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A US government program to train Afghan Air Force pilots has been ended after the airmen kept going absent without leave, or AWOL, while training in the United States.
According to the quarterly report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, more than 40 percent of the Afghan Air Force students enrolled in the U.S.-based training program to fly the AC-208 Combat Caravan, a light attack combat aircraft, went AWOL. Air Force Times quoted SIGAR as saying that the training took place at Fort Worth, Texas. Northrop Grumman operates a 5,000 square-foot custom-built classroom space located at Meacham Airport in Fort Worth.
“The AC-208 Training Center of Excellence is designed to provide partner nations with instructional classroom activities and initial aircrew and maintenance training on the Northrop Grumman modified AC-208 Eliminator aircraft,” a Northrop Grumman press release reads.
Those students that did not go AWOL were pulled back to Afghanistan to complete their training. As a result, only one class graduated from the U.S.-based program. The second and third classes will continue and finish their training in Afghanistan.
SIGAR said they did not have data on whether the AWOL pilots were recovered. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
However, the phenomenon is neither new, nor limited to Afghan Air Force trainees.
“We found that nearly half of all foreign military trainees that went AWOL while training in the United States since 2005 were from Afghanistan (152 of 320),” SIGAR reported in October 2017. “Of the 152 AWOL Afghan trainees, 83 either fled the United States after going AWOL or remain unaccounted for.”
NATO’s Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan maintains a cohort of advisers to train Afghan airmen known as Train Advise Assist Command – Air, or TAAC-Air.
TAAC-Air told the inspector general that it has a plan to continue the student training and is developing a contract solution to support the effort to train the initial group of AC-208 aircrew.
Afghan pilots are a common target for Taliban hitmen, who know taking out highly-qualified attack pilots has a major impact on the battlefield.
It is not uncommon for Afghans to go AWOL while training in the U.S., with many claiming asylum after being apprehended. Those asylum claims are sometimes approved, as was the case of an Afghan officer who slipped away from a U.S. training exercise in Massachusetts, according to the Associated Press.
The first female Afghan pilot was also granted asylum after she continuously received death threats, according to the Wall Street Journal.
