Can the Foreign Office avoid the mistakes of Kabul in Sudan?

A British evacuation of Sudan began last night after a 72-hour ceasefire was agreed. Ministers, however, are anxious about the possibility that the fighting will start up sooner. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said it was ‘impossible for us to predict how long this opportunity will last’. Britons will need to travel to an airfield outside Khartoum themselves, as no escorts are available, and are being told only to travel when contacted. It is a precarious situation.

It is also easy to see superficial parallels with the chaotic evacuation of Kabul in 2021. Cleverly, though, said ‘this situation is fundamentally different to the situation in Afghanistan’, adding ‘we have established contact with a number of British nationals and we are talking where we can directly with them’.

What he didn’t say was that in Afghanistan, there was a significant amount of UK infrastructure including troops who had been stationed there for years.