Dominic Raab reveals he is heading to Afghanistan region today

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Dominic Raab today said Britain did not expect Kabul to fall to the Taliban this year as he insisted he never considered resigning over his handling of the UK’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

The Foreign Secretary told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee that the Government’s central assessment had been it was ‘unlikely’ the group would secure the capital in 2021. 

Britain had expected a ‘steady deterioration’ in the country when US and UK troops left in August, he said, but that planning scenario proved to be completely wide of the mark as the Taliban swept to power much more quickly than had been predicted.

The Foreign Secretary was savaged by committee members as they demanded answers on the UK’s withdrawal preparations and how many people have been left behind. 

Tom Tugendhat, the Tory chairman of the committee, confronted Mr Raab with extracts from what he said was the Foreign Office’s ‘principle risk report’ dated July 22 which had warned ‘rapid Taliban advances… could lead to fall of cities’ and a Taliban return to power. 

Mr Raab, who revealed he is flying to the region this evening, said the UK began planning its military withdrawal from the country in April while work on a contingency plan for an evacuation started in June.

He was pushed for clarity on how many British allies and British nationals have been left stranded following the end of the Kabul airlift.  

He risked anger as he said ‘we are not confident with any precision at all’ on numbers but he believed the number of British nationals still in the country is in the ‘mid to low hundreds’. 

Mr Raab was repeatedly quizzed on his decision to delay his return from a family holiday in Crete as the situation in Afghanistan grew worse. 

He said a ‘modern foreign secretary’ needs to be able to work from anywhere including ‘from abroad’ and that he had ‘engaged in all of the COBRA meetings’. 

He told MPs: ‘I have said that I wouldn’t have gone away with the benefit of hindsight.’  

Mr Raab has been widely tipped for the sack at Boris Johnson’s next Cabinet reshuffle over his handling of the crisis but he told MPs he had never considered quitting and remained focused on ‘getting on with the job’. 

The Foreign Secretary also defended his approach to diplomacy after anonymous briefings said he had been slow to contact his counterparts in the region. 

Mr Raab’s appearance in front of the committee came amid a worsening Whitehall blame game over the manner of the UK’s exit from the country. 

Mr Raab was grilled on a variety of issues as he battled to save his job this afternoon. Below is a breakdown of the key points. 

UK did not believe Kabul would fall this year 

The Foreign Secretary was confronted by Mr Tugendhat with a report which suggested the Foreign Office was warned in July that the Taliban could rapidly seize control of the country. 

Mr Tugendhat said: ‘Your principle risk report from the 22nd of July 2021 read on Afghanistan ‘peace talks have stalled and US NATO withdrawal is resulting in rapid Taliban advances, this could lead to fall of cities, collapse of security forces, Taliban return to power, mass displacement and significant humanitarian need, the embassy may need to close of security deteriorates’.

‘This was on the 22nd of July. How did you actions change after that report?’

Mr Raab said he was ‘very mindful of that’ and added: ‘The central assessment remained until late that the deterioration would be incremental and the planning for military withdrawal obviously began in April. 

‘But the contingency planning was also there for a more rapid deterioration.’     

The Foreign Secretary said the UK’s central assessment was that Kabul was ‘unlikely’ to fall to the Taliban in 2021. 

He told MPs: ‘The central assessment that we were operating to, and it was certainly backed up by the JIC (Joint Intelligence Committee) and the military, is that the most likely, the central proposition, was that given the troop withdrawal by the end of August, you’d see a steady deterioration from that point and it was unlikely Kabul would fall this year.’

Mr Raab said the UK started planning for a possible evacuation of Afghanistan in June. 

Foreign Secretary rejects jibes against his approach to diplomacy

Anonymous negative briefings had suggested that Mr Raab had been slow to contact his counterparts in the region as the situation in Afghanistan worsened. 

But he told the committee: ‘From the period mid-March to August 30 I had over 40 meetings or telephone calls where Afghanistan was on the agenda. So that’s broadly one every four days.’    

He was repeatedly asked when he had spoken to key figures but he suggested telephone diplomacy was not as important as his critics had claimed. 

He said: ‘We get telegrams in, updating us on events… we assess them very carefully. I don’t need to pick up the phone to get an assessment from the ground.

‘What I do need to do is get a holistic picture from the team that are getting all the different advice, get the options and assess what we do next.’

Dominic Raab refuses to say when his holiday to Crete started

The Foreign Secretary was grilled about his decision to delay his return from a holiday to Crete last month as the Taliban’s grip on Afghanistan tightened. 

Mr Raab labelled the questions a ‘fishing expedition’ and said he had already made clear in a statement that he ‘would not have gone away, with the benefit of hindsight’. 

He told the committee: ‘I am not going to start adding to, frankly, the fishing expedition beyond the facts that I have articulated and the fulsome statement and having answered questions on this continuously.’ 

Describing the need to be able to work remotely, Mr Raab said: ‘A modern foreign secretary has to have the ability given those wide array of issues that will constantly bubble up, possibly to crisis point, to be able to deal, act, work, from abroad.

‘I engaged in all of the COBRA meetings. I engaged and directed the emergency response directly and I was engaged with international partners.’

SNP MP Stewart Malcolm McDonald repeatedly asked Mr Raab what date he had gone on holiday but the Foreign Secretary refused to say. 

Mr McDonald said the refusal to give an answer was ‘absurd’ while Mr Raab hit back at what he described as ‘partisan’ questions. 

Dominic Raab never considered resigning over Afghanistan crisis 

The Foreign Secretary has been widely tipped for the sack at the next Cabinet reshuffle. 

Government sources recently said they believed Mr Raab is toast. 

