At least 13 Afghans dead after explosions at Kabul airport

At least 13 adults and children were killed this afternoon in an explosion outside Kabul airport. According to the latest reports coming out of Afghanistan, the explosion is understood to have been detonated by a suicide bomber in a sewage canal where Afghan refugees were having their visa documents vetted close to the Abbey Gate near to the Baron Hotel where UK and US forces are stationed. 

The casualties are believed to be Afghan but members of the Taliban are also thought to have been injured. So far there are no known international military forces involved. The attack is understood to have come from an extremist group, Daesh or IS-K. 

The latest explosion came as British and American troops are packing up at Kabul airport and expected to be gone by Monday. The last few thousand – perhaps 10,000 or more – fugitives can be flown out by a fleet of aircraft from a more than a dozen air forces. That would leave tens of thousands behind – perhaps 100,000 or more – desperate to go as they see no future with the Taliban.

The timetable is being sped up because of an ‘imminent and credible threat,’ according to defence secretary Ben Wallace.

There is yawning credibility gap from the commands of the UK and US forces about what really is going on, and what the next steps might be. It is interesting how the news management of the regimes inside the Washington Beltway and the Whitehall Bubble is not working out. Reality keeps breaking in from Kabul, Kandahar, Panjshir and Spin Boldak.

Indeed, President Biden’s attempt to switch his news narrative once he had turned down the G7 request to extend the Kabul deadline beyond the end of the month has left has been widely criticised. He opened his White House news conference with a five minute peroration on national infrastructure improvement. He wants to forget about Afghanistan; forgetfulness seems to be his theme tune. But the world will want to talk to him a lot more about Afghanistan – and so it should.

Now we have to face the reality of Afghanistan without any meaningful western presence. Can the Taliban really run the show? Are they all they are cracked up to be, better or worse ? We got a brilliant insight on the BBC’s Today from Professor Michael Semple of Queen’s University Belfast. Deeply experienced in the ways of the Pashtun community especially, he served on the ground as a UN representative. He was kicked out by the weaselly Hamid Karzai for talking to ‘the wrong people’ in Helmand – ie tribes people not allied to clan Karzai.

He explained this morning that the Taliban are still largely rural in background – the chaotic urban sprawl of Kabul with its four million population is an almost completely alien world. He sees little chance of them running an urban infrastructure, no more than they managed it from 1996 to 2001.

He foresees years of on-off civil strife, tribal feuding. He holds little prospect of a coherent resistance being run from the Panjsher valley by the young Ahmed Massoud and the remnants of the Afghan Republican forces. Massoud’s father Ahmed Shah ran a formidable resistance against the Russians from 1979 to 1989 and then went on to fight allies of the Mujahideen resistance movement. The difference this time is that Ahmed Shah Massoud had a deep logistical supply line for munitions and recruits through the Tajik lands of the north and into Tajikistan itself. That route is now cut off – because the Taliban occupied the Tajik lands in the north in the opening phases of this summer’s offensive.

Two aspects of the Taliban posture are still unclear. What is the real political and military leadership? They are evidently not the same thing. We have press conferences galore, the return of the negotiators from Doha, reports of a ‘new form of government being formed.’ A lot of this is bluff. The news conferences and press releases are an information Potemkin village – all façade and no substance.

The main posture of the guerrillas, if their propaganda pictures are anything to go by, is toting big guns on trucks, shouting at refugees and reporters, and torture . Whether they can operate as a modern army is an open question. The Russians have reported that the Taliban have seized roughly100 combat and transport helicopters from the Afghan national forces – yet they have not a single trained pilot, let alone one maintenance crew.

The British government is telling fugitives from the Taliban to head for the borders – where they might be processed as refugees or asylum seekers. The complexity of the refugee flow in a broken country was spelled out today by David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee. It is not clear how many border crossings will be open – and a lot of faith is being placed on the authorities, Afghan as well as Pakistan, for instance, at the Spin Boldak crossing to Pakistan Baluchistan. It’s a wing and a prayer proposition in line with Boris Johnson’s plea at the G7 to get the Taliban to let go of whoever wants to quit Afghan territory.

This past fortnight it has been dawning that we are already in another major refugee upheaval, not to say potential or actual disaster. Iran and Pakistan are coping with around four to five million Afghans, some long-term fugitives from earlier phases of almost fifty years of episodic civil conflict. Turkey, understandably, has warned it cannot absorb hundreds of thousands, possibly a million, new Afghan refugees.

Apart from a few bold initiatives by the likes of Afghan Aid, and Rory Stewart’s Turquoise Mountain, very little money, brainpower and muscle have been put into addressing the new crisis.

The failure implicit in this denouement is stark for Boris Johnson and his government. The reason Britain has to get out of Kabul this weekend on the coat-tails of the Americans is that we don’t have the forces to cope on our own – even with allies like Germany and France – to manage in Kabul for a few days more.

Our forces are in a woeful state. The whole defence and security apparatus under-resourced and hollowed out, underlined by this week’s news about defence funding. Forget about the boasting earlier this year of £24 billion extra funding for our forces – the whole thing is a mirage, actuarily as insubstantial as the resurrection chances for the Phoenix in Arabia. A lot of the announced funding had already been allocated in previous programme announcements. Much of the remaining £16 billion was to fill the infamous ‘black hole’ in defence equipment procurement. The defence budget faces a fate of chronic deficit.

Like Joe Biden, Boris Johnson seems to be straining at the leash to move on from Afghanistan. In any discussion about the place he shows every sign of wishing to be somewhere else. There are other big things to command his attention – like the COP-26 climate conference in Glasgow in November. Reports about the preparations and position papers for that meeting are sounding ominously like yet another case of Boris’s dog eating his homework.