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US militaryTop US general says Afghan collapse can be traced to Trump-Taliban dealThe Doha agreement, signed in February 2020, set a date for the US to fully withdraw troops by May 202101:04A More
Foreign policyBoris Johnson will return from US energised despite achieving littleAnalysis: tangible gains were hard to come by but PM will have enjoyed the up close and personal politics Heather Stewart Political editorThu 23 Sep 2021 03.27 EDTLast modified on Thu 23 Sep 2021 03.28 EDTBoris Johnson has flown back to the UK after his transatlantic jaunt reassured about his personal relationship with Joe Biden after the pair sought to put the chaos of the Kabul airlift behind them with face-to-face talks in the Oval Office.The warm personal rapport that characterised Johnson’s relationship with Donald Trump – who called him “Britain Trump” – was not obviously on display as he and Biden briefly addressed the press before retiring for private talks. Biden told an involved anecdote about travelling more than a million miles on Amtrak, which US reporters revealed he has wheeled out on several other occasions.Once the press had been forcefully ushered out by White House media handlers, however, witnesses said the pair held constructive talks. They discussed expanding the Aukus pact – announced last week – into a broader alliance that could cover other areas of shared interest, including safeguarding human rights, technology and expanding open markets.And on Capitol Hill, Johnson took the opportunity to try to soothe concerns about the operation of the Northern Ireland protocol, saying he remained committed to the Good Friday agreement.But news that the UK has all but abandoned hopes of a bilateral free trade agreement with the US underlined the fact that to bond with Biden, Johnson has had to trim his ambitions to fit the president’s agenda.The arch dealmaker Trump used to boast about the prospects for a trade agreement with the UK, but Biden has a packed legislative agenda at home that will take precedence over trying to win congressional backing for a complex set of trade negotiations.As well as taking on China – essentially the purpose of the Aukus pact – the two countries are both committed to tackling the climate crisis, and in doing so, creating more green jobs in their own economies.Johnson’s hopes of securing a successful outcome to the Cop26 climate summit in November that keeps 1.5C of warming within reach took a significant step forward when Biden doubled the US’s contribution to climate finance. When the prime minister met Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, they were able to agree that the $11.2bn US climate pledge made it, as Johnson put it, “a great day for the world”.Other tangible gains from the visit were harder to come by: Johnson said he had won the backing of the president to lift the ban on British lamb exports, though consultations are ongoing and no formal decision has yet been announced.No 10 was also keen to claim credit for the lifting of the US travel ban, claiming a bilateral “travel taskforce” that has been operating since the summer had helped to change the Americans’ minds. But the changes apply equally to scores of countries.The UK government appeared to have had little warning that the decision would be announced on Monday morning, and was left scrambling to establish the details, including whether AstraZeneca jabs would be accepted under the new system.But Downing Street will be happy to bank the intangible benefits of a closer rapport with the US – and Johnson, no fan of Zoom calls, returns to the UK energised by three days of the kind of politics he likes best: up close and personal.TopicsForeign policyBoris JohnsonJoe BidenUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More
Analysis: Joe Biden has cleared the decks to focus on China. But how imminent is the danger?by More
FranceAukus deal showing France and EU that Biden not all he seemsAnalysis: the western alliance is the main victim – and China will win out unless US can soothe Paris’s anger Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editorThu 16 Sep 2021 12.09 EDTLast modified on Thu 16 Sep 2021 14.22 EDTFury in Paris at Australia’s decision to tear up plans to buy a French-built fleet of submarines is not only a row about a defence contract, cost overruns and technical specifications. It throws into question the transatlantic alliance to confront China.The Aukus deal has left the French political class seething at Joe Biden’s Trumpian unilateralism, Australian two-facedness and the usual British perfidy. “Nothing was done by sneaking behind anyone’s back,” assured the British defence minister, Ben Wallace, in an attempt to soothe the row. But that is not the view in Paris. “This is an enormous disappointment,” said Florence Parly, the French defence minister.As recently as August, Parly had held a summit with her Australian counterpart, Peter Dutton, in Paris, and issued a lengthy joint communique highlighting the importance of their joint work on the submarines as part of a broader strategy to contain China in the Indo-Pacific region. Given Dutton’s failure to tell his French counterparts of the months of secret negotiations with the US, the only conclusion can be he was kept out of the loop, was deeply forgetful, or chose not to reveal what he knew.There was no forewarning. France only heard through rumours in the Australian media that its contract was about to be torn up live on TV in a video link-up between the White House, Canberra and London.Moreover, the move was presented not only as a switch from the diesel-powered subs France was building to longer-range nuclear vessels, but as part of a new three-way security pact for the region that would develop new technologies. Perhaps someone had decided the French could not be trusted to join this alliance. Perhaps there were sensitivities around US-UK tech transfer in nuclear propulsion and the other areas