Bagram-mania has taken over the Republican Party:
We have the capability to reestablish our presence at Bagram to continue to evacuate American citizens and our Afghan allies.
The biggest mistake in this debacle is abandoning Bagram.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) August 26, 2021
"Bagram" is the newest "stand down" or "lock her up" from conservatives: a plausible sounding attack line that's based on nothing.
The evacuation only needed one airport and the military made the decision that Kabul airport was the better choice. It's possible that this was the wrong choice, but there's certainly no conspiracy here nor any kind of incompetence on the part of the Air Force planners.
When there are two choices, and the first one turns out to be difficult and deadly, it's always tempting to convince yourself that the other choice would have been better. But Bagram is 40 miles away from Kabul, a 90-minute bus ride. If we had kept it open it would have been harder for people to get there and there's a good chance that we would have evacuated far fewer people. What's more, it probably would have been easy for ISIS-K to plant an IED somewhere that would blow up an entire bus of evacuees. If that had happened, conservatives would all be outraged about our stupidity for not using the more convenient and easily defended Kabul airport.
In any case, "Bagram" is now just a Republican totem. They can repeat it over and over, and to most people it sounds like a good question. Why did we shut down Bagram? But the only reason it sounds like a good question is because Fox News doesn't bother answering it.
I am not a soldier, but my younger brother is a retired officer with several years in a special force’s unit: he was stationed a Bagram a couple of times.
Per my brother, “Bagram is basically a small walled city: designed to be defended, with independent energy and two large airfields. The main upside to Bagram, versus Kabul airport is time. The US could house and sort refugees a Bagram easier than at a public airport. If the US wanted to extend the airlift a couple weeks, realistically the Tally could not attack Bagram or force our exit timeline.”
Left unexplained is how the refugees would get to Bagram in the first place.
They would take the Magic Bus of course.
Or a Magic Carpet Ride.
... One small Steppenwolf for Afghan, one giant leap for Afghanistan...
Psh. Just a "short" two hour bus ride through the wide-open Afghan countryside. What could go wrong?
Who says the refugees were closer to Kabul than Bagram?
Since those at the airport are in fact from the city of Kaboul (where queerly enough many people live and mch of the American Colonial Afghan Government staff reside, you know whole seat of national government thing) showing up in the very day or two after... you can fairly well expect Kaboul itself is the source of many. Those farther away would be quite stupid to travel to Kaboul itself when heading for the Uzbek or Tajik or even Iranian borders would be more certain bets given Taleban control points.
I think it's easy to conflate P-1 refugees fleeing from the Taliban to those who worked for the US and are eligible for US SIVs and P-2 refugee status, qualified to be evac'd to the US. SIVs and P-2 refugees are the ones risking travel to Kabul.
While the bulk of evacuees may come from Kabul, there are hundreds of thousands from around Afghanistan.
We were there at Bagram for an entire generation. Lots of people worked directly for the US, in and around Bagram at peak.
That was just before Kabul fell. I imagine it got a lot worse afterward, as word spread that the US was stepping up evacs from Kabul.
You underestimate the importance people place on getting evac'd to the US over getting stuck in a refugee camp or maybe blocked at the border.
Didn't bother to do your own research before flapping your gums did you? I cannot help but notice that this is something of a habit with you.
You don't have to be mean; you choose to be.
Most refugees from around Afghanistan had been filtering into Kabul over the summer, as it was expected to be the last place to fall to the Taliban. Also Kabul was the epicenter of the occupation, so a majority of the western-backed NGOs, embassy employees and staff, etc were all in Kabul.
Kabul is where you want to be if you want to evacuate people. Bagram is where you want to be if you want to have a military base in a hostile country. That's why the Soviets setup there in the first place.
It has a much larger permieter and thus would have taken more troops to secure. But most importantly, even when we had more than 100k troops on the ground, we never once had a secured route to and from that airport. People made an issue that we evacuated the embassy by copter. But it was always US policy to helicopter in and out all embassy personnel because it was to dangerous to travel by land to bagram.
