Summit leaves West’s credibility on the line
The “virtual” G7 summit meeting to discuss the debacle in Afghanistan cannot have been easy for Boris Johnson to chair. Beneath the diplomatic niceties, most of the participants were seething at the position in which they had been placed by Joe Biden’s rushed withdrawal. Since this began as a Nato operation back in 2001, the Americans should have consulted widely with their partners about the timings and mechanisms for leaving.
In advance of the discussions, journalists were briefed that Mr Johnson would press the US leader to extend the deadline from August 31, but he refused to budge, exemplifying the scale of the estrangement. In fact, the question of an extension to military operations had become somewhat moot because the Taliban had also rejected it and they effectively hold a veto since they run the country.
As a compromise, Mr Johnson said the G7 expected the evacuation to continue beyond August 31, presumably as a civil aviation operation, to ensure the safe passage of all who want to leave. He said the West could bring “huge leverage” to bear on Afghanistan in terms of financial, political and diplomatic (though no longer military) help or hindrance depending on how they reacted.
Mr Johnson said those guaranteed safe passage should include Afghan nationals who feared for their lives because they worked with Nato forces. But at an earlier news conference, Zabihullah Mujahid, the new government’s spokesman, said that while said embassies would remain unmolested and foreign nationals were free to leave, Afghans would not be permitted to do so. How their egress will be enabled once all troops have left is not clear.
The immediate business of the G7 talks concerned the urgency of the situation in Kabul, but there are wider geopolitical issues that will need to be addressed when the dust eventually settles. Regionally these are to do with diplomatic recognition of the new government in Kabul and its inevitable pivot towards China, which has its eye on the country’s rich mineral wealth.
Internationally, there is the question of America’s global role and whether it can any longer be considered a reliable ally by European countries given the insularity exhibited by the last three presidents, starting with Barack Obama. The latter was much more interested in a pan-pacific foreign policy and, in line with the “America First” approach adopted by his two successors, felt Europe was not pulling its weight, financially or militarily, within Nato. President Biden makes a valid point that the Americans supplied 90 per cent of the troops, money and equipment committed to Afghanistan over the past 20 years. The Europeans have relied for too long on an expectation of continuing American support. That was not a justification, however, for the US to cut and run to its own timetable.
But it is too easy to blame the Americans for everything. The UK and Nato partners should have prepared better for the eventual reconquest of Afghanistan by the Taliban by speeding up the processing of visas and other entry requirements for would-be asylum seekers.
As Mr Johnson said, a lot has already been done against the odds and in difficult circumstances. The RAF plans to evacuate more than 6,000 people this week, in addition to the 9,000 already airlifted out. But even if the speed of the Taliban takeover caught everyone unawares, the exit plans should have been ready to implement immediately given the likelihood of such an eventuality. This is not hindsight: those fearful for Afghan interpreters attached to British forces have been saying for months, if not years, that bureaucratic delays were putting lives at risk.
Instead of an orderly withdrawal, we have the fiasco of last-minute efforts to identify people who qualify for refugee status and then extract them from under the noses of the Taliban, who would dearly love to get their hands on them, notwithstanding protestations that the “past is forgotten”.
After the G7 talks, the Taliban still hold all the cards. A great deal of Western credibility, and the safety of thousands of Afghans, is now being staked on the group’s leadership taking a more pragmatic view of the world than anything we have seen from them before.