of tech cooperation, such as undersea drones, artificial intelligence and quantum.To add insult to injury, Biden timed the announcement for the day before the EU was to publish its long-planned Indo-Pacific policy. The EU said it was not consulted in advance, although Pentagon officials said otherwise.Australia said it had given ample warning that design delays meant it could look elsewhere by September, and France’s Naval Group was in fact given until September to revise its plans for the next two years of the project.But in reality, Australia was already working on plan B with the US. To French eyes, Biden had showed – and not for the first time – that he will put the US national interest first.01:27The language emanating from Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French foreign minister and the man behind the original 2016 deal with Australia, is unprecedented. “This brutal, unilateral and unpredictable decision reminds me a lot of what Mr Trump used to do. I am angry and bitter. This isn’t done between allies. It’s really a stab in the back.”Emmanuel Macron, too, will be livid. He received Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, on 15 June at the Élysée Palace, referring to the contract for the 12 submarines as a “pillar [of] the partnership and of the relationship of trust between [the] two countries. Such a programme is based on the transfer of knowhow and technology and will bind us for decades to come.”Coming on top of the mishandled US exit from Afghanistan, a Nato operation in which allies had little say, France and the EU have come to terms with the fact that Biden is not all he seemed when he travelled to Brussels to promise America was back.Doubtless the US believes French ire will subside, or is a piece of artifice ahead of the French presidential elections. France is a major arms exporter, and the loss of an estimated €10bn (£7.25bn), once penalty clauses are included, hardly dents this industry. A state visit to Washington for Macron, a few contracts directed at the French Naval Group in Cherbourg, some Biden charm, an assurance that this was a purely Australian military decision based on a changed threat assessment, and all can be smoothed over.But that is not the language emanating from Paris or Brussels. France points out that the engine was designed specifically as a diesel to meet Australian specifications and it could have offered nuclear-powered subs. But France’s exclusion shows the extent to which the US does not trust it with nuclear technology. This is a big win for Boris Johnson, and those that said post-Brexit Britain would remain more important to the US than the EU, even if it is going to alarm the pro-China business lobby in the UK. Macron now has no option but to restate the case for greater European strategic defence autonomy, a subject less evidenced in real life than the seminars devoted to it. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on Wednesday promised in her state of the union address an EU defence summit, saying Europe has to acquire the political will to build up and deploy its own military forces.Senior US officials in briefing on the Aukus deal seemed unaware of the offence it would cause, blandly saying the alliance “is not only intended to improve our capabilities in the Indo-Pacific, but also to involve Europe, especially Great Britain, more closely in our strategy in the region”.Washington, if it is wise, will work flat out to convince France it can still be a partner in the Indo-Pacific. If not, the only long-term beneficiary will be China.TopicsFranceUS politicsChinaForeign policyAsia PacificanalysisReuse this content More
OpinionUS politicsWhy are Americans paying $32m every hour for wars since 9/11?Barbara LeeI was the sole member of Congress to vote against the war in Afghanistan. Congress has yet to stand up against endless militarism Thu 9 Sep 2021 06.19 EDTLast modified on Thu 9 Sep 2021 06.21 EDTOn 11 September 2001, the world witnessed a terrible attack against our nation that took thousands of lives and changed millions more lives forever. The events of that day fundamentally changed the way we view American national security. But the decision to plunge the US into a state of perpetual war was taken rashly, without the debate that such a momentous decision demanded.Twenty years on, the US and the world are much worse off for this failure of leadership. It is time to turn the page on two decades of endless war with a vague and ever-shifting mission. While this begins with removing the 2001 and 2002 authorizations for use of military force from the law books, it will also require decisive changes in our foreign policy decision processes and resource allocation.Shortly after the attacks, President Bush sent a 60-word blank check to Congress that would give him or any other president the authority to wage war against enemies of their choosing. It was a sweeping resolution known as the 2001 authorization for use of military force, or the 2001 AUMF. I was the lone vote in Congress against the authorization because I feared it was too broad, giving the president the open-ended power to use military force anywhere, against anyone.The human cost has been high: an untold number of civilian casualties overseas, two generations of American soldiers sent to fight without any clear objective or oversight and thousands of our troops and other personnel killed, wounded and traumatized in action.The Afghanistan war alone has cost more than $2.6tn taxpayer dollars and killed more than 238,000 individuals. The 2002 AUMF, which authorized war against Iraq based on fabricated claims of weapons of mass destruction, has cost $1.9tn and killed an estimated 288,000. Together, these two AUMFs have been used by three successive presidents to engage in war in at least seven countries – from Yemen to Libya to Niger – against a continually growing list of adversaries that Congress never foresaw or intended. The Bush, Obama and Trump administrations have