Trump Wishes Americans Stayed in Afghanistan To Fight China

The president who helped end America’s longest war now regrets leaving behind U.S. bases.

Former President Donald Trump helped negotiate the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, ending America's longest foreign war. But now he believes that the United States should have kept its largest base in Afghanistan to help in a future conflict against China.

During this week's Republican National Convention, speaker after speaker has tried to transform "America First" from a slogan against overseas entanglements into a cry for more aggressive military force. And the gambit seems to have succeeded. A day after Trump's running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), condemned the war in Afghanistan as a failure, Trump himself called for using Afghanistan as a springboard to future conflicts.

"They also gave up Bagram [Airfield], one of the biggest bases anywhere in the world, the longest runways, most powerful, hardened, thickened runways. We gave it up," he said on Thursday night. "I liked it not because of Afghanistan. I liked it because of China. It's one hour away from where China makes their nuclear weapons."

China is known to have nuclear facilities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a province bordering Afghanistan, although the facilities themselves are around 1,000 miles away from the border.

Like all politicians, Trump wants to have his cake and eat it too. He also bragged at the convention that there were no Taliban attacks on American troops after he made a deal to withdraw the U.S. military from Afghanistan. But it's hard to see how the United States could have held onto Bagram without resuming the war.

Trump's speech appears to be mixing up two criticisms of the Biden administration's withdrawal. Before the withdrawal, some hawks in Congress argued that Afghanistan was strategically valuable to China and that it would therefore be a mistake to give up America's military presence there. After the withdrawal, other members of Congress questioned why the U.S. military evacuated forces only through Kabul International Airport rather than using the larger Bagram Airfield.

The Biden administration insists that it could not have evacuated people through Bagram Airfield safely.

"Retaining Bagram would have required putting as many as 5,000 U.S. troops in harm's way, just to operate and defend it," Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said at a September 2021 congressional hearing. "It would have contributed little to the mission that we had been assigned: to protect and defend our embassy some 30 miles away. That distance from Kabul also rendered Bagram of little value in the evacuation."

Austin added that "staying at Bagram—even for counterterrorism purposes—meant staying at war in Afghanistan."

As for using Afghanistan as a cudgel against China, the idea was promoted by Rep. Mike Waltz (R–Fla.) in the months before the withdrawal. "By abandoning Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, we will no longer have a U.S. airfield in a country that borders China," he wrote in a May 2021 op-ed for the Military Times, adding that the airfield would be useful in a war against Iran too.

Waltz also said that "American intelligence resources" based in Bagram could support Uyghur resistance to the Chinese government, comparing it to the U.S. support for Afghan and other Muslim rebels against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. "This campaign caused the Soviet military to divert divisions away from Eastern Europe to the Caucasus and Central Asia," Waltz wrote.

Ironically, that part of Waltz's argument highlighted exactly why holding onto Bagram would have been dangerous. The United States would be more like the Soviet Union in this scenario, pulling its forces away from the most important fronts to defend isolated outposts in hostile territory. In a war with China or Iran, the U.S. presence at Bagram would make it a lot easier for those countries to hit Americans than the other way around.

Many Republicans have tried to thread the needle, arguing that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was the right decision and criticizing Biden's execution of it. But Trump now seems to be under the sway of a different idea: that we should have kept troops in Afghanistan after all.