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<\/p>\nIf Afghanistan’s armed forces are to have any chance against the Taliban, they need a strong air force. But the US withdrawal, on top of missed training opportunities due to the coronavirus pandemic, make it unclear whether Afghanistan will have a chance to get its winged warriors up to snuff.<\/p>\n
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Shah Wali Kot, Afghanistan (tca\/dpa) – The UH-60 Blackhawk plummeted like a roller coaster from 10,000 feet \u2014 safe from whatever the Taliban was firing at it \u2014 all the way down to 50 feet, its nose almost licking the sun-scorched terrain of the Shah Wali Kot.<\/p>\n
Blitzing at 115 miles per hour (mph), the helicopter swooped just beyond the battle barriers of an Afghan army base, its two onboard gunners arcing their M240 machine guns as they scanned for any Taliban nearby.<\/p>\n
When the Blackhawk landed, five soldiers \u2014 two wounded, all terrified \u2014 were dragging a sleeping bag with their belongings down the hill through the desert underbrush. They were almost at the helicopter when the gunners let loose a burst of bullets toward a dull-brown knoll. The soldiers threw themselves onboard, one of them frantically pointing at an unseen enemy to the left and begging the crew to take off quickly.<\/p>\n
The door closed. The pilot punched the throttle. The Blackhawk lunged forward, then knifed up into the afternoon sky to the drum roll of another M240 salvo.<\/p>\n
Before takeoff hours earlier, Captain Rezaye Jamshid, had explained \u2014 a wan smile through his thick beard \u2014 that he would descend fast \u00abbecause of the situation.\u00bb<\/p>\n
\u00abBut don’t worry,\u00bb he said, soothingly.<\/p>\n
Bravado? Not really. More a curt acknowledgment of what had become the lethal, daily reality confronting Jamshid and the rest of the Afghan pilots. The Taliban troops were resurgent. The Americans along with NATO troops and their airplanes \u2014 the F-18s, Reaper drones, C-130s and hundreds of other aircraft \u2014 were leaving. The Afghan air force, which the US and its partners has nurtured to the tune of 8.5 billion dollars since 2010, would now be the government’s spearhead in its fight against the enemy.<\/p>\n
But the American pullout was revealing that the very viability of that air force was in question. And it was all getting worse.<\/p>\n
Since May 1, the original deadline for the US withdrawal, the Taliban military has overpowered government troops to take at least 23 districts to date, according to local media. That advance has further denied Afghan security forces the use of roads, meaning all logistical support to the thousands of army and police outposts and checkpoints \u2014 including resupplies of ammunition and food, medical evacuations or personnel rotation \u2014 must be done by air. The result is an operational tempo the pilots can’t sustain; their aircraft routinely exceeds the maximum number of hours they’re allowed to fly.<\/p>\n
And the war means there’s plenty to fly for an air force that includes the single-propeller A-29 Super Tucano, a weaponized Cessna plane and a mix of American and Russian helicopters. The Kandahar airbase alone runs at least 50 to 70 missions a day, said General Fazal Karim Faqeer, head of base operations.<\/p>\n
\u00abThe Taliban are waiting for you. They’re shooting different kinds of guns, RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades], rockets … everything is ready for you,\u00bb said Captain Mohammad Akbar, the pilot on one of two Blackhawks on a second mission that day.<\/p>\n
It began uneventfully. The Blackhawks dropped by a nearby base to pick up bags of onions, tomatoes, flour, cooking oil, cartons of eggs (\u00abHomeland’s product, homeland’s pride,\u00bb was printed on the side). The freight also included a surprisingly serene sheep and a few soldiers they would deliver to army outposts. Swinging toward the north-west, the Blackhawks were joined by a pair of MD530s, bumblebee-esque light-attack helicopters that would secure the perimeter.<\/p>\n
Fields, trails and irrigation channels flashed below in the desert. The blue Arghandab reservoir glinted in the afternoon sun.<\/p>\n
Then came the plunging descent, a dust-swirled rush to the ground and the panicked chucking of supplies out of the side door before that switchblade-fast takeoff. Though it was all done in under a minute, there was still enough time for a Taliban sniper to put a round in a soldier’s leg; the crew had to drag him into the helicopter.<\/p>\n
\u00abThe only reason we’re alive is because the UH-60 is so fast,\u00bb Akbar said later, after the helicopters had landed back at the Kandahar base, which the Americans refer to as KAF. Yet they hadn’t been fast enough to escape taking hits; a bullet had punched a hole through the horizontal stabilator of one of the Blackhawks, and shrapnel pitted the fuselage of another.<\/p>\n
Both of them were out of commission until they could be repaired.<\/p>\n
That would take some time. The American withdrawal means US troops \u00abhave gone to zero,\u00bb and so have the contractors who maintain the Blackhawks. The dwindling number of UH-60 maintenance contractors, who have pulled back entirely from Kandahar, means the helicopters have to fly to Kabul for repairs and upkeep.<\/p>\n
But there is a deeper problem: During the last two decades, the US has built an army in its own image, with Afghan security forces relying on some 18,000 contractors for everything from buying fuel and bullets to doing payroll to the critical tasks of maintaining the 162 aircraft used by the AAF and training the pilots who fly them.<\/p>\n
Since late 2019, 94 per cent of US forces involved in training and advising the air force have left, so contractors have taken on almost all roles. Without continued contractor support, according to a Defense Department inspector general’s report earlier this year, those warplanes would be combat effective for only a few months.<\/p>\n
\u00abWe don’t know when the contractors are going to leave here. When they do, it’ll be very bad,\u00bb said Colonel Salim Razmendah, who runs UH-60 operations in north and east Afghanistan out of Kabul airbase.<\/p>\n