further identified to Congress combat-ready counter-terrorism deployments to at least 14 additional countries, indicating that the AUMFs could justify armed combat in those places as well. Only 56 current members of the House and 16 senators were present at the 2001 vote, making a mockery of the constitutional principle that only the people’s elected representatives in Congress can send our country to war.The results today are a perpetual state of war and an ever-expanding military-industrial complex that consumes a greater and greater amount of our resources every year. Pentagon spending since 9/11 (adjusted for inflation) has increased by almost 50%. Each hour, taxpayers are paying $32m for the total cost of wars since 2001, and these wars have not made Americans safer or brought democracy or stability to the Middle East. To the contrary, they have further destabilized the region and show no sign of ending or achieving any of the long-ago stated goals.Additionally, many of these actions were essentially hidden from the American people by using funds from an account meant for unanticipated developments called overseas contingency operations. Congress appropriated nearly $1.9tn for this account, enabling continuing military actions and wars in several countries, exempted from congressional budget rules. Thankfully, President Biden ended this budget practice this year. But two decades of reliance on emergency and contingency funding sources has resulted in less oversight, less transparency and higher levels of waste.It’s time we end these forever wars. With a coalition of partners, allies and advocates both inside the halls of Congress and out, we are finally on the cusp of turning the page on this state of perpetual war-making.To begin with, I worked with colleagues on a bipartisan basis to urge President Biden to withdraw troops from Afghanistan swiftly and efficiently. He heeded our calls and undertook an evacuation operation unprecedented in its scale, while keeping our commitment to withdraw military occupation before 11 September. The ill-defined AUMF allowed the Afghanistan war to drag on for two decades, even after we had achieved the ostensible mission of eliminating the threat posed by al-Qaida to the United States. The challenges of our evacuation, and the fact that the Taliban could regain control of Afghanistan despite our 20-year war, merely underscore why Congress should not authorize open-ended military engagements.For that very reason, it’s not enough just to withdraw our forces. We must rein in executive power and keep it from being abused by any more administrations – Democratic or Republican. In my role on the Democratic platform drafting committee, I successfully advocated for including a repeal of the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs in the Democratic party platform. In a historic 268–161 vote, the House passed my legislation to repeal the 2002 AUMF in June, and the Senate foreign relations committee voted 14-8 in August to do the same, with both votes drawing bipartisan support. I am also calling on Congress to address the outdated 2001 AUMF. Any new authorization for use of military force must include safeguards to protect against overreach – including a clear and specifically defined mission objective, reporting requirements to increase transparency and accountability and a sunset clause or timeline within which Congress should revisit the authority – among other provisions.Congress must reclaim its constitutional duty to oversee matters of war and peace. In addition to repealing these AUMFs, we also need to revisit the broader statutes that govern war powers so that Congress can more effectively rein in presidential war-making – a project being pursued in earnest by my colleagues, Representatives Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Gregory Meeks (D-NY). But we need to go beyond just changing the law. We need to change our approach to the world, away from framing every challenge as one that requires military force as a response. When we use the frame of war to analyze the challenge of terrorism, we artificially limit the solutions available to us, crowding out the political and diplomatic approaches that offer the only real durable solutions for US security.Helping to build an equitable world that values inclusion and human rights won’t make terrorism disappear. But it would dramatically shrink the space for terrorist groups to operate and weaken the real grievances that they exploit. Not only that, but a US foreign policy based on supporting development and human rights would allow us to pursue a proactive strategy in line with progressive values, rather than one where America finds itself constantly in a militarized defensive crouch.A new foreign policy approach requires a significant reallocation of our resources to address the very real and immediate threats we face. The world is still confronting a global pandemic. Hundreds of millions of people are living in extreme poverty, with many more pushed out of the middle class by Covid-19. And the climate crisis looms over us, threatening every gain in human progress we have made over recent decades. It is unacceptable to continue to pour billions of dollars into the Pentagon when the real challenges we face require diplomatic and development solutions.A new and better approach also requires empowering our civilian foreign policy agencies to set the agenda. For too many years, we have outsourced our foreign policy to the Pentagon. The overwhelming human and financial resources that the Pentagon brings to foreign policy decision-making too often push diplomatic or development concerns to the background. Rebalancing the emphasis of our foreign policy will give us the opportunity to explore solutions that could be both more humane and more durable.The president has a role in fixing the errors of the past 20 years. But ultimately Congress must step up. For two decades, Congress has failed to exercise its constitutionally mandated role to conduct proper oversight, to make appropriate decisions about budgets and resource allocation, and – most importantly – to play the singular role the constitution assigns to us of making decisions about war and peace. The American people have made clear their preference for moving beyond endless war. Congress needs to hear their voice and act.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee is a member of the House appropriations committee, chair of the subcommittee on state and foreign operations, and co-chair of the House steering & policy committee. As a member of the House Democratic leadership, she is the highest-ranking Black woman in the US Congress
