From the moment American forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, President Trump has signalled a colonial ambition to reclaim strategic ground—most notably Bagram Air Base—underscoring a broader ambition of sustained U.S. dominance in the region. This impulse is inseparable from the neoconservative lineage rooted in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which championed military primacy and regime change as tools of U.S. global leadership. At stake is more than one airfield – it is the revival of a colonial mindset that treats foreign soil as an enduring instrument of American power, regardless of local sovereignty or human cost.
We’re Trying to Get it Back
On September 18, 2025, President Trump told reporters in England, “We’re trying to get it back,” referring to Bagram Air Base, America’s largest military installation in Afghanistan until it was lost to the Taliban in 2021. He justified the push on grounds of regional security, arguing that Bagram sits “an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons” and could serve as “a check on China” and other actors seeking to expand their influence in South Asia. This blunt declaration of intent reflects a worldview that sees military occupation as the primary safeguard of protecting America’s interests.
Project for the New American Century
The desire to re-establish a foothold at Bagram is not a novel phenomenon but the continuation of an agenda laid decades earlier by PNAC, a Washington think tank founded in 1997. Led by figures such as William Kristol and Robert Kagan, PNAC called for American leadership through unparalleled military strength and proactive use of force worldwide. Its 2000 manifesto urged the U.S. to ‘preserve and extend an American era of global leadership’ through modernised armed capabilities and, where necessary, direct intervention in regions deemed vital to U.S. interests. This warped framing sees the world as nothing more than a chessboard for America to place her pieces on.
PNAC’s doctrine provided intellectual cover for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq under President George W. Bush, insisting that the removal of unfriendly regimes would spread democracy and secure American hegemony. Scholars note that PNAC’s vision amounted to a new kind of colonial ambition masked as liberation, where military bases and political influence replaced formal empire. Robert M. Kagan later acknowledged PNAC’s policies were grounded in the conviction that U.S. ‘primacy’ was indispensable for global order—a conviction that still resonates in today’s calls to retake Bagram.
Under Trump, these neoconservative ideals have merged with a transactional view of foreign policy. His administration quietly tasked national security officials to explore options for a military return to Bagram, describing it as reclaiming ‘what we built’ and lamenting that it was ‘given to the Taliban for nothing’ following the US 2021 withdrawal. Three sources familiar with internal discussions told CNN that Trump consistently pressed for planning to re-seize the base—even as regional partners and Washington’s own diplomats warned against such a move.
The Murder of Dilawar
The moral and legal implications of retaking Bagram cannot be divorced from its dark history. In 2005, The New York Times obtained a 2,000-page U.S. Army investigatory report on homicides and widespread abuse at the Bagram Theatre Internment Facility. Two civilian detainees—Habibullah and Dilawar—were chained to the ceiling of a temporary holding cell, and repeatedly beaten until they died. Autopsies described injuries akin to being run over by a bus. Military coroners ruled both deaths homicides, and seven soldiers were charged over the abuses.
Dilawar was a 22-year-old taxi driver and farmer from Yakubi village in Khost Province, Afghanistan. In early December 2002, he was detained by U.S. forces after dropping off three passengers near a U.S. checkpoint. Wrongly believing him to be an insurgent courier, soldiers took him to the Bagram Collection Point, the U.S. military detention facility at Bagram.
Dilawar arrived shackled, and was subsequently held in an outdoor temporary cellblock where Afghan detainees were funnelled through narrow sally ports for processing. Without formal charges or access to legal counsel, he joined hundreds of other prisoners subjected to interrogation by U.S. military intelligence.
Over the next five days, guards repeatedly chained Dilawar by his wrists to the ceiling beams—so tightly that his feet hardly touched the ground—and beat him with rifle butts. They also punched, kicked, and verbally abused him. Autopsies conducted after his death revealed massive fractures to both legs and extensive internal trauma. Military coroners ruled his death a homicide.
Dilawar’s killing sparked a U.S. Army investigation into prisoner abuse at Bagram. Seven soldiers faced charges ranging from assault to negligent homicide, but none were convicted of killing him. His case became the centrepiece of the academy award–winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, which highlighted how U.S. interrogation policies at Bagram led to civilian deaths and systemic human rights violations.
Despite Dilawar’s notoriety as a symbol of U.S. abuses in Afghanistan, almost nothing is publicly documented about his surviving family members. No official records identify his widow, children, or other relatives by name. Human rights groups and journalists have reported that his extended family remain in Yakubi village, coping with economic hardship.
Dilawar’s story forms part of a pattern of US human rights abuses. Those tortured at Bagram paint a gruesome portrait of American brutality. Ex-detainees recount being confined in small, windowless cells, subjected to electric shocks, sexual humiliation, and systematic beatings.
Re-occupying a site stained by documented war crimes reveals the transactional heart of Trump’s ambitions – military dominance eclipses moral or legal accountability. The very notion of returning to Bagram without addressing the legacy of torture signals a refusal to confront the human cost of America’s international meddling. It treats Afghan lives as expendable collateral, a hallmark of colonial rule that subordinates indigenous autonomy to the imperatives of a foreign power.
Moreover, calls to re-occupy Bagram ignore the broad regional consensus against any foreign military deployment. Russia, China, India, and Iran have all expressed unified concern that re-establishing U.S. bases in Afghanistan will reignite conflict, destabilise neighbouring states, and perpetuate cycles of intervention and insurgency. Taliban leaders have categorically rejected surrendering their sovereignty over Bagram, insisting that Afghans will never allow their land to be handed over ‘under any circumstances’.
Colonialism Redux
Trump’s persistence reveals more than personal nostalgia for American bases – it reflects an enduring ideological commitment to projecting power wherever U.S. interests are perceived to be at risk. By framing Bagram as a lever against China or a beacon of American security oversight, he perpetuates the PNAC-inspired narrative that military might is the ultimate guarantor of American authority. Yet this approach neglects the lessons of a failed occupation — where self-determination and sovereignty eventually won out despite coalition powers spending more than $2 trillion in their attempts to deny Afghans their independence.
In seeking to re-occupy Bagram, Trump is resuscitating the very colonial paradigm that has repeatedly failed – imposing control over foreign territory in the name of self-seeking American interests, while discounting the sovereignty and dignity of the territory’s inhabitants. Trump’s fetish with Bagram is at odds with the Afghan people’s hard-won autonomy, and calling for a return to Bagram will prove no more than a replay of colonial misadventure. And sadly, it will be the Afghans who pay the price.
—- © 2025 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
