Fresh evidence on UK’s botched Afghan withdrawal backs whistleblower’s story

Farther substantiation professing that the government seriously mishandled the pullout from Afghanistan has been handed to a administrative inquiry examining the operation, the Observer has been told.

Details from several government departments and agencies are understood to back ruinous evidence from a Foreign Office whistleblower, who has claimed that regulatory chaos, clerical intervention, and a lack of planning and coffers led to “ people being left to die at the hands of the Taliban”.

The Observer revealed in August that thousands of emails of critical cases of Afghans in peril were being left unlettered for days at the height of the extremity, with the dispatches of elderly MPs among those not to be opened. Indeed government ministers had emails that hadn’t been addressed.

In an interview with the Observer, Tom Tugendhat, the Conservative president of the foreign affairs select commission which is examining the claims, said others had been in touch to expose enterprises. He described substantiation from three elderly Foreign Office officers last Tuesday, in which its endless clerk Sir Philip Barton admitted remaining on vacation for 11 days after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, as “ fully extraordinary”. He said he was now more convinced about the ruinous evidence his commission entered from Raphael Marshall, a inferior functionary who worked in the Afghan Special Cases platoon.

“ There’s nothing I ’ve heard that leads me to believe he’s incorrect,” Tugendhat said. “ He and numerous like him earn further than an reason. They’ve demonstrated relatively easily the integrity and the ethical norms we should anticipate from elderly government workers, but are chancing those norms in the inferior species, not the elderly bones.”

Tugendhat said that his commission was now sifting through farther substantiation. “ Since the hail on Tuesday, I ’ve been approached by individualities from other government departments and, indeed, other agencies offering their own perspectives on the events in the run-up to August and the fate,” he said. “ We ’re in discussion as to how their substantiation may be presented. There’s a veritably wide feeling that this goes to the heart of commodity that’s simply not respectable, and that Britain deserves better.”

He said the commission would be speaking to defence clerk Ben Wallace over the military rudiments of the pullout. “ We ’re veritably keen to speak to the defence clerk who has agreed to come,” he said. “ We want to hear the military perspective on this. We ’re veritably keen to speak to others who may have been involved in different areas. And we need to sit down and go through a lot of substantiation.”

Tugendhat said that he wanted to stay for a final report on the extremity before concluding where the responsibility for any shortcomings should fall. Still, he said that it was a “ whole government” failure, with the Foreign Office, Home Office and Ministry of Defence all involved in the operation. He said the failure had seen abettors in Afghanistan abandoned.

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