Taliban officials rejected President Trump’s suggestion that Bagram Airfield near Kabul could return to U.S. control after it was abandoned during the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan under the Biden administration.
The Taliban indicated it is willing to talk with the Trump administration about the air base — which was built by the Soviet Union in the 1950s — but said no U.S. service members would be permitted.
Zakir Jalaly, an official at the Taliban Foreign Ministry, said Thursday that the U.S. and Afghanistan can have economic and political relations based on “mutual respect and shared interests,” but the U.S. will not be allowed to have a military presence in the country.
Muhajir Farahi, the deputy minister of information and culture in Afghanistan, shared a part of a poem on social platform X, which in part said that those who “once smashed their heads against the rocks with us, their minds have still not found peace.”
Trump, during a press conference early Thursday in the United Kingdom alongside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, said the U.S. “gave” the base to the Taliban “for nothing.”
“We’re trying to get it back, by the way,” the president said. “That could be a little breaking news: We’re trying to get it back, because they need things from us.”
“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 did not disclose other details on plans to recover the air base.
The base fell to the Taliban after the chaotic 2021 withdrawal of the U.S. forces from Afghanistan during the Biden administration. It was the biggest U.S. military base in the country.
The president said in February that the U.S. should have kept the base under its purview and alleged that China’s People’s Liberation Army took control of it, something Beijing and the Taliban have denied.
U.S. officials have recently engaged with officials in Kabul over Americans who are held in Afghanistan. Trump’s special hostage envoy Adam Boehler and Zalmay Khalilzad, ex-U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, had a meeting with the Taliban’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, Reuters reported.
Trump has often criticized the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, where 13 U.S. service members were killed by a suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport.
