The meeting of NATO defence ministers and Munich Security Conference has left unanswered the question over whether the Biden administration will bring remaining U.S. troops home from Afghanistan by May 1, in accordance with the U.S.-Taliban agreement. The ambiguity of European and U.S. statements following the meeting may be intended to pressure the Taliban and Afghan government back to the negotiating table. But indecision this close to the deadline risks throwing away a one-time opportunity to leave Afghanistan.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s remarks at the NATO meeting assured partners that the “U.S. remains committed to a diplomatic effort to end the war,” but also that the United States will not take a “hasty or disorderly withdrawal” from Afghanistan after nearly twenty years. As a result, the Biden administration is pushing itself into a corner in which it will likely forfeit a one-time opportunity to leave by May without having to broker a new understanding with the Taliban, a path which would be fraught with risk and uncertainty.
The consequences of unilaterally ignoring the May withdrawal deadline will be the dissolution of the U.S.-Taliban agreement, placing U.S. soldiers back in the crosshairs of the Taliban, and an end to intra-Afghan negotiations. A peace agreement between the Taliban and the Afghan government may be unlikely if the United States leaves, but it is dead on arrival if Washington chooses to ignore the deadline altogether.
An endless U.S. war effort will be left as the only remaining option. The passing of the withdrawal deadline will coincide with the beginning of the Taliban’s fighting season and violence will surge even more. This will lead to calls in Washington to cease diplomatic outreach with the Taliban and increase troop levels. If President Biden resists these calls and instead seeks to leave Afghanistan, then any date he chooses will be labeled as “arbitrary” since the May deadline will have passed. This will most likely lead to a doubling down of the counterinsurgency effort of the last twenty years.
NATO partners may also pressure Biden to remain in Afghanistan. The NATO mission in Afghanistan known as Resolute Support was intended as a training mission and that largely remains the case for countries like Germany and Italy. But the majority of combat missions are U.S.-led and the Pentagon provides twice as many troops as the next largest NATO contributor which is Germany. The United Stateshas accounted for 67 percent of all coalition deaths throughout the war in Afghanistan with the U.K. and Canada accounting for the majority of the rest.
The NATO mission in Afghanistan remains a U.S.-led war and it is therefore reasonable for President Biden to pursue an exit that advances U.S. interests. Still, it is crucial that Washington provide partners who have supported Washington in Afghanistan adequate time to withdraw their own remaining troops. This is why the Biden administration should make it clear to NATO sooner rather than later that it is leaving Afghanistan.
Policy reviews are important but the world does not stop spinning as they occur nor do the opportunity costs. Regional diplomacy to push the Taliban toward a ceasefire and Kabul toward an interim government appears to be underway. The Biden administration should participate in such initiatives. But it should not use U.S. troops as a source of coercive leverage in diplomatic efforts because ultimately that runs counter to the goals of diplomacy. Now is the time to bring U.S. troops home before it is too late.
Adam Weinstein is Deputy Director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute, whose current research focuses on security and rule of law in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden during a tour of the largest military training facility in Afghanistan in 2011. (Photo by Chief Petty Officer Brian Brannon/public domain)|Afghan national army Chief of Staff Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi meets Vice President Joe Biden during a tour of the largest military training facility in Afghanistan in 2011. (
The RAND corporation’s Samuel Charap and Johns Hopkins University professor Sergey Radchenko published a detailed timeline and analysis of the talks between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators just after the Russian invasion in February 2022 that could have brought the war to an end just weeks after it had begun.
Much of the piece confirms or elucidates parts of the narrative that had previously been reported. In the spring of 2022, the two sides appeared relatively close to a deal, one that, according to the authors, would “have ended the war and provided Ukraine with multilateral security guarantees, paving the way to its permanent neutrality and, down the road, its membership in the EU.”
But due to a combination of changing battlefield dynamics that convinced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he could win the war militarily, Western allies’ hesitance to engage diplomatically with Russia and simultaneous ramping up of military support for Ukraine, and the discovery that Russian forces had committed atrocities in Bucha, the talks eventually fell apart.
On some of these points, the authors contend that earlier accounts have been overstated. The idea that the U.S. and the UK “forced” Zelensky to back out of peace talks is “baseless,” say Charap and Radchenko, though they acknowledge that “the lack of Western enthusiasm does seem to have dampened his interest in diplomacy.”
