Influencer Editorial Team
Officials have given varying estimates of how many eligible Afghans did not board evacuation flights, the last of which left Saturday, with the head of the UK armed forces General Sir Nick Carter putting this “in the high hundreds”.
The Sunday Times right-wing broadsheet quoted an unnamed minister as saying: “I suspect we could have taken out 800 to 1,000 more people”.
The same minister slammed Raab, claiming he “did nothing” to build ties with third countries from which Afghans might enter the UK.
The Foreign Office acknowledged that Raab had delegated calls to his Afghan counterpart while saying he recently called his Pakistani counterpart.
Richard Dannatt, a former head of the British army, told Times Radio on Sunday that he was calling for an inquiry into why the evacuation “happened in such a haphazard and chaotic fashion”.
Raab himself wrote in The Sunday Telegraph that the Afghan situation was a “bitter pill to swallow”.To deal with the Taliban regime, the UK must build a wider international coalition of regional powers and other United Nations Security Council members, including countries “with whom we have a difficult relationship”, he wrote.
