Image source, Reuters

We brought you an update from the UK's ambassador to Afghanistan earlier and he is not the only European diplomat working to help people leave Kabul.

French, Dutch, German and Czech planes have all left Kabul in recent hours.

France has revealed it has flown to safety 25 French nationals and 184 Afghans "in need of protection". On board the flight to Abu Dhabi were four Dutch nationals, an Irish citizen and two Kenyans.

While France is using Abu Dhabi as an air bridge, Germany is using Uzbekistan for its operations. A second flight was heading to Tashkent on Wednesday after an initial plane arrived in Frankfurt on Tuesday evening.

A Czech plane landed in Prague carrying 87 people including Ambassador Jiri Baloun and dozens of Afghans who had helped Czech officials.

Dutch Foreign Minister Sigrid Kaag says two planes carrying its citizens left Kabul on Wednesday morning.

However, there was an outcry in the Netherlands when it emerged Dutch embassy staff had fled the Taliban arrival in Kabul without telling their Afghan colleagues.

A Dutch foreign ministry spokeswoman tells the BBC that embassy staff were "woken up by the US military and were asked to leave for the airport urgently so they had no time at all to warn local staff".

Image source, HoC

Plaid Cymru's Westminster leader Liz Saville Roberts criticises the "arbitrary and insufficient 5,000 cap" on Afghan refugees and says the government must halt the deportation of people already claiming asylum in the UK.

She asks the government to confirm whether it is true that the US intends to pull out its forces from Kabul airport within 72 hours, making evacuating Afghans more difficult beyond that point.

She calls on the government to confirm it will stay until 31 August, as it had previously said it would.

Richard Drax, a Tory MP and former soldier, says the sacrifices of UK servicemen and women have "lit a torch in a dark place that the Taliban, however hard they try, will find it impossible to totally extinguish".

But he says he has no faith in the Taliban's amnesty and says Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran are "circling like sharks" in the region.

He finishes by quoting a former general who wrote to say the defence review was "filleting the Army" and making operations such as Afghanistan less sustainable in future.

Labour's Hillary Benn calls on the government to rethink its refusal to hold an inquiry.

He says it should not be set up to "find scapegoats" but to understand what went wrong.

Image source, EPA

We've been hearing a lot today about the UK government's plan to take in Afghan refugees. The government has agreed to take in up to 20,000 over the next few years, including 5,000 this year.

So far, the government says, external it has resettled more than 2,000 Afghan nationals, and completed another 2,000 resettlement applications from Afghans.

The Refugee Council - which is a UK-based charity helping refugees - says the government's scheme is a "welcome start".

But it's asked for a few more details - including confirmation that the scheme is on top of the plans to already accept refugees (3,000 from across the world were due to come this year).

And the charity wants the government to go further - resettling at least 10,000 a year, and also expand the eligibility for families so that Afghans living in the UK can be reunited with their loved ones.

Image source, Reuters

And the council also calls on the UK to welcome refugees however they arrive in the UK, saying many flee and cross borders without the proper papers.

"A small number will arrive by themselves in the UK (while Iran and Pakistan will continue to host millions). We must welcome them," the charity says.

It takes aim at the upcoming Borders Bill, under which knowingly arriving in the UK without permission will become a new criminal offence.

"How a refugee reaches the UK should have no bearing on the protection they receive - that applies to Afghans, and anyone fleeing war and persecution. Measures in the upcoming anti-refugee bill that discriminate against some refugees must now be dropped."

Image source, HoC

Tory MP Owen Paterson stands up and mentions that it is the first time he has spoken in Parliament since his wife took her own life last year, thanking other MPs for their words of support.

He highlights the issue of veterans' mental health as they see their work in Afghanistan undermined, with applications for help to the charity Combat Stress doubling.

"We should remember what those veterans did," he says, recalling seeing an ammunition dump being transformed into a school.

"This is in our hands. These are our citizens," Paterson says, speaking of former servicemen and women for whom the "horrors of Afghanistan" return "every time they look at their screens".

Just beforehand, Labour's Debbie Abraham spoke about her constituency caseworker in Oldham, Marzia Babakarkhai, a former Afghan judge who had to flee after she set up a school for girls.

