The prison in the base was handed over to the Afghans in 2012, and they will continue to operate it. They “didn’t take much with them, just the vehicles they needed to transport their soldiers back to Russia,” he said. forces at Bagram, said the Soviets left all their equipment when they withdrew. Saifullah Safi, who worked alongside U.S. Inevitably, comparisons to the former Soviet Union have arisen. “It’s not the kindest parting gift for Afghans, including those taking over the base,” he said. urgency to get out quickly,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the U.S.-based Wilson Center. The decision to take so much away and destroy so much of what is left speaks to the U.S. “There’s something sadly symbolic about how the U.S. Raufi said many villagers have complained to him about the U.S. Bagram villagers say they hear explosions from inside the base, apparently the Americans destroying buildings and material. Central Command said it had junked 14,790 pieces of equipment and sent 763 C-17 aircraft loaded with material out of Afghanistan. officials say they must ensure nothing usable can ever fall into Taliban hands. Anything else that they are not taking, they are destroying and selling it to scrap dealers around Bagram. The Americans have been giving the Afghan military some weaponry and other material. withdrawal effects nearly every household, said Darwaish Raufi, district governor. troops from there will likely serve as the final turn of the page for many of these folks with respect to their time in that country,” he said.įor Afghans in Bagram district, a region of more than 100 villages supported by orchards and farming fields, the base has been a major supplier of employment. military members and contractors who served in Afghanistan,” said Schroden, director of CNA’s Center for Stability and Development. “Bagram formed a foundation for the wartime experience of a large fraction of U.S. Jonathan Schroden, of the U.S.-based research and analysis organization CNA, estimates that well over 100,000 people spent significant time at Bagram over the past two decades. Another section houses a prison, notorious and feared among Afghans. There are also fitness centers and fast food restaurants. The base has a 50-bed hospital with a trauma bay, three operating theaters and a modern dental clinic. GlobalSecurity, a security think tank, says Bagram includes three large hangars, a control tower and numerous support buildings. There are 110 revetments, which are basically parking spots for aircraft, protected by blast walls. The most recent, at 12,000 feet long, was built in 2006 at a cost of $96 million. propaganda fodder for years to come,” said Roggio who is also editor of the foundation’s Long War Journal. “If the Taliban is able to take control of the base, it will serve as anti-U.S. “The closure of Bagram is a major symbolic and strategic victory for the Taliban,” said Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Its growth was explosive, eventually swallowing up roughly 30 square miles. It had been abandoned after being battered in the battles between the Taliban and rival mujahedeen warlords fleeing to their northern enclaves.Īfter dislodging the Taliban from Kabul, the U.S.-led coalition began working with their warlord allies to rebuild Bagram, first with temporary structures that then turned permanent. and NATO inherited Bagram in 2001, they found it in ruins, a collection of crumbling buildings, gouged by rockets and shells, most of its perimeter fence wrecked. That turmoil brought to power the Taliban who overran Kabul in 1996. Three years later, the pro-Moscow government collapsed, and the mujahedeen took power, only to turn their weapons on each other and kill thousands of civilians. The Soviet Union negotiated its withdrawal in 1989. For 10 years, the Soviets fought the U.S.-backed mujahedeen, dubbed freedom fighters by President Ronald Reagan, who saw them as a front-line force in one of the last Cold War battles. When it invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to back a communist government, it turned it into its main base from which it would defend its occupation of the country. The Soviet Union built the airfield in the 1950s.
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