Declared U.S. Troops Leave Afghanistan
Plus—a collection of updates and small corrections to my Afghanistan coverage.
The U.S. evacuation effort in Afghanistan is over, though it remained violent to the end.
Marine Corps Gen. Frank McKenzie announced that the final U.S. aircraft took off one minute before midnight on the eve of Aug. 31, Kabul time. The departure theoretically left 24 hours of evacuation time on the table, and the general admitted “We did not get everybody out that we wanted to get out.”
The remainder referenced by Gen. McKenzie includes some thousands of U.S.-aligned Afghans and, it would seem, scores of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. There will be no official military mission to retrieve these folks — but the possibility of more covert means remains open and has been underscored in recent coverage here and elsewhere.
Before I get to this and other updates, I want to address two points of minor correction within my coverage on Afghanistan so far.
Corrections
First, I had to adjust the number of civilian deaths I included in my previous piece on the conflict in Afghanistan, which tallied victims of the recent suicide bombing attack on Kabul’s airport. Reports of the incident have offered a variety of figures on Afghan deaths and for the most part refer to the dead as simply “Afghans.” The total, then, includes some individuals whom the U.S. likely considers Taliban militants.
Discussions of the attack suggest these troops were a relatively small proportion of the victims. But because the proportions will likely remain unclear for quite a while, I adjusted the previous piece to read “over 170 Afghans,” rather than “over 170 Afghan civilians,” based on CNN’s reported figures.
Another correction has to do with semantics in the headline of the same piece. I called the article “On Afghanistan, White House and Pentagon Offer Secrecy, Inconsistency As Bombs Fall,” but it turns out that “bomb” might not be the most technically correct term.
According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, the first unmanned strike carried out in Afghanistan following the Kabul airport attack used a missile that lacks an explosive payload. Instead, the deployed missile — called the “AGM-114 Hellfire,” R9X variant — ejects six metal blades from its circular surface to “shred” its targets. The point of this is to clean up warfare by reducing civilian casualties.
Aliases for the missile include “flying Ginsu” and “Ninja bomb.” And while the latter alias suggests I don’t really need to change the prior headline, I think these details are worth pointing out. Military news site Task and Purpose describes the missile as “a meteor full of swords.”
Updates
Mainstream Media Acknowledges Covert Ops
The New York Times ran a story supporting ideas I explored in the piece “The Afghanistan Withdrawal Did Not Take Place.” Although the reporting certainly will be buried underneath countless headlines declaring “America’s longest war” to have ended (our official war in Korea notwithstanding, I guess), the article contains a surprisingly clear-eyed view about a new and interminable mission in the war on terror that will, almost definitely, take place in Afghanistan.
Intelligence operatives, reports The Times, have begun to gear up for a “complex counterterrorism mission” that threatens to turn Afghanistan into a “black hole” absorbing security state resources for “years to come.”
“Current and former officials” have described an evolving set of initiatives: negotiations over new military bases in Central Asian countries, the drawing up of plans for “clandestine officers to run sources” in Afghanistan without the aid of official military and diplomatic outposts — though either type of outpost could eventually return — and the ongoing selection of sites for launching drone strikes and “other Afghanistan operations.”
The Times notes that “starting next month, any American presence in the country would most likely be part of a clandestine operation that is not publicly acknowledged.”
The likelihood of (secret) boots on the ground seems high:
The American covert operation in Afghanistan could be carried out by either C.I.A. operatives or Special Operations military troops acting under “Title 50” authority — similar to when Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on a mission run by the spy agency. Such episodes of putting the military under C.I.A. authority became more common in the post-9/11 era as the lines blurred between soldiers and spies.
In addition, the reconfiguring of drone strikes around more distant points of origin could increase costs, as more missions end in “error” or require drone fleets of an increased size to carry out similar operations to those conducted previously. The Biden administration’s hawkish stance against terror in general has been covered extensively on this site; it was renewed when the president vowed to enact revenge killing against the Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K), an extremist group that claimed responsibility for attacks on Kabul’s airport.
This new objective, along with a never-ending fear of new “hubs” for terrorism, makes Afghanistan a fertile ground for covert ops, drone bombings, and the potential rekindling of a more overt military presence. Mission creep can present excellent opportunities for the security state.
U.S. Army and Security State To Blame for Many Civilian Casualties During Evacuation
Another tragic element to the suicide bombing attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul — which killed nearly 200 people and wounded many more — was reported by the BBC on Saturday. It turns out that an unknown but likely significant proportion of the Afghan deaths recorded from the attack came as a result of NATO armed forces and sniper fire that occurred after the bombing took place.
On-the-ground reporting from BBC’s Secunder Kermani suggests that several Afghan civilians died not from the explosive blast of a suicide bomb vest but rather from gunfire from U.S. and Turkish soldiers. The initial blast reportedly led to a state of “confusion” in which these soldiers opened fire. The bullets killed several civilians including Afghan U.S. allies.
Drone Strikes Cause More Civilian Death—and Rocket Fire Brings the Evacuation to an Explosive Conclusion
The U.S. carried out a total of two unmanned strikes in Afghanistan before its declared troops left the country. The first took place some distance from Kabul, and officials claim it killed two “high-profile planners” from IS-K while wounding a third. Officially, the next strike targeted “an imminent ISIS-K threat” to Hamid Karzai International Airport, where the U.S. was still evacuating civilians and troops.
A U.S. Central Command spokesperson stated that the drone strike hit a vehicle full of explosives — which presumably would be driven to the airport for detonation — and that secondary explosions from the “large amount of explosive material inside [the vehicle] . . . may have caused additional casualties.” But a chilling account in The New York Times tells a very different story.
Zemari Ahmadi was coming home Sunday evening, having dropped off colleagues from the local office of an American aid group where he worked, relatives and colleagues said in interviews Monday.
As he pulled into the narrow street where he lived with his three brothers and their families, many of their children, seeing his white Toyota Corolla, rushed out to greet him, family members said. Some clambered onto the car in the street, one jumped in while others gathered in the narrow courtyard of the compound as he pulled in.
It was then, friends and family say, that the vehicle was hit with a missile which they believe was fired by an American drone, blowing out doors and windows in the courtyard, spraying shrapnel, and killing 10 people, seven of them children.
Those killed, according to the account, were friends and allies of the United States. This included one eyewitness’s fiancé, who had worked as a U.S. military contractor. Photographs in the Times show a decimated car in the location described by the eyewitnesses, and confirmatory evidence for the witnesses’ story includes hospital reports that seem to line up with their version of events.
What the U.S. is calling an IS-K attack vehicle has been described by the interviewed family as a car used to deliver food to refugee camps. And this would be far from the first instance of fabrication and erroneous civilian death by drone to occur within our 20 years of occupation in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Finally, a combative conclusion to the evacuation may not have caused any additional casualties.
Up to five rockets were reportedly launched from a car on a Kabul street toward the city’s airport as the U.S. evacuation effort wound down. Any rockets that made it into the vicinity of the airport were gunned down by a C-RAM automated missile defense system, CNN reports.
All of these episodes have caused stress, anguish, and sorrow for thousands of people in and around Afghanistan, as well as for networks of friends and loved ones located around the world. The events are unfortunate notes marking the end of U.S. occupation in Afghanistan — at least for now. Time will tell if we are truly witnessing a conclusion to the long, humiliating conflict which we have named our longest war. Unfortunately, the nature of our recent warfare suggests otherwise, and signs already suggest a mere transmutation of this warfare is underway.
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