by WorldTribune Staff, September 18, 2025 Real World News
President Donald Trump said United States is trying to reclaim control of Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan more than four years after the Biden Administration abandoned it to the Taliban during the botched 2021 withdrawal from the country.
Making the announcement during his state visit to the UK, Trump said the base is important as it is relatively close to a site where communist China is building up its nuclear capabilities.
“We were gonna leave Afghanistan but we were gonna leave it with strength and dignity,” Trump said on Thursday. “We were gonna keep Bagram, the big air base — one of the biggest air bases in the world. We gave it to [the Taliban] 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,” the president announced. “Because [the Taliban] need something from us. We need that base back.”
According to a 2021 report from the Washington Post, China has been building up its nuclear missile capabilities in the eastern part of its Xinjiang region, near the city of Hami, which is most likely the missile site to which Trump is referring. There are just more than 1,400 miles between Bagram Air Base and that part of northeastern Xinjiang.
Related: Who is Kash Patel? Key Trump intel advisor slams ‘unconditional surrender’ of Bagram Air Base, August 26, 2021
Abandoning Bagram, situated just north of Kabul, was seen as perhaps the biggest blunder in a series of devastating mistakes made in Team Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In a 2021 exclusive interview with WorldTribune.com, Kash Patel, current FBI Director and an intelligence advisor in the first Trump term, said of the Bagram situation: “It’s an unconditional surrender, it’s not even a withdrawal.
“We just up and left. Bagram as you know is the brain center of our operation in Afghanistan. It’s what the U.S. Government owns wholly and without the Afghan government. Multiple runways. It’s our allied base operation. NATO operation, staging area for aircraft, helicopters, weapons, machinery. It’s just enormous and you can’t run Afghanistan if you cut the head off. And that’s what Biden did.”
Patel added: “In terms of the national command authority, in terms of the chain of command the president, the secretary of defense, you basically have political figures, buffoons in (Lloyd) Austin and (Gen. Mark) Milley basically instead of doing their job and resigning in protest to the president’s actions to surrender Bagram, kowtowing to him so they can keep their jobs and continue to be the political hacks that they are instead of the apolitical officers they should be.”
Trump aims to recover Bagram Air Base, abandoned during pullout from Afghanistan added by Editor Two on
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