The bottom line is that Biden didn’t leave enough troops in Afghanistan for an evacuation.
The bottom line is that Biden didn’t leave enough troops in Afghanistan for an evacuation.
O n the night of July 1, the United States military departed from Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan “without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left,” the Associated Press reported at the time.
As chaos erupted at Hamid Karzai International Airport following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on Sunday, some members of Congress and Afghanistan war experts are asking why the United States didn’t hold on to its secure base of 20 years at Bagram, located about 30 miles north of Kabul.
“No one in their right mind would have closed Bagram Air Base while leaving behind thousands of civilians,” Arkansas GOP senator and Afghanistan war veteran Tom Cotton wrote on Twitter.
“If you want to conduct an evacuation, you don’t do it from an airport that’s literally almost in the heart of the city,” Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells National Review. “A military planner would know that as soon as things started going south in Kabul, and the Taliban was on the march, that that airport [Karzai International] would be flooded.”
“You can’t secure that airport properly,” he says.
That fact was made all too apparent to people around the world on Monday morning when they woke up to horrifying videos of Afghan civilians clinging to a departing U.S. military aircraft — and then falling several hundred feet from the aircraft to their deaths.
Going back to the spring, following Biden’s withdrawal announcement, Roggio says he’s made the case for holding and evacuating from Bagram in conversations with U.S. “military and intelligence officials whose voices should have been heard by upper-echelons of leadership.”
On Wednesday afternoon, at a joint press conference, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley were asked about the decision to evacuate from Karzai International instead of Bagram. Lloyd didn’t address the question. Milley’s answer was a mouthful, but the bottom line is that there weren’t enough troops.
“If we were to keep both Bagram and the embassy going,” Milley said, that would require “a significant number of military forces,” so “you had to collapse one or the other.”
Milley also said the generals “estimated that the risk” of going out of Bagram or Karzai International “was about the same,” but he also acknowledged that President Biden did not leave enough troops for a scenario in which an evacuation was necessary to hold Bagram, protect the embassy, and protect Karzai International.
Milley said their mission was to keep the embassy open and get the level of “troops down to a 600–700 number.”
Milley on why they didn't keep Bagram airfield open: pic.twitter.com/GV2KYtIiSP
— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) August 18, 2021
“I believe they wanted as small a footprint as possible and they also did not believe it would come to this this quickly,” says Roggio, who writes in depth about Afghanistan and other fronts in the war on Islamist terrorism at Long War Journal. Abandoning Bagram, he adds, “is the perfect example of the generals just saluting, saying ‘yes, sir’ and ‘can do’ and not standing up and saying, ‘This is madness, and I can’t execute this because I’m putting the lives of Americans at risk, and you need to find someone else to do this.’”
Even as order was restored at the military side of Karzai International, chaos reigned on the civilian side on early Thursday morning, Kabul time. “At Kabul airport, civilian side, more chaos than before,” ABC senior foreign correspondent Ian Pannell reported on Twitter. “Evacuees unable to get through. #Taliban wild and dangerously firing and beating civilians.”
While Bagram would be more secure than Karzai International, simply holding on to the base would not have solved the problem that some Americans and Afghan allies are facing right now of the Taliban not letting them through checkpoints. “This is kind of why they couldn’t let Kabul fall to begin with,” says Roggio. “Eventually you’ve got to organize somewhere.” Establishing a perimeter around Kabul, however, would have taken many more troops than Biden wanted left in the country.
But it’s hard to dismiss how helpful it would have been and still would be to have a second airport that is not partially controlled by the Taliban. Biden administration officials told Senate aides on Wednesday that they are “thinking about and discussing air bridges” to exfiltrate Americans trapped in places outside of Kabul.
At the end of Wednesday’s press conference, Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post asked Milley if the military is considering retaking Bagram. Karzai International “has a single runway, with a commercial airport making it much more difficult to defend that runway. We’ve already seen that this week. Bagram has two runways. It would have been a lot easier to protect people once inside,” he noted. “Is there any thought of retaking Bagram in order to expedite this evacuation?”
“Good question, great question, but I’m not going to discuss branches and sequels off of our current operation,” Milley replied. “And I’ll just leave it at that.”
PHOTOS: The Fall of Afghanistan
Correction: This article has been emended since its initial publication to correct the date that U.S. forces departed Bagram Air Base.