Flight Line

摘要

The images broadcast from Kabul Airport - or Hamid Karzai International Airport, as it was rather grandiosely renamed in 2014 - over the past weeks showed a sad picture of the near-breakdown of law and order, and desperate efforts to bring a clean end to the evacuation airlift in the face of an enforced cut-off date. But it wasn't always so. I first visited Kabul almost 20 years ago when, with the country in a spirit of something approaching cautious optimism, the airport was being rebuilt after decades of war and of almost total neglect. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had been set up under United Nations auspices late in 2001, with troops from more than 20 countries. Great effort was being put in to bring Kabul's airport to a state where it could function as the major airhead for ISAF, and an APOD (air point of departure) was established there under RAF responsibility. The airport's runway 11/29 had been the target for an earlier USAF B-52 runway denial attack with 2,000lb bombs, these having left a neat line of equally spaced holes in the concrete. 39 Engineer Regiment undertook the repair, and after three days a UN C-130 made the first incoming flight. Soon, the full 11,500ft was available, and a large crater in the main apron was filled in and covered by a metal bomb damage repair mat.