During the fall of the capital Kabul in August, thousands of Afghans had difficulty getting help from the United Kingdom. Diplomats and soldiers had to work hard to deal with the serious shortage of IT and secure communications support.
The severe lack of PC availability, the lack of secure IT system logins, disconnected IT systems, and desperate attempts to use printed paper methods have all led to chaos in the newly merged Office of Foreign Affairs, Federal and Development (FCDO). Written testimony submitted to Parliament today.
“On the night of Saturday, August 21, the soldiers received one FCDO computer for every two soldiers. These were useless because FCDO IT did not issue a password to unlock them. These computers were finally unlocked on the afternoon of Sunday, August 22. In Before that, the soldiers used a computer shared by about eight people to work,” said Raphael Marshall, a former office official. His evidence [PDF] An investigation by the Special Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Commons on the policies of the Afghan government.
“This obviously reduces their efficiency and speed. I printed an A3 spreadsheet for the soldiers, but this is not a substitute for a computer. The soldiers obviously need a computer to email their travel documents to Afghans who choose to evacuate,” he said .
Contrary to simple efficiency losses or cost increases, these computer problems can lead to loss of life. According to the plan of the British government, 75,000 to 150,000 people have applied for evacuation.
Marshall said: “The vast majority of these applicants are worried that their lives are in danger due to their links with the United Kingdom and the West and are therefore eligible to evacuate.”
“I estimate that less than 5% of these people received any assistance. It is clear that some of those who stayed were later murdered by the Taliban,” he said.
His testimony reads that failing to issue enough computers to soldiers for more than 12 hours delayed the sending of travel documents, thus reducing the chances of the selected Afghans to evacuate, which could directly lead to unnecessary deaths.
Marshall said the chaotic technical support has also extended to the telephone system. Soldiers calling for the evacuation of Afghan nationals will receive a paper log-in list of the department’s non-secure telephone system. However, the telephone system is not suitable for confidential information and cannot work without logging in.
“On the evening of Monday, August 23, the soldiers lost this paper list during the handover between shifts. This will prevent them from calling any Afghan nationals to the airport. My colleagues and I got it from my Fast Stream WhatsApp The group obtained their phone login information, the British Embassy in Beijing and Tokyo (online) and other sources,” Marshall said.
Although the former office official said he tried to solve the phone login problem by contacting the British Embassy in Washington, it found that the situation in the UK was so unbelievable that it believed that the email sent to FCDO Security was a Russian phishing attempt.
Marshall was told to apologize for violating the security rules. The correct way is to request the relevant IT team to log in again the next morning. “In order to protect the integrity of the unsecured phone system, this would waste approximately 12 hours at critical moments,” he said.
At the same time, Marshall said, the lack of integration between the IT systems of the newly merged department also created difficulties.
“About 6 FCDO employees who previously worked at DFID volunteered to help. It is difficult to integrate them effectively because we cannot share real-time documents or give them access to the inbox because DFID and FCO IT systems are not yet integrated. They are clearly confusing to us. The system was shocked,” he said.
The merger of the Ministry of International Development and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was announced in June 2020, a full year before the Afghan crisis broke out. July 2020, Deloitte chooses a £3 million contract Define the “operating model, organizational design, and tool set strategy” for the merged department.
Marshall said that users also lack basic computer training for the task at hand, which also contributed to the failure.
He testified: “The professionalism of the soldiers has left a deep impression on me. However, I believe that some of them may be using Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Outlook for the first time in a professional environment. I understand some administrative errors. To overcome this lack of experience, “including the sending of 91 travel documents from the wrong email account, which means we do not have a complete record. Again, it is not the soldier’s fault,” he said.
FCDO told us: “The British government staff worked tirelessly and evacuated more than 15,000 people from Afghanistan in two weeks. This is the largest such mission in generations and the second largest evacuation mission of any country. We Still trying to help others leave.
“During Op Pitting, more than 1,000 FCDO staff worked to help British nationals and eligible Afghans leave. The scale of the evacuation and the challenging environment meant that prioritization decisions must be made quickly to ensure that we can help As many people as possible. “Unfortunately we cannot evacuate all the people we want to evacuate, but our commitment to them is lasting. Since the end of the operation, we have helped more than 3,000 people leave Afghanistan. ”®
