Witness to Congress: State Department knew Kabul airport was incapable of handling Afghanistan withdrawal

In testimony on Thursday, a witness told Congress the State Department under President Joe Biden was well aware that Kabul’s airport was insufficient to carry out evacuation plans during the Afghanistan withdrawal, but chose the location anyway.

In fact, an entire “State Department team agreed that Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan would have served better as a staging ground for a possible country evacuation” reports The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Command Sgt. Maj. Jacob Smith told a House Foreign Affairs Committee panel that had the Biden administration chosen to evacuate out of Bagram instead, the devastating terrorist attack at the Kabul airport which killed 13 U.S. servicemembers and injured dozens more, would not have been able to take place. “The events that happened at Abbey Gate — that would not have occurred in Bagram,” Smith, who is still active duty, told Congress.

Smith managed U.S. military bases in Afghanistan at the time of the withdrawal, and says he argued to the State Department team that Bagram’s defenses made it a better choice for transporting thousands of U.S. Embassy personnel and Afghan allies out as the Taliban closed in on Kabul.

The Daily Caller reports on the witness testimony:

Bagram had 84 guard towers; “That takes a significant amount of manpower to man,” he told Republican California Rep. Darrell Issa. “If you had 2,000 people, Bagram would be a much safer location” Smith said.

Smith deployed 14 times in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2021. He served as the senior enlisted leader for Area Support Group — Afghanistan charged with overseeing “all base life support functions” at the nine U.S. bases in the country, including Bagram and Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA), from October 2020 to July 2021, according to his written testimony.

Sometime in the spring of 2021, four planners from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul scoped out Bagram as a possible base for the NEO, Smith said.

A contingency plan dating back to 2012 accounted for between 45,000 and 50,000 people who would need to be flown out, Smith said. But the embassy team told him the true number would fall somewhere between 120,000 and 140,000 people — more than Smith believed HKIA could accommodate.
For one thing, Bagram could house nearly 12 times as many people as HKIA, he argued. HKIA doubled as a civilian airfield, opening up additional weak points in security that threat actors could exploit. It was also closer to the urban center of Kabul, where the most intense fighting was likely to occur.

“The site survey team verbally agreed with me, but I understand that a site survey team does not make the command decision on what bases stay open and what bases close,” Smith said.

“In hindsight, I have looked back and tried to identify any pragmatic rationale for using HKIA over Bagram. The only answer I have identified is the ease of evacuees living in Kabul getting to the airfield,” Smith wrote in his testimony.

As the Taliban advanced throughout the spring and summer, Smith received orders to shut down Bagram by July 4.

“All talks of conducting a NEO were ceased. It is my understanding that those in the embassy believed the Taliban would not advance to and take Kabul,” Smith said.

He exited the country among the last conventional U.S. forces to withdraw, leaving “an area once protected by hundreds of Soldiers and contractors … protected by 113 American soldiers and two companies of partner forces.”