Graham is engaging in his usual hysterical histrionics. He claimed in all seriousness that America was obliged to evacuate any Afghans who had worked with its troops during the occupation. Since that would also mean their immediate families, he wants more than a million people rescued.
He's simply not a serious person and never has been. He wanted America to remain in Afghanistan, so he'll petulantly find fault with anything and everything about the withdrawal to show how correct he was.
Suddenly the right-wing goons who lustily cheered for a Muslim ban and shut down refugee settlement are shrieking that Biden isn’t airlifting a million Muslim refugees to America.
They are repulsive, deranged sociopaths.
You can taste their desire for Benghazi.
If only Graham would demand the military provide a new, optimized-for-night-sky-photography camera for KD. But can we ever expect the Republicans to promote something of real practical value? Don’t bet on it.
& an evacuation thru Bagram would have resulted in another Benghazi.
Republicans have as much expertise on any topic as some guy at the end of the bar.
And this is the point. Just because you got a few wins on Fortnight and you always win at Axis and Allies playing against friends, does not make you a strategic genius, or even a novice.
The choice was made by hard nosed, well trained, veterans trying to cover a retreat that has so far been almost miraculous.
... the commentariate cries ShadesOfGrey...
Revenge for 9/11 was achieved.
All the right people were captured, tortured, and / or blown to bits.
All the right people got rich in the process.
It turns out all the right people were sacrificed too.
We know that last part because no one really cared much. No one cared enough to stop the carnage because all the right people were getting rich and those who died in the war were nameless and faceless nobodies.
The 3000 Americans who died 20 years were, it turns out, a profit center for the war mongers and merchants of death. You were played.
See Europe's Surrender Also The general population of Europe is 510 million, the US 320 million.
If France, the UK, Italy and especially Germany, really wanted to save Afghanistan they certainly should have shown their determination.
Oh, they left and ceased flights yesterday....hummmm....what do they know that we don't?
Well, they do not have the lift capacity....or the military.
What?
The entire military might of the EU + the UK could not battle a rag tag band of brigands with ak-47's?
This should tell you lots of things...the foremost of which is the actual importance of Afghanistan.
Heck, we could probably be persuaded to provide the lift capacity if politely asked...and they could have gone it alone.
Traveller
Europe has plenty of lift capacity. And they left because the US is running the show and told them they had to leave.
Please, what was the U.S. going to do if they refused? Shoot down their planes? This a "the dog ate my homework" level excuse.
I have mentioned that I think leaving Bagram was probably a mistake a few times but I think I come from a different predictive than most of those who will criticize on this.
From where we have ended up ( and getting to this place was the real error), would Bagram have been a beneficial place to hold? I think probably but that is debatable.
First kevin seems to be creating a straw man to attack based on what Graham said. Kevin seems to be saying that Bagram would be an inferior option INSTEAD OF Kabul airport. Graham said that now Kabul airport is the ONLY option, so he is talking about using Bagram as an additional option not instead of Kabul airport. How can having an additional option be a bad thing. You only use it when it is better.
Maybe there are some Americans on the outskirts of Kabul who are right on the road to Bagram. And the city is in chaos with masses of people at the airport gates you cannot get through except at huge risk ( like at all the times we told Americans to not try ) . Is it inconceivable that, in at least some cases, the , yes still very risky drive to Bagram might still be safer than trying through the streets of Kabul? Just as an additional option?
And why only considering going overland? Where Bagram would be more useful would be for helicopter evacuations if we decided we had to go into Kabul with special forces and get people out. That sort of thing is a lot easier from a defensible military air base than Kabul airport in the middle of a city ( where no way you can defend from an air to air missle shooting down the helicopter hidden in an urban area).
And what about anyone who needs to be evacuated from someplace other than Kabul? Suddenly nobody seems to even be thinking of them. Would they not have to go overland anyway if they were getting to Kabul airport. Might be easier to get to Bagram.
But here kevin is also guilty maybe of tunnel vision if he is talking about whether we should have abandoned Bagram months ago. If you assume the current scenario where we just hold Kabul airport without active hostility from the taliban holding the city, I still think Bagram could help. But most likely on the margins.
But in other scenarios, Bagram could have been crucial..
