A year after the Taliban reclaimed power in Afghanistan, UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has said the West's two-decade military campaign in the country ended in failure.
Hundreds of UK troops lost their lives in the campaign and Mr Wallace revealed he feared their bereaved parents would ask: "What was it all for?"
Monday marks a year since the Taliban swept into Afghanistan's capital Kabul and toppled the West-backed Afghan government practically unopposed ― an extraordinary end to 20 years of foreign occupation.
It is also a year since the launch of Operation Pitting, Britain's largest evacuation effort since Second World War, during which more than a thousand British troops were sent to rescue stranded UK citizens.
Mr Wallace told the Mail newspaper that he worked round the clock throughout the operation, and also suffered sleepless nights after being sent death threats from animal rights activists who believed he should have prioritised the menagerie of animals owned by UK armed forces veteran Pen Farthing, who ran a sanctuary in Kabul.
There is a prevailing sentiment that Operation Pitting was simply too slow to scale up, an accusation Mr Wallace said was unfounded,
"When we started the relocation scheme they were not queuing up in their thousands, the country was stable enough. What we hadn’t done then was bring many people back," he said.
"But suddenly, as the fabric of the country began to fold, these people became very vulnerable. We didn’t just turn up at the airport and there was a coherent plan. Given another 10 days, we would have got almost everyone out."
Mr Wallace said in endeavours of the scale and logistical difficulty of Operation Pitting, it was inevitable that there would be some uncertainty over the outcome.
"We’d done a reconnaissance visit some months beforehand but even so, when the Paras and 16 Air Assault went down there, they didn’t know what they’d find," he said.
"Nobody could have predicted such a rapid collapse of the Afghan government. In the aftermath, we didn’t know whether the Afghans were going to turn nasty."
Thirteen US troops and at least 170 Afghans were killed outside Kabul's Hamid Karzai airport on August 26.
It was a tragedy consonant with two decades of bloodshed on both sides. Yet despite acknowledging the occupation ended in failure, Mr Wallace said he was proud of the evacuation effort and subsequent Afghan relocation scheme - a scheme which is costing the UK government one million pounds a day, it was revealed on Friday.
"I don’t have regrets. I am proud of the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy ― it is still going and will keep going," he said.
"More people are arriving here every week. We stood by our word and got those people out. On my watch, we did our very best."
Watch: Eyes on ... Afghanistan refugees
Iran's dirty tricks to dodge sanctions
There’s increased scrutiny on the tricks being used to keep commodities flowing to and from blacklisted countries. Here’s a description of how some work.
1 Going Dark
A common method to transport Iranian oil with stealth is to turn off the Automatic Identification System, an electronic device that pinpoints a ship’s location. Known as going dark, a vessel flicks the switch before berthing and typically reappears days later, masking the location of its load or discharge port.
2. Ship-to-Ship Transfers
A first vessel will take its clandestine cargo away from the country in question before transferring it to a waiting ship, all of this happening out of sight. The vessels will then sail in different directions. For about a third of Iranian exports, more than one tanker typically handles a load before it’s delivered to its final destination, analysts say.
3. Fake Destinations
Signaling the wrong destination to load or unload is another technique. Ships that intend to take cargo from Iran may indicate their loading ports in sanction-free places like Iraq. Ships can keep changing their destinations and end up not berthing at any of them.
4. Rebranded Barrels
Iranian barrels can also be rebranded as oil from a nation free from sanctions such as Iraq. The countries share fields along their border and the crude has similar characteristics. Oil from these deposits can be trucked out to another port and documents forged to hide Iran as the origin.
* Bloomberg
Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
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Price: base / as tested: Dh382,000
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How to apply for a drone permit
- Individuals must register on UAE Drone app or website using their UAE Pass
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What are the regulations?
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MOUNTAINHEAD REVIEW
Starring: Ramy Youssef, Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman
Director: Jesse Armstrong
Rating: 3.5/5
J%20Street%20Polling%20Results
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Benefits of first-time home buyers' scheme
- Priority access to new homes from participating developers
- Discounts on sales price of off-plan units
- Flexible payment plans from developers
- Mortgages with better interest rates, faster approval times and reduced fees
- DLD registration fee can be paid through banks or credit cards at zero interest rates
The Bio
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Holiday destination: “I like Paris very much, it’s a city very close to my heart.”
Book: “Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. I am not a communist, but there are a lot of lessons for the capitalist system, if you let it get out of control, and humanity.”
Musician: “I like very much Fairuz, the Lebanese singer, and the other is Umm Kulthum. Fairuz is for listening to in the morning, Umm Kulthum for the night.”
