Milley said their mission was to keep the embassy open and get the level of “troops down to a 600–700 number.”

“I believe they wanted as small a footprint as possible and they also did not believe it would come to this this quickly,” says Roggio, who writes in depth about Afghanistan and other fronts in the war on Islamist terrorism at Long War Journal. Abandoning Bagram, he adds, “is the perfect example of the generals just saluting, saying ‘yes, sir’ and ‘can do’ and not standing up and saying, ‘This is madness, and I can’t execute this because I’m putting the lives of Americans at risk, and you need to find someone else to do this.’”…

While Bagram would be more secure than Karzai International, simply holding on to the base would not have solved the problem that some Americans and Afghan allies are facing right now of the Taliban not letting them through checkpoints. “This is kind of why they couldn’t let Kabul fall to begin with,” says Roggio. “Eventually you’ve got to organize somewhere.” Establishing a perimeter around Kabul, however, would have taken many more troops than Biden wanted left in the country.