Kabul : Afghan scrap dealers are picking over the detritus of the two-decade U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, collecting whatever they can of value from heaps of broken military hardware, scrapped machines and old furniture.
While the scrap men search through junk outside the main U.S. base in Afghanistan, the Afghan government, and the country as a whole, are having to face up to the end of an international mission that promised so much but failed to bring peace.
“There’s just so much waste,” said scrap dealer Abdul Ahmad, outside the Bagram Airfield, about 50 km (31 miles) north of the capital, Kabul, as he surveyed the pickings.
“They didn’t do anything for us since they came and now they’re leaving us with an uncertain future and so much destruction.”
Over Afghanistan’s decades of war, the Bagram air base has been a grand prize for whoever holds the upper hand in the fight.
Now U.S. forces will hand it over to Afghan government forces as they face a surging war with the Taliban and questions swirl about their prospects.
Guards in body armour still control the heavily fortified entrance to Bagram – a favourite target for suicide bombers over the years – and helicopters clatter overhead and an occasional truck comes and goes.
But few people remain in the expanse of prefab facilities that grew up alongside the giant runway in the months and years after international forces arrived in late 2001, as the defeated Taliban fled from U.S. bombers to mountains on the Pakistani border.
Two U.S. security officials said this week the majority of U.S. military personnel would most likely be gone by July 4, with a residual force remaining to protect the embassy.
Many Afghans, like Ahmad, feel abandoned.
Last month, U.S. President Joe Biden told his Afghan counterpart, Ashraf Ghani, that “Afghans are going to have to decide their future, what they want”.
Ghani said his job was now to “manage the consequences” of the U.S. withdrawal.
This week, General Austin Miller, the top U.S.commander in Afghanistan, acknowledged the rapid loss of several districts to the Taliban was worrisome. Only “a political settlement” could establish peace among the warring Afghan sides, he said.
