Less than a year ago a number of these A-29’s passed through Prestwick on delivery, the Afgan Air Force and Army were provided with significant quantities of equipment.

Although a significant number of aircraft have been flown out of Afganistan, they will probably be returned to the Taliban regime in the future. And the question is, what does that future hold for Afganistan and its people.

The Taliban have gained almost complete control of the country, practically without a shot being fired. Despite President Biden’s statement regarding the readiness of the Afgan Government forces, it would seem that things conspired against the government on the defense front.

The existing Afgan president fled, no real mention of his whereabouts, or the whereabouts of the load of cash that he took with him. So the Taliban have captured a country, effectively with its infrastructure in tact – the question is what will they do with the opportunity.

As to the ordinary people of Afganistan, they have tasted possibly some of the globally accepted freedoms and norms of the present day. Many are Afgans agrieved with the west for its abandonment of them, yet there was no attempt by the Afgan people to defend these freedoms – paid for in western lives.

Will the Taliban take the country back in time, or as seems unlikely at the moment embrace the future – only time will tell.

Afganistan falls to the Taliban, hind sight is a wonderfull thing they say. But there have been many wars fought in that part of the world, Britain itself has lost at least three or four, the Soviet Union as was has lost one. What on earth made the rest of the world think that it could win one?

We now have a fully re-equipped Taliban – with much of the latest US tech. As a consequence, we are almost certain to see an upsurge in terrorist incidents around the world.

What about the ordinary people of Afganistan, well the price of freedom is high and the ordinary people are not currently prepared to pay it. In fact the Police, Army, Air Force and a number of other organisations are not prepared to pay the price. Likely caused by the fact that they themselves were not getting paid, with their waged being taken by corrupt officials.

From memory this was something that was supposed to have been tackled by the Afgan government, probably not many of the Billions of Dollars poured into Afganistan went where it was supposed to go.

So all told how many lives were lost, how many people were maimed – all for what?

Quick visit to Prestwick yesterday to catch the two Huron’s before they headed westbound accross the pond, to find that it was a bit like USAF Prestwick. There were already a couple of C-17’s and a couple of KC-135’s, and just after the second Huron took off – we were graced with a third KC-135.

Reminiscent of the 1970’s to some extent, when there was even a MATS desk in the Prestwick terminal. It has been a pretty good year all in all for stuff staging through Prestwick, both east and westbound. There is a Turkish Airforce A400 and a C-130 due today, but they have been due a number of times over the past week.

The place was busy yesterday, I’d say that there were around 40 or 50 spotters there. The weather was pretty fair, although not that great for photography – Grey on Grey never is that good.

Over the next few weeks I think that there will be a number of movements through Prestwick, with stuff that is returned from Afganistan – on the assumptions that the US forces managed to extract the equipment.

On the stuff in Prestwick, here’s a quick Military log – well most of it;

60-0333 KC135R
00-0181 C17
62-3512 KC135R
02-1112 C17
09-0662 MC12
09-0686 MC12
58-0045 KC135T