Why Exactly Did We Abandon Bagram Air Base?; Biden’s Bagram Bug-Out in July Made Kabul Catastrophe Inevitable; ISIS-K Prisoners Left at Bagram Air Base were Released by Taliban, and related stories

Mohammad Ismail/Reuters

Why Exactly Did We Abandon Bagram Air Base?

The Economist’s Shashank Joshi tweeted an important observation that deserves to be highlighted. President Biden was either confused or — worse — actively misleading the American people when he said at Thursday’s press conference that senior military officers advised him to abandon the Bagram air base because there “was not much value added” in holding it.

“They concluded — the military — that Bagram was not much value added, that it was much wiser to focus on Kabul,” President Biden said. “And so, I followed that recommendation.”

Here’s the clip, with the president’s full answer:

You need not be a military genius on the level of Napoleon or Frederick the Great to realize that the international airport in Kabul — with a single runway, surrounded by mountains, and in the middle of a city of 4 million souls — is not an ideal base of operations from which to conduct this evacuation. In fact, the airport is dangerously exposed. --->READ MORE HERE

Mohammad Ismail/Reuters

Biden’s Bagram Bug-Out in July Made Today’s Kabul Catastrophe Inevitable:

The catastrophe in Kabul is playing out before our eyes today in the predictably grisly way. But the Biden administration set events in motion in July. When our forces bugged out of Bagram Air Base, it signaled that President Biden had decided to ensure that events on the ground — no matter how bad they got — could not reverse his determination to pull out.

From my column earlier this week:

The hub of the U.S. military enterprise in Afghanistan since 2002 has been sprawling Bagram air base. In early July, the Biden administration had the dwindling U.S. forces evacuate Bagram in the dead of night, giving no notice to the Afghan security forces to whom the base should have been formally transferred — thus enabling looters to scavenge the compound for hours before the Afghan forces could get there. There was a bounty for the looters because, in their haste to bug out, the U.S. forces had left millions of dollars of materiel behind, including thousands of vehicles and rounds of ammunition (alarming but just a fraction of the U.S. arsenal now in Taliban hands). Rather than alert the Afghan troops with whom they had partnered for years, the U.S. forces cut the electricity as they abandoned the compound — all the signal the looters needed to descend. The message was clear: The Afghan forces would not be capable of holding and exploiting Bagram. Biden had resigned himself to an inevitable Taliban takeover. --->READ MORE HERE

Follow links below to related stories:

+++++Pentagon Says Taliban Released ‘Thousands’ Of ISIS-K Prisoners Ahead Of Kabul Terrorist Attack+++++

Pentagon Confirms ‘Thousands’ of Islamic State Prisoners Released by Taliban

Questions swirl about Bagram airbase withdrawal amid Kabul airport debacle

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