U.S. troops depart last base in Afghanistan
Soldiers left Bagram Airfield this week as Taliban captures north
Without fanfare or ceremony, American soldiers leave Bagram Airfield this week as Taliban forces sweep through the northern provinces.
U.S. troops and their Western allies have departed Bagram Airfield, the last active air base used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan, officials said Friday, effectively ending major U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.
With little fanfare and no public ceremony, U.S. troops left the base Thursday night, U.S. and Afghan officials said, even as the Taliban sweeps through the country’s northern provinces, capturing large swaths of territory. The closure, a symbol of the U.S.’ costly operations in Afghanistan, turned over to the Afghan government the sprawling installation from which the U.S. waged war for nearly two decades.
The departure from the base weeks before the planned withdrawal of U.S. troops in midjuly and months before President Joe Biden's announced Sept. 11 departure highlights Washington’s efforts to signal two different messages: one to the U.S. public that its longest foreign war is ending, and another to the Afghan government that the United States is not abandoning the country in the middle of a Taliban offensive.
Bagram was operating at full capacity until the end Thursday. Fighter jets, cargo planes and surveillance aircraft relied on the twin runways until it was no longer feasible to keep them in the country.
Now air support for the Afghan forces and overhead surveillance will be flown in from outside the country, from bases in Qatar or the United Arab Emirates or from an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. A contingent of 650 troops will remain to protect the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, the capital. How long that type of support will continue is unclear, but the Pentagon has until Sept. 11 — when the U.S. military mission is supposed to formally conclude — to decide.
The departure comes at a perilous time for Afghanistan.
Some U.S. intelligence estimates predict that the Afghan government could fall to its rivals, the Taliban, in as little as six months after the U.S. completes its withdrawal. The Taliban are inching closer to Kabul after having taken about a quarter of the country’s districts in the past two months.
Hundreds if not thousands of members of the Afghan security forces have surrendered in recent weeks, while their counterattacks have taken back little territory from the Taliban. And as the Afghan forces fracture, regional militias have appeared with renewed prominence, in an echo of the country's path toward civil war in the 1990s.
“Civil war is certainly a path that can be visualized,” Gen. Austin Miller, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told reporters Tuesday.
Early Friday, looters entered the base, grabbing gas canisters and some laptops, said Darwaish Raufi, a district administrator for Bagram, adding that some were arrested by the police.
Raufi said the Americans had failed to coordinate their departure with the Afghan forces, leaving a gap in security at the base. But Col. Sonny Leggett, a spokesperson for the U.s.-led coalition in Afghanistan, said the transfer of the base had been “closely coordinated.”
Although the past 40 years of conflict in Afghanistan could be seen as civil war, a return to the fractious era of warlords and armed fiefs has long been feared.
On Friday, Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesperson, called the departure from Bagram a “positive step.”
With Bagram gone, what is left of the U.S. forces in the country remain in Kabul. After Miller leaves in the next several days, his authorities to carry out airstrikes against al-qaida and the Islamic State group, and, in very limited circumstances, against the Taliban, will be assumed by Gen. Kenneth F. Mckenzie Jr., the head of the military’s Central Command.
Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, a former member of SEAL Team 6, will be in charge of the security mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and will report to Mckenzie. Vasely, who is already in Kabul for the transition, will command the U.S. troops that will be largely based at the embassy and remain there indefinitely.
Through September, Mckenzie will also be authorized to keep about 300 additional troops in Afghanistan, if needed for security, Pentagon officials said.