Just four years and 19 days after two-star General Christopher Donahue boarded the last C-17 transport plane departing from Kabul airport, thus closing the longest war in United States history, the current American President, Donald Trump, announced at the British Prime Ministers' 'weekend' residence, Chequers, that "we are going to keep Bagram, the large airbase. It is one of the largest airbases in the world. We handed it over [to the Taliban] for nothing. We are going to try to regain it because [the Taliban] need things from us. One of the reasons we want the base is because, you know, it is an hour [flight] from where China makes its atomic bombs."
Two days later, Trump posted a message on his social network, Truth Social, saying: "If the Taliban do not return the base to those who built it, the United States of America, BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN!"
The United States did not build Bagram. Only parts of it. Washington funded the creation of the base in the 1950s, but it was its rival, the Soviet Union, that expanded Bagram in the 1960s and 1970s. On Christmas Day 1979, 500 Soviet soldiers left the base, traveled the 47 kilometers that separate it from the Afghan capital, Kabul, through the vineyards and fruit orchards of the Shomali plain, entered the presidential palace, and assassinated the Afghan president, the communist Hafizullah Amin. Three days later, another communist, but this time more loyal to Moscow, named Babrak Karmal, arrived at Bagram directly from Moscow and was appointed president of Afghanistan.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began and ended in Bagram. Bagram thus became one of the largest airbases in the world, with three runways and around 15,000 Soviet soldiers, joined by another 5,000 civilians. Whoever controls Bagram controls Kabul, so the airport became the main base of the USSR in its particular Vietnam. One out of every seven Soviet soldiers stationed in Afghanistan was in Bagram, which was constantly attacked by anti-communist guerrillas.
At that time, control of Kabul was decided in Bagram. Trump's plans are, through that base, to control not just a capital, but a continent: Asia. As Ali Maisam Nazary, the Director of International Relations of the National Resistance Front (NRF), the main opposition organization to the Taliban, explained to EL MUNDO on Wednesday, "Bagram is at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. It is the only base from which those two regions can be controlled."
The two runways of Bagram - one three kilometers of asphalt; the other 3.5 kilometers of cement - have been used by giant bombers B-52 and B-1, the former capable of carrying atomic bombs. If the United States were to regain control of the base, these two aircraft models could fly from Bagram to Moscow or Beijing and return without even needing to refuel in flight.
American planes would also enter Russia from the South, and China from the West, two borders that both countries have not protected because their rivals are, respectively, in Europe and the Pacific. "The soft underbelly of the Soviet Union," as Pakistani dictator Mohamed Zia Ul-Haq referred to the border between the USSR and Afghanistan in the 1980s, would thus be completely exposed to US weapons. The same could be said of China. And Iran, because the distance between Bagram and Tehran is almost the same as between Madrid and Amsterdam.
Afghans on the outskirts of the Bagram base observe remnants of equipment that would be sold as scrap.Rahmat GulAP Photo
Approximately 2,354 years ago, one of the greatest empire builders in history, Alexander the Great, understood that the Bagram region is the key to Asia and, during his passage through Afghanistan, founded exactly where the base stands today the city of Alexandria of the Caucasus, named after the fact that the Greeks referred to the Hindu Kush mountain range as Caucasus, a name that also evokes the violent clash of cultures in the region, given that the most common translation of its name is "the death of the Hindus," in reference to the caravans of slaves that traveled from India to Central Asia through the mountains.
The Hindu Kush begins 30 kilometers from Bagram, and on the other side is the Kelagay desert, where the Central Asian plain begins, extending to Siberia and the Arctic to the North and to Germany to the West. In the opposite direction, following the Panjshir and then the Kabul rivers, one reaches the Indus, the great river of Pakistan whose basin largely falls in India. To do this, one simply needs to follow the road where EL MUNDO journalist Julio Fuentes was killed in November 2001.
