The chaotic US withdrawal has led to the flight of thousands of Afghans.
Many more could soon reach Europe - Joe Biden has to help, says expert Elisabeth Braw.
The disaster in Afghanistan will have serious consequences for a long time - also in the form of refugee movements.
This will be particularly noticeable in Europe.
Although the decision for military withdrawal was made in the USA.
Crisis expert and columnist Elisabeth Braw is now calling on US President Joe Biden to support his European allies.
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published on August 19, 2021 by the magazine "Foreign Policy".
Washington, DC - Canada announced early on that it would take in 20,000 Afghans, including women leaders, journalists and LGBTQ people.
The United States flew Afghan interpreters and other people who had worked with the US government from the crisis country.
This was part of a plan to evacuate 22,000 Afghans who were involved in the international effort to democratize Afghanistan.
It's good.
But as the world could see at the airport in Kabul, countless Afghans are trying to leave the country without proof.
Those who are not invited to North America will soon instead try to get to European countries that suspended deportation flights to Afghanistan early on.
So while the US can choose its Afghan refugees, its European allies must do the rest.
As Europeans realized earlier this year, the route to the EU may pass through Belarus, which has enabled thousands of Iraqis and others to cross the border into Lithuania.
Afghanistan: Biden's US withdraws and triggers flight response - Europe worried
Everyone is valuable, but when it comes to refugees from Afghanistan *, Western countries have more compassion for some of them than for others. For example, hardly anyone would agree that the Afghan interpreters of their troops do not deserve to be evacuated - although it must be said that the evacuation of the interpreters was tragically slow. Both the US government and private initiatives are working to bring these people to the United States. The UK, in turn, planned to select 20,000 Afghan refugees to be brought to the UK along with 1,600 military interpreters and other local staff currently evacuated earlier.
But there are many more Afghans who deserve protection now, almost an entire country. No sooner had the US government announced its withdrawal from Afghanistan than the consequences became clear to its allies.
On July 16, referring to the increasing instability in Afghanistan, the Swedish government suspended the deportation of around 7,000 Afghans whose asylum applications had been rejected.
The move sparked concern in other EU member states, who continued to deport unsuccessful asylum seekers and believed that the Swedish U-turn would undermine European unity.
Member States' main concern may have been what an end to deportations would mean for the criminal justice system, as asylum seekers convicted of a violent crime are usually almost certain to face deportation.
Escape from Afghanistan: Expert warns USA - United States had a choice, Europe must help now
But in August they too had to suspend their deportations. For example, on August 11, Germany and the Netherlands declared that they would no longer deport Afghans. At that time there were around 30,000 Afghans in Germany who were supposed to be deported but are now allowed to stay in the country. "A constitutional state is also responsible for ensuring that deportations do not pose a threat to those involved," said Interior Minister Horst Seehofer in a statement. Last week the German government canceled the deportation of six Afghans who were serving prison sentences in Germany. Seehofer is thus softer than during the 2015/16 refugee crisis, when he seemed to support the tough position of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban *.
The takeover of power by the Taliban in Afghanistan thus has direct and concrete consequences not only for the Afghans themselves, but also for Washington’s European allies, who now have to take care of the accommodation and care of the thousands of people they actually wanted to fly back to Afghanistan.
Furthermore, the suspension of deportation to Afghanistan means that Afghans who make it to Europe have virtually the right to stay there until the situation in Afghanistan improves - which could be in two years, ten years, or never .
Seehofer and his colleagues from the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Greece pointed this out in their letter to EU Interior Commissioner Ylva Johansson on August 5, before they were overwhelmed by the events.
While the United States and Canada are choosing Afghans for future lives in North America, America's European allies have no such option as Afghans themselves will come to Europe.
Taliban take power in Afghanistan: Now people need refuge - USA is threatening to leave allies alone
Illegal border crossings are increasing dramatically across the EU. A small part of this can be traced back to the Belarusian action in the "gray area" against Lithuania, through which more than 4,000 people had already entered Lithuania in the course of August. However, the vast majority of migrants come via the Mediterranean Sea and the countries of the Western Balkans. The number of 82,000 people who reached Europe between January and July this year is far from the numbers during the migration crisis in 2015, but it is 59 percent higher than in the same period last year.