Abraham says too many people are willing to accept the "warm words" of the Taliban about respecting human rights.

She says women are being sent home from jobs already and girls as young as 10 being "sold to the Taliban". We must see "deeds not words" from the Taliban, she says.

And Stella Creasy, Labour MP for Walthamstow, says bureaucracy must not get in the way of rescuing Afghans who helped the UK, leaving people trapped at the airport while they are asked to prove their contribution.

She says there must also be an evacuation plan to help people who are being stopped at checkpoints and cannot reach the airport.

Image source, EPA

• Firing is heard in Jalalabad, a city about 80 miles from Kabul, as flag-waving protesters take to the streets waving the Afghan national flag to defy the Taliban
• Taliban leaders are expected in Kabul after they arrived in Kandahar from exile on Tuesday
• The leader of the Taliban-linked Haqqani Network meets former President Hamid Karzai
• The White House says the Taliban have promised civilians can travel safely to Kabul airport
• Reports say Afghans have been beaten by Taliban guards on their way there
• Militants are out in force manning checkpoints across the city

Follow all the latest updates from Afghanistan here.

Image source, HoL

In the House of Lords debate, former head of MI5 Lady Manningham-Buller says the Taliban victory will "inspire and embolden those who wish to promote jihad against the West".

She tells peers the events of the past few days will "excite, encourage and spur terrorists".

And she says "even if we believe the Taliban that it will not allow terrorists to operate from its territory" she doubts that it would be able to.

A former Nato secretary general also warns the retreat from Afghanistan will "strengthen" the UK's adversaries and lead to more terrorism in future.

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen tells peers while allied forces were always going to leave Afghanistan eventually "this shambolic and disorganised retreat will weaken Nato and the West".

He adds the UK needs to "prepare for an enhanced terrorist threat", as well as rebuild the "regional coalition" in countries around Afghanistan to hold the Taliban to account.

Former national security adviser Lord Ricketts says the US government's handling of Afghanistan has been a "decisive contribution" to the Taliban taking control of the country.

The cross-bench peer tells the Lords: "Good allies need to be honest with each other, so it needs saying that the American handling of Afghanistan these last two years has been a decisive contribution to the current disaster."

Image source, Reuters

The UK, US and European Union - along with more than a dozen other countries - have issued a joint statement saying they are "deeply worried about Afghan women and girls" following the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban.

The statement, external calls on "those in positions of power" in the country to protect the "rights to education, work and freedom of movement" of all.

"Afghan women and girls, as all Afghan people, deserve to live in safety, security and dignity," it says, adding that "we will monitor closely" any future government.

The Taliban have said they will rule Afghanistan according to Islam's legal system, Sharia law, and that women could be actively involved in society "under an Islamic framework".

You can read about some of the concerns from women in Afghanistan here.

UK aid funding for Afghanistan is to double to £286m in the wake of the Taliban takeover, Boris Johnson's official spokesman says.

The spokesman stresses to journalists that aid will not be going to the Taliban but will be distributed in conjunction with the UN and other NGOs (non-governmental organisations).

Downing Street says this funding will be in addition to the overall overseas aid budget, so no existing programmes will be cut.

Asked how this fits with the government's decision that aid spending should be cut from 0.7% to 0.5% of Gross National Income due to spending on the coronavirus pandemic, the spokesman says: "I think people will accept that when the situation changes on the ground, we need to react accordingly, that's what we've done."

Image source, HoC

Former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas - the party's only MP - says the resettlement scheme announced by the government is "welcome but it's not enough".

"Places must be based on need, not on numbers," she says. "There should be no artificial cap".

She says there are so many lessons to be learnt from the Afghanistan "disaster", adding: "This Afghan tragedy should be the catalyst that finally forces us to rethink how the so-called war on terror is fought.

A longer-term approach is needed, she says, "stopping arms sales to oppressive regimes that don't abide by international law".

Meanwhile, Conservative MP Liam Fox, who is a former cabinet minister, says we need to remember why we went into Afghanistan - not for philanthropy, he says, but "out of a hard-headed sense of protection of our own national security".

