SIGforum.com    Main Page  Hop To Forum Categories  The Lounge    US Embassy Alerts All Americans To Depart Afghanistan "Immediately" As More Provincial Capitals Fall
Page 1 2 3 4 ... 103
Go
New
Find
Notify
Tools
Reply
  
US Embassy Alerts All Americans To Depart Afghanistan "Immediately" As More Provincial Capitals Fall Login/Join 
Member
posted
https://www.zerohedge.com/geop...all-americans-depart

Over the weekend a second provincial capital has fallen to the Taliban, this time in the north of Afghanistan, just days after the southern Nimruz province which borders Iran fell reportedly with barely any resistance from US-trained Afghan national forces.

On Saturday Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan province, was captured at a moment the US State Department has sounded the alarm for any American citizens still remaining in the country, with just a little over a month to go until Biden's Sept.11 complete troop exit deadline. The US embassy in Kabul had urged Americans to leave the war-torn country "immediately" while noting they can't rely on government flights.

A US Embassy security alert on Saturday stated that "Given the security conditions and reduced staffing, the Embassy’s ability to assist U.S. citizens in Afghanistan is extremely limited even within Kabul."

At the moment southern Helmand province is also under threat of imminent fall the Taliban, who are gaining momentum also through increasing capture of military bases and equipment, including US Humvees and weaponry - which the Islamist militants have been parading of late.

The Wall Street Journal summarizes the significance of this latest provincial capital to fall to the Taliban advance as follows:

"The fall of the city of Sheberghan is particularly important because Jowzjan has long been the traditional stronghold of ethnic Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, one of the country’s main anti-Taliban leaders who served as Afghanistan’s vice president until last year."

Sheberghan also borders Turkmenistan, which means it's yet another huge blow to Kabul in terms of losing an important hub of regional trade, also at a moment the Taliban controls the vast majority of key border crossing areas.

Crucially these latest rapid Taliban gains have been made in the south and north even as Afghanistan's military with the aid of the United States has conducted large-scale airstrikes. "As attacks intensify, Afghan security forces and government troops have retaliated with increasing airstrikes, aided by the United States. This has raised growing concerns about civilian casualties across the country," NBC News writes.

This strongly suggests that even if the Pentagon were to provide full and immediate air support to Afghan forces across all theaters, it would likely do little to blunt the insurgents' offensive. It could now be a mere matter of months or even weeks before Kabul finds itself under siege.


_________________________
"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."
Mark Twain
 
Posts: 12580 | Registered: January 17, 2011Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
posted Hide Post
Who didn’t see the T’bans doing this? We pull out, the thugs return, like rats. Not worth one more GI’s blood let alone life. As usual, it’s been a waste all the way around.
 
Posts: 5768 | Location: west 'by god' virginia | Registered: May 30, 2009Reply With QuoteReport This Post
A Grateful American
Picture of sigmonkey
posted Hide Post
So, the Soviets going to go back for a second helping?

Or maybe the Chicoms would like to go test all their newfangled toys.




"the meaning of life, is to give life meaning" Ani Yehudi אני יהודי Le'olam lo shuv לעולם לא שוב!
 
Posts: 43810 | Location: ...... I am thrice divorced, and I live in a van DOWN BY THE RIVER!!! (in Arkansas) | Registered: December 20, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
posted Hide Post
Kabul will be surrounded and a handful of warlords will hold-out against whatever offensive the Taliban will throw. Afghan's don't know how to do defense, its a foreign concept for them so resistance or, simply pushing-out a parameter isn't in the cards.
 
