KABUL: The Afghan government is planning to open a new international airport in a Taliban-dominated eastern province to transform the region into an air travel hub, the country’s aviation regulator said on Friday.
The project, estimated to cost $2 billion, was already planned in the 1970s by then-President Mohammad Daud Khan, whose killing in a coup in 1978 marked the beginning of Afghanistan’s civil war and foreign invasions that have consequently destroyed the country’s infrastructure.
To be constructed in Logar province, some 45 km south of Kabul, the airport is expected to become operational by 2024, Afghanistan’s Civil Aviation Authority spokesman Mohammad Naeem Salehi told Arab News on Friday.
“The airport will transform Afghanistan’s central zone into one of Afghanistan’s main aerial hubs and will connect it to the regional and world markets,” he said, adding that the project’s feasibility assessment was recently completed by an Italian company.
The new airport will be an alternative to the main international port in the heart of Kabul, which was built in the 1970s and cannot be expanded.
“The total cost of the airport will stand at $2 billion and will be covered by the government of Afghanistan,” Salehi said, adding: “It will be an international standard airport, used annually by 10 million passengers with a capacity of 100,000 tons of cargo.”
The airport will be built in the desert of Mohammad Agha district of Logar, near the Ainak Copper mine, an area where the Taliban have enjoyed a long presence and where government forces routinely come under attack.
The province is also the hometown of President Ashraf Ghani.
“We have enough security forces on the ground in the area for the protection of the project and in addition to this local people are cooperating on this,” Logar provincial council chief Hassibullah Stanekzai told Arab News.
“This is a national project on Afghanistan’s level and the Taliban will never hinder it,” he said.
While the Taliban could not be immediately reached for comment, analysts see challenges for the project to materialize.
“The building of an airport in Logar is a laudable project, but we have to note that Logar is a very volatile province,” analyst Tameem Bahiss told Arab News.
“With the deteriorating security situation in Logar and the corruption in Kabul, this project will be very challenging,” he said.
Former government adviser Torek Farhadi praised the project, but said it should not be a priority for Kabul as “securing access and securing the airport’s perimeter will be key to convincing international airlines to land there.”
He added: “In the long run, we hope for peace in Afghanistan so it can be completed as an international hub. Security right now doesn’t allow for that.”
Farhadi said that even top government officials cannot travel by car to Logar as the security situation is so dire.
Afghanistan to build $2 billion airport in Taliban-dominated province
https://arab.news/pxhhw
Afghanistan to build $2 billion airport in Taliban-dominated province
- Located 45 km south of Kabul, the airport is expected to become operational by 2024
- It will be built near the Ainak Copper mine, an area where government forces routinely come under Taliban attack
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
