UK government blasted over Afghan exit issue

The UK government faced a torrent of criticism yesterday after it ended its hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving behind hundreds of people eligible for relocation.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson hailed a mission "unlike anything we've ever seen" after Britain airlifted more than 15,000 people in the past two weeks.
Troops landed yesterday at Brize Norton air base in southern England after Britain was forced to withdraw following the decision of its ally the United States to end its 20-year presence.
Johnson praised the evacuation efforts in "heartbreaking conditions" and assured the army that decades of deployment "were not in vain" after the Taliban regained control.
But current and former officials criticized the government's failures, suggesting that many more Afghans may have been rescued.
The left-wing Observer newspaper quoted a whistleblower as saying that thousands of emails from parliamentarians and charities to the Foreign Ministry highlighting specific Afghans at risk from the Taliban's takeover were not opened.
Foreign Minister Dominic Raab has already been heavily criticized for not immediately abandoning the beach holiday when the Taliban took control.
The Observer said it saw evidence that an official email account set up by the Foreign Ministry to regularly receive such pleas had 5,000 unopened emails last week.
He said these included messages from the ministers' offices and from the leader of the opposition Labor Party, Keir Starmer.
"They can't know (how many people have been left behind) because they haven't even read the emails," the whistleblower said.
The Foreign Ministry responded that its crisis team worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week "to classify incoming emails and calls."
Officials have provided varying estimates of how many eligible Afghans did not board the evacuation flights, the last of which departed on Saturday, and the UK's chief of armed forces, General Sir Nick Carter, called it "hundreds."
The right-wing Sunday Times newspaper quoted an anonymous minister as saying: "I suspect we could have removed 800 to 1,000 more people."
The same minister criticized Raab, claiming that he "did nothing" to build ties with third countries from which Afghans could enter the UK.
The Foreign Ministry acknowledged that Raab had delegated calls to his Afghan counterpart and said that he recently called his Pakistani counterpart.
The damning reports came after the Times reported last week that it found contact details for staff and job applicants who stayed at the British embassy compound in Kabul, putting them in potential danger.
Public opinion has been sharply divided in Britain over a high-profile campaign by a former military man, Paul or "Pen" Farthing, who runs a British animal charity to evacuate his animals and shelter staff in Kabul.
Farthing managed to fly in a private jet on Saturday with around 150 cats and dogs on board, landing at Heathrow on Sunday morning.
He was hailed as a hero by his supporters, but opponents questioned the ethics of using official time and military support to evacuate animals while Afghans were left behind.