Posts: 14573 | Location: Wine Country | Registered: September 20, 2000Reply With QuoteReport This Post
SIGforum's Berlin
Correspondent
Picture of BansheeOne
posted Hide Post
There goes Kunduz. Wider scene of the defining nine-hour Good Friday Battle in 2010 which made Germans aware that the Bundeswehr was in a shooting war, not just some "stabilization mission" to build schools and drill wells. The day totaled three KIA and eight WIA, plus six Afghan soldiers who were killed in a friendly fire incident as a German Marder IFV lit up the civilian vehicles they were riding in. Participants were later awarded six Honor Crosses for Bravery (about equal to a Silver Star) and 17 Special Honor Crosses in Gold (think Bronze Star with V device), 14 of which to the crews of two American Blackhawks who evacuated the wounded under fire.



quote:
BERLIN - Army Chief Warrant Officer 3 Jason Lacrosse, Joint Multinational Readiness Center Falcons instructor pilot, Hohenfels, Germany, reunites with German soldiers here Sept. 11, 2012 at the Berlin Air Show. Three of the German soldiers were rescued by Lacrosse and fellow soldiers in Afghanistan and the fourth was a member of the Joint Tactical Air Command that was involved in the operation. From left to right: unknown, Hauptfeldwebel Ralf Rönckendorf, unknown, Army Chief Warrant Officer 3 Jason Lacrosse, Stabsgefreiter Maik Mutschke


quote:
Updated Aug. 8, 2021, 10:35 a.m. ET

Live Updates: Taliban Seize 2 Afghan Capital Cities in a Day

The fall of Kunduz, a major northern hub, and another city, Sar-i-Pul, is a devastating blow to the Afghan government just weeks before the final withdrawal of U.S. troops.

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban seized two Afghan provincial capitals on Sunday, including the strategically crucial northern city of Kunduz, officials said, escalating a sweeping insurgent offensive that has claimed four regional capitals in just three days.

The rapid fall of Afghan cities — including Kunduz and Sar-i-Pul, another capital in the north — comes just weeks before U.S. forces were set to complete a total withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is a crucial challenge for President Biden, who in recent weeks has insisted the American pullout would continue despite the Taliban’s advances.

After sweeping through the country’s rural areas, the insurgents’ military campaign has shifted to brutal urban combat in recent weeks. They have pushed into the edges of major cities like Kandahar and Lashkar Gah in the south and Herat in the west.

The strategy has exhausted the Afghan government’s forces and overwhelmed the local militia forces that the government has used to supplement its own troops, a move reminiscent of the chaotic and ethnically divided civil war of the 1990s.

Kunduz, the capital of a province of the same name, is a significant military and political prize. With a population of 374,000, it is a vital commercial city near the border with Tajikistan, and a hub for trade and road traffic.

“All security forces fled to the airport, and the situation is critical,” said Sayed Jawad Hussaini, the deputy police chief of a district in Kunduz city.

Clashes between government forces and Taliban fighters were continuing in a small town south of the city, where the local army headquarters and the airport are situated, security officials said.

“We are so tired, and the security forces are so tired,” Mr. Hussaini said. “At the same time we hadn’t received reinforcements and aircraft did not target the Taliban on time.”

Security forces, who had retreated to the town earlier in the morning, began an operation to flush Taliban fighters out of the city on Sunday evening, according to security officials.

As Kunduz was collapsing on Sunday morning, the Taliban also seized Sar-i-Pul, the capital of another northern province of the same name, after heavy fighting in the area in recent days, officials said.

“Taliban are walking in the streets of the city. Local residents are terrified,” said Sayed Asadullah Danish, a member of the Sar-i-Pul provincial council. Provincial officials had taken shelter in an army base on the outskirts of the city, where clashes were continuing, he added.

In the two preceding days, the Taliban had taken two other provincial capitals: Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan Province in the north, and Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz Province on the Afghanistan-Iran border.

The Taliban briefly seized Kunduz in 2015 and again in 2016, gaining control of a province for the first time since American forces invaded in 2001. Both times, Afghan forces pushed back the insurgents with help from American airstrikes. Kunduz is also where an American gunship mistakenly attacked a Doctors Without Borders hospital in 2015, killing 42 people.

Since the U.S. withdrawal began, the Taliban have captured more than half of Afghanistan’s 400-odd districts, according to some assessments. Their attacks on provincial capitals have violated the 2020 peace deal between the Taliban and the United States. Under that deal, which precipitated the American withdrawal from the country, the Taliban committed to not attacking provincial centers like Kunduz.


https://www.nytimes.com/live/2...anistan-live-updates
 
Posts: 2406 | Location: Berlin, Germany | Registered: April 12, 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
posted Hide Post
Thank you for that photo Banshee…I was in the same task force as Chief Lacrosse, back west when the Good Friday fight took place. Quite an event, and for as crummy as it was it certainly improved relations between US Soldiers and the Ansbach people when we came home.

