Way back when, I pointed out that DEBKA were making some highly questionable contentions about thousands of Al Qaeda soldiers being airlifted out of Konduz before it fell to the Northern Alliance forces of Generals Daoud Khan and Rashid Dostam. World Net Daily has belatedly picked up on this DEBKA theory.
First of all let me lay my cards on the table and say I think DEBKA are by and large a waste of pixels. Almost nothing they say cannot be deduced from open source data that is also available to anyone with a search engine and a working computer. Their analysis ranges from ‘okay’ to ‘wild conjecture’. What is more, to put it bluntly I am not sure I really trust them or their alleged ‘military sources’ given the quantity of dubious calls they have made in the past.
Military sources have solved the mystery: The planes belonged to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida. Under cover of the Pakistani airlift, 3,000 of the group’s fighters were secretly lifted to safety from the besieged towns of Konduz and Khandabad about 15 miles to the south. The double airlift lasted five nights. The planes arriving to ferry Pakistani fighters home were closely shadowed by a phantom airlift extracting al-Qaida personnel.
The rescued Pakistanis were flown to air bases in northwest and central Pakistan. The al-Qaida men were taken long distance to the Persian Gulf emirates, landing, according to Gulf sources, in Abu Dhabi and the Somali town of Baidoa.
My objections to this whole weird scenario remain unchanged from when I first suggested my interpretation of what probably happened in Konduz, which I posted to the Samizdata on November 27th. This section is relevant and nothing I have read has changed my mind since I wrote it
Likewise I think we can assume no pilot is crazy enough to try to land a large multi-engined jet on an unlit cratered dirt strip at night, so we can safely eliminate any of the large multi-engined Antonov jets.
My guess is that the aircraft in question will turn out to be an Antonov An-26. The Pakistani Airforce operates a single An-26 and it would be perfect for a rough strip landing under less than optimal conditions. My money is on that particular one being the specific aircraft involved in ‘The Great Escape’.
DEBKA does not explain where the ‘Al Qaeda’ air assets came from, how they avoided detection by the USAF/USN and how they managed this feat of night time airmanship with the larger Antonov’s than an AN-26 that would be required to get those sort of numbers out of the Konduz pocket. In two other articles on November 28 th, I discussed DEBKA’s view that it was the Pakistani ISI behind it (and I agreed) but pointed out their numbers did not really add up.
In the very next Samizdata article after that, I pondered the views of Tunku Varadarajan of the WSJ, who was saying much the same, only on the basis of sources probably far more reliable than DEBKA’s. Like Tunku Varadarajan, I felt (and still do) that it is hard to believe that the airlift of Pakistanis trapped there was not done with American acquiescence…and therefore indirect observation by sensor (not to mention nearby US and UK Special Forces). Thus it becomes even more fantastical to think a veritable airfleet was going in and out of Konduz unnoticed and unhindered, when all the US was acquiescing to was a limited airlift out of ‘sensitive’ ISI people. I think we can assume AWACS and JSTARS crews are fairly numerate folks. Unless we see some evidence other than DEBKA’s alleged ‘military sources’, I would recommend treating their story of 3000 Al Qaeda folks winging their way to freedom with considerable skepticism, to put it mildly.
