LONDON: Britain and its allies have no coherent plan to deal with the expected Afghan refugee crisis spurred by the Taliban takeover, Britain’s former ambassador to Afghanistan has warned.
Mark Sedwill, who has also served as a senior advisor to two prime ministers and NATO’s top envoy in Afghanistan, said the emergency airlift carried out by coalition forces had helped “relatively small numbers” of people and far more are likely to flee overland.
Speaking at an event hosted by London think tank Policy Exchange, Sedwill said the US decision to vacate Afghanistan could not be changed, but it had a number of ramifications for Britain and the West.
“First, there will need to be a major humanitarian effort in and around Afghanistan. We will be very lucky indeed if there is not a really significant refugee crisis,” he said, adding that the Taliban would have to run an “inclusive and wholly different government” from when they previously ruled, before the 2001 NATO invasion.
The American withdrawal, he continued, “is, in my view, a bad policy, badly implemented. It is an act of strategic self-harm.
“The Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan will undoubtedly fuel extremism and terrorism worldwide, whether or not it is directed from there.”
He said the success of the emergency airlift, which saw the US and its allies evacuate from Kabul over 114,000 individuals and families of people who had worked with coalition forces, “can’t and shouldn’t conceal that overall, we do not yet have a coherent policy and plan in place to deal with refugee flows out of Afghanistan.”
According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, an additional 500,000 Afghans have now left on foot, crossing into neighboring countries including Pakistan and Iran. That is on top of the 2.2 million Afghans who fled during the 20-year conflict.
Britain is now grappling with how to deal with the thousands of people who have a firm or likely claim to resettlement in the UK who could not be extracted before the US completed its withdrawal of forces.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab on Thursday said evacuations might be able to resume from Kabul airport “in the near future,” but talks over the functioning of the airport are ongoing between the Taliban, Qatar and Turkey.
The UK Foreign Office has said it would immediately provide £10 million ($13.8 million) in emergency aid to the UNHCR for the provision of shelters, sanitation facilities and emergency supplies for border refugee camps, and an additional £20 million to Central Asian countries for the expected surge in arrivals.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Britain had extracted 15,000 people from Afghanistan during the airlift, but acknowledged that he did not know how many people eligible for evacuation did not manage to make it to the airport and out of the country.
“The answer is there are some, and we care for them very much, we’re thinking about them, we’re doing everything we can to help,” he said.
Given that neighboring countries have already taken in millions of Afghans, Sedwill cautioned that their goodwill cannot be relied upon in the long term. “The neighbors really can’t absorb more,” he said.
Memories in Europe of the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis and its political ramifications — many of which are ongoing today — have prompted leaders on the continent to take a hard line on the acceptance of Afghan refugees.
“Europe cannot alone assume the consequences” of the Taliban takeover, said French President Emmanuel Macron, while Austria’s interior minister has implied that his country will not take any Afghan refugees.
The UNHCR predicted that in a worst-case scenario, an additional 500,000 people could flee Afghanistan.
Britain has pledged to take 20,000 refugees, and said it expects 5,000 to arrive in the first year.