By Hamed Chapman and Ahmed J Versi
(The Muslim News): The UK announced Thursday that it would send 600 paratroopers to Afghanistan to evacuate around 4,000 Britons and 2,000 Afghan staff as Taliban moved to capture the country’s second largest city of Kandahar and Lashkar Gah, capital of Helmand province.
“I have authorised the deployment of additional military personnel to support the diplomatic presence in Kabul, assist British nationals to leave the country and support the relocation of former Afghan staff who risked their lives serving alongside us,” said Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace.
“The security of British nationals, British military personnel and former Afghan staff is our first priority. We must do everything we can to ensure their safety,” he said after the US announced it was sending 3,000 troops.
It was hoped that the British and US evacuations will be completed by Sept 11, the date chosen by the US as the end of their military involvement in Afghanistan.
It comes after Boris Johnson announced in Parliament last month that British forces had withdrawn from the war-torn country after 20 years in which 457 British military personnel were killed.
Over the past eight days, Afghan Government forces lost control of 12 provincial capitals to the Taliban amid fears that Kabul would be the next to fall.
Wallace said Britain was relocating its embassy from the outskirts of the secure Green Zone to a potentially safer location closer to the centre of the capital.
Speaking on Sky News Friday, the British Defence Secretary was uncommonly critical of the US decision to leave Afghanistan, describing it as a “mistake” that has handed the Taliban “momentum”.
Voicing concern that “the international community will probably pay the consequences” he was worried al-Qaida would regain a base in Afghanistan but said the UK had no choice but to pull troops out, because the international community had to act together.
“When the United States as the framework nation took that decision, the way we were all configured meant that we had to leave,” Wallace said, describing the withdrawal agreement negotiated in Doha, Qatar, by the Trump administration as a “rotten deal” which the UK tried to resist.
Asked how big a mistake it was to withdraw troops, Wallace said: “At the time of the Trump deal with, obviously the Taliban, I felt that was a mistake to have done it that way. We will all, in the international community probably pay the consequences of that.”
“I’ve been pretty blunt about it publicly and that’s quite a rare thing when it comes to United States decisions, but strategically it causes a lot of problems and as an international community, it’s very difficult for what we’re seeing today.”
In the US, Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, said that President Joe Biden’s decisions has us “hurtling toward an even worse sequel to the humiliating fall of Saigon (in Vietnam) in 1975.”
“The latest news of a further drawdown at our embassy and a hasty deployment of military forces seem like preparations for the fall of Kabul,” NcConnell warned. “President Biden is finding that the quickest way to end a war is to lose it.”
Kandahar became the12th provincial capital to be partly or completely overrun by the insurgents after Ghazni, Herat, Fayzabad, Aybak, Qala-e-Nau, Lashkargah, Zaranj, Sheberghan, Kunduz, Taluqan and Sar-e-Pul.
Separately Germany and the Netherlands announced that they had stopped forced repatriations of Afghan migrants.
[Photo: Thousands of displaced families suffer hardships in a park in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 11, 2021. Approximately 30,000 families have been displaced due to govt and Taliban clashes in the northern provinces. Photographer: Haroon Sabawoon/AA]
