Why wasn’t the Foreign Office prepared for Sudan?

The fiasco in Khartoum is being widely interpreted as a tragic failure of intelligence. James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, is facing questions about how and why the government was caught unawares as Sudan descended into bloody chaos. There are bodies on the streets of Khartoum, foreigners have fled the city, and those who remain are braced for a resumption of war. A United Nations-brokered truce turned out to be illusory.

The British military managed to evacuate about 100 diplomatic staff but most of the estimated 4,000 British nationals remain in a place that evokes the mayhem of the panicked evacuation of Kabul. The first RAF flights that arrived in Cyprus carried only a few dozen civilians.

The US state department was also caught by surprise. The army has evacuated diplomatic staff but left 16,000 US citizens in Khartoum. Meanwhile the EU says one of its diplomats has been shot, although not critically injured.

Most countries are making desperate attempts to escalate their evacuation plans. British citizens are being flown to Cyprus. There are attempts to establish an escape route by sea from Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast. But all this is too little too late. Cash-strapped governments have relied on the convenient assumption that the post-Cold War world was predictable and manageable, and that it made sense to reduce military and diplomatic budgets. This has been shown repeatedly to have been a foolish assumption.

It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that our government could or should have predicted the fall of Khartoum. It is clear from the number of countries trying to evacuate their citizens from the capital that no one saw the civil war coming.