LONDON: An error in the UK Foreign Office’s IT systems which prevented staff from opening emails sent by desperate Afghans hoping for evacuation has still not been fixed, a whistleblower has revealed.
During the emergency evacuation of British citizens and their Afghan allies, officials from different parts of the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office were restricted from opening some emails because they were using separate computer systems.
In damning testimony former civil servant Raphael Marshall said officials trying to assist were “visibly appalled by our chaotic system.”
Marshall said there were usually more than 5,000 unread messages in the inbox at any given moment, with desperate subject lines such as: “Please save my children.”
It has emerged that the issue — related to the merger of the Department for International Development into the Foreign Office — has not yet been resolved.
An employee working in the FCDO told the Daily Mail: “To this day, the FCDO and DFID IT systems are not synchronized. In some instances we cannot send emails or messages to our ex-DFID counterparts and have to do it instead using our personal phones.
“We run two different softwares, on which the majority of our work is done. They are not compatible with each other. On email, it is common for our messages not to go through because of security limitations.”
They warned that if a “major crisis” happened, the office would be hampered by the same issue.
A parliamentary inquiry into the UK’s chaotic evacuation efforts during the fall of Kabul is continuing.
The British government said it had evacuated 18,000 people from Afghanistan — 15,000 during the initial wave of airlifts, and a further 3,000 since the Taliban consolidated full control of Afghanistan’s capital.
