WASHINGTON (AP) – Top U.S. national security officials will see how the failed war in Afghanistan can transform U.S. relations in the Middle East as they meet this week with key allies in the Persian Gulf and Europe.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will travel to the Gulf separately, leaving on Sunday. They will speak with central leaders in U.S. efforts to prevent the resurgence of extremist threats in Afghanistan, some of whom were partners in the 20-year struggle against the Taliban.
Together, Austin and Blinken’s trips are meant to reassure Gulf allies that President Joe Biden’s decision to end the U.S. war in Afghanistan to focus more on other security challenges such as China and Russia do not predict the abandonment of American partners in the Middle East. . The U.S. military has had a presence in the Gulf for decades, including the headquarters of the Navy’s 5th Fleet in Bahrain. Biden has not suggested ending that presence, but he, like the Trump administration before him, has considered China the No. 1 security priority, along with Russia’s strategic challenges.
“There is nothing that neither China nor Russia would prefer, they would like more, in this competition for the United States to be trapped in Afghanistan for another decade,” Biden said in the hours following the departure of the last US troops. .
Announcing his trip to the Gulf, Austin told a Pentagon news conference that staying focused on terrorist threats means relentless efforts against “any threat to the American people from anywhere,” even though the states United puts a new focus on China’s strategic challenges.
Blinken travels to Qatar and will also stop in Germany to see Afghan evacuees at Ramstein Air Base awaiting permission to travel to the United States. While there, he will join a virtual meeting with 20-nation counterparts on the road to Afghanistan.
“The secretary will convey the United States’ gratitude to the German government for being an invaluable partner in Afghanistan for the past 20 years and for German cooperation in transit operations that will move people from Afghanistan,” the spokesman said Friday. Ned Price.
Austin plans to begin its journey by thanking Qatar leaders for their collaboration during the Kabul airlift that helped clean up an initially clogged pipeline of desperate evacuees. In addition to allowing the use of the al-Udeid air base for the U.S. processing of evacuees, Qatar agreed to host the U.S. diplomatic mission that withdrew from Kabul at the end of the war. Qataris have also lent a hand to help reopen Kabul airport in cooperation with the Taliban.
During a stop in Bahrain, Austin plans to talk to Marines who spent weeks at Kabul airport executing a frantic and dangerous evacuation of Afghans, Americans and others. Eleven Marines were killed and 15 were injured in a suicide attack at the airport on 26 August. This attack killed a total of 13 members of the US service and dozens of Afghan civilians.
The Pentagon chief also planned to visit Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and meet with senior leaders in a region he is well acquainted with as a retired army general and former head of U.S. central command with responsibility for all military operations there. .
Saudi Arabia was remarkably absent from the group of Gulf states that helped facilitate the U.S.-led evacuation of Kabul airport. Riyadh’s relations with Washington are strained by Biden’s efforts to reactivate a nuclear deal with Iran, among other issues. A few days before the US left Afghanistan, the Saudis signed a military cooperation agreement with Russia.
Biden said his decision to leave Afghanistan after 20 years was part of a plan to “turn the page” on a foreign policy approach since 2001 that he said kept the northern army afloat. American in Afghanistan too long. The Gulf allies, where there are extremist threats at the door, want to know what the next page of U.S. politics will look like.
Also in Europe, the Allies are assessing what the lost war in Afghanistan and its immediate consequences mean for their collective interests, including the question of years ago whether Europe should be less dependent on the United States.
“We must increase our capacity to act autonomously when and when necessary,” Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, wrote on Twitter on Thursday.
NATO’s American European allies had more troops in Afghanistan than the United States when Biden announced in April that it would withdraw in September. Europeans had little choice but to join the exit, given the limits of their combat power so far from home, and relied heavily on U.S. air transport to get out, although they did some of evacuation exits.
Some NATO allies doubted the wisdom of Biden’s withdrawal decision, but it is unknown whether the crisis in Afghanistan will weaken ties between the United States and Europe. In an essay, two of the European experts at the Center for Strategic and International Security Europe – Rachel Ellehuus and Pierre Morcos – wrote that the crisis reveals “inconvenient truths” about the transatlantic relationship.
“For Europeans, it has exposed both its inability to change the calculation of U.S. decisions and its inability to defend its own interests (e.g., evacuating its own citizens and allies) without Washington’s support,” they wrote. .
Germany, Spain, Italy and other European nations allow the United States to use its military bases to temporarily house Afghans who were airlifted from Kabul but who have not been approved for resettlement in the United States or anywhere else. Bahrain and Qatar made similar accommodations. Together, these agreements eased the pressure of the Kabul evacuation operation, which was initially so acute that the airlift had to be suspended for several hours because there was no place to accommodate the evacuees.