Eagle Guardian: The War of 2010

And that's one reason why biological weapons are the very definition of insanity. And also why you will want to make sure that your enemies don't bomb such facilities. But unfortunately, the Russian government has a deep love of secrecy.

Russia has been used thermobarics and fuel-air bombs throughout the war.
They have their own version of the MOAB, yes. The Father Of All Bombs was tested in 2007 and, naturally, bigger than the American's big Mother Of All Bombs. 

Given the need for airports working to keep the economy working, the Seattle airport will be repaired as soon as feasible.
The need to contain the virus will be a severe strain for the less than functional Russian economy and will delay Russia's recovery (at least in the area affected).
Regarding Syria, if the situation evolves into an occupation, it is advisable to fix the Sykes-Picot agreement and split the country into more coherent and stable countries for Alawites, Druzes, Kurds and Sunni Arabs. It would never be a perfect solution (borders would have to be decided), but long term it would be better for the regional stability of the Middle East.

One Hundred and Twelve

Taliban gunmen struck all across Kabul in a coordinated attack. Carrying assault rifles and grenades, while wearing explosive suicide vests, they made quite the daring attack when they attempted to raid a total of eight sites across the Afghan capital. Due to other activities elsewhere in the country in the preceding and following days, back home in the United States the American’s would call this the ‘Taliban’s Tet’. The reference was to what happened in Vietnam back in 1968 with the Viet Cong. The attack against the American Embassy was what made that name used in regard to this series of attacks. However, unlike Saigon forty-two years ago, the embassy didn’t fall to armed insurgents. US Marine guards drove the Taliban off. There were explosions and deaths but the intention to storm the embassy in a propaganda blow like no other failed.

Elsewhere in Kabul, the Taliban met other failures yet some successes too.

They were unable to get into ISAF’s headquarters (an administrative base rather than the field headquarters) across the road from the embassy nor the Presidential Palace which was the official residence of Hamad Karzai. Yet, they did get into the grounds of the Turkish Embassy and the Inter-Continental Hotel: the latter home to many diplomats and high-ranking visitors. Two police stations were successfully attacked as well as the offices of one of the main television networks. Dozens of deaths occurred, hostage situations happened and there were plenty of explosions. Most of those killed were Afghans. However, Westerners lay dead too with diplomats and military personnel killed. The fighting went on through most of August 17th until the last gunman blew himself up inside the large hotel ahead of a final assault against him by ISAF troops: Afghan security forces had hours beforehand decided that this fight wasn’t for them.

ISAF soldiers rushed into Kabul during and after the attacks to join those already in the fight. Among them were Turkish soldiers. The defence of the capital was under the control of Turkish military forces assigned to Regional Command Capital. This was an ISAF formation, not something directly tied to NATO. The Turks had long been involved in the ISAF mission and they had stayed in Kabul – like soldiers from many other countries not part of the Coalition who fought the Russians on Afghanistan’s northern borders – despite the major split between their homeland and its erstwhile allies. The raid on the Turkish Embassy was ultimately unsuccessful for the Taliban but they did take over part of the building before being driven out and also killed many Turks. What later results this would bring for the state of Turkish-NATO/Coalition elations wasn’t something they cared for much.

Apart from the Turks, there were many others who fought in Kabul today. American national guardsmen from the 86th Infantry Brigade Combat Team – home-based in Vermont but with personnel from across New England – were in the capital and so too were Polish troops with their 25th Air Cavalry Brigade. Those Poles still wanted to go home but were being transferred from eastern Afghanistan to the frontlines in the north, going via Kabul, when the Taliban struck. Australians, Frenchman and Hungarians were among those who rushed small numbers of men around the city today as well. The Taliban strike teams – less than a hundred men over all – had no chance when faced with such insurmountable odds.

What happened in Kabul was important for several reasons. Chief among them was the fact that the Taliban remained able to do something like this and were able to, even in a crushing defeat, claim a victory. At the same time, Turkish forces had fought side-by-side among Coalition troops despite the complete schism between the two sides when it came to other matters… such as Turkey walking away from its NATO commitments and leaving them right in the sticky stuff. Would this matter in the long run?


Polish troops which moved through Kabul were on their way to the Afghan-Turkmen border. The fighting had spread away from the frontiers with the CSTO nations of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to Turkmenistan now. Hard-pressed on their flank, American and British forces under the command of the US I Corps needed that reinforcement. There remained fighting in their rear – Kabul was only one event on one day – and the Poles had been taking part in that but General McChrystal sent the Poles to the frontlines because that need was more pressing. As had been the case elsewhere along Afghanistan’s northern borders, what began as long-range air attacks soon became cross-border shelling and then cross-border fighting. Russian-commanded Turkmen forces engaged what few US Army troops had been covering that sector of the border and outnumbered them fast. McChrystal believed that the Poles could do the job of keeping the Russians and their allies out of Afghanistan.

