Another rift has been opened in the “special relationship” between the U.S. and the U.K., this one coming in the aftermath of last week’s terror bombing at the Kabul airport that killed, by some accounts, as many as 200 people, including 13 American service members. The story is getting wide attention. The Italian website formiche.net commented that the leaks “point the finger against the U.K. for the security failure which the Islamic State exploited for the attack against the Kabul airport.” and that “the level of conflict between the United Kingdom and the United States has further increased.”
According to transcripts of videoconference calls between the White House, the Pentagon and U.S. commanders in Kabul that were leaked to Politico, Pentagon officials saw the threat of an ISIS-K bombing with the potential to cause mass casualties as long as 24 hours in advance. Commanders on the ground, namely Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, advocated taking measures to counter the threat, including the closing of gates around the airport. The Abbey Gate, where the bombing occurred on Aug. 26, was of greatest concern.
According to the notes of one conference call between the Pentagon, U.S. Central Command headquarters and Kabul that convened at 4 p.m. on Aug. 25 (12:30 a.m. Aug. 26 in Kabul) Vasely said he was looking to shut down Abbey Gate. Two gates, the North Gate and the East Gate, had already been closed while two others were still open, Vasely said. Vasely said that the plan, worked out with the Taliban, was to close the gate on Aug. 26, Thursday afternoon, the next day.
But Abbey Gate was not closed on schedule. British forces had accelerated their drawdown from the Baron Hotel just a few hundred yards away, their main hub for evacuating U.K. personnel, and the Americans had to keep the gate open to allow the U.K. evacuees into the airport, Vasely said. The British evacuees had not arrived when the suicide bomber struck at about 6 p.m. local time.
The Politico account—which was denounced by Pentagon spokesman John Kirby as based on “unlawful disclosures"—was immediately taken in London as the U.S. trying to shift blame for the bombing on to the British. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab rejected the Politico account, denying that British authorities delayed the closing of the gate despite the risk. “We coordinated very closely with the U.S., in particular around the ISIS-K threat ... but it is certainly right to say we got our civilians out of the processing center by Abbey Gate, but it is just not true to suggest that other than securing our civilians inside the airport that we were pushing to leave the gate open,” Raab said, reported the Guardian. “In fact, and let me just be clear about this, we were issuing changes to travel advice before the bomb attack took place and saying to people in the crowd, about which I was particularly concerned, that certainly U.K. nationals and anyone else should leave because of the risk.”
Prime Minister Boris Johson’s office also denied that Britain had pushed to keep the gate open. It’s simply not true to suggest that we pushed to keep the gate open, the Prime Minister’s spokesman told the Guardian. In response to the change in travel advice ahead of the attack, the U.K. moved operations out of the Baron Hotel. Asked about the state of relations between London and Washington, Johnson’s spokesperson said: “The U.S. continues to be our strongest ally.”
