The Washington Post relates the story from an up coming book….
Part one of an excerpt from “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War.” Whitlock will discuss the book during a Washington Post Live event on Aug. 31.
The suicide bomber arrived at Bagram air base in a Toyota Corolla late in the morning on Feb. 27, 2007. He maneuvered past the Afghan police at the first checkpoint and continued a quarter-mile down the road toward the main gate. There, the bomber approached a second checkpoint, this one staffed by U.S. soldiers. Amid mud puddles and a jumble of pedestrians and vehicle traffic, he triggered his vest of explosives….
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Unharmed by the explosion was a VIP guest at Bagram who had been trying to keep a low profile: Vice President Dick Cheney.
Cheney had slipped into the war zone the day before on an unannounced trip to the region. Arriving on Air Force Two from Islamabad, Pakistan, he intended to spend only a few hours in Afghanistan to see President Hamid Karzai. But bad weather prevented him from reaching Kabul, so he spent the night at Bagram, an installation with personnel numbering 9,000 about 30 miles from the capital.
Within hours of the bombing, the Taliban called journalists to claim responsibility and to say Cheney was the target. U.S. military officials scoffed and accused the insurgents of spreading lies. The vice president, they said, was a mile away at the other end of the base and never in danger. They insisted the Taliban could not have planned an attack against Cheney on such short notice, especially given that his travel plans had changed at the last minute.
“The Taliban’s claims that they were going after the vice president were absurd,” Army Col. Tom Collins, a spokesman for U.S. and NATO forces, told reporters.
But the U.S. military officials were the ones hiding the truth….
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The bomber wasn’t far off the mark. The vice president was supposed to depart for Kabul in a different convoy about 30 minutes later, according to Dalrymple, who had worked with the Secret Service to plan Cheney’s movements.
“The insurgents knew this. It was all over the news no matter how much it was tried to keep secret,” Dalrymple said. “They caught a convoy going out the gate with an up-armored sport-utility vehicle and thought it was him. . . . That opened up a lot of eyes into the fact that Bagram was not a safe place. There was a direct link with the insurgencies.”….
Note….
This is the same place President Biden is pulling most of American troops out of and the Taliban is gaining more ground day by day in….
Fourteen Years Later……
The book shows a very different picture of the US efforts there and how the Taliban has always had it’s hands in most things in the country….And How the US was also dealing with Iraq…