While ISAF focused on securing the border against any possible proper attack into Afghanistan, nothing like that was anywhere on the cards. Fighting at the front, even as it spread southwest like it did, was all that could be done with the limited forces in theatre at the disposal of the Russians. On paper they had immense numbers of men yet there remained that unease among the governments through Central Asia at this war. They continued to assert that they were only undertaking a defensive mission in support of Tajikistan and couldn’t support any real offensive action. From Astana, Bishkek, Dushanbe, Tashkent and now Ashgabat the regimes maintained this common position in the face of what Moscow might or not want. Russia had been taken quite by surprise at how fast this unity came among countries which were often at odds with each other. Kazakhstan was at the head of this alliance but things were quiet equal among the five countries involved. There was no outward hostility towards Russia but none were willing to be dominated once again by their former colonial overlords when it came to this matter. Aware of this, there was talk in Moscow among the Russian Security Council of doing some about it. Yet that wouldn’t happen now. The whole bloc could fall apart and ISAF could roll northwards.

From each side, the fear of outright invasion by the other remained despite neither option being possible.


In the skies above the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, American drones were busy today. There were Predators and Reapers flown by the US Air Force up in Afghanistan but these here over Pakistan were CIA-operated. Two Reapers undertook attack missions in Waziristan where they targeted ‘terrorists’. Hellfire missiles blazed away from the drones and blew up small structures, family homes. There was no Pakistani involvement in this. The targets for those missiles weren’t just the Taliban people believed to be inside the buildings blown up. At each of them, inside were also believed to be agents of the GRU in one and the SVR in another. Russian intelligence officers were known to be active in the FATA. The lines of communication for ISAF to the sea crossed through this volatile region and were (rightly) regarded as being something that Russia would like to see targeted. Intelligence had come to the CIA stating that the Russians were active here aiming to pay the Taliban – with cash or arms – to strike at supply columns here in Pakistan rather than just inside Afghanistan. Using the drone-fired Hellfires was done to put at least a dent in that Russian plot, hopefully knock it out for good if maybe the CIA had enough luck.

Back at Langley, a complex still with those holes in it after those Russian cruise missiles had struck last week, CIA Director Panetta would have had his drones over another part of Pakistan firing Hellfires if he had known where to send them. It had been almost nine years since 9-11 and Osama bin Laden, the architect of that attack, remained on the run. Unknown to Panetta or his employees, bin Laden was in Abbottabad: some distance away to the east from the FATA. It was from there where he had watched as Russia and NATO had set themselves on a collision course for war. Many ideas had swept through his mind as to how this could be exploited yet none had come to fruition yet. He had made a video recording – his first in years; there had been audio recording but not videos – instead and today it was released. Rise up and take advantage, bin Laden called upon the faithful, and strike against the enemies of Islam where you can find them. First broadcast on the Qatar-based al Jazeera television station, copies of it would be shared across websites worldwide. It didn’t look like it wasn’t going to set the world on fire and was the ‘standard’ stuff from bin Laden.

However, there were those watching and waiting for such a signal to spring into action. In the middle of a world war, al Qaeda was soon to launch a major terrorist attack all while the intelligence services of the West were as distracted as they were. Where and in what form would soon be revealed.

The Marburg twist. And intersting set of misunderstandings can develop here. What is NATO, unaware of the whole Marburg incident, attacks forces trying to clean the mess up and establish quarantines. Could the Russians then, unaware that NATO has no clue, think that NATO knows what happens and is purposely retarding their efforts. This interpretation can some cause some to think NATO is exercising biological warfare by default? There is a lot of material here for some great mis-undersatnding and this realy creates lots of possible situations. Also the Russian media to get wind that something is wrong and whips up Russians to blame NATO where the central authority afraid to admit the truth? Lots of fun with this twist.

even this close to Fairford, this quaint little village was still probably safer than London.
Royal Air Force Fairford is an RAF station in Gloucestershire. It is the US Air Force's only European airfield for heavy bombers.

RAF Fairford was the only TransOceanic Abort Landing site for NASA's Space Shuttle in the UK. As well as having a sufficiently long runway for a shuttle landing (the runway is 3,046 m (9,993 ft) long), it also had NASA-trained fire and medical crews stationed on the airfield.
The runway is rated with an unrestricted load-bearing capacity, meaning that it can support any aircraft with any type of load.

With reference to the NATO strike on the Russian Biological Weapons plant was it by chance the Institute of Ultra Pure Biochemical Preparations?

Vladimir Artemovich Pasechnik, was a senior Soviet biologist and bioweaponeer who defected to the United Kingdom in 1989, alerting Western intelligence to the vast scope of Moscow's clandestine biological warfare (BW) program, known as Biopreparat. His revelations that the program was ten times larger than previously suspected were confirmed in 1992 with the defection to the United States of Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov, the No. 2 scientist for the program.
In 1974, at the age of 37, Pasechnik was invited by a general from the Soviet Ministry of Defence to start his own biotechnology institute in Leningrad and he was given "an unlimited budget" to buy equipment in the West and recruit the best staff available. The laboratory he created was in reality part of the countrywide Biopreparat program. Known as the Institute of Ultra Pure Biochemical Preparations, it was to work on a strain of plague. The team succeeded in producing an aerosolized version of the plague microbe that could survive outside a lab. This version of the organism was genetically-engineered to be resistant to antibiotics.

I look forward to the next instalment.