Boris must persuade Biden that America has a duty to Afghan refugees

One of the known unknowns that will follow the Taliban triumph is an exodus of refugees. As Parliament meets today in emergency session, the impact of a new migration crisis on the UK is likely to take centre stage. The in some ways comparable collapse of Syria resulted in a programme that has meant some 23,000 settling here over the past decade. The Government appears to have decided that a similar number of displaced Afghans should be accepted, over and above those who have already arrived or are entitled to come because of their service to British armed forces or officials.

One of the many bizarre facts to have emerged about Joe Biden is that, throughout a crisis that may prove to be the downfall of his presidency, he failed to consult or even speak to a single other world leader for a whole week. That unforgivable silence was finally broken last night, when he had a conversation with Boris Johnson. The few details given by Downing Street are intended to suit its own agenda, so we know next to nothing about what the President may have told the Prime Minister.

Yet it is beginning to look as though Biden is in no hurry to make some recompense for abandoning the Afghans by providing asylum for a substantial number of those fleeing the Taliban. While Britain, with about a fifth of the population and one fortieth of the land mass of the United States, is apparently ready to take more than 20,000 Afghans, the US has so far promised to accept fewer than 10,000 Afghans. This is a tiny proportion of the 300,000 people whom the US acknowledges as “affiliated” with its military and civilian authorities in Afghanistan; some 16,000 of these have received visas under the dedicated SIV programme. So far this year, the Biden administration has allowed just 485 Afghan refugees into the country, plus about 2,000 SIV visa-holders. Even if the Taliban allow those who worked for the Americans to leave, is far from clear how many will be permitted to settle in the US. Whatever the legal situation, in practice the authorities can drag out the immigration process for as long as they like.

Unless President Biden comes up with a more generous scheme in the next few days, it looks very much as if America’s allies will be picking up the pieces for a disaster that was made in Washington DC and on which they were left in the dark. At present, Biden shows no sign of remorse, let alone repentance. As far as Afghan refugees are concerned, he has so far taken even fewer than Trump in his last year, despite promising to restore America’s reputation as the homeland of those who have no home. The famous words engraved on the Statue of Liberty — “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” — do not seem to mean much to this President.

The bitter truth is that Biden has set his sights on winning a working majority in the Senate at next year’s midterm elections. He will not allow abstract considerations of honour or humanitarian obligations to deflect him from that goal. Immigration is a key issue in the swing states that he hopes to regain from the Republicans and, like his former boss Barack Obama, Biden lives in fear of the charge of being “soft” on asylum-seekers. Above all, he still fears Donald Trump. The veteran hero of the Watergate cover-up, Bob Woodward, has a new volume out in his Trump trilogy entitled Peril, which claims that the former President is consumed solely by the idea of revenge on Biden. It does not take much imagination to envisage how Trump could exploit images of desperate Afghans to conjure up the spectre of a flood of Muslim immigrants as part of a xenophobic campaign to paint the President as a man who does not put America first. The Biden Administration’s mean-spirited policy on Afghan refugees is driven not by honour but by fear.

Biden must, indeed, be haunted by his predecessors. As recently as the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was still fighting the Cold War, America was taking up to 300,000 refugees a year, many of them from countries such as Cuba or Iran that were ideological antagonists of the US. Another former President, George W. Bush, has just issued a statement urging Biden to “cut the red tape for refugees”. The US, he said, has “the responsibility and the resources to secure safe passage for them now, without bureaucratic delay”.

In response to such calls, the White House has authorised up to $500 million to pay for those now being evacuated, almost all under the SIV programme for Afghan translators and other affiliated personnel. This is a small though not insignificant sum, even if what it will cover is unclear. But there seems little prospect of the US making any attempt to shoulder its wider obligations to those sections of Afghan society who are already being targeted by the Taliban.

Over the coming months, it will be surprising if the exodus from Kabul alone — a city of four and a half million — does not run into six or seven figures. The emigration that followed the Soviet occupation in 1979 reached a peak of six million refugees in the late 1980s. The previous Taliban regime triggered another mass flight from Afghanistan, most of whom never returned. This time, with the near certainty that the UN will never again authorise Western intervention in the country, as it did in 2001, many Afghans may well decide that they have no future there. A sizeable proportion of the population of 38 million can be expected to land on the West’s doorstep.

MPs have an obligation to interrogate ministers today and in the future about how they propose to deal with this potentially huge migration crisis. The Special Relationship can be a key factor in managing the Afghan crisis, but it must be made to improve on the lamentable fiasco we have seen so far. By announcing immediately that Britain will accept its responsibility to refugees, Boris Johnson has seized the moral high ground. His powers of persuasion will be sorely tested in the weeks to come, as he tries to bring Joe Biden to his senses. Immigration is a sensitive issue in Britain as well as the US: polls show it is a bigger concern than the economy for Tory voters. But leadership is about more than just following the polls. The message from London to Washington must be polite but clear: we stood together in 2001 and we must be seen to stand together in 2021. America cannot walk away from the consequences of its actions. The Atlantic Alliance is on the line.

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