Taliban forces attacked an Afghan military base in the Kandahar Province overnight, overrunning the base and killing at least 26 soldiers, wounding 13 others. Locals say hundreds of Taliban attacked the base in all directions, and the battle lasted hours.
The death toll appears to be very much in dispute. 26 is the minimum reported killed, but the initial Afghan intelligence report said 40 were slain, and the Taliban itself claimed to have killed over 70 soldiers. The Afghani Defense Ministry claimed to have “killed or wounded” around 80 Taliban.
The Afghan Defense Ministry also confirmed that seven soldiers were kidnapped in the incident, and that there are another 21 soldiers missing outright. The Taliban confirmed that they had taken seven captives in the raid.
Also significant, the Taliban reported that in overrunning the base they seized large amounts of weapons and vehicles that were at the site at the time. This has become a growing problem, with the Taliban increase securing large amounts of US-provided weapons from Afghan military and police in such fighting.
Must be Putin’s fault of course.
Interesting, but only amounts to more confirmation that things are going badly for the Kabul regime. Here’s the article that you should be talking about if you want to inform yourself to oppose the war in Afghanistan: A Peace ‘Surge’ to End War in Afghanistan, by Laurel Miller https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/23/opinion/donald-trump-end-afghanistan-war.html.
“…The United States does have a policy of pursuing peace. I was responsible for carrying it out until recently. But the United States has never put the political and diplomatic weight behind the initiative needed for success. The Taliban has long been willing to talk to the United States, but has resisted sitting down with the Afghan government, which it regards as a puppet regime… The United States has worked only in fits and starts to build a format for talks and preliminary understandings to get substantive negotiations going. America’s primary focus on the war has contributed to an inconsistent peace effort… A surge of United States commitment to negotiating a political settlement would not remove all the obstacles, but it is a prerequisite. A first step in this direction could be for President Trump to declare publicly his intent to make a peace deal. He could show his readiness to work out the details of a military withdrawal and emphasize the protection of United States national security interests in negotiations…. .”
The sort of ‘news’ one gets when a war is being lost behind a smokescreen of propaganda. The propaganda will tell everyone that ‘we are winning’, but every once in awhile, they have to admit a defeat that can not be hidden.
During WW2, Hitler lost 250,000 troops at Stalingrad. German war propaganda told the German people that the army was winning great victories at Stalingrad ….. up until the day they could no longer hide the fact that those troops wouldn’t be coming home.