FCDO's Afghanistan response was 'chaotic,' says UK whistleblower

Thousands of emails from vulnerable people in Afghanistan went unread amid the use of a “chaotic” and “misleading” system for dealing with evacuation requests after Kabul fell to the Taliban in August, according to a former U.K. government official who worked on the response to the crisis.

Raphael Marshall, who was a desk officer at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office until September, has written an extensive and highly critical portrayal of how the department — whose officials were allegedly unprepared for the task — decided which Afghans were most at risk of reprisals from the Taliban and were eligible for assistance from the United Kingdom.

A 39-page document detailing the allegations was published Tuesday by the Foreign Affairs Committee of parliamentarians who monitor FCDO, hours ahead of a meeting with senior department officials to discuss the evacuation from Afghanistan — branded by committee Chair Tom Tugendhat as the United Kingdom’s “worst foreign policy crisis” since the 1956 Suez Canal conflict.

A U.K. government spokesperson said its staff “worked tirelessly to evacuate more than 15,000 people from Afghanistan within a fortnight. This was the biggest mission of its kind in generations and the second largest evacuation carried out by any country. We are still working to help others leave.”

Marshall wrote that FCDO’s internal processes, along with a lack of attention and understanding from former Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, were compounded by poor intergovernmental coordination and a lack of resources, including expertise and staffing. Many officials were reluctant to work outside their normal hours on the crisis response, according to Marshall’s evidence.

As Kabul fell to the Taliban in August, numerous development organizations, both NGOs and private sector contractors, received requests for help from former employees, who usually said their association with the U.K. government — sometimes because of the country’s aid funding — made them a target for the Islamist group. Other civilians who claimed to be at risk and requested help included human rights workers, government officials, and female judges.

Afghans seeking evacuation to the U.K., and NGOs asking for help on their behalf, were told to email FCDO addresses. “Many of these emails were not read,” wrote Marshall. He added: “Emails received an automatic response that the request for assistance had been ‘logged’. This was usually false. In thousands of cases emails were not even read.”

A system was used to “flag” emails, but their details were not entered into a spreadsheet for prioritization, according to Marshall. “I believe the purpose of this system was to allow the Prime Minister and the then Foreign Secretary to inform MPs [members of Parliament] that there were no unread emails,” he wrote.

The requests that did make it into a spreadsheet for further scrutiny were also “inconsistent and likely often misleading,” wrote Marshall, citing a lack of time or expertise for officials to properly assess them.

Those requests that did receive further scrutiny from officials were entered into a system “designed as we went along,” he wrote. While Marshall acknowledged it “would have been impossible to design an entirely satisfactory system” for the “appalling” task, he added that it “would surely have been possible to design a considerably better system than the one employed by the FCDO.”

After a media report on Aug. 29 revealed the backlog in FCDO’s email system, two inboxes were locked, leaving officials unable to work on the response. “In my opinion, this was an admission that at this stage the FCDO’s method of processing the emails only served a public relations purpose,” Marshall wrote.

Many Afghans were unable to escape the country after the Taliban takeover, despite being deemed eligible for resettlement in the U.K., he wrote. Fears remain for some former development workers. The U.K. government has said vulnerable Afghans will be able to seek sanctuary under the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme, but the ACRS has not yet opened, despite being announced Aug. 18.

Meanwhile, concerns are growing about the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan, with more than 20 million people facing extreme hunger, according to United Nations estimates. Between the Taliban takeover and Oct. 18, the U.K. government had disbursed just £35 million worth of aid to the country.

FCDO also struggled to recruit enough staffers to work on the crisis, wrote Marshall, saying that he was the only official monitoring the emails on the afternoon of Aug. 21. The department drafted soldiers untrained in bureaucratic work to support the response, he said, only for them to have to share one computer between eight people at times because of equipment shortages.

Around six officials who previously worked in the Department for International Development volunteered to assist on the Afghanistan response and were “visibly appalled by our chaotic system,” wrote Marshall.

“It was hard to integrate them effectively because we could not share live documents or give them access to the inbox because the DFID and … [Foreign & Commonwealth Office information technology] systems are not yet integrated,” he added.

Marshall identified a further communications problem related to the controversial 2020 merger of the two departments, saying he was unable to check whether a former DFID official who held critical information was online.

“More than 1,000 FCDO staff worked to help British nationals and eligible Afghans leave during Op Pitting,” said the government spokesperson. “The scale of the evacuation and the challenging circumstances meant decisions on prioritisation had to be made quickly to ensure we could help as many people as possible.”

The spokesperson acknowledged that not everyone the government wanted to evacuate was able to leave but said its commitment to them was “enduring.”