LONDON (The Guardian) – The UK Foreign Office admitted a catalogue of errors over its handling of Britain’s exit from Afghanistan, but has shut the door on many Afghans who helped the UK prior to the Taliban takeover last August.
Foreign Office officials say it is difficult to judge whether Afghans who worked on UK-funded civilian schemes, such as the British Council, are truly in danger from the Taliban, saying the evidence is that the threat primarily applies to those who provided security support to the UK.
Officials said the slow progress in processing cases this year had been caused by the high number of rejected applications, as well as legal cases challenging UK refusals to provide a right of abode. So far, only 5,000 Afghans have been given permission to come to the UK, in addition to the 15,000 evacuated at the time of the fall of Kabul last year.
The Guardian has been given details by individual Afghans who worked for UK-funded NGOs now in fear for their lives in underground shelters. They claim members of their family have already been executed due to their connections with the UK, but have been unable to get a response from the Home Office.
But in its formal response, published on Friday, to a scathing foreign affairs select committee report released in May on the Afghan evacuation, the Foreign Office said, “If the government were obliged to offer in extremis resettlement to the UK to anyone working on programs it funded in fragile states where there was a risk of an evacuation being needed, that could severely inhibit the provision of funding to NGOs delivering vital development programming.”
The Foreign Office admitted to the foreign affairs select committee that the “special cases” evacuation scheme, for Afghans who supported the UK effort without being directly employed by the UK government, had “many shortcomings” and was “poorly communicated”, and that prioritization of cases was “far from perfect”.
The response stated that there were “staffing gaps in some teams for some periods” during the evacuation, and that “the impact of the crisis on staff welfare was significant”.
The select committee had called in its report for the permanent secretary, Sir Philip Barton, to consider his position after it emerged he had been on holiday during the fall of Kabul. He has said he regretted not returning to work earlier, and in its formal response the Foreign Office admitted it needed to improve its worst-case scenario planning, since at no point was such a rapid collapse of Kabul to the Taliban considered.