Bagram Ghosts

By Roger Morris

The
bombing attempt on Vice President Dick Cheney's life reminds us that
Bagram has a long history in Afghanistan, one that US war-makers should
not ignore

          “I heard a loud boom,” Vice President Dick Cheney remembered of the suicide bomb at Bagram air base outside Kabul where he stopped over this week.  Said
to be aimed at Cheney himself, the attack left him untouched while
killing twenty-one Afghan workers and two Americans—still more
casualties in Afghanistan’s thirty-year, million-and-a-half-dead civil
war.

            In that setting, one hopes Cheney heard symbolically more than a “boom.”  Bagram thunders with relevant ghosts, many of them American.