Even if these statistics did not count for many days after the announcement by US President Joe Biden * on July 8th that he would accelerate the US withdrawal, they did show that 3,600 people arrived via the Western Balkans route in July most of them Syrians and Afghans. That's 67 percent more than in July 2020. You don't have to have a lot of imagination to predict that this number will continue to rise given the control of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
No one would refuse to go to a person fleeing the Taliban.
Given the Taliban's methods, the world may face a refugee exodus equal to or greater than that caused by the Islamic State and the war in Syria.
But the uncomfortable reality that the Biden administration is facing is this: European countries - America's closest allies - are facing a wave of refugees that is not due to their own actions, but rather to US actions taken without European views have been taken into account.
Afghanistan: Germany and Italy helped the USA - now they have to bear the burden of fleeing
Indeed, Washington's European allies in NATO wanted to keep the Afghanistan mission - but only under American leadership.
After Biden's announcement of withdrawal, Great Britain recruited other NATO member states for a possible mission under British leadership - to no avail.
The UK's NATO allies apparently did not consider the country strong enough to lead an Afghanistan mission.
The European allies who fought alongside the United States will feel the consequences when thousands of refugees flee the Taliban and in turn feed right-wing parties.
Some European countries reach more asylum seekers than others: Germany, France, Spain, Greece, Italy, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands have far higher numbers of asylum seekers than other EU Member States.
These and many other countries stood resolutely on the side of the United States and sent troops after the 9/11 attacks when the United States decided to invade Afghanistan.
With the exception of France, practically all of these countries have stayed on course.
Germany and Italy even kept large numbers of soldiers there, mainly to do Washington a favor.
Afghanistan: appeal to the US
These friends of the United States are now facing an immediate crisis in their countries' communities as a result of US action. "More countries inside and outside the EU have to take on responsibility [and accept Afghans]," Maria Malmer Stenergard, migration policy spokeswoman for the Moderaten, the largest Swedish opposition party, told me. "It cannot be that a few countries like Sweden again bear a disproportionately large part of the responsibility." Prime Minister Stefan Löfven takes a similar position: "We will never go back to 2015," he said this week in the Swedish daily
Dagens Nyheter
.
Between the fourth quarter of 2014 and the fourth quarter of 2015 - the beginning of the refugee crisis - Sweden took in 156,100 asylum seekers, the third largest number after Germany and Hungary.
Sweden has a population of just over ten million - the United States, on the other hand, is a country of over 330 million people.
This means that the US would have had to take in more than five million people to match Sweden's level during this period.
Afghanistan, the USA and the “Pottery Barn” rule: Pay for what you damage
The much-cited “Pottery Barn” rule of paying for what you damage should mean Washington should now allow hundreds of thousands of Afghans to find refuge in the United States. Unfortunately this is unlikely. Even under the Obama administration, only 12,587 Syrian refugees were accepted into the United States in fiscal year 2016. In the same year, Germany accepted 344,820 Syrian asylum seekers (and almost 300,000 from other countries).
A more realistic perspective would be if Washington were to help precisely those allies who came to their aid after September 11th and who have stood by its side in Afghanistan ever since. Of course, money cannot buy integration, and neither can will, as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin noted in relation to Afghan troops. However, the European countries will give refuge to countless Afghans until the situation in Afghanistan is so safe that they can return. It only seems fair that the US government, which had a say in the development of the current humanitarian catastrophe, should support the European taxpayers, who had no control over it.
Many people set off in August, including 640 Afghans who were crammed into a US Air Force * transport aircraft designed for around 100 paratroopers and their equipment and who were heroically rescued by its crew.
The United States has a moral obligation to receive these people and many others - but it will not receive all of them.
It would be the least that Biden would help America's best friends carry the burden he has placed on them.
by Elisabeth Braw
Elisabeth Braw
is a columnist with
Foreign Policy
and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she works on countering emerging threats to national security, such as hybrid and gray area threats.
She is also a member of the UK's National Preparedness Commission.
Twitter: @elisabethbraw
This article was first published in English on August 19, 2021 in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” - as part of a cooperation, a translation is now also available to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals. * Merkur.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.
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