LONDON — Britain’s handling of the evacuation from Afghanistan in August was “arbitrary and dysfunctional,” according to a whistleblower who claimed that thousands of emails from Afghans potentially eligible for flights out went unread by the British Foreign Office and that animals were prioritized over people in an airlift.
Testimony provided Tuesday by whistleblower Raphael Marshall, who worked in the Foreign Office during the Taliban takeover, and other officials to a parliamentary committee suggests that the British evacuation effort was marked by disorganization similar to the United States’ chaotic departure from Afghanistan. The U.S. effort was criticized by some in Britain, a key U.S. ally in the war.
Marshall, a desk officer until September, was on the Afghan Special Cases team, which fielded requests from people such as Afghan soldiers, journalists, aid workers and judges, many of whom he said faced risks because of their ties to Britain or other Western countries.
In written testimony to Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee — which convened Tuesday as part of an inquiry into Britain’s withdrawal from Afghanistan — Marshall estimated that 75,000 to 150,000 people, including dependents, applied to the team for evacuation but that “fewer than 5% of these people have received any assistance.”
Thousands of “desperate and urgent” emails were not read, he said, describing decisions about whom to rescue as “arbitrary” in a “chaotic system” that put those left behind...
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