LONDON (Dispatches) – Britain’s Foreign Office abandoned many of the nation’s allies in Afghanistan and left them to the mercy of the Taliban during the fall of the capital, Kabul, because of a dysfunctional and arbitrary evacuation effort, a whistleblower said Tuesday.
In devastating evidence to a parliamentary committee, Raphael Marshall said thousands of pleas for help via email were unread between Aug. 21 and Aug. 25. The former Foreign Office employee estimated that only 5 percent of Afghan nationals who applied to flee under one UK program received help. At one point, he was the only person monitoring the inbox.
“There were usually over 5,000 unread emails in the inbox at any given moment, including many unread emails dating from early in August,” he wrote to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. “These emails were desperate and urgent. I was struck by many titles including phrases such as ‘please save my children’.”
The whistleblower’s evidence, along with the internal inquiry, contributed to the decision to move the then foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, from his position in the cabinet.
Raab was heavily criticized by the government officials and faced grilling from the parliament over his absence as the Foreign Secretary during the turmoil in Afghanistan.
Marshal revealed in his testimony that it took hours for Raab to answer his emails as he “did not fully understand the situation.”
Uproar was reported at the Ministry of Defense, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered an Afghan animal charity to be given priority for evacuation, Marshall said.
“There was a direct trade-off between transporting Nowzad’s animals and evacuating British nationals and Afghan evacuees, including Afghans who had served with British soldiers,” he claimed.
The Taliban stormed across Afghanistan in late summer, capturing all major cities in a matter of days, as Afghan security forces trained and equipped by the U.S. and its allies melted away. The Taliban took over Kabul on Aug. 15.
Many who had worked for Western powers or the government worried that the country could descend into chaos or the Taliban could carry out revenge attacks against them.
Many also feared the Taliban would reimpose the harsh law that they relied on when they ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.
The UK’s Afghanistan evacuation concluded at the end of August, bringing a sudden end to the 20-year deployment. Johnson repeatedly came under fire over his handling of the crisis, including from his ruling Conservative party, amid mounting criticism that Britain has been far too ineffectual during the mayhem.
Several officials in his government termed the shameful handling as “weak, incomprehensible, and very stupid.”