Sigh.

 Missing in action: Tory MPs

It's not just the Foreign Office that displays a shocking lack of seriousness about its role

Melanie Phillips May 25

Afghan refuges crowd in the background as US soldiers guarding the apron at Kabul Airport

Sometimes, bad things happen not because the people involved are bad people but because they are useless.

This week, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee published one of the most damming reports ever produced about a government department. Entitled Missing in Action: UK Leadership and the Withdrawal from Afghanistan, it simply rips into the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) over its behaviour during that dismal and disgraceful episode last year when the Biden administration fled Afghanistan and abandoned the west’s Afghan allies to the Taliban.

Referring to the British government’s “appalling mismanagement of the crisis” and the misleading statements to Parliament which followed, the report says there was a fundamental lack of planning, grip or leadership at a time of national emergency; no clear line of command within the government; untraceable and unaccountable political interventions; and a total absence of plans to evacuate Afghans who had supported the UK mission without being directly employed, an absence which had put lives at risk.

In its summary, the report says: 

The manner of our withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster and a betrayal of our allies that will damage the UK’s interests for years to come…

The UK Government failed adequately to shape or respond to Washington’s decision to withdraw, to predict the speed of the Taliban’s takeover, or to plan and prepare for the evacuation of our Afghan partners. It might be convenient to blame FCDO officials or military intelligence for these failures, but ministers should have been driving this policy. The fact that the Foreign Office’s senior leaders were on holiday when Kabul fell marks a fundamental lack of seriousness, grip or leadership at a time of national emergency. At several key stages in the evacuation there seemed to be no clear line of command within the political leadership of the Government, as decisions were made on the basis of untraceable and unaccountable political interventions.

Most damning for the Foreign Office is the total absence of a plan for evacuating Afghans who supported the UK mission, without being directly employed by the UK Government, despite knowing 18 months before the collapse of Afghanistan that an evacuation might be necessary. The hasty effort to select those eligible for evacuation was poorly devised, managed, and staffed; and the department failed to perform the most basic crisis-management functions. The lack of clarity led to confusion and false hope among our Afghan partners who were desperate for rescue. They, and the many civil servants and soldiers working hard on the evacuation, were utterly let down by deep failures of leadership in Government. We are full of praise — in particular — for the personnel on the ground in Afghanistan during Operation Pitting, who implemented a chaotic policy to the best of their ability.  

The Foreign Office has not been open about these failings. In the course of the inquiry, it has given us answers that, in our judgement, are at best intentionally evasive, and often deliberately misleading. Those who lead the department should be ashamed that civil servants of great integrity felt compelled to risk their careers to bring to light the appalling mismanagement of the crisis, and the misleading statements to Parliament that followed.

The committee’s chairman, Tom Tugendhat MP, has commented further:

The UK’s part in this tragedy exposes a lack of seriousness in achieving co-ordination, a lack of clear decision-making, a lack of leadership and a lack of accountability. At a time when we face critical foreign policy challenges, and the risks to our lives and economy are so serious, including from the current energy and inflation pressures, our diplomacy and security cannot be so confused and unstructured. Unity of purpose, clarity and coordination require serious intent and consistent political leadership. 

The timeline of misery exposed by this report reveals serious systemic failures at the heart of the UK’s foreign policy. The absence of the FCDO’s top leadership — ministerial and official — when Kabul fell is a grave indictment on those supposedly in charge. While junior officials demonstrated courage and integrity, chaotic and arbitrary decision-making runs through this inquiry. Sadly, it may have cost many people the chance to leave Afghanistan, putting lives in danger.  The integrity of the Civil Service depends on those leading these organisations showing the courage to tell the truth to the British people.

There are many heroes in this story who worked under enormous pressures. The military and civilian personnel on the ground in Afghanistan, and many in the FCDO itself, during the evacuation and those who helped from afar deserve our thanks. Now, Afghanistan faces a terrible humanitarian crisis with 23 million people at risk of starvation and the rights of women and girls have faced their greatest reversal in a generation. All this while the threat from extremism has grown. We need a serious rethink in the heart of the UK Government to combine diplomacy, aid and trade in a concerted and strategic approach to future policy towards Afghanistan.

There can be zero confidence that this rethink will happen, because of the refusal by those responsible for this shambles to shoulder that responsibility . 

When the Taliban took Kabul, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the minister responsible for Afghanistan and the FCDO’s top civil servant, Sir Philip Barton, were all on leave. All returned that day except Sir Philip, who remained on leave until the day civilian evacuations ended. As the report says, this was “difficult to understand and impossible to excuse”. It goes on:

While it is essential for those at all levels in Government to take leave, this must be tempered at the most senior level by the need to exercise leadership in a crisis. Despite expressions of regret from the then-Foreign Secretary and Permanent Under-Secretary [Barton], there was no discussion of this point in the department’s Lessons Learned review.

The committee observes that it has accordingly

lost confidence in the Permanent Under-Secretary, who should consider his position.

Yet Sir Philip Barton is still very much still there. He is not considering his position; MPs aren’t supporting the committee in calling for him to go; nor are they calling for urgent action over a foreign ministry that is clearly not fit for purpose. Instead, a number of Tories have been moaning that the committee’s language is a bit… well, undiplomatic; and after all, Barton was entitled to his annual leave.

So it’s not just the British government that’s guilty of a fundamental “lack of seriousness,” but also these backbench Tory MPs — who are far more concerned about whether Boris Johnson broke the lockdown rules in Whitehall drinks events and should therefore resign. Yet they don’t care that the head of the FCDO remains in office, even though the shambles for which he was responsible probably caused avoidable deaths in Afghanistan. So much for their concern with proper accountability in government.

Since they refuse to treat with appropriate gravity the decline into serial incompetence and uselessness of the government department responsible for handling British interests at this supremely dangerous inflection point of global crisis, is it any wonder that these feeble MPs can’t even get it together to have a party leader worthy of his position in leading the country?