Dispatch: Effects of the U.S. Helicopter Downing in Afghanistan
Video Transcript:
Analyst Kamran Bokhari examines the potential fallout from the Taliban's downing of a U.S. Chinook helicopter.
Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology. Therefore, STRATFOR cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
U.S. military authorities are referring to the downing of a helicopter used by U.S. special forces, in which as many as 30 American military personnel were killed, as a one-off incident. While that may be the case, the downing of a U.S. military helicopter, with as many as 25 members of the Navy SEALs aboard it, will be a source of emboldenment for the Taliban. Should the Taliban be able to reproduce this incident in the future, it will enhance its position on the battlefield as well as the negotiating table.
A Pentagon spokesperson described the incident in which 30 U.S. military officials were killed aboard a CH-47 helicopter that was brought down by a Taliban RPG [rocket-propelled grenade], as a one-off incident and cautioned against reading too much into it and said that this did not constitute "a watershed or a new trend." Indeed, the available evidence does suggest that the Taliban militiamen got lucky in this particular incident in the province of Wardak in central Afghanistan, when a team of Navy SEALs tried to rescue rangers who were pinned down in a firefight with the jihadist militiamen.
Even though the Taliban may have gotten lucky this time around, they will definitely be wanting to try and reproduce this incident in the future, just as U.S. military officials are investigating the incident in terms of trying to understand how this happened and how it can be prevented in the future. The Taliban can be expected to do their own probe in which they would want to be able to glean from "lessons learned."
The point to note here is that while the tactical military skills and circumstances may be reproducible, but in the long run the frequency of such events essentially depends upon the Taliban having advanced intelligence on helicopter missions. And that's where they will run into some problems, because ultimately it depends upon how good the Taliban penetration is of the Afghan security forces and how much U.S. military authorities are sharing with their Afghan counterparts.
Should the Taliban be able to bring down additional helicopters in the near future, then that allows them to extract concessions from the United States on the negotiating table in terms of the circumstances of withdrawal and the share of power that the Taliban will be demanding in a post-NATO Afghanistan.
