base, and one that comes with an agreement in place with the Taliban that U.S. Here we are talking about a deadly attack on a U.S. And yet this attack belies that overly rosy depiction. forces departing against the backdrop of a new peace process.

“The outgoing administration is trying to project the idea of a responsible withdrawal, with U.S.

mission in the country.“The optics are dreadful: The United States is pulling troops from the country even as their bases continue to get hit, and the American people aren’t even allowed to know,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program and senior associate at The Wilson Center. The deafening silence around the attack on Camp Chapman is part of a pattern of lack of transparency and information about the U.S. mission in the country, as Washington is increasingly turning a blind eye to a surge in terrorist attacks in recent months, including attacks against bases long associated with U.S. The attack came about six weeks before the United States’ deadline to drawdown its troops in Afghanistan-and underscores both the security vacuum those departing troops leave behind, and the many ways in which the Taliban appear to be violating the terms of their 2020 peace agreement with the Trump administration. A spokesperson for the governor of Khost said that “the KPF did not share the information from the blast with us.” The Afghan Ministry of the Interior and the Criminal Technique department in Kabul both said they had no documentation of the incident. Immediately following the attack, both the Afghan Army and the Khost police were denied access to the scene. Neither Washington nor the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan shared any information about the attack publicly or in response to requests. The attack killed four members of the Khost Protection Force, or KPF-a CIA-trained and equipped militia that maintains an iron grip on the province-as well as three Afghan soldiers and at least six civilians.īut neither local nor international media reported on the incident. Yet unlike the prior four big attacks on Camp Chapman, located northeast of the city of Khost, last December’s deadly assault went unreported and unacknowledged. Eleven years after one of the largest losses of life in CIA history at a notorious military base in southeastern Afghanistan, Camp Chapman was attacked again in early December, a seemingly blatant violation of the U.S.-Taliban peace agreement.

Camp Cryptid by Chick Chapman