US leaves controls, Taliban in cockpit General’s ghostl image reserves place in history
Iban leaders walk oss the runway in bul, marking their ory over foreign ces. They were ked by the ‘Badri’ cial forces
The Taliban group were ll control of Kabul’s internal airport on Tuesday, after ast US plane left its runway, king the end of America’s est war. hicles carrying the Taliban d back and forth along the id Karzai International Airs sole runway on the northmilitary side of the airfield. re dawn broke, heavily ed Taliban fighters walked ugh hangars, passing some e seven CH-46 helicopters tate department used in its uations before rendering unflyable. liban leaders later symboliwalked across the runway, king their victory while ed by fighters of the insurs’ “Badri” special forces unit. elite Taliban team posed for ures as journalists docuted their arrival. fghanistan is finally free,” matullah Wasiq, a top Taliofficial, told The Associated s. “The military and civilian are with us and in control. efully, we will be announcour cabinet. Everything is eful. Everything is safe.” asiq urged people to return ork and reiterated the Talipledge offering a general esty. “People have to be nt,” he said. “Slowly we will verything back to normal. It ake time.” liban spokesman Zabihulujahid addressed the gathered members of the Badri unit. “I hope you be very cautious in dealing with the nation,” he said. “Our nation has suffered war and invasion and the people do not have more tolerance.”
Taliban fighters draped their white flags over barriers at the airport as others guarded the civilian side of the airfield. Inside the terminal, several dozen suitcases and pieces of luggage were left strewn across the floor, apparently left behind in the chaos. Clothes and shoes also were scattered. A poster of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the famed anti-taliban fighter, had been destroyed.
On Tuesday, after a night that saw the Taliban fire triumphantly into the air, guards now blearily on duty kept out the curious and those still somehow hoping to catch a flight out.
US military disable scores of aircraft before exiting
The US military disabled scores of aircraft and armoured vehicles as well as a high-tech rocket defence system at the Kabul airport before it left Monday, a US general said. Central Command head General Kenneth Mckenzie said 73 aircraft that were already at Hamid Karzai International Airport were “demilitarised”, or rendered useless, by US troops before they wrapped up the twoweek evacuation of the Talibancontrolled country.
“Those aircraft will never fly again... They’ll never be able to be operated by anyone,” he said. “Most of them are non-mission capable to begin with. But certainly they’ll never be able to be flown again.”
He said the Pentagon, which built up a force of nearly 6,000 troops to operate Kabul’s airport when the airlift began on August 14, left behind around 70 MRAP armoured tactical vehicles which can cost up to $1 million apiece - that it disabled before leaving, and 27 Humvees.
Carrying his rifle down by his side, Major General Chris Donahue, commander of the storied 82nd Airborne Division, became the last US soldier to board the final flight out of Afghanistan a minute before midnight on Monday.
Taken with a night vision device from a side window of the C-17 transport plane, the ghostly green and black image of the general striding toward the aircraft waiting on the tarmac at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai Airport was released by the Pentagon hours after the US ended its military presence in Afghanistan.
As a moment in history, the image of Donahue’s departure could be cast alongside that of a Soviet general, who led an armoured column across the Friendship Bridge to Uzbekistan, when the Red Army made its exit from Afghanistan in 1989.
Completing a military operation that with the help of allies succeeded in evacuating 123,000 civilians from Afghanistan, the last plane load of US troops left under cover of the night.
In the image, Donahue appears to be moving briskly. He is wearing full combat gear, with night vision goggles atop his helmet, and rifle by his side. He had yet to leave Afghanistan behind, and reach safety.
In contrast, the images of General Boris Gromov, commander of Soviet Union’s 40th Army in Afghanistan, show him walking arm-in-arm with his son on the bridge across the Amu Darya river carrying a bouquet of red and white flowers.
The US and Soviet withdrawals from a country that has become known as a graveyard for empires were conducted in very different ways, but at the very least they avoided the calamitous defeat suffered by Britain in the First Anglo-afghan war in 1842.
The abiding image from that conflict is Elizabeth Thompson’s oil painting “Remnants of an Army” depicting a solitary exhausted rider, military assistant surgeon William Brydon, swaying back in the saddle even more exhausted hors the retreat from Kabul.
When Russia’s Red Army a pro-moscow communist ernment was still in power its army would fight on for t more years, whereas Us-ba Afghan government had alr capitulated and Kabul had f to the Taliban a little over weeks before the Augus deadline for US troops to de
Making an orderly exit, last of Gromov’s 50,000 tr still suffered isolated attac they drove northwards to Uzbek border, though they paid Mujahideen group secure safe passage along way.
The final American eva tion of Kabul will be judge how many people were bro out, and how many were behind.
But Donahue and his c rades will carry harrow images from their chaotic days in Kabul; parents pas babies to them across the r wire, two young Afghans fa from a plane climbing hig the sky, and worst of all, the ermath of an Islamic State cide bomb attack outside the port on August 26 that k scores of Afghans and 13 of t own.