By Jordan Simmons

August 16th, 2021. Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. Masses of people flood the airport’s only runway and Western officials scramble to get more planes to the airport of the fallen capital. In total, about 116,700 will end up being evacuated from Kabul; 58,000 of them will either stop in Doha, Qatar, on the way to another destination or be temporarily housed in the city.  

As the Western powers continue to thank Qatar for its vital role in the Afghanistan evacuation, the question arises: Why? Qatar is a country even smaller than Connecticut, albeit an extremely wealthy one. However, this country, which is rarely discussed when talking about Middle Eastern power dynamics, is seen as an essential partner to some of the world’s and region’s most powerful militaries. As the Taliban surrounded and retook Kabul, the United States, Japan, Germany, Italy, and other Western or Western-allied powers quietly relocated their Kabul-based embassies to Doha. 

There is much more to the situation than appears at first glance. Qatar is the site where rounds of US-Taliban negotiations and other backdoor dealings took place throughout the duration of the US’s stint in Afghanistan. This actually resulted in the signing of the Doha Accords, the quickly forgotten peace agreement signed between the US and the Taliban in 2020. The country even facilitated many peace talks between the now failed US-backed government of Afghanistan and the Taliban.

Qatar’s capacity to function as the West’s needed connection to the Taliban is the result of years of carefully crafted diplomatic moves. It by no means is the only situation in which Qatar acts as an intermediary between two opposing powers, one usually being a Western-designated terrorist group. The country has time and time again acted as a mediator; Qatar has brokered ceasefires between Israel and Hamas, and has additionally facilitated peace talks in Lebanon, Sudan, and Yemen. They have paid ransoms for westerners kidnapped by terrorist groups in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and have even arranged prisoner swaps between the West and Jabhat Al-Nursa, a pro-Assad, extremist group operating in Syria. Suffice to say, Qatar gets to call in many favors with Western-designated terrorist groups, working as a go-between for the warring groups and the West. Just how extensive is Qatar’s list of contacts? Quite extensive. It is alleged that the country has ties to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hamas, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Jabhat Al-Nursa, and Somalia’s al-Shabaab, and these are just the well-known and active groups.

The country is able to curry favor with these groups by financing them, sending them weapons, and providing asylum to their leaders-in-exile. Under sporadic bouts of international pressure, Qatar has scaled back its open support for these groups and become a bit less forthcoming in its harboring of wanted figures. Of course, Qatar isn’t the only country in the region to have contacts with different extremist groups. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Iran, and Bahrain all do the same. However, the country has done so with minimal blowback from the US. 

In its war on terror, why wouldn’t the world’s dominant military power exert its massive amounts of pressure on the country? In short, Qatar is also an indispensable US ally in its counterterrorism efforts. It houses the US’s Al-Udeid Air Base, the superpower’s largest base in the Middle-East, which provides shelter for 11,000 US troops in a region where they aren’t generally welcome. For reference, the country that houses the next largest force of Americans in the region is Bahrain, with 2,000 troops, followed by Saudi Arabia with 300. Al-Udeid Air Base has been critical for the US war capacity in the region, functioning as the regional headquarters of the US Air Force Central Command, Combined Air and Space Operations Center (which oversees US air power in 21 countries), and the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing. The base is also used for the assistance of US missions in the region, such as the rapid evacuation of civilians and military personnel from Afghanistan and as a launch point for bombing campaigns against Syria, ISIS, and the Taliban. In fact, Qatar has spent $1 billion on the construction and renovation of the base. Beyond housing US troops, the country is even home to one of the few Turkish military bases in the region. It also houses the only official Israeli diplomatic presence in the Gulf and is home to the International Renewable Energy Agency, an agency used to track Iranian progress on its nuclear ambitions.

