Category World News

United States President Donald Trump has demanded that Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban hand the country’s Bagram airbase over to Washington, five years after he signed a deal with the group that paved the way for the US withdrawal from Kabul.

At a news conference with United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer on September 18, Trump told reporters that the US government was “trying to get [Bagram] back”.

“We gave it to [the Taliban] for nothing. We want that base back,” he said.

Two days later, on September 20, he followed up that demand with a pointed threat on his Truth Social platform: “If Afghanistan doesn’t give Bagram Airbase back to those that built it, the United States of America, BAD THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN!!!”

The Taliban has rejected Trump’s demand.

This is not the first time, however, that Trump has shown his interest in retaking the former US military base. In a February 2025 media briefing, now deleted from the White House’s website, Trump was quoted as saying, “We were going to keep Bagram. We were going to keep a small force on Bagram.”

So what is the Bagram base, why does Trump want it so badly, what is its strategic significance, and can the US get it back?

What is the Bagram airbase?

Four years after US forces evacuated their military bases in Afghanistan, Bagram remains a contentious piece of real estate that the Trump administration wants to retake from the Taliban.

The base, which has two concrete runways – one 3.6km long (2.2 miles), the other 3km (1.9 miles) – lies about 50km (31 miles) outside Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. It has been a strategic stronghold for the many military powers that have controlled Afghanistan – and fought over it – over the past half-century.

The airfield was first developed by the Soviet Union in the 1950s, an early shot fired at the dawn of the Cold War that would drag Afghanistan into its vortex for decades. But the Afghan government of the time controlled the base.

That changed after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 — its troops stayed in charge of the base for a decade, before Moscow withdrew from the country.

In 1991, the Soviet-backed government of Mohammad Najibullah lost control of Bagram to the Northern Alliance, one of the most influential opposition groups fighting for power. But the Northern Alliance would itself lose control of the base to the Taliban.

After the NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the base then became a strategic centrepiece of the US military’s presence in the country, used as a special command for various military divisions, steadily growing in size, capacity and utility.

At its peak in 2009, the base could host about 10,000 people. While US forces controlled the base, it was shared with other NATO members, including units from the UK’s Royal Marines.

Aside from military units, the base hosted a large prison that became notorious for abuse and torture of Afghan detainees by US forces and their local partners. Bagram was also home to a fully functioning hospital, housing barracks for thousands of soldiers, and several US chain restaurants, like Pizza Hut and Subway.

The base and facilities were evacuated, with much of the weapons and equipment destroyed, by US forces during the withdrawal of August 2021. What remained was looted by local groups before the Taliban seized control.

Why does Trump want the Bagram base back?

Trump has frequently complained about how the US left major weapons behind in its hasty evacuation in 2021, in effect handing them over to the Taliban and other armed groups in Afghanistan.

But experts say that the real appeal of Bagram lies not in the largely wrecked military equipment there, nor in the abandoned chain restaurants on the complex.

There is the symbolic value of showcasing US control over a base built by a geopolitical rival. “It has always been of important strategic value, since it was built by the Soviet Union,” said Ibraheem Bahiss, senior analyst at Crisis Group.

The rugged, mountainous terrain of Afghanistan makes controlling its airspace difficult, with few places suitable for landing large military planes and weapons carriers. Bagram – the country’s largest airbase – offers rare respite.

The Bagram base played a “crucial role” in Washington’s so-called “war on terror” after 2001, said Hekmatullah Azamy, security analyst with the Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies (CAPS), a think tank with headquarters in Kabul.

Major air missions took off from Bagram, including ones that led to civilian killings, such as the 2015 bombing of a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, in Kunduz, in which 42 people were killed and at least 30 were injured.

The US commander in Afghanistan repeatedly changed his narrative on what prompted the bombing, before eventually acknowledging it was a mistake. Then US-President Barack Obama apologised.

