Do we really want to rely on the cooperation of the Taliban and Pakistan?
P resident Trump recently floated the possibility of regaining use of Bagram Air Base outside of Kabul. This is a very bad idea.
Trump’s narrow logic for wanting the base back makes sense on its own terms. Its strategic location near western China makes it a good place to base American air and missile assets. In the event of war, possession of Bagram would allow America to threaten China’s rear, especially its nuclear weapons bases.
That doesn’t mean that the U.S. would bomb the bases, as attacking a country’s nuclear deterrent could cause it to launch those weapons. Still, having the capability to threaten them would add another layer to the military puzzle China would face.
The trouble with Bagram is that its location is on balance a strategic weakness. It’s not the proximity to China that makes it so; it’s the position within Afghanistan and proximity to Pakistan that undermines the efficacy of this proposal.
Bagram would be surrounded by Taliban-held territory. In the event of war, the Taliban could easily blockade the base to prevent resupply by land or even attack it. Preventing that would require the pre-positioning of ground troops and supplies. That’s not a good use of scarce U.S. resources.
Even worse, Bagram’s ability to survive a war with China rests on America’s ability to resupply it by air over Pakistani airspace. That’s how the U.S. kept its forces in Afghanistan for 20 years.
The Pakistani military often played a double game in that war, allowing American resupply while covertly shielding Taliban forces within Pakistan when the going got tough. Pakistani generals have long thought a friendly, Islamic-controlled Afghanistan provides it with strategic depth in its eternal conflict with India.
Since America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Pakistan has shifted significantly toward China. It now purchases the bulk of its weapons from China, including China’s most advanced airplanes and air defense systems.
The two nations are also drawing economically closer. Pakistan is an active participant in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which uses Chinese money and trade to build infrastructure and tie recipient nations closer to Beijing.
Last December’s signing of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor Phase 2.0 highlights this growing dependence. This initiative uses Chinese funds to construct roads and other avenues of transportation connecting China to Pakistani ports along the Arabian Sea.
If completed, this gives China the ability to bypass the narrow Malacca Strait near Singapore and Indonesia when it imports oil from the Middle East. Such ability is crucial to reducing China’s economic exposure to American naval power and would also make Pakistan economically tied to Chinese imports.
Pakistan is also fiscally reliant on Chinese loans. China owns 22 percent of the nation’s foreign debt and has been eager to extend even more credit to the beleaguered nation.
In short, there is every reason to believe that Pakistan would tacitly back China in any war with the United States. Denying American resupply to its forward Bagram base would be the least belligerent way of helping its creditor and harming the U.S.
This, in effect, would make Bagram-based forces hostages to our enemies.
America possesses the military might to rescue these hostages or even to force its way through Pakistani airspace to keep them in place. But that diverts ships and aircraft from the decisive theaters in the Eastern Pacific to support a minor sideshow.
China would love to see the United States put one or two of the seven or eight aircraft carriers potentially active worldwide at any time in the northern Arabian Sea rather than the Pacific Ocean defending Taiwan and Japan.
President Trump was right in his first term to press for U.S. withdrawal from this vulnerable and extended position. He should resist any temptation to reverse course and once more put American troops in harm’s way, this time with a potentially catastrophic result.