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Senior US security officials will see how the failed war in Afghanistan could transform US relations in the Middle East when it meets key allies in the Persian Gulf and Europe this week.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will travel to the Gulf separately, departing on Sunday. You will speak to leaders who are central to US efforts to prevent resurgence of threats from armed groups in Afghanistan, some of whom have been partners in the 20-year war against the Taliban.
Together, Austin and Blinken’s trips are intended to reassure Gulf allies that President Joe Biden’s decision to end the US war in Afghanistan to focus more on other security challenges such as China and Russia is not an exit from the US Middle East partner predicts.
The US military has had a presence in the Gulf for decades, including at the headquarters of the Navy’s fifth fleet in Bahrain. Biden has not proposed ending this presence, but – like the Trump administration before him – he has identified China as a top security priority along with strategic challenges from Russia.
“There is nothing that China or Russia would prefer or want more in this competition than that the United States is stuck in Afghanistan for another decade,” said Biden in the hours after the last of the US troops had withdrawn.
Announcing his golf trip, Austin said at a Pentagon press conference that focusing on terrorist threats means relentless efforts against “any threat to the American people from anywhere,” even as the United States shifts its focus to strategic challenges posed by China.
Blinken is traveling to Qatar and will also stop in Germany to visit Afghan evacuees at the Ramstein Air Force Base, who are waiting to be cleared for entry into the United States. There he will take part in a virtual meeting with colleagues from 20 nations who are on their way to Afghanistan.
“The State Secretary will thank the German government for having been an invaluable partner in Afghanistan over the past 20 years and for German cooperation in transit operations that transport people from Afghanistan,” said spokesman Ned Price on Friday.
Austin plans to begin his journey by thanking the Qatar guides for their collaboration during the Kabul Airlift that helped clear an initially clogged pipeline of desperate evacuees.
In addition to allowing the US to use al-Udeid Air Force Base for handling evacuees, Qatar agreed to accept the US diplomatic mission, which withdrew from Kabul after the war. In cooperation with the Taliban, the Qataris also contributed to the reopening of Kabul Airport.
During a layover in Bahrain, Austin plans to speak to Marines who have spent weeks at the Kabul airport conducting a frantic and dangerous evacuation of Afghans, Americans and others. In a suicide attack on the airport on August 26, 11 Marines were killed and 15 injured. Numerous Afghan civilians and 13 US soldiers were killed in this attack.
The Pentagon chief also planned to visit Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and meet with high-ranking leaders in a region he knows well as a retired Army General and former head of the US Central Command responsible for all military operations there.
Saudi Arabia, in particular, was absent from the group of Gulf states that helped facilitate the US-led evacuation from Kabul Airport. Riad’s relations with Washington are strained, among other things, because of Biden’s efforts to revive a nuclear deal with Iran. Just days before the US withdrew from Afghanistan, the Saudis signed a military cooperation agreement with Russia.
Biden said his decision to leave Afghanistan after 20 years is part of a plan to flip a foreign policy approach since 2001 that he believes has kept the US military in Afghanistan for far too long. Allies in the Gulf, where extremist threats loom, want to know what the next US side of politics looks like.
In Europe, too, the allies are examining what the lost war in Afghanistan and its immediate consequences will mean for their collective interests, including the longstanding question of whether Europe should become less dependent on the US.
“We have to increase our ability to act autonomously when and where it is necessary,” wrote Josep Borrell, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, on Twitter on Thursday.
America’s European allies in NATO had more troops in Afghanistan than the United States when Biden announced in April that he would withdraw by September. The Europeans had almost no choice but to join the move as their combat strength was so far from home, and they largely relied on US air transport to get out, despite flying some of the evacuation missions.
Some NATO allies questioned the wisdom of Biden’s decision to withdraw, but it is uncertain that the Afghanistan crisis will weaken ties between the United States and Europe. In an essay, two European experts from the Center for Strategic and International Security – Rachel Ellehuus and Pierre Morcos – wrote that the crisis has revealed “uncomfortable truths” about transatlantic relations.
“For Europeans, it has exposed both their inability to change the United States’ decision making and their impotence to defend their own interests (e.g. evacuate their own citizens and allies) without Washington’s support,” they wrote .
Germany, Spain, Italy and other European nations allow the US to use their military bases to temporarily house Afghans who have been airlifted from Kabul but not approved for relocation to the United States or elsewhere.
Bahrain and Qatar have taken similar precautions. Together, these measures relieve the initially so acute evacuation from Kabul that the airlift had to be interrupted for several hours because there was no space for the evacuees.
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