Islamabad, Pakistan – Seated next to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer during a visit to the United Kingdom in September, United States President Donald Trump made clear he was eyeing a plot of land his country’s military once controlled nearly 8,000km (4,970 miles) away: Bagram airbase in Afghanistan.
“We gave it to [the Taliban] for nothing. We want that base back,” he said. Two days later, this time opting to express his views on social media, Trump wrote: “If Afghanistan doesn’t give Bagram air base back to those that built it, the United States of America, bad things are going to happen!”
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The Taliban, predictably, bristled at the demand and stressed that under “no circumstances” will Afghans hand over the base to any third country.
On Tuesday, the Taliban, who have ruled Afghanistan since their takeover of Kabul in August 2021, won a remarkable show of support for their opposition to any US military return to the country, from a broad swath of neighbours who otherwise rarely see eye-to-eye geopolitically.
At a meeting in Moscow, officials from Russia, India, Pakistan, China, Iran, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan joined their Taliban counterparts in coming down hard on any attempt to set up foreign military bases in Afghanistan. They did not name the US, but the target was clear, say experts.
“They called unacceptable the attempts by countries to deploy their military infrastructure in Afghanistan and neighbouring states, since this does not serve the interests of regional peace and stability,” said the joint statement (PDF) published by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on October 7 at the conclusion of the seventh edition of what are known as the Moscow Format Consultations between Afghanistan’s neighbours.
Pakistan, China, Russia and Iran had opposed “the reestablishment of military bases” in a similar declaration last month on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. But the Moscow communique brought together a much wider range of nations – some with competing interests – on a single page.
India and Pakistan have long vied for influence over Afghanistan. India also worries about China’s growing investments in that country. Iran has often viewed any Pakistani presence in Afghanistan with suspicion. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have long feared violence in Afghanistan spilling over into their territory. And in recent years, Pakistan has had tense relations with the Taliban – a group that it supported and sheltered for decades previously.
The confluence of these countries, despite these differences, into a unanimous position to keep the US out of the region reflects a shared regional view that Afghan affairs are a “regional responsibility”, not a matter to be externally managed, said Taimur Khan, a researcher at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI).
“Despite their differences, regional countries share a common position that Afghanistan should not once again host a foreign military presence,” Khan told Al Jazeera.
That shared position, articulated in Moscow, also strengthens the Taliban’s hands as it seeks to push back against pressure from Trump over Bagram, while giving Afghanistan’s rulers regional legitimacy. Most of their neighbours are deepening engagements with them, even though Russia is the only country that has formally recognised them diplomatically as the Afghan government.
A symbolic, strategic prize
The groundwork for the Afghan Taliban’s return to power was laid in Doha in January 2020, under Trump’s first administration; they ultimately took over the country in August 2021, during the tenure of the administration of former President Joe Biden.
Yet in February this year, a month after taking the oath for his second term, Trump insisted: “We were going to keep Bagram. We were going to keep a small force on Bagram.”
Bagram, 44km (27 miles) north of Kabul, was originally built by the Soviet Union in the 1950s. The base has two concrete runways – one 3.6km long (2.2 miles), the other 3km (1.9 miles) – and is one of the few places in Afghanistan suitable for landing large military planes and weapons carriers.
It became a strategic base for the many powers that have occupied, controlled and fought over Afghanistan over the past half-century. Taken over by US-led NATO forces after the invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks, Bagram was a central facility in Washington’s so-called “war on terror”.
Afghanistan’s rugged, mountainous terrain means there are limited sites capable of serving as large military logistics hubs. That scarcity is why Bagram retains its strategic significance, four years after the US withdrew from the country.
Kamran Bokhari, senior director at the Washington, DC-based New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, said he was sceptical about the US seriously planning any redeployment of forces to Afghanistan, despite Trump’s comments.
“The new US geostrategy is about military retrenchment. There is no appetite in Washington for any such military commitment, which would be a major logistical undertaking,” Bokhari told Al Jazeera. “Even if the Taliban were to agree to allow the Americans to regain Bagram, the cost of maintaining such a facility far outstrips its utility.”
At the same time, Bokhari said that the Moscow meet worked as an opportunity for Russia to show that it retains influence in Central Asia, a region in which its footprint has been eroded by the war in Ukraine and by China’s rising geoeconomic presence.
But the concerns about any renewed US footprint in Afghanistan aren’t limited to Russia, or even China, America’s biggest long-term rival. Amid heightened tensions with the US and Israel, Iran will not want an American military presence in Afghanistan.
But the concerns about any renewed US footprint in Afghanistan aren’t limited to Russia, or even China, America’s biggest long-term rival. Amid heightened tensions with the US and Israel, Iran will not want an American military presence in Afghanistan.
Other regional nations – India and Pakistan among them – are also eager to show that the neighbourhood can manage the vacuum created in Afghanistan by the withdrawal of US security forces, Bokhari said. Though a close partner of the US, India’s ties with Washington have frayed during Trump’s second term, with the American president imposing 50 percent tariffs on imports from India, in part because of New Delhi’s continued purchase of oil from Russia.
