LONDON — London wants a briefing war with Washington over the deadly Kabul airport blast to stop — but is offering up its own take first.
U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab on Tuesday rejected briefings out of Washington suggesting U.K. demands contributed to the terrorist attack on Kabul airport last week which killed 200 people, including 13 U.S. service personnel.
Tensions between the two capitals are already fraught over a perceived lack of consultation with allies by U.S. President Joe Biden on the Afghanistan exit plan. Those tensions ramped up Monday after POLITICO reported that American commanders wanted to close the Abbey Gate at Kabul airport ahead of the attack, but kept it open longer to allow Britain to continue evacuating personnel based at the nearby Baron Hotel.
Raab told Times Radio Tuesday: “We certainly did take precautionary steps to limit and mitigate the risk [at Abbey Gate.] And one of those was removing the civilian staff in the Baron Hotel inside the airport. But that didn’t need or necessitate keeping the gate open.”
The foreign secretary, under pressure at home over his own handling of the crisis, added: “We also took measures to warn any British nationals not to come to the airport and if they were in the crowd in the queue to leave. So I’m confident we did everything we could to mitigate that risk.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s spokesperson later told reporters it was “simply not true to suggest we pushed to keep the gate open.”
“In response to the change in travel advice ahead of the attack last week the U.K. moved operations out of the Baron Hotel,” the spokesperson added.
Shifting the blame
Some in Johnson’s party were left deeply unimpressed by the U.S. briefing. “It’s a domestic issue. It’s all about Biden’s complete collapse in the run-up to the mid-terms,” former Conservative Party Leader Iain Duncan Smith said.
But while the U.K. has been forthright in dismissing the claim, there’s also a desire to cool the rhetoric.
U.K. government sources told POLITICO’s London Playbook they wanted to end briefings that have already seen British “Cabinet insiders” label Biden, among other things, “doolally” and “gaga.”
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s intervention suggesting the president was prompted to withdraw by an “imbecilic” slogan about ending America’s “forever wars” has also been seen as unhelpful inside government.
“The U.S. and their military support have enabled this evacuation to happen on such a vast scale. Over the past two weeks U.K. troops have worked side by side with the U.S. to evacuate more than 100,000 people to safety under incredibly difficult circumstances,” one government source told Playbook.
Asked Tuesday if he saw the U.S. as seeking to shift blame for the terror attack, Raab would not engage, instead telling Times Radio he had an “excellent working relationship” with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood, chair of the House of Commons defense select committee and a fierce critic of the U.S. withdrawal, warned that public spats would only help the West’s adversaries.
“What we have seen with these comments spilling into the media is deeply unhelpful. The world certainly looks very different than it did a month ago, the West looks diminished and humiliated. Now is not the time for any form of a blame game, but in fact to regroup and determine what our collective strategy and foreign policy is.”
He added: “We need politicians on both sides to acknowledge that we need to do better than this — the U.S. is our closest security ally.”
Source: Politico
