Published on: September 23, 2025 2:53 AM

We begin with a prayer for sound judgment and for the protection of innocent lives: May those who hold the levers of power choose restraint over rashness, and may the suffering of ordinary families be spared the thunder of renewed war.

President Trump’s recent declaration that the United States “wants [Bagram] back” – and his warning that “bad things are going to happen” if the demand is not met – is not merely a rhetorical flourish. It is a public ultimatum aimed at a sovereign state now governed by a regime that has repeatedly insisted on its independence and territorial integrity. To speak of “getting it back” without acknowledging the scale of what that implies is to invite a darkness of consequence that cannot be measured simply in dollars or troop rotations.

Any serious attempt to retake and hold Bagram would require a force posture that looks very much like re-invasion.

This urgency – presented as if the cost could be traded away for strategic advantage – deserves a sober pause. Ask plainly: why, at this perilous moment, should the United States risk lives and treasure to re-establish control over a base it abandoned amid humiliation just four years ago? The calculus offered is blunt and chilling: the perceived need is to neutralize threats before they can reach Israel, to blunt Iranian influence that allegedly “barters” through Afghan soil, and to deter Pakistan’s conventional and nuclear capabilities from shaping the outcome of conflicts in the Middle East. That rationale, if true, places Israel’s security at the center of an American sacrifice that would demand fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers be risked abroad – a moral choice that must be argued openly, not imposed as an offhand strategic fait accompli. The president’s public boast that the base “belongs to those that built it” treats sovereignty like a ledger entry rather than a........

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