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UK whistle-blower alleges govt failures have cost many Afghan lives

Wednesday, 08 December 2021 12:46 AM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 08 December 2021 12:49 AM ]

Saeed Pourreza
Press TV, London

A whistle-blower who worked in the UK’s foreign ministry during the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August has made damning claims about government failures during the withdrawal from Afghanistan that could have cost many Afghan lives. He alleges junior officials were left to make hundreds of life-and-death decisions, and that the UK’s top diplomat at the time failed to see the urgency of the situation.

It was a chaotic end to a 20-year-long US-led occupation of Afghanistan; thousands of Afghans who’d worked with British forces appealed to be airlifted out of their country.

Months since that shambolic evacuation, inflammatory claims about how the UK foreign office responded as the Taliban took over Kabul. 39 devastating pages of evidence provided by junior diplomat Rafael Marshall.

Among the allegations, Marshall says up to 150,000 people applied for evacuation, but fewer than five percent got any assistance. No member of the team working on the evacuation requests had any knowledge of Afghanistan, and that foreign office staff stuck to the eight-hour shift culture during the emergency.

He reserves his most stinging criticism for former foreign secretary Dominic Raab, holidaying in Greece at the time, for dragging his feet on responding to the crisis. The former foreign secretary has defended his decisions.

Marshall claims Prime Minister Boris Johnson personally intervened to secure the evacuation of animals in the care of a British charity worker at the expense of afghans at imminent risk.

Mr. Marshal says an email he wrote warning people might die unless things improved was criticized for being ‘shrill’. That claim and the many others mentioned in this report raise serious questions about the dysfunction at the heart of the British government with deadly consequences.

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