US Military Vacates Main Air Base in Afghanistan, Underscoring Withdrawal Expected Within Days

By Dan Lamothe, The Washington Post

02 July 21

 

he U.S. military has vacated its most important airfield in Afghanistan, defense officials said Friday, a strategically and emotionally significant move in a 20-year U.S. war that the Pentagon is preparing to end within days.

The transfer to Afghan forces was completed with no ceremony or fanfare, in a remarkably quiet end at a base that was for years the nerve center in its counterterrorism campaign across Afghanistan. Fighter jets, drones and cargo planes took off from Bagram’s twin runways day and night as U.S. Special Operations troops based there hunted al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and other militant groups in raids in Afghanistan’s rugged mountains to the east. Each of the previous three U.S. presidents visited the airfield during visits to Afghanistan.

The departure follows President Biden’s decision in April to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, ending what he and other critics have called a “forever war.” As the Taliban launched a bloody offensive and encircled numerous provincial capitals, defense leaders briefly considered slowing the military’s departure from Bagram last month, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. The Biden administration decided to continue.

Biden said in Washington on Friday that “we are on track, exactly where we expected to be.”

“Look, we were in Afghanistan for 20 years,” Biden added, asked about the risks of the withdrawal. “Twenty years.”

For weeks, Bagram, some 45 miles north of Kabul, has been used as a launchpad for the military to leave Afghanistan. Hundreds of C-17 flights have removed U.S. equipment and weapons, many of them flying from the air base. Other equipment was destroyed there.

Army Col. Sonny Leggett, a U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan, said in a statement that the transfer of Bagram to the Afghan government “was an extensive process spanning several weeks,” beginning soon after Biden directed the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in April.

“All handovers of Resolute Support bases and facilities, to include Bagram Airfield, have been closely coordinated, both with senior leaders from the government and with our Afghan partners in the security forces, including leadership of the locally based units respective to each base,” Leggett said.

The Bagram district governor, Darwish Raufi, expressed irritation with not being included in the process. He said in a statement that the U.S. military left “without coordinating with security and defense forces and in general without coordinating” with the Afghan government and officials in Bagram district.

“Some looters went in, some of them were arrested and some others escaped,” the governor said. “They were in for equipment that they could carry.”

Fawad Aman, an Afghan defense ministry spokesman, said in a tweet that Bagram was handed over to the “ANDSF,” an acronym for Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.

“ANDSF will protect base and use it to combat terrorism,” he said.

A defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that Army Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan for nearly three years, remains in charge and retains the ability to protect U.S. troops if required as the withdrawal continues.

Miller met with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Friday to discuss how the United States and Afghan governments will cooperate after the withdrawal is complete, according to a statement released by the Afghan presidential palace. Miller is expected to depart Afghanistan soon.

A one-star Navy SEAL officer, Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, is expected to become the senior U.S. military officer in Kabul, overseeing a smaller security mission and reporting to Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, chief of U.S. Central Command, the defense official said. About 650 U.S. troops are expected to be stationed around the U.S. Embassy, with another few hundred possible temporarily to protect Hamid Karzai International Airport, the main commercial and military airfield in Kabul.

Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said in a statement that the group considers the “evacuation” of all U.S. troops from Bagram to be a positive step, and that Taliban leaders still “seek withdrawal of foreign forces from all parts of the country.”

“Such is in the interest of both them & Afghans,” he added. “Afghans can move closer to peace & security with complete withdrawal of foreign forces.”

Bagram initially was built as an airport in the 1950s, as the United States and the Soviet Union poured money into the country during the Cold War. It was seized by the Soviet Union in 1979 after that country invaded Afghanistan, built up as a military base during the nearly 10-year Soviet occupation of the country, and then was taken over by the United States after the September 2001 terrorist attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan that followed.

Bagram, overlooked by the rugged, snow-tipped Hindu Kush mountains, was where many U.S. troops killed in combat were sent home from. “Ramp ceremonies,” in which fellow service members drape a deceased service member’s remains in a U.S. flag, were a common sight there at the height of the U.S. war. A camp at Bagram was named after Senior Airman Jason Cunningham, who died in a battle in March 2002 and is credited with saving the lives of 10 other people.

The air base departure has renewed concerns among lawmakers, veterans and analysts who think the U.S. military should not leave Afghanistan completely.

Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), a retired Special Forces officer, called the base “by far the biggest symbol of our 20 years of blood and treasure we have expended for all veterans that have served there.”

“As our only base sandwiched between China, Russia and Iran it’s a huge strategic asset,” Waltz said. “Why are we just giving it away?”

Mick Mulroy, a former CIA paramilitary officer and Pentagon official early in the Trump administration, said that the speed of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan “may be a testament to the logistical capabilities of our force, but it also is not allowing for a buffer to see if the Afghan security forces will hold against the Taliban without our direct support.”

Close air support and casualty evacuation from Bagram were critical enablers in the war, said Mulroy, now an ABC News analyst.

“These enablers are often the deciding factor in engagements between our Afghan military and security partners and the Taliban. Engagements that will inevitably become more frequent once a complete U.S. withdrawal happens,” Mulroy said.

Lawmakers asked senior Pentagon officials during a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week whether it would be possible to keep control of Bagram. Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responded that “it is not necessary for the United States to stay at Bagram for what we’re going to try to do here with Afghanistan.”

Eighty-one of about 419 district centers in Afghanistan have fallen under Taliban control, Milley said; others are contested by the militants. Sixty percent of the districts under Taliban control fell to the insurgents last year, and the rest fell in the past few months, the general added.

Miller, speaking to reporters in Kabul this week, raised concerns that Afghanistan could slide into a prolonged civil war after the U.S. military withdrawal.

“The security situation is not good,” Miller said.

More than 2,400 U.S. troops have been killed in 20 years of fighting, and 20,000 more have been wounded. About 47,245 civilians have been killed, along with tens of thousands of members of Afghan security forces, according to United Nations assessments.

Biden administration officials have said that the United States will launch strikes in Afghanistan if there is evidence of a threat against the United States. Such an arrangement would focus on terrorist groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, which are believed to pose a threat outside Afghanistan, rather than the Taliban, which is focused on taking over the country.