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No one ever accused President Donald Trump of being a systematic thinker. Were not the potential consequences so great, the obvious response to his demand on Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban to “return” Bagram air base would be uproarious laughter.
It’s been more than four years since the Biden administration withdrew U.S. forces from the central Asian state. The departure, just a few weeks shy of the 20-year anniversary of the arrival of American forces, made Washington’s 1975 exit from Saigon look orderly. However, the U.S. military’s retreat was long overdue and completed the accord negotiated by Trump during his first term. Some of the insurgents had been fighting since the Taliban first emerged in 1994, and even before, against Soviet occupiers. Demanding that the victors accept a permanent U.S. military presence would have killed any agreement, turning Afghanistan into a truly forever war.
Since then, the people of Afghanistan have suffered under the Taliban’s oppressive, theocratic rule. However, for many the end of the war was still a relief. While Americans like to view themselves as liberators, many Afghans saw them as anything but that. Explained interpreter Baktash Ahadi:
Virtually the only contact most Afghans had with the West came via heavily armed and armored combat troops. Americans thus mistook the Afghan countryside for a mere theater of war, rather than as a place where people actually lived. U.S. forces turned villages into battlegrounds, pulverizing mud homes and destroying livelihoods.
Unsurprisingly, Ahadi continued, “any sympathy for the West evaporated in bursts of gunfire.” Compared to the distant, corrupt, and incompetent Kabul government and its American ally, the Taliban became the lesser of two evils.
Even critics of the latter welcomed peace. After visiting the country shortly after the insurgents’ victory, journalist Anand Gopal observed that “the biggest thing I noticed on the ground is just how tired people were of fighting.” Most Americans had no idea. Added Gopal:
The first thing people say when I call them these days is, “Thank God everything’s peaceful.” They're not even thinking about the kinds of things we think of, like, “Who’s going to be in the government? Are the Taliban going to be sharing power? What’s the role of women?” Right now, the people I'm talking to, men and women, the thing they say is, “Well, thank God it’s just peaceful”.
Although the U.S. quickly defeated the Taliban militarily, the Bush administration arrogantly demanded total victory, refusing to negotiate the group’s formal capitulation, and opposition gradually returned. Then, as America’s position deteriorated, military and political officials alike hid the facts from the public, policymakers, and perhaps even themselves. The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock wrote a devastating critique of the war, detailing how “senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan …, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” Although Trump failed to override military opposition to a withdrawal, he appeared to understand the impossibility of victory and eventually negotiated to end the war, though he left the pull-out to his successor.
But now he wants a U.S. military restoration.
Peaceful engagement with Afghanistan makes sense. Toward that end the new administration apparently has met with the Taliban, which announced that the governments discussed “bilateral relations between the two countries, issues related to citizens, and investment opportunities in Afghanistan.” Continuing to treat Kabul as an enemy achieves nothing. The Taliban has triumphed and is now looking for partners, including China and Russia. Engagement is more likely than isolation to encourage the Taliban to moderate its rule.
Alas, Trump is making military demands that treat Afghanistan like a captive satrapy. But the Taliban, which defeated the U.S., has no reason to grant Washington any favors. The latter does not recognize the Afghan government, sanctions the nation’s leadership, and continues to freeze central bank assets, which affects private Afghans as well as their rulers. America’s forces had barely made it home before Washington’s War Party, led by the ever-belligerent Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and then-Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), more recently Trump’s discredited national security adviser turned United Nations ambassador, were campaigning to restart the war. Regime opponents have lobbied Congress to support a new armed opposition, though so far without much success. Why would Kabul invite Americans still acting like an enemy, to return with guns potentially blazing?
It is worth thinking of the Afghan people for a change. Their civil war began in 1978 and went through multiple phases, finally ending with the collapse of America’s decrepit and unloved client regime, which ruled little more than Kabul and other urban areas. What would more fighting mean? Charli Carpenter of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst warned:
A renewed Syria-style civil war would pose a far greater danger to civilian life. The average civil war lasts 10 years and kills hundreds of thousands of civilians directly from violence and indirectly from disease, deprivation and other forms of conflict-related insecurity. Civil wars tend to spread across borders: We know from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s research on civil wars that internationalized civil wars are the fastest-growing category of violent conflict in the international system. And while civil wars kill far more civilians than terrorism, they also help terrorist groups thrive, which means those who fear escalating jihadism should also be concerned first and foremost with conflict prevention.
In any case, how would Bagram benefit the American people? The country is far from America, its territory, people, and interests. U.S. forces arrived in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, perpetrated by Al Qaeda, decapitated and dismembered the group, but then stayed to democratize Central Asia, a foolish and doomed project. As most sober analysts predicted, “losing” Afghanistan had no impact on terrorism against Americans since the Taliban, always focused on local rule, was not interested in the U.S. and had no desire to give it an excuse to renew hostilities. None of Afghanistan’s neighbors are campaigning for a revived American presence. Indeed, attempting to maintain such a base today—about as far from the U.S. as possible and in as inhospitable terrain as anywhere on earth, surrounded by China, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, and just one country away from India and Russia—would require great effort for minimal measurable gain.
