Granted the evacuation could have been executed better but I am not sure there was much flexibility on the timing once the Doha agreement was signed. The orginal date was May, that too is in the fighting season.

https://inews.co.uk/news/real-life/p...celled-1170058

Afghanistan: Pen Farthing’s truck shot at in Kabul chaos as plane to evacuate staff and animals is cancelled

The former Royal Marine said ‘All of a sudden we heard gunshots and our vehicle was targeted’

Two more explosions being reported

I didn’t think things could get much worse…. A trending tweeted announcement from US Congress I think.

The Afghan Forces and Police were left with 85 billion usd worth of kit consisting of :-

1/ Over 200 Aircraft
2/ 75,000 vehicles
3/ 600,000 small arms and ammunition
4/ 16,000 night vision goggles
5/ Body Armour
​​​​​​ And
6/ Biometric kit complete with the biometric data of every Afghan Forces member trained in the last 20 years!

Apparently, no plans in how to retrieve any of this kit.

Words fail me! 😡

Defense planning seems to be a lost art. Accountability went some time previous.
That said, with winter coming on and obvious internal fissures surfacing, a much more serious tragedy seems inevitable.
How will people get food in a city of 4 million given the ongoing chaos?

You want UK to send aid?

1) - 5) really annoying.
6) fatal.

Aid is clearly impossible, the roads are not there. The place needs enough peace to allow harvesting and distribution to happen. Else it will get really horrendous.
Afaik, over a million Afghans have left the country over the past couple of years, so obviously the reality on the ground was driving people to flee.
They saw the future more clearly than the high priced bloviators in the media and the government.
.

The "splinter group" responsible, ISIS-K, says that the Taliban "is not extreme enough" and will continue to blow things up.

What a horrible place to be stuck in.

They also were passing lists to the Taliban of those they wish to help leave.

B-52H Stratofortress C/S GRIMM61 currently on FR24 just NE of Muscat possibly heading to the Stan....

Ben Wallace on Sky has confirmed the UK in-processing centre at the Baron hotel is now closed and no further evacuees are being accepted from outside the airport perimeter.

Those already within the perimeter, about 1000, will be processed and flown out today. British presence now measured in hours.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/b...find-pr7vh5db0

British embassy left details of Afghan staff for Taliban to find

Foreign Office staff left documents with the contact details of Afghans working for them as well as the CVs of locals applying for jobs scattered on the ground at the British embassy compound in Kabul that has been seized by the Taliban.

The papers identifying seven Afghans were found by The Times on Tuesday as Taliban fighters patrolled the embassy. Phone calls to the numbers on the documents revealed that some Afghan employees and their families remained stranded on the wrong side of the airport perimeter wall days after their details were left in the dirt in the haste of the embassy’s evacuation on August 15…..

Such was the British surprise at the speed of the capture of Kabul that the embassy’s evacuation protocols, necessitating the shredding and destruction of all data that could compromise local Afghan staff, their families or potential employees, appear to have broken down.…..

The documents included the name and address of a leading member of the embassy staff in Kabul, other staff members and their contact details and the CVs and addresses of applicants for jobs as interpreters.

Calls made by The Times to numbers on the abandoned documents revealed that although some of those listed had been evacuated to the UK in the past few days, other embassy staff had been left behind. Among them were three Afghan staff and eight family members, including five children, stranded among the crowds unable to access the British-held sector of the airport. “Please don’t leave us behind,” said one man in the group.

In a series of communications with senior Foreign Office officials inside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai international airport, the details of these missing staff were handed over and their rescue co-ordinated.

However, the fate of at least two job applicants for positions as interpreters with the British, and whose contact details were left scattered in the embassy grounds, remains unknown.

“During the drawdown of our embassy every effort was made to destroy sensitive material,” the Foreign Office said last night……

"the embassy’s evacuation protocols, necessitating the shredding and destruction of all data that could compromise local Afghan staff, their families or potential employees,"

remembering similar incidents in Tehran etc does anyone ever calculate how much stuff needs to be shredded and how many shredders will be needed for X days to do it?

"The Afghan Forces and Police were left with 85 billion usd worth of kit consisting of :-

1/ Over 200 Aircraft
2/ 75,000 vehicles"


Imagine the size of the convoy to get all those vehicles out...................

I suppose the point is that the Taliban will let lack the spares to keep many of them in use - and a lot will disappear into private hands anyway. If they have any sense they'll sell the biometric data to a US or European healthcare company for their databases

can’t help but wonder if you have ever been anywhere near that situation?

Depressing forecasts reported by Politico…

Never-ending war on terror

Foreign policy analysts agreed the grim irony of yesterday was that, while the whole point of Biden’s controversial withdrawal from Afghanistan was to end the “forever wars” and prevent more American deaths abroad, these were the first U.S. troop to be killed in the country in 18 months and the president had now committed to ongoing military operations to retaliate against those responsible.

Former President Barack Obama’s Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told CNN last night: “We’re going to have to go back in, to get ISIS. And we’ll probably have to go back in to get Al Qaeda … We can leave the battlefield, but we can’t leave the war on terrorism.”

What happens next?

There are also increasing fears about what is going to happen in Afghanistan after August 31, as an emboldened ISIS challenges the new Taliban government.

POLITICO’s Nightly email in D.C. has some must-read analysis from Bruce Hoffman, counterterrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, who warns: “The Taliban is overwhelmed. They are very effective at bullying and victimizing civilians, but they are incompetent at battling groups that look like themselves.”

Jason Blazakis, a former State Department official and terrorism expert at the Soufan Center, adds that “you have the beginnings of a massive relocation of radical Islamists to Afghanistan,” with some 10,000 foreign fighters flooding into the country recently, according to the U.N.

Blazakis says the Taliban do not have the resources to fight ISIS on their own and will work with Al Qaeda and the Haqqani network to maintain their grip on the country. Hoffman argues the growing threat from ISIS-K plus a revived Al Qaeda means an increased chance of terrorism on Western soil…..

I know the solution!
Let's shift money from somewhere else to fund those resistance guys!
I think there's a guy called Ollie who could help...

When we pulled out of Incerlik at short notice two policeman came out purely to destroy documents. They could not be shredded, they had to be incinerated. Took them nearly a week going virtually non stop.

The trouble with records is I cannot understand why they do not hold them on the likes of a secure cloud based server, I realise some copies may need to be held locally on hard drives, SSD's etc, but I cannot see the need for tons of paper copies in an Embassy, by all means fill out a paper copy, scan it and upload then destroy the paper copy at the time. A hard drive is easier to encrypt and then physically destroy.

Simply put them in contact with some money brokers, I know a couple of Nigerian princesses and ministers that would be glad to help out.