But why go to these lengths and spend this much money on diplomacy? The answer is that Qatar wants strategic autonomy from its historical patron, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, like Qatar, has massive amounts of oil wealth and spends the third most in the world on its military, behind only China and the US. Following a 1992 border clash with the Saudis and a subsequent proxy war with them in Yemen in 1994, Qatar’s Sheikh decided to strengthen relations with Iran, against the wishes of the Saudis. Today, Qatar has good ties with Iran, the US, various terrorist groups in the region, and has recently deepened bilateral relations with Turkey, as the country seeks to expand its influence in the region. This has been done much to the annoyance of the Saudis.

In fact, the Yemeni Civil War was not the only war to see the two countries engage in proxy warfare. Throughout the Arab Spring, Qatar assisted many rebel and extremist groups that rose up against their country’s monarchy. Saudi Arabia, being a monarchy fearful of civilian revolt naturally backed the existing government structure, in direct opposition to Qatar. Qatar’s insubordination and continued support for rebel groups led to the now-failed 2017 GCC blockade. For almost four years, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt waged a diplomatic, trade, and travel blockade on Qatar, closing both their borders and their airspace to it. Their official justification of the blockade, to stop Qatari support to extremist groups, was fictitious, as the Saudis and United Arab Emirates have connections to those same extremist groups. 

The coalition’s demands were numerous and included: the closing of the influential Al Jazeera news station (a highly influential news organization, that has gained notoriety throughout the world, which sometimes criticizes other Arab governments), downgrading diplomatic ties with Iran, closing a Turkish military base in country, and ending “interference” in other countries’ internal affairs. We can see that this blockade was only meant to reign in Qatari foreign policy.

However, Qatar has weathered the storm thanks to its vast sovereign wealth fund (built off liquid natural gas revenue) and the ties it has cultivated with other powers. In light of the blockade, Iran and Erdogan’s Turkey, both regional rivals of Saudi Arabia, stepped in to tie Qatar’s economy closer to theirs through the form of generous financial assistance. Qatar performed joint military drills with the Iranian military and permitted Turkey to station troops in its country to spite the other Gulf countries. Earlier this year, the blockade was officially lifted with the country having fulfilled none of the 13 demands by the other Gulf nations. The fact that the US repeatedly tried to mediate the situation and eventually brokered their normalization deal, instead of backing the Saudi coalition, is telling. The 4-year blockade seems to have little effect on Qatar.

This conflict has shown the strategic autonomy Qatar has pursued so heavily coming to fruition. There is now little chance that they will change course in their diplomatic dealings. They are likely to continue pursuing this policy, which will lead them to continue to cultivate ties with Iran, Turkey, the US, and other terrorist groups. They will also continue to act as an intermediary between West and regional extremist groups. It is unlikely they will stop arming resistance and other extremist groups in the near future. 

It is possible that the Qatari government will be blamed for the actions of the groups it supports. Qatar does not want the same international outrage and sanctions that Pakistan has had placed on it, as they would greatly damage its international reputation, both as a mediator and an ally of the West. The risk Qatar runs with their “iceberg strategy” is that the country could unintentionally find itself involved with other conflicts its patron groups are engaged in. Safely playing ball on the side of conflicting powers only works while both sides have a vested interest in having your country on their side. If the larger powers are not constantly reminded why they need you, one will abandon you, leaving you to be swallowed up into the orbit of the other. I do not foresee this being an issue for Qatar, but as the US shifts its long-term priorities to Asia, it might become more comfortable with the idea of further scrutinizing Qatar’s close ties to these Western-designated terrorist groups. Recently however, the US has tended to shift resources in the Middle East towards countering Iranian influence, through Gulf Unity, while shifting resources away from its goal of combatting terrorism. This is a large reason for why the country’s diplomats tried as hard as they did to put an end to the Saudi-led Gulf Blockade. 

Qatar has the green light to pursue its own policy and will continue being a quiet linchpin in the converging, and often clashing interests in the region. Qatar might even end up playing a mediating role between Saudi Arabia and Iran in their quiet cold war. Despite its tiny size, its massive wealth and careful use of diplomacy has let it punch far above its weight class and to guarantee its security. In an area rife with proxy conflicts, secret alliances, and backdoor deals, Qatar is arguably in the best position it can be.