Trump wants Bagram back. The fortress of America’s longest war, the sprawling air base north of Kabul, the symbol of occupation and retreat. He calls it the mistake of mistakes to abandon it. He says it should be reopened, rearmed, reclaimed. The justification is familiar. Terrorism is rising. ISIS-K mounts attacks in Kabul and beyond. Al Qaeda whispers again in Afghan mountains. The Taliban are rulers but not governors. They cannot contain their factions. They cannot command legitimacy. Trump wants Bagram as the solution. He imagines it as a hammer to strike, a watchtower to surveil, a lever to project American will. But Bagram is no solution. It is a ruin. A trap disguised as an asset. A base without a strategy. A magnet for insurgents. A target more than a shield. America had Bagram for twenty years. Drones flew. Special forces raided. Intelligence networks hummed. And yet terrorism survived. The Taliban endured. ISIS mutated. Al Qaeda adapted. America left in failure. To want Bagram back is to want the illusion of control. Not the reality of victory. The terrorism conundrum is real. ISIS-K is growing. The Taliban are unreliable. Pakistan is playing its double game again. Islamabad presents itself as partner against terror, while its intelligence services provide sanctuary to factions, while its territory shelters fighters, while its economy lives off foreign cash delivered in the name of counterterrorism. Washington has known this for decades. It has looked away. It still looks away. Pakistan has been both arsonist and fire brigade. America has paid the bill anyway. Trump speaks of Bagram as if geography has no memory. As if the base could be reactivated without Pakistan’s cooperation, without supply lines through territory Islamabad controls, without dealing once more with the same duplicity that drained America before. Pakistan understands this. It knows America needs access. It knows terrorism in Afghanistan spills across the Durand Line. It knows its leverage grows each time Washington speaks of returning. Pakistan will take money. It will offer promises. It will sell access while it protects proxies. The double game will continue because America enables it. And human rights will vanish from the conversation. Washington claims to defend women, to defend freedoms, to defend dignity. But in practice it defends interests. It defends optics. It defends narratives. Afghan women were symbols when America invaded. They were symbols when America left. They are symbols again as Trump talks of returning. Yet in the villages where the earth shook, they were not symbols. They were bodies under rubble. They were voices unheard. They were casualties of an earthquake compounded by Taliban neglect, abandoned by a world that had once promised to never abandon them again. America speaks loudly of human rights when it serves a geopolitical purpose. It whispers when allies violate them. It stays silent when inconvenient. Women are buried in rubble and under decrees, and Washington’s debate is about bases, not about lives. Bagram becomes more important than Bamiyan, more important than Herat, more important than the women crushed in their homes. Human rights become slogans. Terrorism becomes the excuse. Pakistan becomes the partner in the double game. And Afghan lives are reduced to collateral in an endless cycle of intervention and retreat. The earthquake exposes the fragility of Afghanistan. Mud houses collapse. Rescue never arrives. The Taliban forbid women from learning, from working, from showing their faces. They also forbid them from receiving help, from being visible in suffering, from being counted in death. The world looks away. Trump looks at Bagram. The contrast is obscene. The United States insists it left because the war was unwinnable. Yet it still toys with returning, not for the people but for the optics of power, not to build but to bomb. This is not care. This is calculation. Washington will talk about human rights while partnering with Pakistan’s generals, while cutting deals with the Taliban when useful, while ignoring the rubble where women die. Human rights are rhetoric. Geopolitics is reality. And geopolitics demands bases, leverage, access, pressure. The United States is not unique in this hypocrisy, but it is loudest in its moral posturing. Bagram is the symbol. To return would be to reenter the cycle: Pakistan providing corridors, America providing cash, terrorism providing justification, women providing imagery, none of it producing stability. ISIS-K would strike again. The Taliban would posture again. Pakistan would manipulate again. America would abandon again. The earthquake would bury again. Nothing would change. Trump wants to believe that reclaiming Bagram restores deterrence. In truth it restores illusion. Illusion that America can control Afghanistan from the air. Illusion that terrorism can be bombed out of existence. Illusion that human rights are served by airstrikes. The reality is harder. Terrorism is born of chaos. Pakistan profits from chaos. The Taliban embody chaos. Afghan women suffer most in chaos. Bagram cannot fix chaos. It can only sit inside it, a fortress without a mission. Trump wants Bagram back. America may be tempted. But bases cannot replace policy. Bombers cannot replace dignity. Airstrips cannot replace justice. If America returns it will prove again that it values leverage more than lives, that it values symbols more than substance, that it values power more than people. Afghan women know this truth better than anyone. They are still under the rubble.