Very sad to see the current events unfolding around AFG.


Evaluating volume of fire vs. shot placement effectiveness.
 
Posts: 659 | Registered: February 10, 2009Reply With QuoteReport This Post
SIGForum Official Hand Model
Picture of ThankGod4Sig
posted Hide Post
Now I wasn't around for Vietnam, but this kinda sounds like the same thing from the fall of Saigon.....


"da evil Count Glockula."-Para
 
Posts: 7903 | Location: C-bus, Ohio | Registered: December 17, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Freethinker
Picture of sigfreund
posted Hide Post
quote:
Originally posted by ThankGod4Sig:
sounds like the same thing from the fall of Saigon.....


Yup: It do, don't it?

One of many disadvantages of living a long life is being disappointed in one’s hopes to never see certain things more than once.




6.4/93.6

“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.”
— Plato
 
Posts: 47365 | Location: 10,150 Feet Above Sea Level in Colorado | Registered: April 04, 2002Reply With QuoteReport This Post
SIGforum's Berlin
Correspondent
Picture of BansheeOne
posted Hide Post
quote:
Originally posted by Creeping_Death:
Thank you for that photo Banshee…I was in the same task force as Chief Lacrosse, back west when the Good Friday fight took place. Quite an event, and for as crummy as it was it certainly improved relations between US Soldiers and the Ansbach people when we came home.

Very sad to see the current events unfolding around AFG.


Your guys were actually the first, German or otherwise, to get that particular decoration. All the bravery awards had only been instituted two years before as part of the slow realization that the Bundeswehr actually had to fight in Afghanistan and there was a need to recognize individual courage, difficult military history or not. 2008 was bad enough to make that happen. Additionally all the German KIAs that year came from the district of the Bundestag member I was working for at the time, including two who died in the crash of a Spanish helicopter in Bosnia. She went to a lot of funerals at the time.

Without those Blackhawk crews, the body count on that Good Friday would certainly have been higher. You can see the scars some of the troops retained in the picture; the MSgt second from left was permanently blinded. The Army found a way to keep him in service by putting him in charge of the base range office and equipping it accordingly.

My brother #3 did two tours in Mazar-i Sharif as an MP, but luckily returned unscathed despite frequent convoy escort missions.
 
Posts: 2406 | Location: Berlin, Germany | Registered: April 12, 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Fighting the good fight
Picture of RogueJSK
posted Hide Post
“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” - Sir Winston Churchill

 
Posts: 32429 | Location: Northwest Arkansas | Registered: January 06, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Nullus Anxietas
Picture of ensigmatic
posted Hide Post
quote:
Originally posted by wcb6092:
Over the weekend a second provincial capital has fallen to the Taliban, this time in the north of Afghanistan, just days after the southern Nimruz province which borders Iran fell reportedly with barely any resistance from US-trained Afghan national forces.

I don't think anybody with at least two functioning neurons to rub together didn't see this coming.



"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system,,,, but too early to shoot the bastards." -- Claire Wolfe
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living." -- Seneca the Younger, Roman Stoic philosopher
 
Posts: 26009 | Location: S.E. Michigan | Registered: January 06, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
half-genius,
half-wit
posted Hide Post
Taliban = 7th century mindset with cellphones.

The next plane you see taking off from Afghanistan may be the last one for the next 1500 years.
 
Posts: 11305 | Location: UK, OR, ONT | Registered: July 10, 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Just because you can,
doesn't mean you should
posted Hide Post
quote:
Originally posted by sigmonkey:
So, the Soviets going to go back for a second helping?

Or maybe the Chicoms would like to go test all their newfangled toys.


Let either or both take a swing at it since the crazies can walk to those countries from there.

Vietnam Mk.II for sure except they at least were polite enough to let us get out when we declared peace in '73. Our government just wasn't smart enough to get completely out so they finished the job a few years later resulting in the embassy photos.
What is about the "those that forget history expression" that seems so hard to remember?

