Taliban officials on Thursday reportedly dismissed President Donald J. Trump’s call for the United States to retake Bagram Air Base, the sprawling military hub outside Kabul that fell into Taliban hands after the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
The Taliban insisted that while they are open to discussions with the Trump administration, any American military presence in Afghanistan remains off the table.
Zakir Jalaly, a senior official in the Taliban’s Foreign Ministry, said the group envisions economic and political relations with Washington based on “mutual respect and shared interests,” but made clear that “the U.S. will not be allowed to have a military presence in the country.”
The rejection came hours after Mr. Trump, speaking at a joint press conference in the United Kingdom with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, said that America “gave” the base away “for nothing” under President Biden.
“We’re trying to get it back, by the way,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “That could be a little breaking news, we’re trying to get it back because they need things from us.”
The former base, built by the Soviet Union in the 1950s and expanded during America’s two-decade war in Afghanistan, was the largest U.S. military installation in the country.
Its abrupt abandonment in August 2021 became a defining image of what Mr. Trump has consistently described as a disastrous withdrawal.
The Taliban quickly overran the site, seizing infrastructure and equipment as American forces scrambled to evacuate.
For Mr. Trump, Bagram remains more than a symbol of lost ground. “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,” the president said, offering no further details but underscoring his long-held warnings about Beijing’s regional ambitions.
Taliban officials, for their part, sought to punctuate their refusal with symbolism. Muhajir Farahi, the deputy minister of information and culture, posted lines of poetry on X, writing of those who “once smashed their heads against the rocks with us” and whose “minds have still not found peace.”
Mr. Trump in February argued the U.S. should never have relinquished Bagram and claimed that China’s People’s Liberation Army had since taken control of it — an allegation denied by both Beijing and the Taliban.
Still, the president has pointed to the base’s strategic value near China, evidence, in his view, of the Biden administration’s failure to think geopolitically.
The administration has quietly opened channels with Kabul on other matters.
Adam Boehler, Mr. Trump’s special hostage envoy, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, recently met with Taliban foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, according to Reuters, to address the fate of Americans detained in Afghanistan.
For Mr. Trump, the issue remains inseparable from the August 2021 bombing at Kabul’s airport that killed 13 American service members.
He has repeatedly said that the tragedy was avoidable had the United States retained Bagram and pursued an orderly exit strategy.
Though the Taliban have rebuffed any return of U.S. troops, the president’s remarks signal an attempt to reframe America’s position in Afghanistan — not as an occupying power, but as a nation reclaiming its strategic assets lost in what he continues to call one of the greatest failures of the Biden era.
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