Why the Afghan withdrawal went so wrong

Dominic Raab and Boris Johnson don’t show up well in this tragi-comedy written by a whistleblower, writes Sean O’Grady

Only a few of the thousands of Afghans with a genuine claim for asylum had their emails read (EPA)

Usually a whistleblower tells the world something shocking that they didn’t know. Raphael Marshall, a former desk officer at the Foreign Office, is telling us about something which we already know is shocking – the “dysfunctional and chaotic” British and allied exit from Afghanistan in August. That is not to say it is lacking in impact; it adds much colour to an already damning outline of national shame.

What Marshall has done is to explain, rather embarrassingly for the government, why it was that things went so wrong so rapidly. Before the written testimony Marshall submitted to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, there may have been a certain amount of allowance made for the pressures of the time, and in particular the rapid cascading collapse of the Afghan government and the remarkably unchallenged advance of the Taliban towards Kabul. The then foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, claimed that no one saw that coming – a claim disputed even then – but it now seems that that element of surprise was compounded by complacency, neglect and incompetence in the organisation of the UK retreat.

The result, as Marshall states with a force that brings one up short, was that only a few of the thousands of Afghans with a genuine claim for asylum and evacuation had their emails read, and: “It is clear that some of those left behind have since been murdered by the Taliban.” There is nothing that can now be done for them. The government is still struggling to establish an Afghan resettlement scheme.