A former British foreign secretary has defended his oversight of the evacuation of troops and civilians from Afghanistan following a damning whistle-blower's report alleging that the operation was "dysfunctional" and "chaotic" and left U.K. allies abandoned.
Dominic Raab, who was transferred from the Foreign Office to his current post of justice secretary following the evacuation that ended at the end of August, defended his record on December 7.
Raab described as "inaccurate" claims made by Foreign Office staffer Raphael Marshall, who wrote to a parliamentary committee that, while he estimated that 75,000 to 150,000 people requested evacuation, just 5 percent of Afghan nationals who applied received help.
Marshall said that at times he was the only person monitoring the e-mail system set up to field requests for assistance, and that there were "usually 5,000 unread e-mails in the inbox," some of them with headings like "please save my children."
"It's inaccurate in certain respects; the suggestion that junior desk officers were making decisions is just not correct," Raab told the BBC.
“Some of the criticism seems rather dislocated from the facts on the ground, the operational pressures [that came with the] takeover of the Taliban," he told the BBC. "I do think that not enough recognition has been given to quite how difficult it was."
Marshall also told members of parliament that "thousands of Afghan friends of the U.K. at risk of murder" were removed from evacuation lists, and that limited capacity on planes deployed during the airlift was at one point used to transport animals.
Marshall alleged that soldiers were put at risk as a result of the decision to aid the evacuation of animals from a shelter at the request of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The operator of the shelter, former Royal Marine Paul Farthing, has accused Marshall of lying, saying "not one single British soldier" was used in the evacuation of the animals.
Raab told Sky News on December 7 that "we did not put the welfare of animals above individuals."
More than 122,000 people, including soldiers and civilians who worked for the Afghan government or Western powers, were evacuated from Afghanistan in a combined effort carried out by the United States and its allies in the two weeks that followed the Taliban's capture of Kabul on August 15.
Some 15,000 people were evacuated by Britain.