Kabul chaos: lift the asylum cap

Priti Patel should scrap Britain’s 5k limit on Afghan refugees

The UK government has briefed the Times that it will extend the evacuation from Kabul, that it will press the US to abandon the 31 August deadline and expand its list of evacuees beyond the UK’s immediate allies to civil society groups in danger.

This is late but welcome. It is also a reflection of the scale of failure. The announcement of “hubs” in neighbouring countries, where those escaping overland can be processed, is a tacit admission that the Kabul operation is failing.

The underlying reality is that the British state is paralysed over the Afghan withdrawal. MPs on all sides are bombarding ministers with case-work of Afghans eligible for extraction — but they seem powerless.

British troops on the ground are hamstrung by the US agreement with the Taliban; the FCDO’s helpline, set up to log and process Afghan refugees’ attempts to evacuate, takes hours to answer. All this is more than a week after it first became clear that Kabul would fall without a fight.

A relatively small set of politicians, civil servants and security people around the FCDO, MoD and Downing Street are simultaneously trying to (a) process a strategic geopolitical defeat; (b) handle the Kabul airport crisis…