What if worst case and the taliban were actively hostile from Kabul city, launching attacks and shooting down planes trying to leave with air to air missles from hidden urban areas. What do we do then? Kabul airport is unusable then. Do we try to capture most of kabul with 6000 marines ? Do we try to reinforce them ? How if you cannot get planes in? Do you punish them with air power? Sure nice to have Bagram for that, huh? We are screwed royally and might end up with 6000 marines held hostage ( or less minus those dead).
Bagram should have been held for the possible worst case scenario if nothing else. And just holding it would be an implict threat preventing it.
You can only evacuate a handful of people at a time by helicopter. How many helicopter trips would’ve been needed to transfer 100,000 people from Kabul to Bagram? 10,000 with 10 people each in them?
Who was that guy who signed the treaty with the Taliban???
Exactly!
Zbiegniew Brzezinski?
But, if you are talking about using both Hamid Karzai and Bagram, you are talking about committing the extra resources to hold both. We're talking a lot of extra troops that will then need to be airlifted out at the tail end of the evacuation. Unless you procure more airlift capacity, this will significantly reduce the number of people you can evacuate.
The rest of your post is equally specious.
If someone needs to be evacuated from somewhere other than Kabul, Bagram isn't close enough to be a meaningfully better option. They're still going to have to traverse a long stretch of Taliban controlled territory.
If you are talking helicopter evac, the fact that the airport itself might (and I emphasize might) be more protected from ground-to-air missile fire doesn't mean much when the helicopters are going to have to fly over 40+ miles of enemy held territory each way.
The question of what would have happened had the Taliban decided to be actively hostile in Kabul is irrelevant, as it's pretty clear that the administration was in constant communication with the Taliban and knew that this was not going to be a problem.
Holding on to Bagram is a solution in search of a problem that it would actually help with.
We had the 2,500 troops Trump left us.
Biden had the presence of mind to get 6,000 more in, but it just seems like too much. Helicopters are easily shot down.
The point is, we’ve evacuated 100,000 people. There are only 1,000 or so Americans left, and they’ve been on notice since April that we’d be pulling out by September.
By contrast, we evacuated 7,000 people from Saigon.
Losing a war is ugly. Why do you think Trump spent four years avoiding this? He’s a gutless sociopath, but he’s not stupid.
+1
Actually, we evacuated about 50,000 from Saigon in the days before the fall of Saigon. The 7,000 was the last two-day total.
"How can having an additional option be a bad thing." Because it would need defended. If it takes 6000 troops to defend and operate karzai airport it would take an additional 9000 to defend and operate bagram. And we were going to bring in another 9000 troops. And then you have to ask the taliban to secure the 40 miles of road to bagram.
Hey, troll, what about those 'thousands' of Americans you claimed had died after the pullout announcement? The claim you never bothered to back up despite repeatedly asked to do so? For that matter, you've never once admitted you were indisputably wrong; the few times you have, it's always been with a caveat to the effect that you were still 'really' right on a more 'fundamental' level.
You're just here to sealion and I'm sick and tired of your continued insults.
FOAD, troll.
Look for interminable investigations into Bagram v. Kabul, a la Ben Ghazi, if R's retake the House.
Notwithstanding the actual question -- but it's kind of crazy that from your desk in OC you can just map the drive time from Kabul Airport to Bagram, isn't it? And get *two* suggested routes?
I know!!! I remember when state of the art was a RandMcNally spiral bound atlas that you would mark up with your route or the free maps you could get at the tourist info booths at rest areas on the interstate.
Bagram, Bagram, poor Bagram. We will never forget. If Joe Biden were a real American, he'd have saved Bagram, moved the damned thing back to the states, and made it into a theme park. It's not too late. Watch for that to be an official plank of the Republican party platform in 2024.
We know Joe Biden doesn't really care about the safety of Americans anyway. If he did, he never would have pulled us out of Afghanistan. He'd have pulled us out of Florida and Texas instead. About 100,000 lives lost to senseless tragedy in the last year alone. We've occupied both since 1845 and if we stay another 200 years it won't get any better.
Too true.
Too true.
