The senior civil servant in charge of the UK’s Foreign Office should consider resigning over the country’s “disastrous” retreat from Afghanistan, an MP led report has found.
Sir Philip Barton, the civil servant running the UK’s Foreign Office, should consider tendering his resignation over his role in Britain’s “disastrous” withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, a report published on Tuesday has recommended.
Titled “Missing in action: UK leadership and the withdrawal from Afghanistan”, the investigation from the MP-led Foreign Affairs Select Committee concluded that not only had senior officials not been available to help evacuation efforts due to some of them being on holiday, but that the foreign office under Barton had itself been “evasive” when it came to answering for the actions of its senior members.
Sir Philip Barton pictured in Beijing on January 30, 2019 (Photo by THOMAS PETER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
According to the report, despite having ample time to prepare for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, officials had not adequately understood the situation, nor laid the groundwork for the pulling out of British assets.
What’s more, the MPs also claim in the document that proper procedure was not always followed during the evacuation, with animals being airlifted from the country — possibly as a result of a “mysterious intervention” which may have originated with Prime Minister Boris Johnson and which followed a pressure campaign in the media — despite not at all meeting the criteria for such an evacuation.
“The episode highlights deep problems with Government decision-making,” the document reads. “First, that it allowed its resources to be absorbed by media campaigns, rather than focusing on the humanitarian and strategic implications of the crisis. Second, that it made important policy decisions through informal, unaccountable means, which were later impossible to trace.”
Ultimately, the paper concludes that the withdrawal was a “disaster, a betrayal of our allies, and weakens the trust that helps to keep British people safe”, and that the “[Foreign Affairs Select] Committee has lost confidence in the Permanent Under-Secretary, who should consider his position”.
Last year’s chaotic withdrawal from the middle-eastern state marked the end of Britain’s most recent controversial intervention in Afghanistan that kicked off shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks.
What followed was over two decades of controversy, with hundreds of UK troops flown home in coffins, killed by the likes of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) or Suicide Bombings.
Despite public opinion having long since shifted against the war, Tony Blair, the then-Labour Prime Minister who got the UK involved in the region in the early 2000s, has since defended his decision to embroil Britain in the conflict.
“When you’re faced with a situation in which you believe that the interests of your country demand that you stop something bad happening, it’s important that you stand for that, and that you take the action necessary to stop it,” Blair said, defending his decision making during an interview earlier this year.
“People often say over Iraq or Afghanistan that I took the wrong decision but you’ve got to do what you think is right,” he continued. “Whether you are right or not is another matter.”
“In those really big decisions you don’t know what all the different component elements are, and you’ve got to follow, in the end, your own instinct,”.