Pentagon Chief Warns Al-Qaida May Seek Comeback in Afghanistan

Enlarge this image


US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin speaks during a joint press conference with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Qatari officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Doha, Qatar, Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2021.





Olivier Douliery/AP



hide caption



toggle caption


Olivier Douliery/AP



Politics
Biden Pledged To End The Forever Wars, But He Might Just Be Shrinking Them

Austin, a retired Army general, has a deep network of contacts in the Gulf region based in part on his years commanding U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq and later as head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East. This week’s trip, however, was his first to the Gulf since taking office in January.

Austin had been scheduled to visit Saudi Arabia on Thursday as the final stop on his Gulf tour. But on Wednesday evening his spokesman, John Kirby, announced that the visit had been dropped due to «scheduling issues. Kirby offered no further explanation but said Austin looked forward to rescheduling.

Austin indicated that his visit was postponed at the Saudis’ request. «The Saudis have some scheduling issues; I can’t speak to exactly what they were, he said.

The Saudi stop notably was to happen two days before the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people. Fifteen of the men who hijacked commercial airliners and crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001 were Saudis, as was Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaida network plotted the attack from its base in Afghanistan. The attack prompted the U.S. invasion that became a 20-year war in Afghanistan.

U.S. relations with the Saudi government have been strained at times in the intervening years. In 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman oversaw an unprecedented crackdown against activists, rivals and perceived critics. The year culminated in the gruesome killing of Washington Post contributing columnist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey.

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden directed the declassification of certain documents related to the 9/11 attacks, a gesture to victims’ families who have long sought the records in hopes of implicating the Saudi government. Public documents released in the last two decades, including by the 9/11 Commission, have detailed numerous Saudi entanglements but have not proved government complicity.

The Saudi government denies any culpability. On Wednesday the Saudi Embassy in Washington released a statement welcoming the move to declassify and release more documents related to 9/11, saying, «no evidence has ever emerged to indicate that the Saudi government or its officials had previous knowledge of the terrorist attack or were in any way involved in its planning or execution.