Officials with the Afghans National Security Council insist they can \u00abAfghanize\u00bb the army, meaning Afghans can take on more logistics roles or at least renegotiate terms with contracting companies for significant savings. But the air force is different \u2014 maintenance contracts account for more than half of its budget.<\/p>\n
Training a routine-level aircraft maintainer takes 18 months; an advanced-level one more than seven years. Though Afghans were dispatched to Slovakia for nine months to learn how to maintain the UH-60, the coronavirus pandemic meant contractors gave no hands-on training when the students returned to Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
There have been frenetic efforts to change that. A few days after that early May mission, the two Blackhawks were in Kabul, one of them swarmed by a gaggle of uniformed Afghans working with a contractor in di rigueur khakis.<\/p>\n
Razmendah, who was standing nearby with his helmet under his arm, said: \u00abThe Afghan maintainers, they’re working hard. But it’s very hard for them to do in two months what takes two years.\u00bb<\/p>\n
One potential solution, officials say, is to transfer contract maintainers to a nearby country such as Uzbekistan and bolster nearby bases in Afghanistan like the one in Mazar-i-Sharif, 20 minutes away. No neighboring government has accepted. Another contractor with a braided beard added there were plans to run trainings with Zoom or virtual reality, but everyone acknowledges there’s no substitute for on-site training. Meanwhile, of the 47 Blackhawks with the AAF, 10 were due for inspections.<\/p>\n
None of this comes as a surprise. That the Blackhawk was even part of the Afghan air force’s assets was more a political than a practical decision, even though US commanders once touted it as the silver bullet against the Taliban. Fast and survivable, the Blackhawk was preferred by crews over the Russian-made Mi-17, once the backbone of the Afghans’ rotary wing.<\/p>\n
But US sanctions on Russia meant a moratorium on importing Mi-17 parts. The goal was to phase them out with refurbished UH-60s as part of a decadelong transformation plan ending in 2023, said General John Michel, a retired US Air Force general who oversaw the NATO mission to build a modern Afghan air force and is now an executive in the aviation industry.<\/p>\n
\u00abWe introduced a complex system late in the game, and now we’re ending it three years early,\u00bb he said. \u00abSo you have a system not as well-suited for the mission set.\u00bb<\/p>\n
The Mi-17, he added, was an aircraft the mechanics knew since the Soviet era and could handle more than 80 per cent of its maintenance. (They have zero maintenance capability so far on the UH-60, the inspector general report noted.) Besides, the Mi-17 was better for battles, Michel said.<\/p>\n
\u00abIt’s tractor with a rotor, a U-haul truck, and it has a lot of inherent agility. You could drop that thing on the pavement,\u00bb Michel said.<\/p>\n
Michel expected the Pentagon to keep the Mi-17s in operation for longer and reduce the number of aircraft to a more manageable number.<\/p>\n
But it’s unclear what reductions can happen with an already overstretched air force. At KAF, General Faqeer, a burly, clean-shaven Afghan flyboy with the strut to match, spoke glowingly of his A-29, a single propeller warplane equipped to drop guided bombs and the pilots under his command. (He rhapsodized his time training in the US, professing his love for guacamole.)<\/p>\n
\u00abWhen you bring a soldier back for medical treatment, you’re like an angel,\u00bb he said.<\/p>\n
But he acknowledged that the 10-minute response time troops seeking air support could expect when NATO was around was long gone.<\/p>\n
\u00abWe have what we have right now. With NATO allies, they would just shift the plane from one spot to another. For us, we have to receive a cypher … it goes to the Operations Informations Center, and then the pilot has to fly,\u00bb he said.<\/p>\n
Ground commanders complain that can take an hour and a half, if strike aircraft come at all. The response time is also likely to get worse. Pilot training is afflicted by problems, including attrition.<\/p>\n
Five UH-60 pilots left in the last three months due to Taliban threats, officers say; in January, a pilot was killed in a drive-by shooting. Though there are 150 cadets in the pipeline, Razmendah said, he and other active-duty pilots were too overstretched to prepare them for missions.<\/p>\n
\u00abBefore, a company did this. Now it’s gone. There’s no training at all for the UH-60,\u00bb he said.<\/p>\n
Jack McCain, a former adviser to the Afghan air force who helped train UH-60, said the pace was \u00abnot sustainable.\u00bb<\/p>\n
\u00abYou’re going to burn your people and your aircraft out if you don’t prep their replacements and get them out of the fight,\u00bb he said, adding that flying in Afghanistan was akin to \u00abflying in Vietnam every single day and with nowhere else to go.\u00bb<\/p>\n
Despite those issues, few dispute that the AAF gives the government a crucial edge over the Taliban \u2014 or that it’s a relative success story in an overall spotty US record.<\/p>\n
\u00abThe Afghans did something the US would never ask of their own pilots: from never touching a Blackhawk to flying operational missions in under a year, which is flabbergasting,\u00bb McCain said.<\/p>\n
The AAF, Michel said, was \u00abthe single most important capability that we have done in our investment of people and resources.\u00bb<\/p>\n
But the air force is under constant threat. On Wednesday, an antitank missile slammed into the side of a Blackhawk near the airport in Ghazni, a stop that pilots had been forced to make every day to replenish fast-depleting ammunition stores. The pilots survived. The Blackhawk couldn’t be repaired; 46 remain.<\/p>\n
By Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If Afghanistan’s armed forces are to have any chance against the Taliban, they need a strong air force. But the US withdrawal, on top of missed training opportunities due to the coronavirus pandemic, make it unclear whether Afghanistan will have a chance to get its winged warriors up to snuff. Shah Wali Kot, Afghanistan (tca\/dpa) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1094184,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1094183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-actualidad"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t