Bagram Airbase: A symbol of the US's forever war
From The Barrel
As a facility to measure heightened intelligence activity in and around the Pentagon, they called it the Pizza Intelligence, or ‘Pizzint’ for short.
Image: Eva Hambach / AFP
IT IS not always easy to read with prescience the policy announcements of President Donald J Trump. It is even intellectually reckless and somewhat egregious to take his every word at face value.
This is because as POTUS 47, the Donald has been honing his skills at doublespeak. Deception equates diplomacy. This may be on account of the fact that the US President does not seem to have invested much in the acuity of the language with which he communicates his policy positions.
This constrains his vocabulary on weighty matters requiring elaborative articulation.
There remains some two steps in the art of political posturing that still elude him however. These are when the Donald has to issue direct threats on the one instance. And on the other, is when he is about to attack or authorise an attack on another country.
There are many reasons why the Donald feels either compelled or emboldened to broadcast these direct imminences.
Purely on conjecture, this may be because he is avoiding obliging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with some unseemly skirmish, whether as ground attack on Yemen, open a new front against Turkey somewhere in Syria, or even resisting the overwhelming bloodlust instincts of the China hawks.
So that in some demented sense, Trump goes to war with third parties in order to avoid being drawn to war with the kind of adversaries that could bloody his nose. Like all bullies, as the urban legend iterates, the softest and most vulnerable part of their escutcheon, is the nose.
Only if he could teach both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Netanyahu on how not to always choose the pugilists who know how to bleed the exposed veins of the empire’s olfactory!
In the case of successive US Presidents, however, there is no pressing reason to contrive excuses for war or contort themselves into a pretzel just to evade allies with high nuisance value.
With more than 800 military bases around the world, the US military project has constant need to rotate its ordnance and long range munitions. The logic and indeed the intensity behind this impulse, is engendered by the pressures of keeping ahead of its main military peer competitors, China and Russia, jointly and severally.
In order to test the efficacy of their high impact delivery systems and so sharpen both their offensive and defensive edge over adversaries, every US President has to choose his wars from a tableau, much like from a five-star menu some macabre Pentagon chef has already prepared.
There are rumours rustling in the leaves that the Donald has beat the biggest drum of war. As he was royally feted in the gilded walls of Whitehall in his recent state visit to the United Kingdom, he pulled out the Bagram. Or to be exact, the Bagram Airbase north of Kabul in Afghanistan. And he called it “small breaking news”.
No one knows for certain what is meant by small, or breaking, or news for that matter! One way or the other, however, as his plans progress towards their actualisation, the world will find confirmation. Frank Meeks, the pizza delivery guy in Washington DC figured a way to hypothesise his observations and validate his theory. He called it the Pentagon Pizza Index.
On August 1, 1990, he realised that every time some US attack is about to happen somewhere in the world, the orders of pizzas skyrocket within the Pentagon precinct. And it’s not urban legend.
This theory, going by a different cognem, was noticed by the Soviets in the ’60s and ’70s. As a facility to measure heightened intelligence activity in and around the Pentagon, they called it the Pizza Intelligence, or ‘Pizzint’ for short.
While on the subject of the Soviets, in the ’50s they are on record as having built the Bagram Airfield situate some few good miles north of Kabul. Much as the political relationship between King Muhammad Zahir Shah of Afghanistan and the Soviets was strategically important, the King’s relationship with the US was equally cordially if not economically important too.
So important was the relationship between the US and Afghanistan that US President Dwight Eisenhower visited Kabul in 1959, landing at the Bagram Airfield. During the 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan conflict, the Soviets used the airfield as main hub for their military operations, logistics coordination and central command.
Similarly, during the 20-year US invasion of Afghanistan from 2001 to their tragic and chaotic withdrawal in 2021, Bagram provided host for US forward operations. With the first runway having been completed in 1976, the second modern runway with hardened air shelters was completed in 2006, with the base housing 40 000 US servicemen and servicewomen.
Even Trump himself thought it critically important to visit the Bagram Airfield. He graced the base with his eminent presence during the Thanksgiving holiday of 2019. The Donald must have seen something odd or unsettling — poor DJT. For immediately thereafter, he facilitated negotiations with the Taliban which were concluded in February 2020.
Their historic Withdrawal Agreement stipulated that all NATO forces ought to have been completely withdrawn by the 1st of May of 2021. For reasons associated with deep-state prevarications and imprecise logistical plans, former US President Joe Biden extended the deadline to August 31, 2021.
But it was not to be. Leading up to August 15, the Taliban launched massive attacks on various locations which facilitated the collapse of the US backed government. The withdrawal, now known as Operation Allies Refuge, became urgent and in its desperation, turned abysmally chaotic. Amid the chaos, a suicide bomber claimed the lives of 13 US servicemen and 170 Afghan civilians.
The pictures of Operation Allies Refuge at the chaotic withdrawal, were so uncannily resemblant of the similarly chaotic withdrawal of US troops in Vietnam in 1975. Termed Operation Frequent Wind, its horrific images of desperate South Vietnamese trying to board the last available getaway transporter choppers have become iconic.
South Vietnamese men who have been staunch allies of the US military contingent based in Saigon were desperately trying to go to the US instead of being captured by the advancing northern forces of General von Giap. But so were many women who served the US interests in varying capacities, with some having sired offsprings from their casual fraternity with the US servicemen and commissioned officers.
The severity of the images of women and babies attempting to board helicopters on the US embassy rooftop, could simply be swapped for the stills in Afghanistan. And there would be no noticeable difference.
The 2021 withdrawal from Bagram facilitated a historic oddity. The US deposed the Taliban administration in 2001 only to usher a brand new and more resolved Taliban administration in 2021. This mortified Trump, who was already sitting at home, having lost to Biden in the 2019 US Presidential elections.
Now, the Donald has thrown down the gauntlet. Give us the Bagram Airbase, or else! And to remind everyone, the US requires this facility to make sure they can checkmate the Chinese nuclear assembly facilities located an hour away from Bagram, so we are told.
If the Taliban do not oblige Trump’s demand, bad things are going to happen them, Trump has declared. Whoever the Taliban representatives engaged in the negotiations with the Trump administration are, must proceed with care. They may be decapitated by some Israeli drones as standard drill, a precursor to a full invasion of Afghanistan.
Needless to say that the Taliban have already responded to the demand. They shall not allow the US military in their country, or any other country’s military for that matter.
The US President’s UN General Assembly address has come and gone, with his team ensuring that in this cameo appearance, where the recognition of Gaza would steal the show, he was expected to give the ultimate diversionary Oscar performance.
Declare World War III if possible. And Jesse Watters of Fox News would add his bit by encouraging the Donald to bomb the UN.
If the US could resolve to return to Afghanistan, which would arguably keep them deeply preoccupied in that enclave for another 20 years or more, Trump would have landed himself and the US war machine, the biggest graft of all time.
The ultimate forever war.
* Ambassador Bheki Gila is a Barrister-at-Law.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.