But even though the US has now left Afghanistan, Bagram’s value has only increased, Azamy said, with the rise of Chinese influence in the region.

“As the priorities shifted, and the US started viewing China as the number one threat, this base is seemingly important once again, primarily because of its proximity to China and the significance it has,” he said.

Bagram is about 800km (about 500 miles) from the Chinese border, and about 2,400km (about 1,500 miles) from the nearest Chinese missile factory in Xinjiang.

Trump has also referred to China as a key reason for wanting to retake control of Bagram, saying this month in London that the base is “an hour away from where [China] makes its nuclear weapons”. Back in February, Trump also claimed that the base was “exactly one hour away from where China makes its nuclear missiles”.

Chinese officials, on their part, have pushed back. “Afghanistan’s future should be decided by its own people. Stirring up tension and creating confrontation in the region won’t be popular,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lin Jian said after Trump’s comments alongside UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Can the US retake Bagram?

This is questionable, say experts.

“In theory, Bagram is a strategic base for the US in terms of projecting power into the region,” said Ashley Jackson, co-director at the Geneva-headquartered Centre on Armed Groups. She pointed out, however, that “the move would seem to be in direct contradiction to the US policy of ending the military mission in Afghanistan”.

“The sheer logistics of negotiating redeployment and handing back would be extremely challenging and lengthy, and it’s not clear that this would serve either side’s strategic interests,” Jackson added.

Both Azamy and Bahiss believe the Taliban, too, have no incentive to want to give up Bagram.

Such a move would “crush the Taliban’s legitimacy,” Azamy said.

Bahiss said the group “would be unwilling to accept a foreign footprint on Afghanistan, including at Bagram airbase”.

The Taliban movement was built in large part on the idea of fighting foreign occupation and influence, Kabul-based Bahiss pointed out. The group has often argued that “as long as foreign troops hold even one metre of soil, jihad or holy war is an obligation”.

“Any negotiations with a foreign military would shatter their strength and risk their own members deserting the movement in large droves,” Bahiss said.

How has the Taliban responded?

Indeed, the Taliban, on their part, have been very clear, and have repeatedly rejected Trump’s demands. On September 21, the group cited the 2020 agreement that Trump’s administration signed with the Taliban in Doha.

“It should be recalled that, under the Doha Agreement, the US pledged that ‘it will not use or threaten force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Afghanistan, nor interfere in its internal affairs,” Hamdullah Fitrat, deputy spokesperson of the Taliban, said on social media.

“The US needs to remain faithful to its commitments.”

Fitrat’s comments followed Trump’s threat of “bad things” happening to Afghanistan if the Taliban did not hand Bagram over.

What is the US game plan?

The Taliban’s refusal to negotiate over the base has not deterred Trump, so far, and analysts believe the US might be using the Bagram demand as a bargaining chip.

It could be “a means of demanding something grand, like Bagram, and settling for something smaller and more symbolic down the road, [like] the return of some weapons and equipment, which the president has talked about previously,” Jackson of the Centre on Armed Groups said.

A 2022 assessment by the then-US Department of Defense, now the Department of War, found that more than $7bn worth of weapons had been abandoned in Afghanistan, much of which is now believed to be in the Taliban’s control.

And if the Bagram demand is a gambit in a larger negotiation, that might be good news for the Taliban, too, say analysts. Afghanistan’s rulers have been seeking wider international legitimacy, and talks with the US are a step towards that.

“In some ways, the Trump administration is [saying that it is] open to the idea of engagement with the Taliban,” Kabul-based Bahiss said, pointing to other examples of the US president showing a willingness to build ties with leaders Washington has previously treated as enemies: from Ahmed al-Sharaa in Syria to Vladimir Putin in Russia and Kim Jong Un in North Korea.

But ultimately, Bahiss said, Trump’s desire to do business with the Taliban will also depend on what is on the table for him.

“What can the Taliban offer? Is it going to be private investment, minerals, or military assets like Bagram?” asked Bahiss.

