Scott Ritter to Sputnik: Any Afghan Pilots Who Make Way to Ukraine Will Be on a ‘Suicide Mission’
19:10 GMT 29.08.2022 (Updated: 12:44 GMT 13.04.2023)
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Earlier Monday, a source told Sputnik that the Pentagon plans to recruit former Afghan Air Force pilots to ‘plug holes’ in Ukraine’s Air Force after it its decimation by the Russian military. Pilots are said to be getting training in California, and are eventually expected to be dispatched to Ukraine via Poland, according to the source.
The idea that former members of Afghanistan’s Air Force and special forces troops could be consigned by the Pentagon to fight Russia in Ukraine is ‘fantastical,’ and if there’s any truth to it, it would mean certain death for any volunteers foolhardy enough to agree to the idea, former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has indicated.
“On the surface, this report sounds fantastic. And I don't mean in a good way, I mean as if it’s an item of fantasy. This makes no sense whatsoever. The strength of the Afghan soldier was his connection with the land, with the people, with the culture, with the tribes. When you pull an Afghan out of Afghanistan, you lose all that. And so the notion that you have this highly trained, capable, competent military asset that can be plugged in anywhere in the world is ludicrous. For any Afghan who seeks to go to Ukraine under contract, it's a one-way trip. It's a suicide mission,” Ritter told Sputnik.
The former soldier, who now works as an independent military analyst, emphasized that Afghan military pilots are more familiar with simple aircraft used in counterinsurgency operations, not the advanced types of planes and enemy ground-based air defense systems found in Ukraine.
“They don’t know how to survive in a modern air defense environment. So they would literally die on the first day. And anybody training them would know this. The Afghan pilots would know that. This sounds to me more like somebody wrote a position paper that was advocating that some thought be given into this. But I can't see any real decision maker, any responsible person actually acting on this,” Ritter reiterated.
The retired intelligence officer emphasized that if the information is legitimate, it would be a “desperate measure,” on the Pentagon’s part.
“It's an act of desperation to take men who have very specific combat training, that is combat training specific to the reality of Afghanistan, and to seek to repurpose them to fight in Ukraine in plugging holes. Literally it is the definition of plugging holes. It's not a game-changing effort to reshape the battlefield with the introduction of a decisive force. This is a stopgap measure that will fail. And when it fails, it doesn't just mean the death of those Afghans who were sent to Ukraine, but it is the failure of the money invested, the time spent that could have been used for a better purpose. It would actually make Ukraine weaker,” Ritter said.
He added that the former Afghan Air Force pilots and special forces troopers fled Afghanistan in the first place because they didn’t want to die, so sending them to their certain death in Ukraine would be ridiculous.
“Now, if these are men who are in a desperate situation, they're being promised that their families will be taken care of, their families will be brought to America, etc., I could see a man entering into that kind of dark contract. But this presumes that there's a significant body of Afghan men who want to fight. But fight for what, what cause? Is Ukraine their cause? No. Is there enough money to compensate them for the certainty of death? I doubt it,” he said.
Ritter emphasized that if these men wanted to “commit suicide,” they would have done it in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban in 2021, instead of fleeing the country for safer harbor only to end up in Ukraine.
29 August 2022, 15:45 GMT
Maybe Not So Fantastical
Omar Samad, former Afghan ambassador to France, Canada, the European Union and NATO, told Sputnik that the use of former Afghan pilots and special forces would truly be evidence of desperation, but may not be as fantastical as it might seem at first glance.
“If this news about the use of Afghan pilots in the Ukraine war by the West is correct, then that signifies a tactical escalation, meaning that Ukraine, backed by Western countries, feels pressure, enough pressure that they need to go and outsource some of the military assets, whether in terms of personnel or equipment to fight the Russians. The use of Afghans has been rumored for a while. It is not new news, but it is a sign that the tens of thousands of Afghan special forces, including pilots, who were evacuated after the fall of Kabul in August 2021 are scattered around the world, but mainly most of them have ended up in the United States,” Samad said.
The former diplomat, who also served as an advisor to Afghan Presidents Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah before resigning in late 2015, said that an attempt by the US to use Afghan fighters in this way was not something “unheard of.”
“We hear of reports on all sides of non-indigenous assets being used in this war, which means that we are going to see more of a proxy-type engagement evolving over time. As far as Afghans are concerned, I think that these assets, these Afghan trained assets, eventually may even be used in other parts of the world in case of need and become maybe some type of a mercenary force over time. But at this point, it is not clear, and the track record is still to be tested and confirmed,” Samad said.
The Afghan Air Force had over 180 planes and helicopters in its inventory and 7,000+ airmen at the time of its disintegration along with the rest of the military last summer. In the final weeks of August 2021, as many as 48 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters were reported to have been flown out of the country to neighboring Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Nearly a dozen helicopters were eventually reported to have made it to the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base outside Tucson, Arizona.
The Afghan National Army Special Operations Command had at least 30,000 soldiers in total at the time of its disintegration.
The Afghan government and military collapsed on August 15, 2021 while US and allied forces were still withdrawing from the country, bringing the West’s 20-year nation-building experiment in the landlocked West Asian nation to an end and resulting in the near-total Taliban* takeover of the country.
* A group under United Nations sanctions for terrorist activities.