"Were we successful? Yes we are... We did not see a repeat of 9/11."

Ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn says the government needs to respond to the offers from local councils who are offering to take in refugees.

"They need the financial support to be able to house them," he says.

He adds: "If we are an open and welcoming society that does welcome refugees, then we should mean it for refugees wherever they come from, not just Afghanistan."

Will the Afghan Citizen's Resettlement Scheme deliver?published at 14:18 British Summer Time 18 August 2021

14:18 BST 18 August 2021

Well-intentioned - but repeatedly flawed, say reports

Dominic Casciani
Home and Legal Correspondent

Over the last four years there have been two reports from the independent immigration and borders watchdog into how the government's various resettlement programmes for refugees have worked out in practice.

The inspections found that British government staff were incredibly dedicated and cared about the fate of the people they were trying to help - but the process was incredibly slow - sometimes taking more than a year to find suitable accommodation and support for an incoming family.

In 2020, the then chief inspector David Bolt said there needed to be a game-changing intervention, external to prevent the Home Office repeating the same mistakes in new schemes.

Migration NGOs also say that the longer that it takes for someone to get safety through an official route, the more likely it is for them and their family to rely on smugglers to travel across the world.

And that would ultimately mean more people in camps on the English Channel prepared to risk their lives in a small dinghy.

More now from the prime minister's official spokesman who has been speaking to journalists at Westminster.

He has said there was "no hard, set rule" on where potential Afghan refugees might come from under the new resettlement scheme.

There were "two routes" - those that had made it over the border to a third country - and those that were still in Afghanistan, he said.

Asked about the numbers, he said the figure of 5,000 refugees in the first year wasn't a "hard cap" and the total number of 20,000 would be reached "over the next few years".

He said the government would work with local councils to put support structures in place.

The spokesman also reiterated that the UK wasn't seeking to do this on its own and were "calling on other countries to make similar offers".

The UK's ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Laurie Bristow, says the embassy is doing "everything we can" to get British nationals and Afghans who helped the UK government out of the country.

In a video shared on Twitter he says that on Tuesday around 700 people have been flown out but adds that they are trying to "scale up the speed" at which the evacuation is taking place.

"We are working flat out to bring British nationals and our Afghan colleagues to safety," he says, adding that he is proud of the team in Kabul.

Sir Laurie was said to be personally stamping visas at Kabul airport over the weekend. He was appointed to the role in June.

Image source, HoC

The SNP's Stewart Hosie, a member of the intelligence committee, says that when the "autopsy" is carried out on the intervention in Afghanistan, we will need to know if there was an intelligence failure.

He questions whether we had the intelligence, whether officials had the confidence to "speak truth to power" and whether ministers understood or ignored their advice. But he says the UK did not "heed the warnings as province after province fell" to the Taliban in recent weeks.

And ends with another question: "Why is there always the political will and the funding to go to war, but rarely the foresight to see what the consequences for ordinary people will be?

"Why is there never the resources to rebuild, reconstruct and a plan ever to win the peace?"

Conservative MP Jane Hunt defends the intervention, saying it "achieved its aims" because no further terror attacks were launched on the West on the scale of 9/11.

And she highlights the progress in educating "millions of girls" and putting women into positions of power, saying the UK must be clear to the Taliban it can have no legitimacy unless it respects human rights.

Tory MP John Baron calls it a "mistaken intervention" which now brings a responsibility to refugees, and he urges the government not to put an arbitrary limit on the numbers the UK takes in.

"We simply do not know the scale of the humanitarian disaster," he says.

Speaking earlier in the Commons debate on Afghanistan, former PM Theresa May said it is “incomprehensible and worrying” the UK could not work with other nations to “sustain” an Afghan government.

You can see a clip of what May had to say here:

Image source, UK Parliament

A little more from the House of Lords now where peers are settled in for an eight-hour debate.

Lord Dannatt, the former head of the British Army, has accused US President Biden of undermining years of "patient and painstaking work" in Afghanistan.

"The manner and timing of the Afghan collapse is the direct result of President Biden's decision to withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

"At a stroke he has undermined the patient and painstaking work of the last five, 10, 15 years to build up governance in Afghanistan, develop their economy, transform their civil society and build up their security forces."

