President Trump said he is aiming to regain control of Bagram Air Base, which has been under Taliban control since U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021.
“We gave it to them for nothing. We’re trying to get it back, by the way. That could be a little breaking news, we’re trying to get it back because they need things from us,” Trump said Thursday of the base.
“We want that base back but 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 added.
The president, while speaking at a press conference in the United Kingdom with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, did not expand on plans to get the base in U.S. hands and did not explain what he meant by the Taliban needing “things” from the U.S.
The base was the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan and fell to the Taliban during the chaotic withdrawal under the Biden administration. Trump in February asserted the U.S. should have kept control of the base and claimed that China’s People’s Liberation Army had taken control of it, which China previously denied.
The Taliban last week said it reached an agreement on a detainee swap as part of its efforts to normalize the U.S.-Afghanistan relationship, The Associated Press reported. Talks included Afghanistan’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, and Trump’s special envoy for hostage response, Adam Boehler.
Trump has been critical of the 2021 departure, which he set in motion in 2020 when he negotiated and signed a deal with the Taliban committing to an earlier timeline for the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Former President Biden delayed the withdrawal by a few months before following through on the exit in August 2021, when 13 U.S. service members were killed by a suicide bombing at the airport in Kabul.
In May, the Pentagon convened a new panel to review the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan and analyze the decisionmaking inside the Biden administration that led to the chaos.
