The decay at the heart of the civil service

That Britain no longer has the capability to maintain peace in Afghanistan other than as an appendage of the United States has been clear for decades. When President Biden made his decision to hurriedly withdraw from the country, then, Britain never had an option to do anything other than to join a messy evacuation.

But at the very least we owed it to those Afghans who helped us during two decades of occupation to save as many as we could from the murderous clutches of the advancing Taliban. The testimony of a 25-year-old former junior officer in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) shows just how far short we failed.

Indeed, written evidence presented to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee shows up the extent of the institutional decay of the British state.