In a federal lawsuit filed by the Democratic-run state, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth quickly disputed the state’s order to send 200 Oregon National Guard soldiers to the state of Oregon.

The troops would be “called into Federal service effective immediately for a period of 60 days,” according to a memo signed by Hegseth and delivered to the state’s top military officer, the day after US President Donald Trump declared he wanted to send soldiers to “worship-ravaged Portland, the state’s capital.”

In a conversation with the president on Sunday, Oregon’s governor, Democrat Tina Kotek, admitted to having an objection to the deployment.

She stated in a statement that “Oregon is our home and not a military target.”

Soon after state officials received the memo, Democratic Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield sued Hegseth, Trump, and US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in federal court in Portland on Sunday.

“What we’re seeing is not about public safety,” Rayfield&nbsp asserted. The president is using his political slam dunk to attack the media at the expense of our community, according to the article.

In the US, the National Guard is a state-based reserve military force that can be called upon to perform active duty. It also supports military operations abroad and typically responds to domestic emergencies like civil unrest and natural disasters.

Trump stated in a social media post on Saturday that he had directed the Pentagon to send all necessary Troops to protect Portland, and any of our ICE facilities under siege from attacks by Antifa and other domestic terrorists, despite the fact that the memo does not specifically mention Portland as the target of the proposed deployment.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s division is under the Homeland Security Department.

Trump continued, “I am also allowing Full Force,” if necessary.

According to the CATO Institute, people with right-wing ideologies have been to blame for 54 percent of politically motivated murders in the nation since 2020, more than double the number that has been attributed to the left, despite the Trump administration’s pledge to crack down on Antifa, a loosely affiliated left-wing anti-fascist movement.

A deadly shooting occurred at an ICE facility in Texas just days before Trump’s announcement on Saturday. Trump blamed the “radical left” for the attack, which claimed one detainee was killed, and two others were seriously hurt in it, without providing any evidence.

Trump has mandated troop deployments to several states and cities where his political rivals, the Democratic Party, are in power.

After previous deployments to the nation’s capital, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, California, he has also ordered troops to be sent to&nbsp, Memphis, Tennessee, and Chicago, Illinois.

Despite the crackdown, protests against the US government’s anti-immigration policies continue outside ICE facilities, where advocates claim that people are being held in degrading and crowded conditions as the Trump administration pushes for mass deportations.

Over the weekend, protesters gathered outside of an ICE building in Portland, some of whom wore colorful costumes.

After an earlier crowd had begun to disperse, less than 100 people were present at the protest outside the federal building in the city, which is home to some 635, 000 people.

Meghna Gupta*, a graduate from age 23, a few years of work in India, and a move to the United States before she turned 30 to settle there, had planned it all.

So, she clocked countless hours at the Hyderabad office of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT firm and a driver of the country’s emergence as the global outsourcing powerhouse in the sector. She waited until the promotion, which would have taken her to West Coast in California.

Now, Gupta is 29, and her dreams lie in tatters after US President Donald Trump’s administration upended the H-1B visa programme that tech firms have used for more than three decades to bring skilled workers to the US.

Companies that sponsor these applications have had significant new costs as a result of Trump’s decision to increase the fee for visas from about $2,000 to $60,000 in many cases. The base salary an H-1B visa employee is supposed to be paid is $60, 000. However, the minimum wage for the employer now increases to $ 160, 000, and in many cases, employers will likely find American workers with comparable skills for lower pay.

This is the Trump administration’s rationale as it presses US companies to hire local talent amid its larger anti-immigration policies. This is a blow, however, for the thousands of young people who are still enthralled by the American dream. And nowhere is that more so than in India, the world’s most populous nation, that, despite an economy that is growing faster than most other major nations, has still been bleeding skilled young people to developed nations.