Mr McDonald asked the Foreign Secretary if at any point during the crisis he had considered or offered to resign. 

Mr Raab replied: ‘No, I considered getting on with the job of what has been a herculean task of getting 17,000 people out and now focusing on getting out the remaining people that we want to see out via third countries.’

No ‘definitive answer’ on how many British allies were left behind

On the crunch issue of the number of Afghan citizens who worked for the UK forces and who are eligible to come to Britain but who have been left behind, Mr Raab said he could not give a ‘definitive answer’.  

Asked to confirm the Prime Minister’s assertion that the ‘overwhelming majority of people who worked for us are out’, he said: ‘I’m not confident with precision to be able to give you a set number, but I am confident that the Prime Minister is right, that we’ve got the overwhelming number out.’ 

Mr Tugendhat asked Mr Raab how he could be ‘confident’ on Government estimates for people still in the country. 

The Foreign Secretary replied: ‘We are not confident with any precision at all because, for two reasons.

‘We think that in terms of nationals we are into the hundreds, possibly the mid to low hundreds.

‘But again it depends on eligibility which of course is one of the things that has been a challenge.’

Mr Raab also appeared to admit that some Afghans who worked as security guards at the UK embassy in Kabul were unable to be evacuated because of problems relating to their travel to the airport. 

He said: ‘We wanted to get some of those embassy guards through but the buses arranged to collect them, to take them to airport, were not given permission to enter.’

Foreign Secretary rejects ‘control freak’ criticism

Government sources claimed earlier this week that Mr Raab was a ‘control freak’ who had trouble delegating tasks to officials. 

But the Tory heavyweight rubbished the accusation this afternoon, telling the committee: ‘No one in the FCDO thinks I don’t challenge official advice rigorously. I do. If anything I get accused of being over inquisitorial but I do think it is important.

‘And indeed the Foreign Office as an institution was testing, and we did across Government. That is not to say there aren’t lessons to be learned but you have also got to look at, the sort of caricature, the critique against me is I am either lazy and delegating too much or a control freak.

‘The truth is you need to exercise grip but you also need to be willing to delegate. If you don’t do that you will never take decisions.’

UK Embassy portrait of the Queen may not have been destroyed

Mr Raab was asked if a portrait of the Queen had been left in the UK Embassy in Kabul. 

He replied: ‘My understanding was that it was destroyed. Are you saying that it wasn’t?’

He was told some Taliban fighters had been pictured with the portrait, and replied: ‘We had a very clear, in fact I talked through with the team the policy for destroying not just documents but anything relating to HMG. It’s not clear to me whether that came from outside or inside the embassy.

‘Clearly we were conscious of the attempted propaganda coup around the Taliban taking over embassies and what have you.’ 

Mr Tugendhat had set the tone for Mr Raab’s appearance as he said yesterday the UK and US exit from Kabul had left people ‘defenceless in front of armed gangs’. 

Meanwhile, other members of the committee had described the UK’s withdrawal from the country as the ‘worst crisis since Suez’ while Labour said it is the ‘biggest foreign policy failing in a generation’. 

Mr Raab yesterday defended his handling of the situation and took aim at his critics as he appeared to blame the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office for some of the Government’s failings.  

Westminster was braced for the clash between Mr Raab and Mr Tugendhat, with the latter having been a vocal critic of the handling of the withdrawal and the overall decision to leave the country. 

The former soldier said last week that the exit from Afghanistan and the decision to leave many Afghan allies behind means Britain could face the ‘biggest hostage crisis the UK has ever seen’. 

Mr Tugendhat said the UK and the US had been ‘defeated’ and ‘this is what defeat looks like’ after the Taliban completed its takeover of the country. 

He warned yesterday that the manner of the departure from Afghanistan risked another war. 

Responding to a US politician who tweeted ‘ending wars is good actually’, Mr Tugendhat said: ‘Ending wars is good. Leaving people defenceless in front of armed gangs is not how you end a war, it’s how you start a new one.’ 

Mr Raab said yesterday that the number of British nationals still in the country is in the ‘low hundreds’ but the Government has not given a concrete figure for how many Afghans who helped UK forces have been left behind. 

Government sources have predicted that Mr Raab will be ‘toast’ at the next reshuffle. 

The Foreign Secretary launched a counter offensive yesterday as he lashed out his critics and appeared to point the finger at other departments for failings. 

Responding to a series of negative anonymous briefings against him, Mr Raab said those people making the remarks were ‘not credible’ and the timing of them during the airlift was ‘deeply irresponsible’.  

The Foreign Office has been accused of leaving hundreds of emails from people stuck in Afghanistan unopened but Mr Raab said those email accounts were actually the responsibility of the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence.         

He also risked MOD fury as he said the ‘military’ assessment of how quickly the Taliban would seize control of the country was ‘clearly wrong’. 

Government sources last night accused Mr Raab of trying to ‘throw the MOD under a bus’. 

The Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman said yesterday that Mr Johnson has ‘full confidence in his Foreign Secretary’ and there are ‘no plans’ for a reshuffle.  

However, Mr Raab remains fighting for his political career with reports suggesting Michael Gove, the Minister for the Cabinet Office, is being lined up to replace him.  

Mr Raab’s committee appearance came after it emerged British officials had opened formal talks with the Taliban about getting UK citizens and allies out of Afghanistan. 

Special envoy Sir Simon Gass, the chair or the Joint Intelligence Committee, met senior representatives of the group in Qatar to try to secure safe passage for those left behind following the chaotic military withdrawal. 

Officers from MI6 also met the militia group, while the head of MI6 Richard Moore flew to Islamabad for talks with the head of the Pakistani army.