Questions about the details of today miss the larger failure over the last 20 years. In 2021, there should never have been any US military bases in a hostile country of barely literate religious fanatics half way around the world.
“Afghanistan has an average literacy rate of 38 percent, while the international average is 84 percent. Education in rural areas is especially low.”
“Pew found high support in many countries for executing Muslims who convert to a different religion, notably 79 percent of Afghans, 76 percent of Pakistanis and 42 percent of Iraqis support the death penalty for apostasy.”
Why is any American bothering to sacrifice anything for them? No thanks. Good luck though.
Rational Thought says..."a defensible military air base," but offers no reasoning why or how this might be so.
There is the..."Two Perimeter Problem," in that airports have vast areas of land to be able to operate. So, at a minimum, double the troops Are the Taliban going to be cooperative with this? (There is some surprise how good they have been in reference to Kabul Airport).
See the background high ground and mountains...you have to hold them. You see an opportunity, I see Dien Bien Phu.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aerial_view_of_Bagram_Air_Base.jpg
Best Wishes, Traveller
Those mountains are pretty far away. Not like they are so close the taliban could put snipers there. Irrelevant.
Bagram we defended find for decades. What makes you think we would have built our main air base in an indefensible place?
An airport in an urban area is indefensible unless you are willing to level a large perimeter so as to not allow the enemy to get close enough to attack. As the USA is not willing to destroy a large part of Kabul and kill tens of thousands of innocents to do so ( and we should not be) it is not defensible.
Snipers?
Rockets and the like
The approximate distance is 2.5 km.
The evocation of Dien Bien Phu is quite specific for the situation. Look it up. Not American history of course.
The US left overnight w/o telling anyone they were leaving. By abandoning the base, they left weapons and ammunition open to looters. Also, 5000 Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters were still locked up, well, until the base was later abandoned without so much as a fight.
It remains my humble opinion that it was the sudden, unexpected abandonment of Bagram that lit a fire on the Taliban's momentum and killed the desire of the Afghan forces to fight.
Eventually, they'd have to abandon it, but, to leave as they did, they really signaled to the Afghan forces that this was it, hasta nunca!
But hey, according to KD, Biden made zero errors. 🤨
Who was that guy who signed a treaty with Taliban? Pompeo/Biden?
Pure fiction.
You think it was the abandonment of Bagram and not the surrender to the Taliban by Trump in February 2020 without bothering to consult the Afghan government that signaled the end?
Ohhhkaaay.
“The US left overnight w/o telling anyone they were leaving.”
Well, other than the February 2020 surrender by Trump to the Taliban committing us to withdraw troops within 14 months, and the announcement by Biden in April 2021 that he was extending the withdrawal to September 2021.
But yeah, other than that, no one told anyone anything.
If you've read my comments in the past, you wouldn't ask an asinine question like that. I've laid out how we got here to this evac fiasco, starting with Trump, specifically Zalmay Khalilzad and the "peace" deal.
The US has stated they did tell the Afghan leadership they were leaving Bagram, who themselves seemed to have not told their own people (perhaps at our request because we knew there were members and implants we couldn't trust).
We have read your comments in the past. That's the problem. Your problem.
"By abandoning the base, they left weapons and ammunition open to looters. " they left zero weapons and ammunition. All the references in the media to 'American' equipment left behind was exclusively to the afghan army equipment. All equipment owned by the US military was successfully taken out of the country.
You clearly have no idea of the logistics involved in pulling out. US is going to be destroying a hell of a lot of stuff when they leave HKIA.
You clearly have no idea of what you're talking about. You also clearly expect others to do your research for you. TL;DR: You're a parasite.
So they destroyed it or left it behind? Which is it?
Your humble opinion is off-base, but it's clear you're working from conclusion to evidence, rather than vice-versa.
Don't think for one second that he doesn't know that.
I don’t know whether or not we should have left Bagram, but I think Graham’s suggestion that we should retake it is nuts. And about what one might expect from a guy who didn’t think Trump should be impeached but thinks Biden should be.
Don't have a problem with that criticism.
He says we have the ability to retake it and maybe we do - I do not know enough to be sure. But does seem hard to see how it could help soon enough now.