Indian IT companies have sponsored the most H-1B visas of all companies for years, using them to bring Indian employees to the US and contracting out their expertise to other companies as well. This changed: In 2014, seven out of the 10 companies that received the most H-1B visas were Indian or started in India, In 2024, that number dropped to four.

In a list otherwise dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple, Gupta’s TCS was the only Indian company in the top ten H-1B visa recipients in the first six months of 2025.

But what had not changed until now was the demographic of the workers that even the above US companies hired on H-1B visas. In 2024, over 70% of all H-1B visas were granted to Indian nationals, including those in the medical and tech sectors. Chinese nationals were a distant second, with less than 12 percent.

Thousands of people in India are now concerned that the US is being blocked by this route.

“It has left me heartbroken”, Gupta told Al Jazeera of Trump’s fee hike.

Gupta, who was born and raised in Bageshwar, a town of 10,000 in Uttarakhand, said, “I planned for this all my life. Everything revolved around this goal for me to move to the US.”

“The so-called ‘ American Dream ‘ looks like a cruel joke now”.

‘ In the hole ‘

Gupta’s crisis highlights a wider contradiction that currently defines India. On the one hand, the country — as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government frequently mention — is the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

After surpassing Japan earlier this year, India currently has the fourth-largest gross domestic product (GDP) in the world, behind only China, India, and the US. But the country’s creation of new jobs lags far behind the number of young people who enter its workforce every year, widening its employment gap. The biggest cities in India are creaking as a result of inadequate public transportation, potholed roads, traffic jams, and growing income inequality.

The result: Millions like Gupta aspire to a life in the West, picking their career choices, usually in sectors like engineering or medicine, and working to get into hard-fought seats in top colleges – and then migrating. In India, there has been a significant increase in the migration of skilled professionals, particularly those in STEM fields, to countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US in the past five years.

As per the Indian government’s data, those numbers rose from 94, 145 Indians in 2020 to 348, 629 by 2024 — a 270 percent rise.

Trump’s new visa system could now effectively close the entryway for those skilled workers. The fee hike comes on the back of a series of tension points in a souring US-India relationship in recent months. New Delhi is currently subject to a steep 50% tariff on US exports, half of which is used to purchase Russian crude, which the US claims is used to fund the Kremlin’s conflict in Ukraine.

Ajay Srivastava, a former Indian trade officer and founder of the Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI), a Delhi-based think tank, told Al Jazeera that the hardest-hit sectors after the new visa policy will be “the ones that Indian professionals dominate: mid-level IT services jobs, software developers, project managers, and back-end support in finance and healthcare”.

Sponsorship is unprofitable, especially for smaller businesses and startups, according to Srivastava, because for many of these positions, the new $100, 000 fee exceeds an entry-level employee’s annual salary. “The cost of hiring a foreign worker now exceeds local hiring by a wide margin”, he said, adding that this would shift the hiring calculus of US firms.

According to Srivastava, “American firms will scout more domestic talent, reserve H-1Bs for only the hardest-filling specialist roles, and push routine work offshore to India or other hubs.”

“The market has already priced in this pivot”, he said, citing the fall of Indian stock markets since Trump’s announcement, “as investors brace for shrinking US hiring”.

He argued that Indian STEM graduates and students “must completely reevaluate their career paths in the US.”

To Sudhanshu Kaushik, founder of the North American Association of Indian Students, a body with members across 120 universities, the Trump administration’s “motive is to create panic and distress among H-1B visa holders and other immigrant visa holders”.

According to Kaushik, “to remind them that they don’t belong.” “And at any time, at any whim, the possibility of remaining in the United States can become incredibly difficult and excruciatingly impossible”.

The announcement was made shortly after the new academic year’s start of classes, with many international students, including those from India, which sends the majority of foreign students to the US.

Typically, a large chunk of such students stay back in the US for work after graduating. According to an analysis of the National Survey of College Graduates, 41% of international students who graduated between 2012 and 2020 will still be residing in the US in 2021. For PhD holders, that figure jumps to 75 percent.

