With the Taliban growing more violent and adding checkpoints near Kabul's airport, an all-volunteer group of American veterans of the Afghan war launched a final daring mission on Wednesday night dubbed the "Pineapple Express" to shepherd hundreds of at-risk Afghan elite forces and their families to safety, members of the group told ABC News....As of Thursday morning, the group said it had brought as many as 500 Afghan special operators, assets and enablers and their families into the airport in Kabul overnight, handing them each over to the protective custody of the U.S. military.That number added to more than 130 others over the past 10 days who had been smuggled into the airport encircled by Taliban fighters since the capital fell to the extremists on Aug. 16 by Task Force Pineapple, an ad hoc groups of current and former U.S. special operators, aid workers, intelligence officers and others with experience in Afghanistan who banded together to save as many Afghan allies as they could.
There's a lot more at the link.
UPDATE: A parallel story involving CIA paramilitaries, also usually former special operators.
4 comments:
Good work to organise and operate so quickly. I know that's their training, but it's still impressive.
I've downloaded an Audible book by Jason Redman, one of the operatives apparently involved.
We hadn't been doing much or spending a lot of cash the last few years in Afghanistan anyway. i know it is popular for presidents - both Trump and Biden - to claim they got us out of wars. But did we need to do anything? Was the status quo that terrible?
Last casualty before yesterday was February 2020.
But there were significant opportunity costs and hazards. In addition to the expense — with no hope of any real victory on any timeline — there was for example the logistics issue. Those troops had to be fed and supplied. There were only three methods: by air, which can only do so much given AFG’s limited air infrastructure; by truck from Pakistan; and vis rail networks in the Stans that Russia controlled. Pakistan cut off their ground line of communication in protest over the Bin Laden raid.
So that left us with troops who were effectively hostages for our good behavior to Russia. We couldn’t use them elsewhere, and to feed and supply them we couldn’t irritate Putin much.
It was a smaller problem under Trump than Obama, where the Trump troop commitment was only around 2,500. Still, it was strategically questionable to tie our guys up there without a viable strategy, and with the logistics handcuff to boot.
Post a Comment