Raab refuses 11 times to say when he went on holiday in lead up to Afghanistan crisis
Dominic Raab has refused 11 times to reveal when he went on holiday in the lead-up to the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in a 90-minute grilling by MPs.
The foreign secretary said today that he “wouldn’t have gone away with the benefit of hindsight”, but would not reveal if he left after western intelligence had already indicated Kabul would soon fall.
Tory chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee Tom Tugendhat revealed in today’s hearing that Raab was warned at the end of July by his department that Afghanistan was on the brink of collapse, with the Taliban making “rapid advances”.
However, the foreign secretary said he was going off the assumption that Kabul would not fall this year at all.
It took the Taliban just one week to sweep through Afghanistan in a devastating offensive mid-August that sparked tens of thousands of Afghanis to flee the country.
Raab has come under fire in the past two weeks for being on holiday in Crete last month as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban and for refusing to take calls on evacuating British nationals.
He instead delegated the calls to junior ministers, before coming back to the UK on 15 August on the same day that Kabul fell to the militant Islamist group.
Labour has called for his resignation and there have been some media reports suggesting that Raab is set to be demoted in the next reshuffle by Boris Johnson.
Raab said questions during the committee meeting by Scottish National Party MP Stewart McDonald around when he went to holiday were “partisan”.
When asked by Labour MP Chris Bryant when he went on holiday, Raab said: “I’m not going to start, Chris, adding to the fishing expedition beyond the facts I have articulated.”
Raab revealed during the committee hearing that he was travelling to the region today to “test the accessibility” of new security and immigration protocols in Afghanistan.
There are still hundreds of Afghan citizens with British visas who are stuck in the country, after failing to get out during the UK’s evacuation effort.
Raab and the Foreign Office were criticised by committee members for not being prepared for the mass evacuation.
Labour MP Graham Stringer said the crisis had exposed a “failure of planning on a grand scale”, while Tugendhat said it had been the greatest British foreign policy failure since Suez.
The foreign secretary said an intelligence failure meant the UK was not expecting Afghanistan to fall before the US completely withdrew from the country in August.
He said there were still plans in place from June to start eventually evacuating British nationals and Afghanis who worked with the UK.
“The central assessment we were operating to…is that the most likely proposition is that given the troop withdrawal by the end of August you would see a steady deterioration from that point and it was unlikely Kabul would fall this year,” he said.