American soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan in 2013. Photo / Getty Images
For two decades, Bagram Airfield was the nerve centre of the United States-led counterterrorism campaign across Afghanistan and the main hub for Special Operations troops.
As US forces were withdrawing from Afghanistan in August 2021, the Afghan military that they had armed and trained collapsed.
The Taliban regained control of the country and, within weeks, the network of military bases the US had occupied over 20 years of war was lost.
In September, US President Donald Trump made a surprise demand for the regime to hand Bagram back.
He described the facility as “one of the biggest air bases in the world” and suggested it was “an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons”.
His comments drew a quick rebuke from the Taliban. Even before Trump’s remarks, the regime had deployed soldiers and spies to guard the airfield outside Kabul and other former US facilities.
After regaining control in 2021, the Taliban announced plans to turn the former US bases into hubs for their own soldiers and into special economic zones.
In propaganda footage posted on social media, the Taliban have depicted a flurry of activity at the bases, including troop exercises, aircraft maintenance and military parades.
But a Washington Post analysis of satellite images, open-source data and interviews with regional officials suggests that the cash-strapped and isolated regime has managed only limited use of many of the bases.
Officials now acknowledge they have virtually no economic use for the bases, but they maintain that their military is using the facilities.
The Post reviewed more than three dozen satellite images provided by Planet Labs and Vantor that were taken between early 2021, when the US still controlled the facilities, and this northern autumn, four years into Taliban rule.
While they reveal efforts at several bases to salvage spare parts for tanks, armoured vehicles and aircraft, they also show decoy aircraft. The number of actual high-value aircraft and weapons systems appears limited.
“A lot of the equipment they inherited doesn’t work,” said Asfandyar Mir, a senior fellow for South Asia at the Stimson Centre think-tank.
The Taliban Government’s efforts to shield Bagram from unwanted visitors and attacks are visible from space.
In the eastern and southwestern sections of the base, shipping containers that once served as offices, temporary housing and storage units have been moved, apparently to wall the base off from outside view.
It’s less clear what the Taliban are hiding. Satellite images indicate only minor military activity there over the past four years.
The tarmac at Bagram once teemed with US and Afghan warplanes. In their place now are images of aircraft painted directly on the pavement, apparently intended as decoys when seen from above.
They haven’t moved since the withdrawal, according to William Goodhind, a geospatial analyst at the research project Contested Ground, which uses satellite imagery to track armed conflict.
Initially, the Taliban regime hoped to use Bagram both for military and civilian purposes, with plans to establish special economic zones there.
But in a statement to the Post, a spokesman for the Taliban-run Ministry of Industry and Commerce acknowledged publicly for the first time that those plans are off.
“After technical evaluations,” spokesman Akhundzada Abdul Salam Jawad said, “we concluded that converting military facilities into economic centres would require a series of major demolitions and reconstructions - a process that would be both costly and damaging to our military sector.”
It’s a reflection, Mir said, of the Taliban’s broader struggle as they try to make Afghanistan’s aid-dependent economy self-sufficient.
“There are enough airfields,” he said. What the Taliban government really needs, he said, are trains and railway tracks to transport the minerals and rare earths it is hoping to extract for revenue.
US forces left more than US$7 billion ($12b) in military equipment with the Afghan National Army, the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported in 2023.
That included more than a quarter of a million rifles - enough to arm the entire US Marine Corps - and nearly 18,000 night-vision goggles, enough to outfit the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.
Many of these rifles and goggles have since appeared in neighbouring Pakistan, where they are increasingly carried by insurgents who have pledged allegiance to the Afghan Taliban regime’s leader, a Post investigation found this year. Pakistan accuses the Afghan regime of sheltering and supporting the militants; Kabul denies these accusations.
At the abandoned bases, the Afghan Taliban also found planes, helicopters and armoured vehicles that had been used by the Afghan Army.
Satellite images suggest “a concerted effort by the Taliban to centralise, assess and salvage its newfound fleet” in the years since, Goodhind said.
In Kandahar, home to a major air base vacated by the US in May 2021 and overrun by the Taliban, images show hundreds of vehicles grouped together in multiple compounds. Humvees that had probably been handed over to the US-backed Afghan Army were “gutted and their chassis piled in open ground”, Goodhind said.
At the Kabul Airport, images show the Taliban regime moving stored or scrapped aircraft to the aprons since 2021 - what Goodhind said was probably part of a similar effort to “consolidate all captured equipment and to cannibalise parts needed for repairs”.
Among the military aircraft that could be seen at the Kabul Airport in August were several A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft and UH-60 Black Hawk twin-engine utility helicopters, according to Goodhind and Sean O’Connor, lead satellite imagery analyst at Janes, a defence intelligence firm.
There also appeared to be several transport aircraft, including C-130 Hercules and Cessna 208 planes, and several Mi-17 Hip helicopters, the analysts said.
Officials and analysts in Pakistan are concerned about the reactivation of aerial assets by the Taliban regime.
While the Taliban government lacks skilled pilots and technicians, it is finding new ways to repair some aircraft by sourcing spare parts on the black market, a senior Pakistani official said.
Pakistani and Afghan forces clashed last month amid tensions over Islamabad’s accusations that the Afghan Taliban are sheltering Tehrik-e-Taliban, the militants who are waging a growing insurgency in Pakistan’s northwest.
The Taliban’s helicopters and close-support aircraft would be “useful when facing a minimally armed insurgency or aggressor”, O’Connor said, but not a nuclear-armed country with one of the world’s largest militaries such as Pakistan.
Syed Muhammad Ali, a Pakistani defence analyst, cautioned that the aerial assets still could help the Taliban “to quickly shift forces and equipment, and improve the speed of their mobilisation” if needed in an escalating conflict with Pakistan.
The Taliban’s Defence Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Under the Biden administration, US defence officials rejected responsibility for the abandoned equipment.
The Pentagon said last year that it had provided weapons and equipment to the Afghan Army after “careful end-user considerations including risks of enemy capture”. Officials said they had no intention of recovering the arms.
Trump believes otherwise. “I think we should get a lot of that equipment back,” he said in February.
While Kabul remains the Afghan capital, Taliban Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and other ideological leaders of the Taliban are based in the southern city of Kandahar.
As the Taliban have moved important government offices to the south, some of their most valuable military assets do not appear to have followed.
In recent satellite images, Goodhind said, “Kandahar seemed almost empty of aircraft”.
The sudden drop-in activity in Kandahar is visible from space even at night. Compounds that used to be illuminated around-the-clock now lie in darkness.
Kabul, by contrast, has remained “a hive of aviation activity”, Goodhind said.
In the eastern section of the Kabul Airport, the Taliban built 10 sentry towers in 2023 and 2024, significantly boosting security around the area that was targeted by an Isis suicide bomber during the US withdrawal in August 2021. The attack killed 13 US troops and an estimated 170 Afghans.
Islamabad views the Taliban’s focus on the Kabul Airport as a sign of weakness, the senior Pakistani security official said.
“They keep most aircraft in Kabul,” he said, “because they don’t have enough people or equipment to run many airfields.”
Others believe it’s a reflection of the Taliban regime’s internal power dynamics, with different factions controlling different parts of the security apparatus.
The Kandahar-based hardliners who lead the regime appear comfortably in control in conservative southern Afghanistan and may not need to pool their resources there, Mir said. They and their supporters are widely believed to be competing for power with the Haqqanis, a family-run faction of the Taliban that’s particularly active in the capital and east of the country.
“Controlling Kabul is key,” Mir said. A retreat from there “would leave the field open”.
- Shaiq Hussain and Haq Nawaz Khan contributed to this report.
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