Afghanistan, NATO and the secret services ruled out the fall of Kabul in 2021

2021-09-01T17:25:47.183Z

The British government considered the fall of Kabul in 2021 "unlikely". Accused of underestimating the Afghan crisis, the British Foreign Minister, Dominic Raab, explained to the House Foreign Affairs Committee that this was the "central assessment" on which it was working. , supported by the military and the JIC, the Joint Intelligence Committee. The assessment was that "given the withdrawal of troops by the end of August, there would have been a steady deterioration from that date and it was unlikely that Kabul would fall this year," Raab said. All this "was widely shared by NATO allies", he pointed out. Raab confirmed that some Afghan guards of theBritish embassy were not evacuated because they had not been given written permission to access the airport, adding that they had asked for a report to clarify what happened. Finally, he ensured that no portraits of the queen were left, avoiding the risk of them being used by the Taliban as propaganda. Raab was heavily criticized because he was on vacation in Crete when Kabul fell and from the Greek island he delegated a phone call to the head of Afghan diplomacy to an undersecretary. In an extraordinary hearing before the Deputies of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the House of Commons, the president of the commission himself, Tom Tugendhat, his party mate, former officer and veteran of the Afghan trench, did not hesitate to brand himself as "the greatest,single foreign policy disaster since the Suez crisis ": fool that in the distant 1956 marked the end of any residual explicit colonial claim for France and Great Britain. A disaster for which Raab has called into question, if only as co-responsible allies - from Washington to the European partners - as well as the reports and forecasts marked by evident underestimation of the Taliban (or overestimation of the forces left in power in Kabul) born in the various capitals by counterintelligence agencies and star generals after 20 years of presence in the Asian country The British Foreign Minister, however, tried to defend "the effort" led by his government as by others to get 15,000 people out of the country in two weeks (out of about 120,000 rescued by the entire coalition);000 including early transfers initiated from London "from April". But - targeted by accusations of inaction by some deputies, by some personal beating aimed at himself and Johnson for initially going on vacation in mid-August (while front-line soldiers and licenses were revoked as early as 23 July) and from a few single requests for the resignation of the Labor opposition - however, he has not been able to give a precise figure of the Afghan friends left behind for the moment. Limiting himself to announcing his emergency diplomatic tour in the countries of the region to try to wrest at the eleventh hour guarantees on the maintenance of exit corridors for those who still want to flee Afghanistan. In addition to an investigation into the embarrassing ways oftemporary abandonment of the London embassy in Kabul, where a journalist reported having unexpectedly found confidential documents abandoned: with useful information to trace former collaborators left by the diplomatic staff at the mercy of the Taliban.