President Donald Trump said that the Bagram airfield should not have been abandoned to the Taliban
US President Donald Trump has said he wants to regain control of Bagram Air Base in northeastern Afghanistan.
American troops hastily evacuated the base in July 2021, a month before Taliban militants seized Kabul, toppling the UN-backed government and ending the 20-year US occupation of the country.
“We should have never given it up,” Trump told reporters at the Oval Office on Friday. He added that during his trip to the UK the previous day, the US was negotiating the issue with the new Afghan government. “We want that base back,” he said.
“One of the reasons we want the base is, as you know, it’s an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons,” he said Thursday during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Photos and videos of the looted base and abandoned military equipment became symbols of the failure of the US war in Afghanistan.
Although Trump had negotiated the transition of defense responsibilities to local authorities during his first term, he blamed the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on former US President Joe Biden, calling the chaotic departure of the last American soldiers “a disgrace.”
Zakir Jalaly, an Afghan Foreign Ministry official, wrote on X on Thursday that the people of Afghanistan would reject the return of American troops.
“Afghanistan and the US need to engage with one another, and can have economic and political relations based on mutual respect, without the US maintaining any military presence in any part of Afghanistan,” he said.
Following the US withdrawal, the originally Soviet-built airfield came under the control of Afghanistan’s Taliban-led defense ministry. Trump has repeatedly alleged that the Chinese are using the base, but this claim has been rejected by Kabul and lacks credible evidence.
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