Britain’s Johnson defends the Kabul airlift after the game of guilt erupts

LONDON, Aug. 29 (Reuters) – Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Sunday defended the British airlift from Kabul following growing criticism that ministers had “slept on guard”, potentially leaving thousands of eligible Afghans in the country.

Britain, like the United States, has been criticized for not predicting how quickly the Afghan government would fall, meaning that it had not prepared enough for the chaos that would ensue when the Taliban took power.

Britain’s latest military flight took off from Kabul on Saturday afternoon and ended two chaotic weeks in which soldiers helped evacuate more than 15,000 people from the crowds that landed at the capital’s airport, desperate to flee the country.

Richard Dannatt, a former chief of staff to the British army, said the government now needed an investigation to determine why it was so ill-prepared for the rapid turn of events.

“It’s unattainable why it would look like the government was sleeping on guard,” he told Times Radio. “We had this chaotic extraction. We should have done better, we could have done better.”

The Observer newspaper said thousands of emails sent to the Foreign Ministry by lawmakers and charities, detailing cases of Afghan citizens in need of help to leave, had not been read.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman said he had worked tirelessly to evacuate people, but had always warned that he could not help everyone. The spokesman declined to give further details about the process.

Britain’s Defense Minister Ben Wallace predicted last week that the evacuation time of nearly 1,000 Afghans who were eligible to come to Britain, including former staff in the UK, was over.

Lisa Nandy, a spokeswoman for the opposition’s foreign office, said ministers were not fully prepared for the withdrawal. “It really is an unprecedented moment of embarrassment for this government, which we have allowed to come to this,” he told Sky News.

Johnson said, however, that while Britain would not have wanted to leave Afghanistan in the same way it did, the armed forces should be proud of its achievements.

Speaking to the 150,000 men and women who completed a tour of Afghanistan and the families of the 457 who died there, Johnson said they had managed to keep Britain safe and improve livelihoods for local Afghans.

“I thank everyone involved and I think they can be very proud of what they have done,” he said in an online video.

A flight carrying troops and London Ambassador Laurie Bristow landed in Britain on Sunday, with new flights planned. Bristow said the British embassy in Afghanistan would operate in Qatar for now, before it can return when it is safe.

Report by Kate Holton Edited by Raissa Kasolowsky

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