The facility would serve no useful military purpose. The U.S. has no conflict with India or the Central Asian states. It already has demonstrated the ability to bomb Iran at will, while doing the same against the People’s Republic of China or Russian Federation would trigger general, and likely nuclear, war. The president is agitated by the apparently false belief that Beijing has occupied the base, but even if true, so what? The heavy American military presence in the Asia-Pacific is far more threatening to China.
Bizarrely, he imagines that Washington could use Bagram to threaten Chinese nuclear facilities. Explained Trump: “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.” So much for his nonsensical campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize. Targeting Chinese nukes would ensure that if the U.S. and People’s Republic of China ended up at war, the latter would destroy Bagram the moment hostilities began. Indeed, such a base would invite military preemption. Remember Washington’s reaction to Soviet deployments in Cuba in 1962? Great powers do not placidly allow adversaries to threaten vital interests.
Which is a compelling reason the Taliban will not accept an American military base. Afghanistan must live with the PRC. Today their relationship is cooperative, though not particularly close. According to the Stimson Center’s Sarah Godek:
China has preferred to steadily build on core drivers of bilateral engagement with Afghanistan that existed before the takeover, including counterterrorism, humanitarian aid, small attempts at regional connectivity, and emphasis on regional mechanisms. It has not been eager to make big bets on Afghanistan or officially recognize the Taliban.
However, turning a base over to Trump so he could bomb Chinese nuclear facilities would transform the Afghan-PRC relationship, and not for the better. Afghanistan would become a conflict zone between the world’s two greatest powers.
Trump allowed: “We're trying to get it back because they need things from us.” He could offer to recognize the Taliban, end sanctions, provide financial aid, and perhaps even assist the Afghan military. If so, he should negotiate rather than bloviate, though it is hard to imagine paying the Taliban enough to convince the highly ideological movement to drink what amounts to international hemlock—accepting an America reoccupation and preparation to attack China. Any deal would cost Washington more than the base is worth.
Unfortunately, the president has only one gear, and that is menacing confrontation. Declared the president: “We’re talking now to Afghanistan. We want it back right away, and if they don’t do it, you’re going to find out what I’m going to do.” Five years after signing a peace pact with the Taliban, Trump has effectively retracted his promise “not to use force or threats against the territorial integrity and political independence of Afghanistan.” Declared the president: “If Afghanistan doesn’t give Bagram Airbase back to those that built it, the United States of America, BAD THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN!!!”
However, few threats are emptier. Surely he won’t be suiting up to lead the troops in climbing the Hindu Kush mountains. Presumably even Trump understands the insanity of launching a broad invasion of Afghanistan. Sending in special operations forces might cause the Taliban some pain. However, the onetime insurgents know their country better than any Americans and retain an affinity with the conservative, often fundamentalist rural population. U.S. personnel would die, and for nothing. Nor would any ground campaign of any size win popular support in America. Imagine trying to explain why U.S. military personnel are dying to grab some cheap real estate halfway around the world.
Which leaves airpower. Bombing another nation to seize sovereign land as a base would be rightly seen worldwide as callous, selfish, and imperialistic. Expanding Trump’s territorial ambitions from the Western Hemisphere to Central Asia would unnerve even allied states, which would fear being drawn into war, if not being made targets of war, by Washington’s growing recklessness. And, certainly, spreading death and destruction would dent his Nobel campaign. Nor is coercion likely to work. The Taliban’s red lines are clear. Army head Fasihuddin Fitrat declared: “We assure our fellow countrymen that not even an inch of our land is up for negotiation.” The Taliban and Mujahedeen before it spent decades resisting foreign intervention and rule. Bombing Afghanistan and especially regime targets would only reinforce Kabul’s determination to exclude America from Afghan territory.
Afghanistan has consumed U.S. presidents going back to Jimmy Carter. History counsels the latest president to leave Afghanistan to the Afghan people. Warns journalist Shadi Khan Saif: “From the British retreats of the 19th century to the Soviet defeat in the 1980s and the U.S. exit in 2021, foreign powers have learned the same lesson: Afghanistan cannot be held without local consent.” Washington doesn’t need to dominate Central Asia. Washington isn’t able to dominate Central Asia. Indeed, attempting to dominate Central Asia would undermine U.S. security, making a mockery of Trump’s promises to put America first and make America great again.
Unfortunately, Trump’s delusions about running the world are looking increasingly like those of his dismal predecessor. The American president’s responsibility is to protect America, its people, territory, and liberties, not turn Washington into a global empire, however laudable his claimed objectives. Engage the world, yes. But the administration should leave foreign peoples to run their own countries. Including Afghanistan.