by Monica Showalter
One week after Joe Biden's ignominious pullout from Afghanistan, China is eyeing up Bagram as war booty.
Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, abandoned by Joe Biden's military leaders in the dead of night without telling the Afghanis, is now well known as a big reason why his Afghanistan pullout from crowded Kabul Airport was such a disaster.
This isn't surprising. Bagram was dismissed as a nothingburger by chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley in congressional testimony:
On Bagram, Bagram is not necessary tactically operationally for what we're gonna try to do here with Afghanistan — consolidate on Kabul, in support of their government.
Biden followed Milley like a lemming:
"They concluded — the military — that Bagram was not much value added, that it was much wiser to focus on Kabul," he said. "And so, I followed that recommendation."
It's some nothingburger. One week out from the final disastrous Biden departure, the Chinese disagree:
China is considering deploying military personnel and economic development officials to Bagram airfield, perhaps the single-most prominent symbol of the 20-year U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.
The Chinese military is currently conducting a feasibility study about the effect of sending workers, soldiers and other staff related to its foreign economic investment program known as the Belt and Road Initiative in the coming years to Bagram, according to a source briefed on the study by Chinese military officials, who spoke to U.S. News on the condition of anonymity.
Really? And of course, they are denying it, knowing that the Bidenites will swallow that denial hook, line, and sinker. But they always deny military ambitions, as any watcher of the Spratly spectacle in the South China Sea is well aware.
According to U.S. News & World Report, the idea is to embarrass the Americans. They'd deal a "devastating blow to the image of the United States," as one quoted expert said, if they go through with their plan to set up shop at Bagram.
This, frankly, is the least of it.
What's bad here in this cat-and-mouse set-up and denial stuff, always prefaced by experts as "not a complete" takeover, is that they do it all over the place — the U.S. News report cites several places.
Here's the elephant in the room, though: the U.S. may well find itself in the unenviable position of having to go back to Afghanistan once the Taliban set themselves up as a base for more 9/11 attacks. If they get one through (and of course deny it), it's very likely the U.S. is going to have to go back in. Not only will they have to face a U.S.-armed Taliban with $83 billion in U.S. equipment, abandoned there by the Biden administration, but they'll face the prospect of a direct conflict with China, sitting there on our old U.S. Bagram Airfield base.
The U.S. would be more helpless than ever, so to think China won't jump at this chance is pretty wishful thinking.
That's more of the Afghanistan fallout that is now plaguing America under its unfit leaders who have yet to be fired or forced to resign. This is not just a loss of face. Stand up and take a bow, Joe.
Image: U.S. Army via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
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Monica Showalter
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/china_licks_its_chops_for_bagram_air_base.html
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