A whistleblower has accused the British government of abject failures in its efforts to manage the evacuation of people from Afghanistan as the Taliban took control in August. Emma Graham-Harrison returns to the country to find it facing a humanitarian crisis

When the Taliban entered Kabul in August and completed their takeover of Afghanistan, thousands of people scrambled for the last remaining flights out of the city’s airport. It was chaos that turned deadly: a bomb attack on the airport’s perimeter killed more than 70 people as they crowded the fences, desperate for a way out. Now testimony from a whistleblower who was working on the UK government’s response to the crisis paints a picture of a callous, complacent and incompetent Foreign Office.

It’s a picture that rings true for the Guardian’s senior foreign reporter Emma Graham-Harrison, who tells Michael Safi that while some of the staff in the Foreign Office acted heroically, the system as a whole had huge failings. The government has rejected the account of the whistleblower. A spokesperson said: “Regrettably we were not able to evacuate all those we wanted to, but … since the end of the operation we have helped more than 3,000 individuals leave Afghanistan.”