President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the U.S. is trying to reclaim the Afghanistan airbase that American troops abandoned in 2021 during their withdrawal from the country.
Trump has repeatedly attacked former President Joe Biden for handing over Bagram Airfield, the largest American military base in the country and a logistics hub for the 20-year international war effort there.
“We’re trying to get it back,” he said during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, adding that it’s “about an hour away from where China is developing its nuclear weapons.”
Trump did not elaborate as to whether his administration was speaking with the Taliban or how reclaiming the base tied into the Chinese nuclear program.
The U.S. in 2021 unceremoniously handed over Bagram — the hub of its post-9/11 war effort to oust the Taliban and target al-Qaeda — to Afghan forces. It was the most visible step to that point in the U.S. military withdrawal.
Trump has said repeatedly that he would never have given up Bagram.
Biden “went through the Afghanistan total disaster for no reason whatsoever. Trump said on Thursday. “We were going to leave Afghanistan but we were going to leave it with strength and dignity. We were going to keep Bagram, the big air base — one of the biggest air bases, we gave it to them for nothing.”
But the deal the first Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban in February 2020 paved the way for America’s departure and did not mention the base. It established a ceasefire between U.S. and Taliban forces pending a full withdrawal of American troops in 14 months. The U.S. also committed the Afghan government to release 5,000 imprisoned Taliban fighters.
Bagram was built by the Soviets in the 1950s and served as a main base during their own decadelong war. Bagram, at its peak as a U.S. base., hosted more than 100,000 troops and included extensive infrastructure, from long runways to a 50-bed hospital and prison.
Trump made the deadly U.S. withdrawal under Biden a topic of his reelection bid. He brought the families of 13 Marines killed at the Abbey Gate suicide bombing near Kabul airport in August 2021 to the Republican convention last year.
The ISIS-led bombing also killed 170 Afghan civilians gathered to try and get on the last U.S. cargo planes ferrying people out of the capital.
Joe Gould contributed to this report.