And then there are the Central Asian countries that share long, porous borders with Afghanistan – and fear their soil might be used by violent groups energised by any return of the US, militarily, to Bagram.
Central Asia’s security calculus
The four Central Asian countries that were part of the Moscow Format – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – together with Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, form a bloc of six landlocked nations whose geography gives them a unique vantage point in regional politics, while also compelling them to seek access to warmer waters for trade.
Analysts argue an American presence in the region would be “undesirable” for many of these nations.
“This is not knee-jerk anti-Americanism,” Kuat Akizhanov, a Kazakh analyst and deputy director of the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation Institute (CAREC) said.
“A US base would put host states on the front line of US-Russia-China rivalry. Moscow and Beijing have both signalled opposition to any renewed US presence, and aligning with that consensus reduces coercive pressure and economic or security retaliation on our much smaller economies,” Akizhanov told Al Jazeera.
He added that regional actors now prefer regional groupings such as the Moscow Format, or even the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) led by Moscow and Beijing, for cooperation on security and the neighbourhood’s stability, to any US presence.
What do the Taliban and Afghanistan’s other neighbours fear?
Many of Afghanistan’s bigger neighbours have their own concerns.
“They fear that a revived US military presence could potentially reintroduce intelligence operations, fuel instability, and once again turn Afghanistan into a proxy battleground,” Khan from the Islamabad-based ISSI said.
“This is the lens from which regional countries now view Afghanistan: a space that must be stabilised through regional cooperation and economic integration, and not through renewed Western intervention or strategic containment efforts,” he added.
For the Taliban, meanwhile, Trump’s Bagram demands pose a dilemma, say experts.
Ibraheem Bahiss, a Kabul-based senior analyst for Crisis Group, said he believed that Trump’s Bagram demand was primarily driven by the US president’s “personal inclination” rather than any consensus within the US strategic establishment. “There might be a sense that Afghanistan remains an unfinished business for him,” the analyst told Al Jazeera.
For the Taliban, surrendering Bagram is unthinkable. “Kabul cannot offer Bagram as it would antagonise their own support base and might lead to resistance against their own government if [the] US comes here,” Bahiss said.
At the same time, Bokhari, of the New Lines Institute, said that the Taliban know international sanctions are a major obstacle to governance and economic recovery, and for that, they will need to engage the West, and especially the US.
“The Taliban are asking for sanctions relief, but the question is, what do they offer? Washington is more interested in Central Asia, to which it does not have easy access to. The region is otherwise blocked by Russia, China and Iran,” he said.
Trump has cited Bagram’s proximity to China and its missile factories as a reason for wanting to take back control of the base. Bagram is about 800km (about 500 miles) from the Chinese border, and about 2,400km (about 1,500 miles) from a missile facility in Xinjiang.
“It is not in the US interest in allowing China to monopolise the region,” Bokhari said.
Against that backdrop, the Bagram demand might be a signal from the US that it is eager to explore new ways to do business with the Taliban, Bokhari and Bahiss agreed.
Washington isn’t the only one reaching out to the group, which until a few years ago was largely a global pariah. In fact, the US is late – the Taliban have already been making major headways, diplomatically, in its neighbourhood.
Engagement, not recognition
Since taking control of a country of more than 40 million people in August 2021, the Taliban have faced international scepticism over their style of governance.
Afghanistan’s rulers have imposed a hardline interpretation of Islam and have placed several restrictions on women, including limits on working and education.
International sanctions have further weakened an already fragile economy, while the presence of multiple armed groups – including Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) – continues to alarm neighbouring states. The Taliban insist that they do not support the use of Afghan soil to attack neighbours.
Pakistan, once seen as the primary benefactor of the Taliban, says it has grown increasingly frustrated over the past four years at what it sees as the Afghan government’s inability to clamp down on militants.
The year 2024 was one of the deadliest for Pakistan in nearly a decade, with more than 2,500 casualties from violence, many of which Islamabad attributes to groups that it says operate from Afghan soil, allegations rejected by Kabul.
On Wednesday, several soldiers were killed in an ambush by the TTP near the Afghan border in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Still, Pakistan upgraded diplomatic ties with the Taliban in May. That month, Afghanistan’s acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi hosted his counterpart from Pakistan, spoke on the phone with India’s foreign minister, and flew to Iran and China for summits.
Muttaqi was in Moscow for the recent regional consultations that produced the criticism of Trump’s Bagram plans, and on Thursday is due to arrive in New Delhi for a historic, weeklong visit to India, a country that viewed the Taliban as a Pakistan proxy – and an enemy – until a few years ago.
Bahiss said the compulsion for regional nations to deal with the Taliban is driven by shared, pragmatic goals, which include keeping borders calm, guaranteeing counterterrorism assurances, and securing trade routes.
Akizhanov, the CAREC analyst, meanwhile, said that the wider regional interaction with Afghan officials “normalise working channels [with the Taliban] and reinforces their narrative that regional futures will be decided locally, not by outside militaries”.
However, “legitimacy remains conditional in capitals of each country, hinging on counterterrorism guarantees, cross-border security, economic connectivity, and basic rights, especially for women and girls,” said the analyst, who is based in Urumqi, China.
ISSI’s Khan agreed.