Unless he is also saying we should be staying longer but biden is sticking with 8/31, it seems.
Biden is sticking to 8/31 because thats the treaty we signed and NATO agreed to. You do NOT want our good faith demolished with our allies over this - they were hesitant to join us in this fight
They don't have the military capabilities we do because they spend far less on the military than we do.
As for Bagram? It served it's purpose as a military airbase. The ONLY advantage it has over Kabul is that the hangars and terminals are empty and would be staffed by U.S. Troops ONLY. Is it worth the fight? Was it ever?
I honestly don't know but being EX military I WANT to believe we made the right decisions but being older and wiser now I know what I WANT to believe about our ,military is not always true.
Most members of Congress believe they can command a battle fleet after having dinner on Joe Manchin's houseboat
The Taliban have been accommodating to a point so far. WE need to understand ISIS-alphabet is the Taliban's enemy - we have no treaty with them. They made US look bad and as an added bonus made the Taliban look bad too.
Aug 31 cannot come fast enough. We will always have questions and opinion about what we could have done differently and there will be plenty of opinions about that
What could have been done better is a different story and unless we put our own boots on the ground over there we need to leave up to the folks that are there
We have no reason to retake it, that's just a crack in the door to not compete the withdrawal.
HAMBISCUITS! isn't nuts. He's just swinging from El Jefe's nuts.
Did you all hear the story of how Taliban insurgents fired rockets into Bagram Air Base while Dick Cheney was visiting there back in 2007? If not that was by design. The story was purposely covered up to give the impression everything was fine back at the time when of course it wasn't.
I'm sure the Taliban know how to surround and attack Bagram if they wanted to. And the idea that all those refugees taking bus and or truck trips 40 miles to Bagram outside Kabul, assuming they could fund such transportation and that wouldn't have been just as chaotic or just as inviting to ISIS terrorists planting IEDs on the road and requiring convoys to protect them (with even more troops and resources) is just ridiculous and dare I say partisan thinking.
The reason KIA was chosen was that foreign embassies handling visa and SIV applications could easily relocate there in the city quickly as the Taliban took over everything rapidly without so much as a shouting match, including Bagram Air Base which was given over to the Afghan government back on July 1. They obviously didn't hold onto it. The U.S. didn't want to spend the treasure to go and retake it and possibly ruin any chance of working with the Taliban to get people out (you know, because they were in control?) and have to try and defend two airbases, one of them 40 miles outside the city, when they could have everything at one airport, one they already controlled, in one location they could be responsible for.
This obsession with Bagram is simply a MacGuffin to make partisan attacks. Remember that 243 Marines, TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-THREE! died in one fell swoop in 1983 when a single suicide bomber in an explosive-packed truck, leveled the base those troops were stationed at in Lebanon. I don't recall at all any calls for Reagans' resignation, let alone impeachments or single-minded focuses on "The Barracks!" in the aftermath (of course the U.S. invaded Greneda shortly afterward so moot point on all that.) I mean if you want to talk abort "performance-art-hippy-crap" the Republicans are doing so when it comes to politics in spades. Everything is just a signal to their base with absolutely no content or seriousness at all. No one should take it seriously (especially the press) because it's not meant to be taken seriously. Bagram is simply just anotehr itch to scratch.
What is more galling is that a good percentage of the base knows this too, but hey, anyway you can to pwn the libs. "You can't prove to me that I know I'm lying" is where they're at now.
Plus the Embassy was in Kabul and we weren't going to secure both locations without surging troops. Aside from that, good luck securing that road to Bagram from however many directions, let alone helicopter flight paths from you know what.
It sure seems like democrats are ready to abandon their agenda to help millions of actual Americans living in the USA today. Apparently the welfare of some fools half way around the world is more important to them. Go figure. Well, if that’s what you want then I guess all this silliness about infrastructure and climate change was just so much BS.
I do hope it makes you feel good. You saved a bunch of religious fanatics and turned the US over to trump and his death cult. Good for you!
I have no use for these despicable Afghans. Useless POS. Democrats are idiots.
I'm pretty sure that "Bagram" is just "ivermectin" in the Punjab language of central Afghanistan.