18, August 2021
“Nothing indicated Afghan collapse in 11 days” 0
The Pentagon’s top general defended on Wednesday the US military’s response to the Taliban’s breakneck seizure of power in Afghanistan, saying no one foresaw the collapse of US-trained Afghan forces that fast.
“There was nothing that I, or anyone else, saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days,” US Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley said.
“The Afghan security forces had the capacity, and by that I mean they had the training, the size, the capability, to defend their country. This comes down to an issue of will and leadership,” he added.
The US military and the administration of President Joe Biden are under political attack domestically over the Taliban’s defeat of the Afghan forces with little fight and the collapse of president Ashraf Ghani’s US-backed government last weekend.
The speed appeared to catch the US government off guard and it launched a rapid evacuation operation for US citizens and Afghans granted special visas for their work for US forces.
Since Saturday, around 5,000 US troops have flown in to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport to manage evacuations of thousands.
Critics have faulted the State Department, US intelligence and the Pentagon for not anticipating the debacle and preparing earlier for the evacuation, which involves more than 10,000 US citizens.
Douglas London, the CIA’s former counterterrorism chief for South Asia and then an advisor to Biden’s presidential campaign, said US intelligence had predicted the Taliban would defeat Afghan forces and that it was possible the government would capitulate within days.
Those projections were “highlighted to Trump officials and future Biden officials alike,” in the last year, London wrote Wednesday on the Just Security website.
Source: AFP



















20, August 2021
Southern Cameroons Interim Gov’t censures La Republique for excessive force against Amba kids 0
The Southern Cameroons Department of Foreign Affairs has censured the excessive use of force by Francophone army soldiers against children in Southern Cameroons.
Under directives from Vice President Dabney Yerima, the Foreign Affairs Department released a document recently that focuses on the critical aspect of the Ambazonian identity as a country and as a people after it was revealed that several children were killed across Southern Cameroons as a result of extreme violence exercised by Cameroon government troops over the past week.
The Department of Foreign Affairs added that French Cameroun troops killed a Southern Cameroon boy in Akwaya in Manyu after shooting him in the chest.
Cameroon government forces also shot and killed a 15-year-old boy in Batibo who was riding a bicycle. Another 12-year-old Southern Cameroons teenager was also shot in the back and died en route to the Weh Health Centre in Menchum Division.
A teenager died from gunshot wounds earlier this week in Ekondo Titi that he sustained in the neck more than eight weeks ago.
“Southern Cameroons children shot in the chest, neck and back: this is completely unacceptable that our children’s lives are being cut short so young,” Dabney Yerima said in this week’s cabinet briefing.
Yerima pointed out that Ambazonian families would suffer lasting emotional scars on their losses, emphasizing that children have special protection under international law and must be protected from violence at all times.
By Chi Prudence Asong