In Great Britain, which after America suffered the highest casualties in the Afghanistan war, emotions are high.

Defense Secretary Ben Wallace's voice failed on Monday when he admitted in a radio interview that British soldiers would not be able to get all of the Afghans who helped them out of the country.

When asked by the moderator why he was being treated like that, Wallace said in a cracked voice, “Because I'm a soldier.

Because it's sad.

And the West did what it did. "

Jochen Buchsteiner

Political correspondent in London.

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Wallace is one of those in London who consider the withdrawal decided in Washington to be a grave mistake.

He described the deal that former American President Donald Trump made with the Taliban as a “rotten deal”.

He finds less harsh words for the continuation and acceleration of this policy under Trump's successor Joe Biden.

Biden "inherited" a double momentum, said the defense minister on Monday - one momentum for the withdrawal of troops and one for the Taliban, because they were allowed to feel as victorious after the withdrawal.

Only the seeds of his predecessor had grown under Biden.

Foreign Minister Raab "missing in the field"

On Sunday, Wallace told a newspaper that he had sought a coalition of his own. “When the United States announced their deal and immediate withdrawal, I tried to find others to take their place - to no avail. Tired populations and parliaments had no appetite. ”Wallace tries not to portray the Afghanistan mission as a total failure. He may also have had the more than 450 British families who have lost relatives on the Afghan battlefield in mind when he recalled the mission's “successes”. At least it was possible to drive Al Qaeda out of the country and to limit the heroin trade. "Less terror and less drugs were worth the fight," he wrote.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Foreign Minister Dominic Raab have so far held back. Johnson said only that Afghanistan should not become a breeding ground for terrorists again and called on "like-minded powers" to act together. A new government in Kabul should not be recognized prematurely, the Prime Minister demanded after a meeting of the security cabinet. Raab has been criticized for not breaking off his summer vacation in Cyprus until Sunday. The minister was "missing in the field", declared the opposition, which holds the governments in London and Washington a "catastrophic miscalculation". But even the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Tugendhat, found himself unable to explain the Foreign Ministry's policy."We haven't heard from the Foreign Minister for a week - despite the biggest political disaster since Suez," said the Conservative MP.

Conservatives disagree

While Tugendhat alluded to the unsuccessful intervention in Egypt in 1956, his group colleague Tobias Ellwood declared the 1975 case of Saigon as a benchmark.

He distributed a video of the evacuations in Kabul and wrote: “If that's not Saigon 2.0.

is - what then? ”Ellwood, who chairs the Defense Committee, reiterated his call for a public inquiry to be carried out on the Afghanistan mission.

First of all, there will be a special session of the lower house on Wednesday, for which all members of parliament have been called back from vacation.

While MPs like Tugendhat and Ellwood tend to criticize the decision to withdraw and the tactical errors of the operation, the twenty-year military mission is fundamentally questioned by other politicians. It was "born of ignorance, unrealistic in its goals, poorly executed and underfunded," said Conservative MP John Baron on Monday. Now even the withdrawal ends in chaos. Baron called on Johnson to apologize - also on behalf of previous prime ministers - including the soldiers now deployed, who "are still paying the price for this folly".

600 soldiers are deployed to fly British and local forces out of Afghanistan. On Monday night, the first 300 arrived at a military airport in Oxfordshire. According to the Ministry of Defense, up to 4,000 people, mostly Afghan aid workers, were still waiting for British help.