CIA Director William Burns conveyed to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman the United States' distraught over Riyadh's rapprochement with Iran and Syria.
This came according to what was reported by the "Wall Street Journal" yesterday, Thursday, when the newspaper continued that Burns, during an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia, expressed his dissatisfaction with the decision of the Saudi authorities to improve relations with Iran and Syria.
According to the newspaper, Burns told the Saudi crown prince that the United States of America was "shocked by Riyadh's rapprochement with Iran and Syria, which are still under Western sanctions," while Burns discussed with the Saudi leadership cooperation in the field of intelligence and combating terrorism.
Al-Arabiya channel had previously reported, quoting a source, that the director of the CIA visited Saudi Arabia this week to meet with representatives of the kingdom's authorities. According to the source, Burns confirmed Washington's desire to enhance cooperation with Riyadh on security and counter-terrorism issues, without the official in the administration specifying who exactly the CIA chief met with and how long he was in the kingdom.
Tehran and Riyadh had agreed, last March 10, to restore diplomatic relations between the two countries, and to resume the work of the embassies of the two countries within two months, while representatives of the two countries held talks in Beijing over several days, which resulted in the preparation of a tripartite statement.
“We were not ready for the fall of Kabul so quickly.” Blinken identifies 5 examples drawn from the events in Afghanistan
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken acknowledged that his department was completely unprepared for the rapid downfall of the Afghan government in August 2021, Politico reported.
This came in statements made by Blinken on Thursday during an event in which US State Department officials participated and organized after the White House report on the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan was issued.
Blinken said that his ministry is working to provide Congress with its own assessment of these events, but that assessment is not for publication, according to "Politico", which said it had seen the course of the meeting.
"This (the Taliban's rapid takeover of power in Afghanistan) was considered very unlikely, but it clearly would have been a very serious event, and more could and should have been done to prepare for it," Blinken said.
In his statements, Blinken spoke of "five lessons" that his ministry drew from those events, the first of which was that the US State Department should have planned and prepared faster for the "worst scenario" in Afghanistan.
Second, according to Blinken, the State's contingency plans have been hampered by fears that such an open setup "might send the wrong signal to Afghans and the government that we have lost confidence in it, and will hasten what we hoped to avoid, which is its collapse."
Other findings included a lack of a clear understanding of who was leading the evacuation, "conflicting and contradictory directives" from Washington regarding evacuation priorities, and a lack of clear tracking of Americans in Afghanistan.
Blinken explained that one of the reasons he wanted to keep the report confidential was to avoid making "some of our vulnerabilities" public, because "that's information that wouldn't be a good idea to share widely."
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