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The world closes the skies of Afghanistan

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Among the many mistakes made in the last twenty years in Afghanistan, the Americans have not replicated that of distributing hundreds of anti-aircraft weapons to the Afghan allies, as they had done in the 1980s: at the time of the Soviet invasion, Washington armed the Mujahideen with missile launchers Stinger, deadly against military helicopters but usable (in theory) also against civilian aircraft, in short, excellent for terrorist attacks. It was then a struggle to recover them all.

This time, we said, it did not go like this: out of the 85 billion dollars spent in twenty years to arm and train the Afghan army, which then handed over all the material to the Taliban without firing a shot, the Americans did not allocate a penny to the anti-aircraft weapons. “There was no need,” military analyst Pietro Batacchi, director of Rid-Rivista Italiana Defense told La Stampa, “given that the Taleban do not have an air force”. But it certainly also weighed the negative and anxiety-inducing precedent of the error of forty years ago.

If an airliner flies over Afghanistan, therefore, there is no risk of being shot down. Yet just in these days the states and airlines are deciding to exclude the airspace of Afghanistan from flights, after civilian planes have passed through it without worries for twenty years, despite the fact that 8 or 10 thousand kilometers further down is fought fiercely. Why this exclusion of flights right now?

The fact is that among the consequences of the dissolution of the Afghan government there is also the dissolution of the local equivalent of our ENAC: in other words, there is no longer an air space control body. As long as the Kabul Intercontinental Airport is functioning there will at least be its control towers to sort out some traffic, but after the Westerners are gone, and until all functionality is restored with local resources, there will be no no one to watch over the air routes that cross Afghanistan. And given that there is no supranational authority that can give rules (neither ICAO nor IATA have this power) the various national authorities are exercising a substitute function, providing indications to their respective airlines.

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The professor. Antonio Bordoni, an expert in aviation safety, reports that “for a few days the American FAA has absolutely forbidden the overflight of airplanes on which it exercises its authority”; from La Stampa we have verified that our ENAC has done something similar (albeit in less peremptory terms, which recall the “advice” of the Farnesina) and the various national authorities are doing the same on their own, or the individual companies if they do not receive official indications from those in charge. Around Afghanistan are Alitalia, Air France, KLM, Lufthansa, British Airways, Emirates etc. The consequence is that on the routes between Europe and the East the routes to get around Afghanistan are lengthened, thus increasing the times a little, and sometimes even the prices. But large price rises are not justified.

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