The middle east has been a sh*t hole for most of human history due to it being controlled by religious zealots that predictably can't get along. Spending billions to build infrastructure wasn't the solution after all. Sorry about all our people that were killed and maimed to prove the concept once again.


___________________________
Avoid buying ChiCom/CCP products whenever possible.
 
Posts: 9456 | Location: NE GA | Registered: August 22, 2002Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
posted Hide Post
This is similar to the fall of Saigon. I was at a different embassy when Saigon fell but my friend wasn't. The US Ambassador to Vietnam was an idiot.

In any case, this ^^ was predictable and the ending in AF will be as well.

Same thing will probably happen in Iraq. I believe the Embassy in Iraq is our most expensive in the world. We'll probably just freshen it up a bit before the Iranians occupy it if the Russians to get there first.
 
Posts: 1447 | Location: Western WA | Registered: September 11, 2006Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
posted Hide Post
agree Saigon all over again. so many parallels.

and so much waste all the way around. the fact that AFG had 15+ years to get their sh*t together defies western reason.

they should have seen this coming years ago. but in the final analysis -- 'uniting' a backward, tribal culture is not possible no matter how much $$$ we throw at it especially when the rural countryside can not be secured.

---------------------------


Proverbs 27:17 - As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
 
Posts: 8940 | Location: Florida | Registered: September 20, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Like a party
in your pants
Picture of armored
posted Hide Post
We stopped FIGHTING WARS after WW2!
 
Posts: 4609 | Location: Chicago, IL, USA: | Registered: November 17, 2002Reply With QuoteReport This Post
His diet consists of black
coffee, and sarcasm.
Picture of egregore
posted Hide Post
There's nothing we can do about it. We were unwilling and unable to defeat and occupy them in the manner of World War II Japan and Germany. It was a mistake to believe they would embrace Western-style democracy. Some people just need a boot firmly planted on their heads. Get everybody out safely, and destroy any equipment that can't be taken. That includes Afghans who helped us.
 
Posts: 27834 | Location: Johnson City/Elizabethton, TN | Registered: April 28, 2012Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
posted Hide Post
Unfortunately, we'll be back in both Sh*t holes - AF and Irag. Except next time it will be our grandchildren.

I don't see either country emerging like Vietnam and Laos. They will probably have a Cambodian style Khmer regime or slide back into ISIS territory. Heads will roll soon.

After we leave, we'll periodically run SF operations like we do in Africa for pest control.
 
Posts: 1447 | Location: Western WA | Registered: September 11, 2006Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
posted Hide Post
Our presence in Afghanistan should've been purely punitive. 9/11 happened, we rolled in, crushed those who challenged us, hunt down AQ and gathered-up all the intel possible.

Instead, what was originally a SOF operation, evolved into Big Army/All-Joint/NATO article-5 disaster, let alone setting up these giant logistics tails; everybody had to get in. Just the geography and logistics alone should prevented any notions or, dreams of 'building a country'. Iraq and Vietnam, were better build options than Afghanistan. State Dept got involved, and everyone there was stuck in Model UN mode, instead of merely being functionaries to the outside world while the Afghan govt got stood-up, everybody had to have a say-so; everyone had to have their own special pet program. Laura Bush, First Lady, openly questioned 'what about the Afghan women and how they're treated?' Sorry Madame First Lady, that's an Afghan problem, not an American problem.
 
Posts: 14573 | Location: Wine Country | Registered: September 20, 2000Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Keeping the economy moving since 1964
Picture of chbibc
posted Hide Post
For all that happened there and as lousy as it is ending, did it not for years act as a magnet for all form of islamic crazies to go there and fight the US and coalition forces, and get killed? As opposed to coming here?

What is happening there now reminds me of what I read happened when the Russians pulled out.


-----------------------
You can't fall off the floor.
 
Posts: 8513 | Location: Rochester, NY behind enemy lines | Registered: March 12, 2002Reply With QuoteReport This Post
  Powered by Social Strata Page 1 2 3 4 ... 103 
 

SIGforum.com    Main Page  Hop To Forum Categories  The Lounge    US Embassy Alerts All Americans To Depart Afghanistan "Immediately" As More Provincial Capitals Fall

© SIGforum 2024