Bagram Air Base is located in
- (a)Turkey
- (b)Pakistan
- (c)Afghanistan
- (d)Israel
Correct — C, Afghanistan. Bagram Airfield lies in Parwan province, about eleven kilometres south-east of Charikar and some forty kilometres from Kabul. The Soviet Union built it in the 1950s, and after 2001 it became the largest American and NATO base in the country — the logistics hub, detention centre and air operations base around which the whole western military presence turned. That is why its handover was read as the real end of the war rather than a stage in it: American forces left Bagram on the night of 1 to 2 July 2021, shutting off the power and departing without informing the incoming Afghan commander, and on 15 August 2021, as Kabul fell, the Afghan troops holding it withdrew and the Taliban took the base along with the thousands of prisoners held there. This paper was set in November 2021, with all of that a few months old, which is exactly why the base was in the question.
- (a)Turkey — Turkey hosts long-standing NATO air facilities, and Turkish troops were in fact discussed in 2021 as possible guards for Kabul airport after the American withdrawal — but Bagram is not in Turkey.
- (b)Pakistan — Pakistan is the neighbour through which much of the coalition's supply traffic to Bagram moved, which is what makes this the most tempting wrong answer. The base itself is on the Afghan side of the border.
- (d)Israel — Israel had no part in the Afghan war and no connection to this base. It is in the list to fill the fourth slot.
Bagram sits on the plain north of Kabul, in the Parwan valley below the Hindu Kush, which is why it has been militarily valuable for seventy years — it commands the approaches to the capital and has room for a large airfield. Built by the Soviet Union in the 1950s, it served the Soviet forces through the 1980s, fell into the front lines of the Afghan civil war in the 1990s, and was rebuilt after 2001 into the main coalition installation in the country.
Defence and international-affairs items on this paper cluster tightly around the twelve months before the exam, and 2021 handed the setters an unusually clear sequence in Afghanistan: the withdrawal agreement, the departure from Bagram at the start of July, the fall of Kabul in mid-August, and the evacuation that followed. A candidate who had followed that sequence had several questions' worth of value from it. As of now the base remains under Taliban control, and proposals from outside the country to return to it have gone nowhere, so the position established in August 2021 has held.
- Bagram Airfield is in Parwan province, Afghanistan, about eleven kilometres south-east of Charikar and roughly forty kilometres from Kabul.
- It was built by the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
- United States forces vacated it on 1-2 July 2021, leaving at night and cutting the power as they went.
- The Afghan troops holding the base fell back on 15 August 2021 and the Taliban took it, freeing the prisoners held there.
- It was the largest United States and NATO base in Afghanistan through the two decades after 2001.
Four months that put a Soviet-built airfield into a General Knowledge paper.
- Placing the base in Pakistan because coalition supplies moved through Pakistani territory.
- Confusing Bagram with Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport, which was the site of the August 2021 evacuation.
- Assuming the withdrawal from Bagram and the fall of Kabul happened together; they were six weeks apart.
As a place-to-country item, or inside a statements question on the events in Afghanistan in 2021.
Consider the following pairs: Towns sometimes mentioned in news — Country 1. Aleppo — Syria 2. Kirkuk — Yemen 3. Mosul — Palestine 4. Mazar-i-sharif — Afghanistan Which of the pairs given above are correctly matched?
- (a) 1 and 2
- (b) 1 and 4
- (c) 2 and 3
- (d) 3 and 4
Answer(b) 1 and 4
The same skill of pinning a place to a country when the news has made it familiar. That item pairs Aleppo, Kirkuk, Mosul and Mazar-i-Sharif with countries, and Mazar-i-Sharif is Afghan, like Bagram — the towns move in and out of the headlines, but the map does not change.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Bagram Airfield, which was in the news in 2021, is located in which province of Afghanistan?
- (a)Kandahar
- (b)Herat
- (c)Parwan
- (d)Balkh
Answer(c) Parwan — the base lies about eleven kilometres south-east of Charikar, the provincial capital, on the plain north of Kabul.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Bagram Airfield was originally built by
- (a)the United States in the 1960s
- (b)the Soviet Union in the 1950s
- (c)the United Kingdom in the 1940s
- (d)Afghanistan's own government in the 1970s
Answer(b) the Soviet Union in the 1950s — it served Soviet forces in the 1980s and was rebuilt as the main coalition base after 2001.