BRUSSELS (Dispatches) – Since the Taliban takeover of Kabul, a specter has haunted Europe: is the refugee crisis that engulfed the region in 2015 and poisoned its politics for years about to repeat itself?
European leaders of all stripes worry the continent may face a huge influx of asylum seekers from Afghanistan, boosting rightwing populists ahead of elections in Germany and France.
That fear prompted politicians from Stockholm to Athens this week to insist there could be “no repeat of 2015”. Emmanuel Macron, who is set to run for a second term as French president next year, was among them.
“We must anticipate and protect ourselves against significant irregular flows of migration that would endanger those who use them and fuel trafficking of all kinds,” he told the nation in a TV address.
Most EU countries have agreed to take in small numbers of Afghans, but all are reluctant to consider a larger influx — especially Germany, whose decision to allow in more than 1m asylum-seekers in 2015-16 rocked the country’s political system to its foundations.
German fears of another refugee crisis mounted when Horst Seehofer, interior minister, told MPs that the Taliban’s takeover could prompt anywhere between 300,000 and 5m Afghans to take flight.
Former UK prime minister Tony Blair, who in 2001 took Britain into war in Afghanistan alongside the United States, on Saturday condemned their “abandonment” of the country as “dangerous” and “unnecessary”.
In his first public comments on the crisis since the Afghan government collapsed last weekend, Blair criticized the U.S. motives for the withdrawal as “imbecilic” and “driven not by grand strategy but by politics”.
“The abandonment of Afghanistan and its people is tragic, dangerous, unnecessary, not in their interests and not in ours,” Blair wrote in a wide-ranging article published on his institute’s website.
The comments will be widely seen as a direct attack on U.S. President Joe Biden, who used the “forever wars” phrase repeatedly during campaigning last year.
Blair, a controversial figure both in Britain and abroad over his strong support for U.S.-led military action in both Afghanistan and then Iraq, argued the withdrawal left “every militant group round the world cheering”.
UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab stated that Britain would have to turn to Russia and China to exercise a “moderating influence” over the Taliban despite a mistrust between the UK and those governments.
“We’re going to have to bring in countries with a potentially moderating influence like Russia and China, however uncomfortable that is,” Raab told The Sunday Telegraph newspaper.