At Bagram, the lights went out and the Afghans found themselves facing the Taliban alone
The US’s pullout – the exact timing of which had been kept secret for security reasons, despite weeks of preparations alongside the Afghan military – still came as a shock to many Afghan soldiers, leaving many rattled.
Afghan soldiers returned to their barracks to prepare for dinner last Friday when all the generators suddenly fell silent and the lights on this massive base, the centrepiece of America’s war effort in Afghanistan, shut off.
“It just went dark,” said Sergeant Ehsanullah, an Afghan soldier stationed there who uses only one name. Once the power went out, the water stopped pumping, too, he and other Afghan soldiers said. Scores of Afghan civilians entered the facility and looted it, stealing supplies before being turned away.
The Americans’ departure – the exact timing of which had been kept secret for security reasons, despite weeks of preparations alongside the Afghan military – came just as the Taliban has been advancing across the country, including near Bagram, about 65km northeast of Kabul. While the US military has made public its intention to leave, and worked with Afghan officials on the handover, the departure still came as a shock to many Afghan soldiers, leaving many rattled.
US Army colonel Sonny Leggett, a spokesman for the US military command, said the transfer of the Bagram airfield to the Afghans was completed after an extensive process over several weeks, adding that all handovers of Bagram and other bases had been carried out in co-ordination with the Afghans.
Afghan officials are now trying to figure out how they will protect the base, maintain it – and turn the lights back on. The US will continue to support and fund Afghanistan’s security forces, but helping Afghans from afar, such as with restarting generators, will be a challenge.
“We are Afghan, we have to solve our problem, we have to secure our country, and once again build our country by our own hand,” said the base’s new Afghan commander, brigadier general Mir Asadullah Kohistani.
In addition to taking over the deserted base, General Kohistani has received about 3.5 million items that US officials had said they were leaving behind. That inventory includes hundreds of cars and trucks, some weaponry and ammunition.
But there are also hundreds of thousands of items that can best be described as the detritus from two decades of America’s military involvement: flagpoles, desk chairs, phones, pallets of plywood, tents, refrigerators, dollies and boxes of soft drinks.
Afghan officials said they don’t know what to do with much of the American stuff they now own. But General Kohistani said he appreciated some of the remaining infrastructure, including a 50-bed hospital, fuel storage tanks, other military and civilian equipment and radars for the flight operations. The base also houses a prison that is under Afghan control and still holds about 5000 inmates, he said, most of them suspected members of the Taliban or Islamic State.
The massive airfield, which served as the hub of the Soviet military occupation in the 1980s, was appropriated by the US once American Green Berets landed in Afghanistan weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks that al-Qa’ida had plotted on Afghan soil.
President Joe Biden directed in April that all American troops must come out of Afghanistan by September 11 this year. Since then, nearly a third of Afghanistan’s districts have fallen to the Taliban as Afghan forces, deprived of American air support that often came from Bagram, surrendered en masse. A recent US intelligence assessment says Afghanistan could fall to the Taliban within six months of the American forces leaving.
Already, the consuls of the four nations that maintain diplomatic missions in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif – India, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey – have left for Kabul, said provincial council chief Mohammad Afzal Hadid. Junior consulate employees remain in the city.
The Parwan province where Bagram is located is also coming under increasing Taliban attacks. General Baba Jan, a local strongman and former anti-Soviet commander in the area, visited the facility on Monday, accompanied by dozens of tribal chiefs, and pledged to defend Bagram from the Taliban.
“We will take care of the security outside of the base, if you take care of the security inside,” he told General Kohistani, putting a traditional chapman coat on his shoulder and offering congratulations.
The Afghan military is likely to struggle with maintaining Bagram, a vast facility that requires extensive know-how and funds to keep running. In accordance with the agreements that former president Donald Trump reached with the Taliban last year in Doha, Qatar, the US. military withdrawal also includes the pullout of civilian contractors who serviced the coalition’s bases.
On Monday, a late-model black Chevrolet Suburban, a common must-have vehicle for US senior officers, sat on the side of a road in the middle of Bagram with a big yellow ‘X’ on its windshield. A white school bus was parked on another road, its rear door still open. More than a dozen Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, sat in the corner of a weedy field with a lone Afghan soldier guarding them.
A lot of the Americans’ excess material was destroyed or trashed, and some equipment was shipped out of the country. Still, a lot more has stayed behind.
A new fire tanker truck stood alone in a parking lot. Old bunkers, warehouses, hangars, tents, shipping containers and light towers pepper the base. Kilometres of the 7m cement barriers lined the roads. One of the base’s two runways, built in 2006 at an estimated cost of $US96m to American taxpayers, is empty. A package of brown cinnamon Pop-Tarts, a staple of US military cafeterias, sat on a dusty filing cabinet covered with stickers to identify these cabinets as once containing classified information.
Seargent Ehsanullah’s new job, for now, is to guard one of the car parks filled with all the trucks, buses and other vehicles the Americans left behind. The lot contains Chevrolet and Ford trucks, Land Rover Defenders supplied by the British government, and numerous buses, once used to ferry troops from one side of the base to another. Few appear to have any keys in them, and Sergeant Ehsanullah just shrugged when asked what the Afghans would do with all the vehicles.
“We are the guards of this place,” he said. “We don’t know what they are going to do with these cars.”
The Wall Street Journal
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