From the desert to the noisy base, the last US forces said goodbye to Bagram By Reuters

By Peter Graff

(Reuters) – This was the moment. The sky exploded over Kabul. We were able to see the headlights of Taliban trucks leaving the capital.

Fighters from the Northern Alliance danced in a cloud of hashish smoke. Their commander smiled. America went to war.

It was the night of October 7, 2001. We were on the front line separated by a desolate strip of concrete that had long since been separated from the Taliban enemy by the forces of the Northern Alliance: an abandoned Soviet air base called Bagram.

In his head, U.S. warplanes had just begun the war that would end on Friday, nearly 20 years later, in the same place.

I am from New York City where I watched the 9/11 attacks on TV from the Reuters Moscow editorial office and a few days later I headed to Afghanistan because the Taliban government had Osama bin Laden, the man who suspected the kidnapping.

The only entry was by helicopter from Tajikistan, with the Northern Alliance. A group of journalists flew over a high mountain pass to their redoubt, Panjsher Gorge. Bagram was on the fertile plain below and beyond was the Taliban.

Bagram was then a desert full of machine guns, surrounded by corpses surrounded by abandoned Soviet planes, bombed hangars, and watchtowers. Built by the Soviets in the 1950s, after being invaded in 1979, it would have been their main base, but it became obsolete after its withdrawal a decade later.

When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, the strategic location was turned into a front under the canyons where guerrillas could shelter in the war of attrition between the Taliban and former mujahideen fighters of the Northern Alliance.

9/11 MEMORIES OF VICTIMS

That night I saw in Bagram the initial American bombing that would overthrow the Taliban a few weeks later. I left Afghanistan for a few weeks, and by the time I got back to Bagram, they were going to take care of soldiers from the 10th U.S. Mountain Division. Special forces personnel dressed in bizarre and Afghan clothing were introduced and joked about the steps taken to hide journalists who were previously covering the war.

During that time, a plane landed carrying New York firefighters and police. They brought photos of the dead members of the World Trade Center, exchanged hats with soldiers and buried part of the fallen towers on unmarked ground.

In recent years I have returned frequently to Bagram, as well as on a tour as head of the Reuters office in Kabul.

Unlike in Iraq, the U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan was small over the years. The Bagram continued to be far enough away from the CIA that a few years later President Barack Obama would admit to torture so that detainees believed to be linked to Al Qaeda could be called “improved interrogators.”

But in the end, during the Obama era, the U.S. and NATO contingents in Afghanistan numbered 130,000 troops. It was strange to see what Bagram would become.

From Iraq, I’ve long been accustomed to large American bases, their Burger Kings and Green Bean cafes. But taking a frappe from Bagram?

The base became huge and frantic as troops from dozens of NATO countries reached and left remote positions.

Beyond its walls, intentions to bring “better governance” to the remote Afghan provinces of the U.S. demanded more and more labor and spending, and fierce fighting rarely lasted.

I left Afghanistan a decade ago and have not returned. The U.S.-led force has disappeared, and for most of the past seven years its mission has been more modest: no longer fighting for the mountain valleys, providing enough firepower and support to keep the Kabul government from falling.

And now, like the Russians before them, they are gone.