Explosion at HKIA
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Looks like there’s been an attack on one of the gates at Hamid Karzai International Airport.
Hard to say anything conclusive right now, although the chatter is that IS-K (the Afghanistan branch of the Islamic State) has been working hard on some spoiler ops. Worth following with respect to how it will impact ongoing evacuations, as well as relations between the Taliban guarding the airport and the US military inside.
In other news, my latest at 1945 takes on a counterfactual: What if the US didn’t invade Afghanistan in 2001?
The question is not as absurd as it sounds. Popular support for military retribution against Al Qaeda following the 9/11 attacks was high, but this retribution did not need to take the form of a campaign for regime change. Indeed, some senior officials in the Bush administration were notably unenthusiastic about invading Afghanistan, seeing it as a strategic backwater and far too remote to make an effective demonstration of American military might. What if the United States had taken a different path?