Trump's idea of retaking Bagram, therefore, is not far-fetched. Quite the opposite. It is, fundamentally, a new version of the Great Game, which was the Cold War between Victorian Britain to prevent the advance of Tsarist Russia towards India through Central Asia and Afghanistan, a scenario that is part of Rudyard Kipling's work. This is how Afghanistan was born, as a buffer state between two empires. What Trump now wants is the Great Game in reverse: moving up from the South, not towards Russia, but towards China.
In fact, the president's team had been considering the idea since January, albeit discreetly. But the big question is how they can achieve it. All the legitimacy of the Taliban is based on the fact that they expelled the Americans. If they are allowed to return, their power will lose its meaning... If they can even maintain it because, historically, it has been impossible to have real control of Afghanistan without Bagram. The return of the United States would also lead to neighboring countries aligning with the Taliban. In July, Russia became the only country in the world to give full diplomatic recognition to the Afghan government, despite Moscow having been one of the main supporters of opposition forces to that movement in the 1990s.
With all these conditions, and given that the Taliban never managed to take the base, not even in their moments of greatest military push, Nazary suggests that the US "support the Afghan opposition so that we are the ones who occupy the base, a task that is not very complicated given the weakness and divisions of the Taliban." The Republican Party also has much better relations with the NRF than the Democratic Party, who with Joe Biden abandoned Afghanistan to its fate.
The Taliban have taken Trump's words very seriously. This is partly due to the timing of his statements. The U.S. President spoke just after an unsuccessful negotiation in Kabul between the Taliban and representatives of the Trump administration to secure the release of several Americans detained in Afghanistan. When Trump spoke at Chequers, the Supreme Leader - Hibatullah, the official title holder of the Emirate of Afghanistan, became so concerned that he placed his Foreign Minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, who had led the negotiations, under house arrest and ordered a search of his home and computer. Hibatullah, who strongly opposes any negotiations with the United States, fears that some of his associates may be negotiating the handover of Bagram.
The paradox is that during the 19 years, nine months, and three weeks that the U.S. was in Afghanistan, the idea of turning Bagram into a strategically significant base was never considered. When the first soldiers arrived in 2001, they turned it into a prison where about 200 Afghan prisoners were held in two large cages, many of whom were completely unrelated to the war and had been imprisoned for absurd reasons. One of them had been captured by the Americans while planting mines in a completely nonsensical location because he wanted his neighbor's cows, with whom he had an ancient feud, to explode.
Others were not as fortunate. Dilawar, a taxi driver, had an anxiety attack in 2002, and to silence him, the Americans beat him for two days until he died. The autopsy revealed that his legs were "as if he had been run over by a train." Bagram was also possibly the first secret prison of the U.S. in its war against Al Qaeda because its vast facilities had more than enough space for cells with alleged terrorists who officially were not there.
The base had been the battleground for four years between the Taliban and the Afghan opposition and was completely destroyed. In the basement of the part used as a prison, there was an unexploded 200-kilogram Soviet bomb. Remnants of Soviet fighter jets littered the runways, which were filled with bomb craters making them impassable. Bagram was not only American; it also housed international forces, including Spaniards.
Just like the USSR in 1979, the U.S. in 2001 thought its presence in Afghanistan would be very short-lived. So short that the Pentagon took months to install showers in Bagram because they deemed it not worth it. Washington rebuilt the entire base, converted the three Soviet runways into two, and in the early 2000s, had up to 40,000 people there, including military and civilians.
Since its abandonment in 2021, Bagram seems to have little activity. According to Nazary, "it has been visited several times by Chinese teams to inspect U.S. facilities, but without a permanent military presence." The Taliban Air Force is much smaller than the Afghan republic they overthrew.
Now, Bagram, the base built on the ruins of the city founded by Alexander the Great to control the passage from Central Asia to South Asia, could play a decisive role in 21st-century geopolitics. This time, it would not be about controlling Afghanistan, as with the USSR and the U.S., but about all of Asia and Russia.