UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace appeared to hold back tears as he told media that, “Some people will not get back,” from Afghanistan.
As of Monday morning, the sole remaining route out of the capital city of Kabul, Hamid Karzai International Airport, is being inundated with people desperately trying to flee the country; the chaos at the airport has already led to at least five deaths, although it is not clear whether they were killed in a stampede or by gunshots. US troops, who are guarding the airport’s perimeter, have also found it necessary to fire into the air to deter civilians from breaking loose across the tarmac and attempting to board flights out of the country.
For those who despair of gaining a seat on a flight out, Taliban checkpoints await them as they leave the airport’s grounds. Many of those who cooperated with foreign forces in Afghanistan over the past few decades fear reprisals from the Taliban, despite the group’s promises that they will not be engaged in revenge attacks.
“I think we all saw and felt a real sense of sadness that first of all the forces that the British and the international community had invested in had melted away in some areas so quickly,” Wallace told Sky News. “You don’t fix things overnight in global issues; you have to manage them … When that deal was done a few years ago, what happened was ultimately we undermined the community … [and] the Afghan government.”
Wallace added that it was a “really deep part of regret for me” that it would not be possible to rescue all Afghans eligible for entrance to the UK, even though Britain hopes to succeed in evacuating around 1000 people per day.
“My job as Defense Secretary is to make sure that we protect not only the UK nationals, but those Afghans we have an obligation to; that is actually why we’re in the country,” he noted. “For the last few weeks, we’ve been in the country solely to process those people and to make sure we protect our officials doing that job, and we’ll continue to do so.”
Asked whether he would admit that the Taliban had won the war, he said: “I don’t know about a win, I think, I acknowledge that the Taliban are in control of the country. You don’t have to be a political scientist to spot that’s where we’re at.”
Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson concluded that, “The West has done what it’s done,” and called the Taliban victory a “failure of the international community.” Both he and former NATO head Lord Robertson negatived the idea that foreign troops would return to Afghanistan, with Johnson insisting that a military solution no longer existed.
“I don’t think we’re going to be back in there again,” said the former NATO head, who served as general secretary of the military alliance between 1999 and 2004. “We can’t go in there militarily; that’s over, that’s finished.”
He blamed a “failure of intelligence” on the part of allied forces for failing to predict the speed at which the Taliban would seize control of the country. Just a few weeks ago, the United States and other countries were convinced that Kabul would succeed in holding out for another three months at least.
Robertson added that, “What we have to do now is make sure that our own defenses are much more resilient … We’ve got to watch what the international ramifications are going to be – and they will not be good.”