What really happened with Afghanistan evacuation? | Dominic Lawson

Media Noise

One of the traits of the mass media industry is its inability to prevent the important from being drowned out by the loud. The last few days have shown this with great clarity as a seemingly endless stream of revelations have been released to the public regarding the Downing Street shenanigans last Christmas.

It is understandable why the media has focused on these stories; for one it gives them the opportunity to humble the Prime Minister, who journalists perceive as treating the mainstream media with disdain. Secondly, media views depend upon stirring a backlash and what could be more emotional than the mental image of elderly COVID patients dying alone in cold hospital wards as the Prime Minister’s staff partied? The image of Allegra Stratton giggling on the lectern was the cherry on the top. 

If you had wanted to perfectly design a story to generate anger against the government, it’s hard to think of a more effective one. 

  Yet, as is characteristic of the media, it has meant that a more important story has been missed. This story is the accusation by Foreign Office civil servants of Downing Street, i.e. the Prime Minister, intervening in the Afghan evacuation.

If correct, this story does have the capacity to be just as damaging to Johnson’s reputation and political capital, however, it lacks the emotional punch and personal sacrificial lamb that Stratton provided us all.

Weakness at the top of Government

The accusations are as follows; that the Prime Minister intruded into the operation to evacuate Afghan civilians to prioritise the animals and personnel within Pen Farthing’s animal charity, called Nowzad, at the behest of his wife, Carrie.

If true, this would have diverted British personnel and resources away from aiding human beings, who may have held potential operational intelligence or has a history of aiding British forces. This was done to make Afghanistan the model child of the supposed universality of Western norms.

This is despite the fact that there was no reason to think that the Taliban would attack an animal rights charity, and the released documents acknowledge that fact.

Downing Street has continued to deny these allegations but, if they are true, it means the Prime Minister knowingly put British soldiers in danger to assuage his wife and to not achieve any strategic objective.

There were some thousand British soldiers on the ground who would be required to operate beyond the relative safety of the airport into Kabul city. The urban cityscape and the chaotic nature of the evacuation created the perfect opportunity for insurgents (such as the Afghan ISIS franchise, or any number of grievance laden-guerrilla fighters) to attack British personnel. It is a genuine and fortunate surprise that no British soldiers were killed throughout the process and it is likely that if we had not been so lucky, this aspect of the story would be far more prominent in the national press than it is now.

It is worth saying that this is not the first time that we have seen experienced government officials complaining of Carrie Johnson having undue influence over our Prime Minister. In his testimonial to the Health & Science Committee, Dominic Cummings alleged that Carrie Johnson was able to derail national crisis discussions about coronavirus because she was concerned about the media coverage of stories about her pet.

Ignoring the personal antipathy between the two men, the man that Cummings paints Johnson as is a familiar one, he is a man who clearly lacks the ideological north star of a Thatcher, or the personal fortitude of his hero, Winston Churchill.

That may be fine if he was an effective operator, but we see that the Prime Minister is a man of weakness and someone who is unable to prevent his personal life from interfering with policy.

Endemic Dysfunction

The intervention of the Prime Minister into the conduct of a military operation is bad but the further details of the evacuation suggest that the problems extend far deeper. In fact, the Afghan evacuation seems to suggest, again echoing Mr Cummings, that the British state is fundamentally dysfunction.

For instance, the operation suffered from immense structural issues, not least of which was a major share of the burden for the evacuation fell upon the most inexperienced and untested civil servant staff. 

This looks to be the result of under-staffing, and of the dominance of a credentialed HR culture which banned civil servants from working overtime, even during an emergency situation.

As well, civil servants apparently had no background knowledge about the country they were supposed to be evacuating, with many of them being unaware of the internal geography or of the location of the various cities which were falling to the Taliban. Combined with a complete lack of coordination between departments, with the Home and Foreign offices seemingly working at complete cross purposes and communications from ministers not being relayed down the organisation hierarchy, we see an almost comical operation which demonstrates a state structure which is painfully outdated and incapable of working quickly and efficiently.

A particularly egregious example of this stands out. Soldiers deployed to Hamid Karzai Airport reported that they were given computers which had not been unlocked by the MoD’s IT department, with some service men opting to share their own laptops between up to eight other people.

If true, this should be seen as a test run for what to avoid in coming national emergencies. We have been told by numerous government bodies and think tanks that the coming decades are likely to be some of the most challenging for this country we have seen in decades.

We will probably witness major cyber attacks, nuclear weapon proliferation, extreme weather events and any number of black swans which threaten to destabilise our society and throw our foreign policy off course. 

It is easy to hope that directing our country through this litany of threats will fall on competent shoulders but that looks increasingly doubtful if our civil service cannot handle what looks to be a relatively minor crisis in the grand scheme of the 21 century. 

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