CONSERVATIVE MP Tom Tugendhat has spoken out about his experience of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan on the first anniversary of the controversial pullout.
In a moving interview the ex-leadership candidate said it was heartbreaking to see how half the Afghan population of 16 million women and girls had “just effectively been thrown straight back into slavery.”
Commenting on his feelings about the anniversary Mr Tugendhat, a former soldier who served in Afghanistan, told GB News: “It’s been one of those days when when a lot of things come flooding back, and not all of them good, because let’s not forget, there’s a lot of people who didn’t get out, a lot of people I worked with who were incredibly brave, who texted called, begged for help from places around Afghanistan.
“On the day of the withdrawal, like many people, I was doing other things on holiday, and I started to get more and more desperate phone calls from friends in Lashkar Gah or in Kabul, in places where I’d served.
“The advance that we were watching on TV listening to all the radio started to become more dramatic as town after town fell to the Taliban.
“Friends and interpreters who had served alongside government officials who had worked with soldiers started to understandably get very worried about their families across Afghanistan and try and get them out.
Commenting on the steps he took to try and raise the profile of the situation Mr Tugendhat, who made an impassioned speech in Parliament in the aftermath of the withdrawal, added: “In the early days, I was doing a lot of shouting, really shouting as loud as I could to try and get the Government, other governments to realise quite how serious this was.
“And I was giving interview after interview, to try and get people to listen. I was talking to ministers, talking to others, behind the scenes, to try and get people to act and then it became a sort of network so many of us were so frustrated.
“It was a collection of ex soldiers and officers who were getting together not just in the UK, but Australia, United States, France, France in a few other places as well, to try and get those who we worked with out.”
Mr Tugendhat told GB News: “Afghanistan’s an incredibly beautiful country, it’s mountainous – to say it’s rocky is just to understate it. Even the landscape is pretty hostile.
“The deserts are pretty harsh, and the mountains are pretty fierce. And the people in some ways match it but the people are very, very kind as well.
“I had the great, good fortune of working there for, on and off, for about four years. And one year I was working down in Helmand Province, I was working with the governor and his team and working very, very closely with Afghans and it was a fantastic privilege.
“It was hugely interesting as you can imagine but it was also extremely challenging.
He added: “I got to listen to the stories that people tell us when they sit around in the evenings.
“It’s storytelling, the old kind and it was just fantastic to listen and to understand a country that’s so different from ours.
“And the reality is that, of course, it’s very remote from us, but sadly 9/11 again, 21 years ago, taught us that even remote countries have a direct effect on our lives.”
He said: “For me, it was a hugely life defining moment. It was four years of your life doing something and then you see it come to nothing.
“It’s pretty heartbreaking but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is you bury a lot of friends. You see a lot of injuries.
“In fact, last year as that turmoil was reignited, a lot of people who you thought were okay, turned out they weren’t and it was like, you know, tearing, tearing the plaster off an old wound and watching it bleed again.
“It was really painful, so I think for a lot of people it was a very difficult time, still is, actually…
“It does feel very difficult, half the Afghan population of 16 million or so women and girls have just effectively been thrown straight back into slavery.”
He added: “But it’s also important to remember that a lot of people demonstrated something that we didn’t think would happen when those planes went in on 9/11.
“When that attack happened…we thought we’d be fighting Islamic terrorism on our streets for years and decades into the future.
“We didn’t, and part of that is down to the operations that we fought. And part of that is down to the courage of those individuals.
“I was lucky enough to serve with and meet many of them Afghan as well and there’s a lot of us who have stayed in touch.
