, one of two remaining U.S.-controlled bases in the country, The Washington Post reported.

The U.S. is conducting air combat patrols and providing support to Afghanistan from ships in the North Arabian Sea and sending surveillance aircraft to Afghanistan from nations in the Gulf region, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress earlier this month.

But he declined to address whether the U.S. will provide combat air support to Afghan forces after the U.S. withdrawal is complete.

lawrence.jp@stripes.com
Twitter: @jplawrence3

BEFORE THE TALIBAN EVEN TAKE OVER
Ban on Afghan girls singing at schools overturned by social media stir

Asyia Hamzaie
Mon, June 21, 2021,

(Asiya Hamzaie, Hasht e Subh Daily)

The protracted war in Afghanistan has fragilized the country’s entire education system. Both the quest for political power and religious extremism in the Islamic country have led to the politicisation of education, with some circles seeking to introduce ideology into the school system. Officially, the Afghan government favours girls’ access to education, but culturally, some girls still face restrictions to attend school in certain areas of the country.

While on paper the Afghan constitution guarantees gender equality, there are serious shortcomings in practice. Najiba Arian, a spokesperson for the Afghan Ministry of Education, said there are currently 9.7 million students in the country, 42 per cent of whom are girls. But roughly 3.7 million children do not attend school — 60 per cent of them are girls. Hardships to access the school system are worst in southern and eastern provinces, said Ms Arian, not only due to security reasons but also because of tribal and traditional customs. Most of these areas, which belong to particular ethnic groups, are controlled by the Taliban, who ruled the country in the 1990s and still oppose girls’ and women’s education, despite recent claims of change. Schools that have been built over the last 20 years are in fact getting destroyed by the armed group.

Yet facing these and other challenges have led Afghan women to fight for their rights, sometimes with successful outcomes. In 2015, the country’s Ministry of Education presented a controversial plan involving female students’ uniforms that would cover girls’ bodies with long, dark-coloured clothing, similar to that of extremist Islamist groups. Civil society activists contested the move, arguing that the dress not only promoted extremism but was also too hot to wear during summertime — which is when schools are open in the country. The Ministry of Education had to abandon the plan. In some parts of the country, where conservatism and tribal customs still prevail, girls do wear body-covering long dark dresses —which also cover their faces— despite often reaching high temperatures, making it hard for them to attend school or actually paying attention in class.

Nazo Ana High School in Nangarhar’s capital, Jalalabad, 2017 (Asiya Hamzaie, Hasht e Subh Daily)


But now the battle for gender equality in Afghanistan’s educational environment has taken a new shape, thanks to an online women’s rights movement that hopes to raise the voice of those who have been silenced for too long — the "Ma’arif [which means Education] Choir Campaign."

The campaign was born out of the outrage caused by an announcement from one of the Ministry of Education’s departments in March 2020, which forbade female students over-12 from singing in school choirs in public and in front of men. Spontaneous and leaderless protests began taking place online, due to the coronavirus pandemic, in a rather original way. More than 100 women posted videos of them singing their childhood songs on the Internet, asking why female students should be prevented from singing two decades after the fall of the Taliban rule, prompting widespread and long-lasting public support for the campaign.

Once again, the protests led the government to retreat, and the Ministry of Education finally issued a statement saying that the plan did “not reflect the official position and policy of the ministry." Wahid Omar, an adviser to the Afghan president Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai said, “No individual or institution is allowed to set limits for its citizens, [which is] contrary to the spirit of the country’s constitution.”


Fariha Esaar, Civil Activist and member of the Ma'arif Choir Campaign (Naseer Kawoshgar, Hasht e Subh Daily)



Earlier this year, the government tried another move, this time to merge schools with mosques during the first three years of the elementary school programme —presumably to gain influence against radical Islamists groups such as the Taliban— but it was also quickly shut down after online protests. The Minister of Education, Assadullah Hanif Balkhi, said the plan was for students to have access to education in areas without schools and that it had been misinterpreted. During the choir campaign, Fariha Esaar, one of the women activists who sang in front of a camera, said, “Both the plan to merge schools with mosques for the first three years of education and the plan to ban female students over-12 from singing in schools are efforts made to radicalize and Talibanize Afghanistan’s education system.” Now, with the withdrawal of foreign forces and the possibility of escalating civil war in the country, she added, there are serious concerns about the group’s influence in specific circles. “We can not remain silent in this regard. We will stand up and prevent the influence of extremism in the education sector. We have succeeded in this campaign, but we must have more structural plans to ensure gender equality so that political decisions don’t exclude women.”

Ghulam Dastgir Munir, an education expert, said he got suspended from his teaching position in a public school because of his heavy criticism of extremist initiatives such as educating children in mosques and banning girls from singing. According to him, the main challenge that remains ahead is that the seats and positions in the education sector are assigned not on the basis of expertise but depending on political affiliation, and that, in order to ensure gender equality and de-politicize schools, appointments must be free of political affiliation.

The Ma’aref Choir Campaign is one successful example of a civil society movement fighting for gender equality in Afghanistan. However, a long term action plan is needed to guarantee gender equality in the educational sector — one that raises female teachers rates and increases awareness among families, particularly in remote areas of the country, so that more girls can attend school.

This article is being published as part of “Towards Equality”, an international and collaborative initiative gathering 15 international news outlets to highlight the challenges and solutions to reach gender equality.

(Towards Equality)