During an interview with the Fox News Channel aired on Saturday’s “Fox Report,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley stated that the bombing at the Kabul airport “would have happened no matter where it was.” Because there would have been a perimeter guarded by American forces and that more people were evacuated from the Kabul airport “than you would have ever gotten out of Bagram” due to the distance between Kabul and Bagram.
Milley stated, [relevant remarks begin around 2:20] “The security of HKIA was challenging to say the least, and we saw the bombing. But that would have happened no matter where it was. People talk about Bagram, wherever there’s a perimeter, if there’s no outside force, if there’s no Afghan force securing it, and there wasn’t any, then there’s going to be U.S. forces on the perimeter, on the edge.”
He later added, “We got 124,000 people out of KIA. So, the flow, the volume was never an issue. And in fact, you got more people out of KIA than you would have ever gotten out of Bagram. Because they would have had to go from Kabul, north 60 miles — 60 kilometers.”
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