BAGRAM AIR BASE: For months, America’s most important military base was a rugged frontier camp at a bombed-out Afghan airfield. So when Sgt. Maj. C.J. Costello arrived here recently, she was stunned to see her living quarters: a carpeted tent near a shower facility with hot water and plastic flowered curtains.

“Can you believe this?” said Costello, 42, part of the 18th Airborne Corps from Fort Bragg, N.C., squeezing a foam mattress that lay atop her cot, in a tent with a wooden frame, fluorescent lighting, an iron and a coffee-maker. Outside, soldiers strolled back from the PX with their purchases, everything from Pringles to DVD players. The ground was furrowed with ditches dug for a new electrical system.

Bagram is rapidly taking on the look of a military installation built to last, raising the question of how long US forces intend to stay. The base got a further upgrade last week, as the allied military headquarters for Afghanistan operations shifted from Kuwait to Bagram, bringing in a staff of hundreds and a three-star general.

Bagram is a world removed from last November, when the US military moved in after the ruling Taliban militia was driven from Kabul, the Afghan capital, 35 miles to the south. Initially, the base housed a few hundred soldiers, mainly Special Forces troops who camped out amid minefields. Bagram was littered with smashed aircraft and other wreckage dating to the Soviet occupation of the 1980s and more recent battles between Taliban forces and Afghan rebels.

The steadily expanding base now houses 5,000 US and allied troops, and the air is filled with the drone of construction machinery. But the US military carefully avoids any suggestion that Bagram is turning into a long-term commitment.

“We’re trying to walk a fine line between making improvements for the safety, health and welfare of our soldiers and not creating a permanent presence, because we have no intention of this being a permanent presence,” said Col. Roger King, public affairs officer here for the arriving 18th Airborne Corps troops. Still, he said, there is no pullout date for the 3,000 US troops at this base: “It’s open-ended.”

The most important sign of the expanding role of Bagram was the arrival on Friday of Lt. Gen. Dan McNeill, who commands the 18th Airborne Corps, a huge outfit with 85,000 soldiers deployed worldwide. For the first time since the war began, nearly all military operations in Afghanistan, from air attacks to Special Forces raids, are controlled by an officer at Bagram.

McNeill will answer to Army Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the Central Command in Tampa, Fla. The previous Bagram commander, two-star Army Maj. Gen. Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, worked through Camp Doha in Kuwait, which in turn reported to Franks.

Even before McNeill’s arrival, the base had begun to reflect a more formal military structure. Soldiers have been ordered to start saluting, a practice rare in combat zones because it could tip off enemy snipers to officers’ identities. US soldiers are being issued standard billed military caps to replace round, floppy-brimmed camouflage hats.

More permanent facilities are going up, including a US military hospital and a powerful electrical system that will replace dozens of small generators. Among the more unusual changes planned for the next few weeks is establishment of a ”Web-based headquarters,” in which Bagram soldiers will receive instructions and updates on their laptop computers.

“We don’t generate paper orders anymore,” King said, emphasizing that they could fall into the wrong hands.

Bagram is still dotted with bullet-riddled buildings and other reminders of past conflicts. But Afghan labourers are repairing damaged roofs and shattered windows. Every morning, dozens of Afghan truckers park at the base entrance, hoping to sell loads of building materials.

The rapidly changing conditions at Bagram are good news for many soldiers who face deployments here of six months or longer. Pvt. Jason Warder, 18, of the Army’s 63rd Ordnance Company, had been told to expect the worst in Afghanistan: no showers, no phones, no food except MREs (Meals Ready to Eat). When he arrived two months ago, he found a completely different situation.

In Bagram’s civilian-military affairs office, a large board lists base issues. They include garbage dumpsters, water tanks and “women being touched.”

Although it is becoming a more settled base, Bagram remains a hardship post. Soldiers cope with shared tents, loneliness, boredom and gusts of wind that roar across the hot plain, coating hair and clothing with a fine dust. Few soldiers are permitted to even visit nearby Kabul.

Warder said conditions are superior to those of some assignments he has had in the United States, such as training in the Mojave Desert. But Bagram is hardly perfect.

“It’s not like Maryland,” he said.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.