'We should've never left': UK Tory MP calls Afghanistan exit 'humiliating' post wind down

‘Political masters’ have let down military troops with ‘humiliation’ in Afghanistan drawdown, senior UK Conservative lawmaker Tobias Ellwood reportedly said on Sunday, 29 August 2021, condemning the deadline adherence. The Chairman of the Commons Defence Select Committee and former Army officer in his remarks to the LBC radio station also warned about “a terrorist attack somewhere in the world that will almost bookend 9/11.” Ellwood condemned the hasty UK troop withdrawal from Afghanistan saying that there’s “a litany of concerns" related to the British government’s handling of the Afghan conflict that needs to be addressed, according to an interview with UK broadcaster Sky.

The ex-UK soldier and the chair of the Defence Select Committee, along with the senior conservative MPs is mounting pressure on the Boris Johnson administration on lending an explanation about botched Afghanistan troop withdrawal as the last military jet from Kabul flew home late Aug. 29. 

Ellwood told the broadcasters that the UK Foreign Office no longer had the ability to deal with the challenges that it battled in the last two weeks as the Afghanistan deadline of Aug 31 edged nearer and the extension could not be negotiated with the Taliban. His remarks came as the Afghans, who were eligible for relocation in the UK left behind in Kabul, told the correspondents on the ground “we feel hopeless” as they were abandoned by the UK officials. The final aircraft with the last British soldiers and the British ambassador to Afghanistan flew out of Kabul and landed at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire on Sunday morning concluding the 2-decade of the British presence in Afghanistan alongside the US forces. 

 "How [the Foreign Office] handled this crisis will be the subject of a coming [Foreign Affairs Committee] inquiry. The evidence is already coming in," another Conservative ex-soldier who heads the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Tom Tugendhat wrote in a tweet. 

Boris Johnson administration has claimed that it evacuated more than 15,000 people since Aug. 14 after the Taliban laid siege on the Capital metropolis of Kabul taking over the control of the key checkpoints surrounding the Hamid Karzai International Airport. UK’s armed forces notified in a statement that via Operation Pitting, the UK airlifted an estimated15,000 British nationals and Afghans out of Kabul in over two weeks, in the largest military operation since WWII.

While UK military’s Vice Adm Sir Ben Key called the Afghan evacuations as a "tremendous international effort” that perhaps wasn’t a  “moment of celebration,” Tory MP Ellwood said that the UK “made the situation worse, by absenting ourselves from the very place where it’s now very easy for terrorist groups to do their work.” In the aftermath of the gruesome twin bombing, the former military service member had warned that more terrorism “will raise its ugly face again as a consequence of the pullout.”  

“We lacked the strategy, the statecraft, the patience to see through, and the manner of our departure is a humiliation, a confirmation of our diminished resolve, and our adversaries will not be slow to exploit it,” Ellwood stressed.  "We need to recognise that this is a wake-up call, that the world is getting more dangerous, not less," he went on to add in his remarks to Sky network. 

"As soon as we've departed, there have been terrorist attacks," he said. "And there will be further terrorist attacks because we've departed," he adds. 

'Concerned about terrorist attack somewhere,' ex-soldier says

Deriding the leaders’ defence strategy in Afghanistan, Ellwood stated, “until we defeat this ideology, we can have as many drone strikes as we like, we can invade as many countries as we like, we will never win”. In his statement to the newspaper the Bournemouth Echo, Ellwood lamented the wind-down of the evacuation process, stating that the “emotional journey” for those who served and were left behind along with their families as Taliban tightened its grip on the country was “going to be very painful.” He added that the Brits countrywide were now questioning “what was it for, that we didn’t have the resolve to see it through.” 

“The world is a more dangerous place because of what Joe Biden has done. I am concerned we will have a terrorist attack somewhere in the world that will almost bookend 9/11 as we near the 20th anniversary,” Ellwood’s remarks to the paper read.