On the suggestion that the discovery of war crimes convinced the Ukrainian president to abandon negotiations, the authors note discussions “continued and even intensified in the days and weeks after the discovery of Russia’s war crimes, suggesting that the atrocities at Bucha and Irpin were a secondary factor in Kyiv’s decision-making.”
But taken together, these factors, along with certain details of the agreement that were never finalized, were enough to imperil the negotiations.
In the two years since Ukrainian and Russian interlocutors last convened, the realities on the ground have changed. By April 2022, Vladimir Putin had likely realized that he would fail to achieve his most maximalist war aims. Now, with Western aid stalled and the war tilting in Moscow’s favor, Ukraine is in a less favorable negotiating position than it was and Russia may be less inclined to enter talks.
But, as George Beebe and Anatol Lieven detail in a recent Quincy Institute paper, all sides still have a reason to pursue a diplomatic solution, one that could both end the war and provide for a new European security architecture once the fighting ceases.
As Charap and Radchenko note in their Foreign Affairs piece, one of the reasons the original talks broke down was because the two sides were more focused on the broader endgame rather than on shorter-term solutions.
“A final reason the talks failed is that the negotiators put the cart of a postwar security order before the horse of ending the war,” they write. “The two sides skipped over essential matters of conflict management and mitigation (the creation of humanitarian corridors, a cease-fire, troop withdrawals) and instead tried to craft something like a long-term peace treaty that would resolve security disputes that had been the source of geopolitical tensions for decades.”
The two years of war have only increased distrust between Russia, Ukraine, and Kyiv’s Western backers, and diplomacy appears to be more difficult today than it was in 2022. But, say Charap and Radchenko, Zelensky and Putin surprised us once before with the concessions they may have been willing to make, and perhaps they will do so again.
The consequences of that failed first effort at diplomacy are clear, as Thomas Graham, former senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff, argued this week.
“The great tragedy of the Russian-Ukrainian war is that it will ultimately prove to have been futile. The likely outcome — territorial adjustments in Moscow’s favor, security guarantees for Ukraine and Russia — could have been peaceably negotiated beforehand had leaders had a firmer grasp of the real balance of power or greater political courage,” he wrote in the Hill. “The cost of failed diplomacy is already hundreds of thousands of lives lost and hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of property destroyed.”
In other diplomatic news related to the war in Ukraine:
— After months of waiting, the House may hold a vote to give Ukraine another tranche of aid over the weekend. On Wednesday, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) introduced four separate bills, including one that will provide approximately $60 billion in aid for Kyiv. The House Speaker is already facing backlash from members of his own party, but the legislation is likely to have enough bipartisan support to pass if it is brought to the floor for a vote.
— There are reportedly increasing points of tension between Washington and Kyiv as Ukraine awaits more aid and its war effort falters. Zelensky was frustrated that Washington has not offered his country the same missile defense help as it provided to Israel during Iran’s strikes over the weekend. “European skies could have received the same level of protection long ago if Ukraine had received similar full support from its partners in intercepting drones and missiles,” Zelensky wrote in a post on X. “Terror must be defeated completely and everywhere, not more in some places and less in others.”
Moreover, Kyiv has expressed frustration over Washington’s recommendations that Ukraine not strike Russian oil refineries, according toThe Washington Post. Vice President Kamala Harris reportedly privately made the suggestion to Zelensky in February at the Munich Security Conference.
“The request, according to officials familiar with the matter, irritated Zelensky and his top aides, who view Kyiv’s string of drone strikes on Russian energy facilities as a rare bright spot in a grinding war with a bigger and better-equipped foe. Zelensky brushed off the recommendation, uncertain whether it reflected the consensus position of the Biden administration, these people said.” according to the Post. “Instead of acquiescing to the U.S. requests, however, Ukraine doubled down on the strategy, striking a range of Russian facilities, including an April 2 attack on Russia’s third-largest refinery 800 miles from the front.”
— Russia and Ukraine nearly struck a deal late last month to renew the agreement that allowed for the safety of shipping in the Black Sea before Kyiv suddenly pulled out, according to Reuters.
