The US military trainers handed the new recruit, Mohammad Ismail, his AK-47 to defend his remote Afghan village. He turned around and immediately used it, spraying the US soldiers with bullets and killing two — the latest of nine US service personnel gunned down in two weeks by their supposed Afghan allies.
The shooting in western Farah Province was not the only such attack on Friday. Hours later, a few provinces away in Kandahar, an Afghan soldier wounded two more coalition servicemen.
One turncoat attack per month raised eyebrows last year. One per week caused concern earlier this year, but when Afghan forces turn their guns on international trainers twice in a day — as they now have two weeks in a row — it is hard to argue there is not something going on. The question is, what is it?
Photo: AFP
The US-led alliance says it is too soon to tell what is behind the rash of insider attacks. The most likely explanations: Either the Taliban are increasingly infiltrating the Afghan police and army, or relations between Afghan and US forces are turning toxic — or both.
“There’s no positive spin on this,” said Andrew Exum, an analyst at the Center for a New American Security who has advised the top US generals in Kabul.
That is bad news for the US exit strategy for Afghanistan, which has seen Washington spend more than US$20 billion on training and equipping a nearly 340,000-member Afghan security force.
The coalition has downplayed the attacks as anomalies and mostly a result of personal grievances, even as their numbers soared from 11 last year to 29 so far this year.
Some historians are hard-pressed to find precedent for this in previous wars.
“I have never heard of anything in Vietnam comparable to what we have recently experienced in Afghanistan,” said James McAllister, a political science professor at Williams College in Massachusetts.
Exum said the attacks have “tremendous strategic impact” beyond the 36 coalition forces killed this year because they hit international troops’ morale and weaken support for the war in the US and other NATO nations training Afghan soldiers and police to take over security nationwide by 2014.
What is unclear, he added, is how much influence the Taliban actually have in organizing the increasing numbers of attacks.
The insurgents have been happy to take credit. The Taliban’s supreme leader, mullah Mohammad Omar, boasted on Thursday that the insurgents “have cleverly infiltrated into the ranks of the enemy” and were killing a rising number of US -led coalition forces.
Afghan military analyst Amrullah Amman has no doubt that Taliban infiltration of Afghan security forces is rising. He said that despite new methods of screening, it’s simple to forge documents and invent references in Afghanistan.
“The gate is wide open. The enemy is infiltrating because they see it’s very easy,” Amman said.
Afghan soldiers interviewed by AP earlier this year offered their own explanations: The Afghans feel disrespected, the soldiers said. They complained of getting inferior equipment and condescending treatment by US forces.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of