This essay is co-published with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law as part of a series exploring new approaches to national security 20 years after 9/11
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Dominic RaabYesterday’s war: why Raab did not foresee Afghanistan catastropheAnalysis: minister’s call log shows he had little interest in Afghanistan, prioritising India and south-east Asia Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editorFri 3 Sep 2021 10.38 EDTLast modified on Fri 3 Sep 2021 11.58 EDTDominic Raab has been reluctant to criticise Joe Biden, who has faced an unprecedented wave of criticism over the US exit from Afghanistan, partly because he always saw the decision as inevitable, and partly because in principle he instinctively sympathises with it.The foreign secretary is trying to position the UK as close as possible to the Biden administration, even though the criticism of the US president continues unabated from former British diplomats, politicians, security chiefs and military figures.Raab’s instinctive sense that Afghanistan was yesterday’s war, unlikely to flare up as a first order issue until next year, may also explain why he deputed the issue to a minister. There is surprise, for instance, that Raab took credit at the foreign affairs select committee for overseeing backchannel talks between Pakistan and Afghanistan over the last year. The talks were built on the personal initiative of the chief of the defence staff, Gen Sir Nick Carter, and depended on his relationship with the then Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, and Pakistan’s army chief of staff, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa.Dominic Raab seems to contradict PM by saying Taliban takeover was surpriseRead moreSenior sources in Pakistan said Bajwa had great respect for Carter but had never met Raab.Raab’s priority was great power competition, not terrorism, so his itinerary and call log reflects a deep interest in India and south-east Asia. That did not include Pakistan, let alone Afghanistan, explaining his previous failure to contact the Pakistani foreign minister.Indeed he told a select committee in October 2020 that he specifically excluded Pakistan from his definition of the Indo-Pacific.Raab explained this week that he and the UK ambassador to the US, Dame Karen Pierce, had concluded from presidential campaign rhetoric that the August troop withdrawal timeline was “baked in”. Biden had been a key sceptic of the US troop surge under Barack Obama. He had secretly visited Afghanistan and Pakistan at Obama’s instructions in January 2009, when he had furious discussions with both the Afghan and Pakistani presidents over the war. He had been accompanied on his trip by his now secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who like Biden saw nothing but muddled goals.The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) was historically more invested in the war, and according to one former UK ambassador to Afghanistan, Sherard Cowper-Coles, incurably optimistic. Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, tried hardest at Nato defence and foreign affairs meetings in the spring to see if support for a continued Nato mission in Afghanistan was possible without US involvement.That in part explains the briefing war between the Foreign Office, the MoD and others in the Cabinet Office. It was not just about the grip of the Foreign Office in rescuing those stranded in Afghanistan. The MoD believed in the mission, though Raab less so.Raab has not fully articulated his views on the 20-year war, possibly waiting in vain for a definitive lead from the prime minister. But he hinted at them at the select committee this week. He said: “From 2001 there are questions about what was the mission, how it adapted, have we at every stage reconciled our means and our ends, and what the exit looked like in a strategic way. There are lessons to be learned about the way a campaign primarily morphed from counter-terrorism into something more akin to nation building. We have to recognise the support domestically for these kinds of interventions has fallen away.”Raab has said he is sure the US will bounce back, but other senior diplomats, including many in Europe, are less sanguine. In the wave of relief at Donald Trump’s departure, there was collective misreading of Biden and his promise that the US was back. For Britain, the end of the honeymoon is especially acute.The former Nato secretary general Lord Robertson describes it as “a crass surrender”. The former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt sees a dangerous split in the transatlantic alliance, highlighting decisions imposed on the UK. The former cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill condemned “a bad policy badly implemented”. The former No 10 foreign policy adviser Tom Fletcher said: “We expected empathy, strategy and wisdom from Biden. His messaging targeted Trump’s base, not the rest of the world, and not allies, past or (we’ll need them) future.”The former UK ambassador to Washington Kim Darroch perceived a defeat and a humiliation. Another said: “The G7 looks like the G1. When the rest of the G7 asked for a few days’ delay, and even went public, Biden gave us nothing.”In Europe there is similar dismay. “We must strengthen Europe so that we will never have to let the Americans do it again,” exclaimed Armin Laschet, the CDU candidate for the German chancellorship.Not surprisingly, there is now return of fire in the US from the many supporters of Biden’s decision. Emma Ashford, a leading advocate of a new grand strategy of US restraint, said: “If this episode pushes America’s European partners to improve their own military capabilities for this kind of thing, I’ll be thrilled.” Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard, writes in Foreign Policy that he is “mystified” by “the anguish of Europeans, which sometimes borders on hysteria”, and irritated by their lessons on “moral responsibility”.Senior diplomats say the US relationship has been through these squalls before, and now that “over the horizon” terrorist spotting is becoming the new order, they believe the need for intelligence cooperation only grows in significance.But it is a sobering moment and may yet require Biden to explain himself at the UN general assembly this autumn.John Casson, a former foreign policy private secretary in No 10, recently checklisted what his five personal objectives in diplomacy had been, admitting disarmingly that it was a chastening list of failure. The goals were: “Stay and lead in the EU; help young Arabs get free of authoritarians; the Foreign Office innovative and impactful, not timid and transactional; be a development superpower; leave Afghanistan well.”At least he can now claim the set is complete.TopicsDominic RaabForeign policyUS politicsJoe BidenBiden administrationAfghanistanPakistananalysisReuse this content More
OpinionAfghanistanThe Guardian view on dealing with the Taliban: no good optionsEditorialStrategic failure has drastically reduced the west’s ability to influence the future course of events Mon 30 Aug 2021 13.30 EDTLast modified on Mon 30 Aug 2021 16.43 EDTAs the final evacuation flights leave Kabul, watched in despair by those abandoned and in peril, the lasting consequences of strategic failure must now be faced. During the Doha peace talks, American diplomats liked to talk of a process towards an inclusive political settlement that would be Afghan-led and Afghan-owned. The “process” turned out instead to be a victory procession for the Taliban. What comes now will therefore be Taliban-led and Taliban-owned. Hamstrung as a result of their own mistakes, the United States, Britain and their allies have little choice but to engage with the new reality.Belated attempts are being made to do so from a supposed position of strength. As the last British forces left Kabul at the weekend, Boris Johnson adopted a stentorian tone to warn: “If the new regime … wants diplomatic recognition or to unlock the billions currently frozen, they will have to ensure safe passage for those who wish to leave the country, to respect the rights of women and girls, [and] to prevent Afghanistan becoming again an incubator for global terror.” It seems clear that Taliban leaders hope to avoid the international pariah status of the 1990s and will soon be in desperate need of cash. Both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have suspended payments to Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, and the Afghan central bank’s reserves are frozen in the US. But the notion that, as China and Russia pursue their own agendas, the west can continue to call the shots and impose its terms is wishful thinking.Unfolding humanitarian crises will limit the scope for playing diplomatic hardball. Over the weekend it emerged that, despite the huge evacuation effort from Kabul airport, British government estimates of the number of vulnerable people left behind were far too low. There is no plan in place for what those left stranded should do now, and no route established yet for refugees to neighbouring countries. Demonstrating extraordinary negligence, the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, failed even to engage with his Pakistani counterpart until a week after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. On Monday, the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, began a diplomatic tour of countries bordering Afghanistan, including Pakistan, in the hope of securing refugee agreements which should have been negotiated months ago.According to a joint statement by the UK, the US and more than 90 other countries, the Taliban have given assurances that foreign nationals and Afghans with travel authorisation from other countries will be allowed to leave. This seems at odds with reports of house-to-house searches and the intimidation of those associated with the former government and western forces. But in the absence of any leverage in the country, America and its allies must simply hope that the Taliban’s calculation of their self-interest works in the west’s favour. Meanwhile, soaring food prices, prolonged drought in much of the country and the internal displacement of millions of refugees – many of them women and children – are already leading to appalling hardship as autumn and winter approach. It will be impossible to deliver to desperate Afghans the scale of humanitarian assistance required without some degree of cooperation and collaboration with the new regime.On Monday, the Kremlin called for Washington to release the Afghan central bank reserves on humanitarian grounds, while in a phone conversation with the US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, said that the international community should engage with the Taliban and “guide it actively”. By failing to link military withdrawal to conditions on the ground, the west no longer controls the course of events. In relation to the Taliban regime it inadvertently installed, it has no good options now.TopicsAfghanistanOpinionSouth and Central AsiaUS politicsTalibanForeign policyUS foreign policyeditorialsReuse this content More
OpinionUS newsGo back to Afghanistan? Men like McMaster and Panetta are addicted to warL More