“A deal was reached in March ‘to ensure the safety of merchant shipping in the Black Sea’, and though Ukraine did not want to sign it formally, Kyiv gave its assent for Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan to announce it on March 30, the day before critical regional elections, the sources said,” reports Reuters. The reason for Kyiv’s withdrawal is unclear. Russia and Ukraine previously struck a deal to allow for safe shipping in June 2022 but Moscow withdrew from that agreement after one year.
U.S. State Department News
In a press briefing on Wednesday, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel urged the House to pass the aid bill for Ukraine quickly.
“So it certainly would not be hyperbole to say that every day matters, and the House, we believe, needs to act this week to support Ukraine and Israel as they respectively defend against Putin and the Russian Federation and the Iranian regime. And so this is something that we need Congress to provide urgently,” Patel said.
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L-R: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands after their meeting at the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem, on Monday, January 30, 2023. DEBBIE HILL/Pool via REUTERS
State Department leadership is ignoring a recommendation from an internal panel to stop giving weapons to several Israeli military and police units due to credible allegations of serious human rights abuses, according to a major new report from ProPublica.
The alleged violations, which occurred before the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, include extrajudicial killings, sexual assault of a detainee, and leaving an elderly Palestinian man to die after handcuffing and gagging him. Secretary of State Antony Blinken received the recommendation in December but has yet to take action to prevent the units involved from receiving American weapons.
The bombshell ProPublica report comes just two weeks after White House spokesperson John Kirby insisted to reporters that the Biden administration has yet to see credible allegations of Israeli human rights abuses, despite widespread concerns from human rights groups and aid organizations.
“The State Department has a process, and to date, as you and I are speaking, they have not found any incidents where the Israelis have violated international humanitarian law,” Kirby said. “Unless you think we don't take this seriously, I can assure you that we do.”
“The State Department has looked at incidents in the past and has yet to determine that any of those incidents violate international humanitarian law,” he continued.
The report gives remarkable insight into the ways in which Israel receives unique treatment from U.S. officials in addition to its already privileged status under U.S. law. As ProPublica notes, allegations of Israeli human rights abuses are investigated by a special panel known as the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum (ILVF).
The ILVF’s title is a reference to the Leahy Laws, which prevent units of foreign security services from receiving U.S. weapons if they are found to have committed significant violations of international law. For most states, this vetting process is straightforward and sometimes results in sanctions against specific units, with little input from top-level officials.
But not for Israel. Unlike with other states, Israeli officials are consulted by the ILVF during the vetting process. If the panel finds credible evidence of abuses, then their recommendation is passed onto a group of higher-level officials in Middle East and arms transfer policies. It’s there that the allegations are usually blocked, according to Josh Paul, a former State Department weapons transfer official who resigned in protest last year.
“It's at that point, typically, that the process grinds to a halt, whether it is from the leadership of a bureau involved in the process or sort of a higher level guidance that, ‘Hey, this isn't gonna go anywhere. Let's move on to the next thing,’” Paul told RS last year.
Remarkably, the recommendations revealed by ProPublica made it past this step, meaning that powerful State Department officials endorsed the sanctions before they reached Blinken’s desk. This suggests a greater level of internal anger over alleged Israeli abuses — and a greater willingness among top officials to flout U.S. law — than has previously been reported.
The State Department told ProPublica that the allegations require a “careful and full review,” adding that “the department undergoes a fact-specific investigation applying the same standards and procedures regardless of the country in question.”
The recommendations come as a growing number of Western states have cut off arms sales to Israel due to its actions in Gaza, where a months-long Israeli campaign against Hamas has left more than 34,000 Palestinians dead and many more on the brink of famine. Belgium, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain have all cut off arms sales, and British government lawyers have reportedly recommended to their leadership that it should do the same.
U.S. lawmakers are also scrutinizing sales to Israel following its actions in Gaza. Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) — the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee — has placed an informal hold on a long-term deal that would send F-15 fighter jets to Israel.
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US Army Special Forces soldiers assigned to 10th Special Forces Group move out on skis into the Swedish Arctic on 23 February 2022. (NATO)
As NATO commemorated its 75th anniversary this month, the direction of the alliance’s posture toward the Arctic region has been called into question.