He said the only glimmer of hope was that the Taliban of 2021 was not the Taliban of 2001.

Lord Dannatt also called for a public inquiry into the campaign in Afghanistan.

He said such an inquiry should focus on strategic decision making at "both the political and senior military levels and crucially their interface".

While the debate is continuing in Parliament more information has been coming from Downing Street.

No 10 did not deny reports, raised in the Commons by the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, that an evacuation plane left Kabul "almost empty".

Downing Street acknowledged there was a "difficult situation" on the ground but said 306 people had already been flown out.

The prime minister's official spokesman told journalists that Boris Johnson spoke to the British Ambassador this morning.

A rapid response unit is now on the ground and the British Embassy has "effectively relocated to the airport" while work continues to evacuate British and Afghan nationals, the spokesman said.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defence has tweeted that an RAF aircraft carrying British nationals and eligible Afghan nationals had landed at an Oxfordshire base on Tuesday.

The UK leaving Afghanistan does not need to be defeat, but it "damn well feels like it", an MP and army veteran has told the House of Commons.

After describing the joy of seeing girls attending lessons in the country, Tom Tugendhat shared a darker memory of a father who brought his dead daughter to a UK army base and was begging for help.

After listening in silence to his emotional speech, MPs across the House stood and clapped the Conservative MP.

A little earlier - and as our correspondent Nick Eardley has just reminded us - Conservative MP Johnny Mercer, a former British army officer who served in Afghanistan, said veterans were having to deal with feelings they have not been trained to feel as this crisis unfolds.

Mercer referenced some tips that the Help for Heroes charity has been sharing on social media, external.

The charity has been in touch and asked us to share their tips for veterans and relatives of veterans who may be following our coverage:

• Acknowledge the situation and how you feel about it, even if the emotions are challenging
• Chat about how you’re feeling with someone you trust
• Practise self-care and put your wellbeing first
• Reach out for professional support if you need it
• Look out for those around you who might be struggling too.

Anger and criticism from veteran MPs who served in Afganistanpublished at 13:16 British Summer Time 18 August 2021

13:16 BST 18 August 2021

Nick Eardley
Political correspondent

Some of the most emotional contributions in the debate have been from MPs who served in Afghanistan.

We’ve seen Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat talk about the impact of recent events, reopening old wounds.

He was angry at President Biden’s suggestion the Afghan army had not fought hard enough in recent weeks, calling the president’s comments “shameful”.

The same word was used by another Afghanistan veteran Dan Jarvis, the Labour MP.

He said some of those who he had served with had died – or considered themselves dead men walking.

Jarvis asked: “Where were we in their hour of need?

“We were nowhere, that was shameful”.

There was direct criticism of Boris Johnson too from Tory MP Johnny Mercer, who was veterans ministers until April.

He accused the prime minister of failing to live up to commitments he had made to veterans on mental health.

Image source, Parliamentlive.tv

Senior Conservative Sir Iain Duncan Smith says "the way we withdraw matters almost as much as the decision to withdraw"

He calls the departure "chaotic" and "ghastly".

"The way that people were falling off the aircraft in their determination to get away, and the helicopter shipping people out, says terrible things about the values that we hold and those we wish to protect," he says.

"This is a shame on all of us. Not just America, but also the whole of Nato and here for us in this House."

Sir Iain mentions the 70,000 members of the Afghan forces who died fighting the Taliban - and fellow Conservative MP Mark Francois also speaks up to defend them, after US President Joe Biden suggested the Afghans were unwilling to fight their own war.

"To imply somehow that they basically ran away, when for 10 years or more they've done precisely the opposite, is basically shameful," says Francois.

Labour MP Yvette Cooper says it is "disturbing, shameful and distressing" to watch the events in Afghanistan right now, as people who worked with us now have to hide.

She accuses the UK and US of having "no evident strategy". But she suggests there are practical things that can be done, including broadening the scope of the relocation scheme.

Although the home secretary said this morning people who have worked to deliver UK aid programmes would also be included, Cooper says "that's not happening on the ground right now".

"People are being turned down as we speak... even though they are at risk."