However, Kaushik claimed that their hotline has received more than 80 inquiries from students who are now concerned about what the future holds.

“They know that they’re already in the hole”, he said, referring to the tuition and other fees running into tens of thousands of dollars that they have invested in a US education, with increasingly unclear job prospects.

According to Srivastava of GTRI, the current US landscape reflects “less opportunities, tougher competition, and shrinking returns on US education.”

Nasscom, India’s apex IT trade body, has said the policy’s abrupt rollout could “potentially disrupt families” and the continuity of ongoing onshore projects for the country’s technology services firms.

The new policy, it added, could “ripple effects” on the global job markets and the US innovation ecosystem, noting that “additional cost will require adjustments” for businesses.

They “do not care about people at all.”

Ansh*, a senior software engineer at Meta, graduated from an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), one in a chain of India’s most prestigious engineering school, and landed a job with Facebook soon after that.

He currently drives a BMW sedan to work while living with his wife in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, US. Both Ansh and his wife are in the US on H-1B visas.

He was agitated by the White House news of last Saturday.

He spent that evening figuring out flights for his friends — Indians on H-1B visas who were out of the country, one in London, another in Bengaluru, India — to see if they could rush back to the US before the new rules kicked in on Sunday, as major US tech firms had recommended to their employees.

The Trump administration has since clarified that existing H-1B visas and renewals will not be subject to the new fees. For now, Ansh’s job and status in the US are secure.

He claimed that this isn’t much of a reassurance.

“In the last 11 years, I have never felt like going back to India”, Ansh told Al Jazeera. However, people make those life changes because of this type of instability. And now we are here, wondering if one should return to India”?

Ansh claimed that moving back to India, despite causing a dramatic change in their lives and plans, was at least something they should think about because they are not expecting, was at least something they should think about. But what of his colleagues and friends on H-1B visas, who have children, he asked?

The US government’s approach shows that they don’t care about people at all, he said. “These types of decisions are like … brain wave strikes, and then it is just executed”.

According to Ansh, the new visa policy also has a chance of causing the US to lose. “The immigrant contribution is deeply sprinkled into the DNA of the US’s success”, he said.

He claimed that innovation won’t occur once talent is lost. “It is going to have long-term consequences for visa holders and their families. Everyone would benefit from its impact, in some way or another.

India’s conflict

After the announcement from the White House on Saturday, Prime Minister Modi’s principal secretary, PK Mishra, said that the government was encouraging Indians working abroad to return to the country.

Some experts concurred with Mishra’s assertion that the H-1B visa suspension might offer an opportunity for India because it could theoretically stop the nation from experiencing the brain drain it has long experienced.

GTRI’s Srivastava said that US companies that have until now relied on immigrant visas like the H-1B might now explore more local hiring or offshore some jobs. According to him, “Indian IT firms will double down on offshore and remote delivery because the $100, 000 H-1B fee makes onsite deployment prohibitively expensive.”

“US postings will be reserved only for mission-critical roles, while the bulk of hiring and project execution shifts to India and other offshore hubs”, he told Al Jazeera. This “encouraging” reliance on offshore teams, which raises well-known questions about data security, compliance, and time-zone coordination, is what US clients are seeing as costs rise.

Srivastava noted that India’s tech sector can absorb some returning H-1B workers, if they choose to return.

But that won’t be simple. He said that even though hiring in India’s IT and services sector has been growing year-on-year, the gaps are real, ranging from dipping job postings to new openings clustered in AI, cloud, and data science. Additionally, returning students who have received US training should anticipate salaries that are well above Indian benchmarks.

And in reality, Kaushik said, many H-1B aspirants are looking at different countries as alternatives to the US — not India.

The senior engineer at Meta, Ansh, concurred. “In the US, we operate at the cutting edge of technology”, whereas the Indian tech ecosystem was still geared towards delivering immediate services.