From wasteland to bustling base, the last U.S. military said goodbye to Bagram, Reuters

Peter Graff

(Reuters)-This is the moment. The sound of explosions over Kabul lit up the sky. We can see the headlights of the Taliban truck leaving the capital.

The soldiers of the Northern Alliance danced in a cloud of marijuana smoke. Their commander grinned. The United States joined the war.

It was the night of October 7, 2001. We are on the front line. The Northern Alliance forces have long been separated from their Taliban enemies by a desolate concrete belt: an abandoned Soviet air base called Bagram.

Above, American warplanes have just started this war, and this war will end at the exact same place on Friday, 20 years later.

I am a New Yorker. I watched the September 11 attack on the TV of the Reuters newsroom in Moscow. I was sent to Afghanistan within a few days, where the Taliban government sheltered Osama bin. Bin Laden, he is suspected of planning the hijacking.

The only way to enter is by helicopter from Tajikistan and the Northern Alliance. They led a group of reporters flying over a high mountain to their fortress Panjsher Gorge. Bagram lay on the fertile plain below, behind which was the Taliban.

Bagram was a wasteland full of shrapnel, surrounded by abandoned Soviet aircraft, bombed hangars and the remains of watchtowers. It was built by the Soviets in the 1950s and would serve as their main base after the invasion in 1979, but was abandoned after withdrawal ten years later.

When the Taliban occupied Kabul in 1996, its strategic location under the canyon to shelter the guerrillas made it a frontline in the war of attrition between the Taliban and the former jihadist fighters of the Northern Alliance.

9/11 The memories of the victims

The American bombing that I witnessed in Bagram that night will overthrow the Taliban in a few weeks. I left Afghanistan for a few weeks, and when I returned to Bagram, soldiers from the US 10th Mountain Division had already been there to guard. Special forces personnel with beards and Afghan costumes introduced themselves and joked about the measures they had previously taken to avoid reporters covering the war.

During this period, a plane carrying New York City firefighters and police landed. They brought photos of the comrades who died in the World Trade Center, exchanged hats with the soldiers, and buried part of one of the collapsed towers on the unmarked ground of the base.

In my later years, I would often return to Bagram, including when I was the Reuters bureau chief in Kabul.

Unlike in Iraq, the US military footprint in Afghanistan has been small for many years. Bagram is still a remote enough outpost that the CIA can use it to conduct so-called “enhanced interrogations” of detainees believed to be associated with Al Qaeda, which President Obama admitted to torture a few years later.

But in the end, during the Obama era, the US and NATO contingents in Afghanistan increased to 130,000. It was so strange to see what Bagram would become.

In Iraq, I have long been accustomed to large American bases, where there are Burger King and Mung Bean Cafe. But sipping smoothies in Bagram?

The base became huge and crazy, and troops from dozens of NATO countries arrived and left remote outposts.

Beyond the city walls, the US plan to bring “better governance” to the remote provinces of Afghanistan requires more manpower and costs, and hard-won achievements rarely last.

I left Afghanistan ten years ago and have never returned. The U.S.-led unit has been laid off. For most of the past seven years, its mission has been even more humble: no longer fighting for the valley, just to provide enough firepower and support to prevent the downfall of the Kabul government.

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