NATO allies urged to rethink alliance after Biden’s ‘unilateral’ exit from Afghanistan

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European allies had hoped that the election of Joe Biden to the presidency of the United States would reinforce the importance of NATO after the turbulent years of Donald Trump. Washington’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan is prompting a rethink.

After the fall of Kabul, EU defense and security officials blatantly criticized the US decision to send its troops home, arguing that it had weakened NATO and raised questions about Europe’s security dependence on Washington. Their reaction marks a bitter end to the coalition’s longest-running mission, which over two decades of fighting had turned into a training program of 10,000 personnel from 36 countries by the time it was over.

This kind of troop withdrawal caused chaos. “The chaos is causing additional suffering,” Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks told local radio on Tuesday. He added that such long-term missions are unlikely in the future, and added: “This era is over. Unfortunately, the West, and Europe in particular, is showing that they are weaker globally.”

He echoed Ben Wallace, Britain’s defense minister, who appeared close to tears on Monday as he thought “some will not return” from the war-torn country. “Something sad. Twenty years of sacrifice is what it is,” he said.

Armin Laschet, Germany’s conservative candidate to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel, on Tuesday called the Allied withdrawal “the biggest disaster that NATO has seen since its founding.”

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani shakes hands with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in Kabul in February last year © Stringer / Reuters

“It appears that NATO has been completely bypassed by unilateral American decisions,” said Lord Peter Ricketts, Britain’s former National Security Adviser. First and foremost, Trump’s decision to start talking to the Taliban about leaving and then Biden’s decision to set a timetable. The Afghanistan process was always going to end at some point, and it would never last forever, but the way it was done was humiliating and damaging to NATO.”

The NATO intervention in Afghanistan, prompted by the al-Qaeda-led 9/11 attacks on the United States, was the first and only time the alliance had invoked Article 5 of the Collective Defense Principle, whereby an attack on one ally is an attack on all. .

Nearly twenty years later, there have been cracks in the unit over how best to end “America’s Longest War”. As the Taliban surrounded Kabul on Friday, Wallace revealed that this year he has tried to put together a coalition of “like-minded” NATO countries that would keep some forces in Afghanistan independent of the United States.

Lord George Robertson, who was NATO Secretary-General on the day of the Twin Towers attack in New York, and who released the material five hours later, noted that the US decision to withdraw even as Allied objections escalated was prejudicial. He told the Financial Times: “It weakens NATO because it appears that the principle of ‘in together, abroad’ has been abandoned by both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Biden administration officials have been careful to consult with allies as they try to decipher Trump’s isolationist legacy. Regarding Afghanistan, some coalition members complain that Washington has given them a fait accompli.

“This was discussed at length, the United States listened to it, but Biden made a political decision,” said a person familiar with the withdrawal plan.

Once the decision was formally made, the UK, Turkey and Italy were eager to find a way to keep forces in place to help stabilize the country. But this was considered impossible without the formidable military infrastructure provided by the United States, particularly air support from the US-operated Bagram Air Base north of Kabul.

French soldiers stand near a military plane at Kabul airport on Tuesday as they prepare to evacuate French and Afghan nationals. © STR / AFP / Getty

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said, on Tuesday, that the collapse of the Afghan government raises doubts about Turkey’s plan to continue securing Kabul International Airport.

“We must realize that when it comes to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, neither Germany nor European forces could have had an independent role,” Merkel said on Monday. “We’ve always said that we rely primarily on the decisions of the United States government.”

A former military commander who served in Afghanistan said there were “significant implications” for perceptions of NATO’s deterrence capabilities.

“It’s very nice that NATO is talking about its ability to fight Russia, but it hasn’t even been able to find 3,000 to 5,000 troops to ensure Afghanistan is stable enough to impose a stalemate and eventually a ceasefire on the Taliban, without American support,” he said.

In its 2030 strategy, NATO set out a promise for deeper political coordination and a renewed commitment by its members to the 2 percent defense spending target. But the crisis in Afghanistan has highlighted unease about the lack of strategic focus.

“Afghanistan today is the thousandth expression of NATO’s failed and light-hearted policy,” Ioni Bellara, the leader of Podemos and Spain’s minister of social policy, wrote on Twitter.

Lilith Verstring, another senior Podemos official, argued that NATO’s failures provided further reason for Europe to move toward a more independent position of its own, one pushed by French President Emmanuel Macron. “It is time to shift towards greater sovereignty and defend our interests,” she said.

Asked on Monday whether NATO should move away from “state building,” Merkel agreed: “Objectives [of such deployments] It should be a lot narrower.”

Lord Mark Sedwill, who served as a former ambassador and senior NATO representative in Afghanistan, suggested this week that the alliance focus its efforts on rebuilding operational capabilities to intervene when necessary, “to avoid the overreach and impatience that has proven fatal to the Allies’ Afghan campaign.”

Robertson said the Afghan withdrawal may be a cautionary tale for NATO countries that failed to realize that US security guarantees were time-limited. “If this is a wake-up call for Europeans—that in the future they will have to protect their security much more than before . . . America’s global policeman will not necessarily be around all the time—then he will have served a purpose.”

Additional reporting by Daniel Dombey in Madrid, Victor Mallet in Paris, and Katrina Manson in Washington

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