The recent accession of Sweden means that seven of eight of the world’s Arctic nations fall under NATO’s security umbrella, with Russia being the outlier. While some analysts see the addition of Sweden and Finland as an opportunity for NATO to “increase its footprint” and “deter Russia,” the last thing the alliance needs is to scour for another avenue for confrontation with Russia.
Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership undoubtedly affects the alliance’s influence in the Arctic. In March, over 20,000 NATO soldiers from 13 nations, including Finland, Sweden, and the United States, participated in the latest leg of the ongoing Nordic Response 2024 exercise in Norway. Additionally, over 50 frigates, submarines, and other vessels, as well as over 100 aircraft, were involved in the exercise. Ultimately, Nordic Response 2024 will involve over 90,000 troops from all 32 NATO allies.
Defensive exercises are a necessary feature of NATO’s newly increased Arctic presence, but the Russian threat in the Arctic should not be inflated.
The Arctic served as a frontline in the confrontation between NATO and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Over several decades, Russia has revitalized Soviet-era Arctic bases, which outnumber NATO’s by about a third. In recent years, Russia has launched significant investment projects and built up its military presence in the Arctic as it develops a crucial northern maritime route linking Asia and Europe. The United States only has one operational heavy icebreaker — compared to the 40 that Russia currently maintains.
Irrespective of hawks sounding the alarm about Russia’s supposed “militarization” and “dominance” of the Arctic, Russia retains a relative incapacity to threaten a conventional military land incursion into European Arctic territory. Moscow’s military efforts in the Arctic have been mainly defensive in nature as it has established multi-layered anti-access, area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities around the Kola Peninsula, a fundamental Russian interest.
Such developments pose little threat to the United States and its NATO allies, especially as Russia is bogged down in Ukraine.
Moreover, given that Russia’s Arctic coastline is ten times longer than America’s, the “icebreaker gap” is to be expected. Russia’s fleet of icebreakers is primarily dedicated to escorting commercial shipping through dangerous polar seas. Otherwise, it performs the same missions as the U.S. Coast Guard: “search and rescue, anti-smuggling, oil spill response, and resupply of remote coastal communities and polar research stations.”
Regarding force projection capabilities, the American-dominated NATO nuclear submarine fleet outmatches the opposing Northern Fleet of the Russian navy.
On top of NATO’s military capabilities, the alliance’s most influential member, the United States, has placed little military importance on the Arctic. Russia’s inability to pose severe threats in the Arctic has led to the region appearing at the bottom of the list in the 2022 Biden-Harris National Security Strategy (NSS) overview of regional policies. In addition, the document lacks any language regarding deterring threats to Arctic allies and partners.
Rather than seeing the addition of Finland and Sweden as an opportunity to increase the militarization of the Arctic, NATO should work toward utilizing working groups like the Arctic Council to forge multilateral arrangements to reduce tensions, avoid crises, and mitigate the risks of conflict through an accident or miscalculation.
In February, Russia suspended annual payments to the Arctic Council until "real work resumes with the participation of all member countries.” Yet, while Russia removed several listed multilateral formats from its official Arctic strategy, it kept the point of “the Arctic Council as the key regional platform coordinating international activities in the region.” Thus, Russia doesn’t appear poised to form an alternative platform.
Tensions are high, and Arctic Council cooperation with Moscow effectively ceased after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Despite this, the Council should refrain from pushing out the largest Arctic player and severing an essential communication channel. Deepening isolation has pushed Russia to look east for partners in the Arctic, namely China. Further ostracization will only incentivize Russia to coordinate more with Beijing in the region.
Russia and NATO share an interest in maintaining peace in the Arctic region. A war in such terrain would be extremely costly and difficult for both sides. Furthermore, the Arctic Council has facilitated the improvement of marine safety in the Bering Strait, where the U.S. and Russia share a maritime border. Communication channels and shared objectives must also be kept open to keep the peace there.
Amid a worsening situation in Ukraine, escalation in the Arctic region would do no favors for the United States or its NATO allies. Russia’s considerable influence in the Arctic is not going to change in the near future. Therefore, taking advantage of existing channels will enable the West to signal to Russia that NATO does not intend to engage in offensive operations but is fully prepared to defend its interests.