Desk Report
Publish: 30 Aug 2021, 04:24 pm
Prime Minister Boris Johnson || Photo: Collected
The UK government on Sunday faced a torrent of criticism
after its hurried withdrawal from Afghanistan ended, leaving hundreds eligible
for relocation behind.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson hailed a mission "unlike
anything we have seen in our lifetimes" after the UK airlifted over 15,000
people in the last two weeks.
Troops landed back at Brize Norton airbase in southern
England on Sunday after Britain was forced to withdraw following the decision
of its ally the United States to end its 20-year presence.
Johnson praised the evacuation efforts in "harrowing
conditions" and assured the military that decades of deployment "were
not in vain" after the Taliban retook control.
But current and former officials slammed government
failings, suggesting many more Afghans could have been rescued.
The Observer leftwing broadsheet cited a whistleblower as
saying thousands of emails from MPs and charities to the foreign ministry
highlighting specific Afghans at risk from the Taliban takeover went unopened.
Foreign Minister Dominic Raab has already been strongly
criticized for not immediately leaving a beach holiday when the Taliban took
control.
The Observer said it saw evidence that an official email
account set up by the Foreign Office to receive such pleas regularly had 5,000
unopened emails last week.
It said these included messages from ministers' offices and
the leader of the opposition Labour party, Keir Starmer.
"They cannot possibly know (how many people have been
left behind) because they haven't even read the emails," the whistleblower
was quoted as saying.
The Foreign Office responded that its crisis team worked
24/7 "to triage incoming emails and calls".
Officials have given varying estimates of how many eligible
Afghans did not board evacuation flights, the last of which left Saturday, with
the head of the UK armed forces General Sir Nick Carter putting this "in
the high hundreds".
The Sunday Times rightwing broadsheet quoted an unnamed
minister as saying: "I suspect we could have taken out 800 to 1,000 more
people".
The same minister slammed Raab, claiming he "did
nothing" to build ties with third countries from which Afghans might enter
the UK.
The Foreign Office acknowledged that Raab had delegated
calls to his Afghan counterpart while saying he recently called his Pakistani
counterpart.
The damning reports came after the Times reported last week
that it found contact details of staff and job applicants left behind at the
British embassy compound in Kabul, potentially endangering them.
Public opinion has been sharply divided in Britain over a
high-profile campaign by an ex-serviceman, Paul or "Pen" Farthing who
runs a British animal charity to evacuate his animals and staff from a shelter
in Kabul.
Farthing managed to fly out on a privately chartered plane
on Saturday with around 150 cats and dogs on board, landing at Heathrow on
Sunday morning.
He was hailed as a hero by supporters but opponents
questioned the ethics of using official time and military support to evacuate
animals as Afghans remained behind.
Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative MP and head of the Foreign
Affairs Select Committee, told LBC Radio that an Afghan interpreter who had
worked for the UK asked him: "Why is my five-year-old worth less than your
dog?"
Richard Dannatt, a former head of the British army, told
Times Radio that it "looks odd that we're giving prominence to a man and a
lot of cats and dogs", while adding he doubted Farthing's flight prevented
any Afghans leaving.
The focus should be on why Britain did not prepare better
while knowing the danger faced by former interpreters and other locally hired
civilians, Dannatt said.
He called for an inquiry into why the evacuation
"happened in such a haphazard and chaotic fashion".
Raab acknowledged in The Sunday Telegraph that the Afghan
situation was a "bitter pill to swallow".
To deal with the Taliban regime, the UK must build a wider
international coalition of regional powers and other United Nations Security
Council members, including countries "with whom we have a difficult
relationship", he wrote.
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