Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, turned the spotlight on Mr Raab ahead of him appearing before the MPs to face a grilling over Britain’s preparedness and response to the crisis.
He stressed that the Taliban had “defeated” the Soviet Union and now the Americans and so no longer feared threats from abroad as they previously did.
“So we need to build up alliances in the region and make sure we actually have relationships,” he told ITV’S Good Morning Britain.
“I’m very impressed with the German foreign minister who spent the last few weeks going to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and Tajikistan and building up those relationships or Charles Michel, the president of the European Commission, who since April has been communicating with the neighbours of Afghanistan, getting ready for any potential evacuation.
“I’m looking forward to hearing from our own Foreign Secretary what he has done in the last four months.”
Asked what faith he has in the Foreign Secretary to get “traction” to help hundreds of Britons still stuck in Afghanistan and to get foreign aid in, Mr Tugendhat added: “That’s one of the reasons we have got the hearing this afternoon.
“Sadly, the Foreign Secretary has only granted us an hour which I don’t think is particularly long, given the scale of the crisis.
“But this is exactly what we need to understand.”
Taliban spokesman appears on GMB
/ ES CompositeTobias Ellwood, Conservative chairman of the Commons defence committee, also piled pressure on Mr Raab.
“There are some big questions about the quality of our statecraft,” he told Talk Radio.
“The weakness of our special relationship to actually persuade the Americans to think somewhat differently….and the quality of our back channels and the strategic insight that we have to provide solutions, which is something usually we are pretty proud of.”
However, Mr Raab came out fighting on Tuesday after facing days of briefings that he is facing the axe in Boris Johnson’s next reshuffle.
He slammed “buckpassing briefers” and insisted that no Whitehall department had performed better than the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office during the huge operation to evacuate around 14,000 people from Kabul in recent weeks.
Mr Raab also suggested that failures in military intelligence had meant that the West had been caught off guard by the pace of the Taliban power grab in Afghanistan.
In addition, he pointed the finger of blame, at least partly at the Home Office and Ministry of Defence, following reports that thousands of emails from people desperate to get out of Afghanistan had gone unread.
The Foreign Secretary, who has admitted he should have returned earlier from holiday in Crete, rejected allegations that he did not take regular calls from Afghan and Pakistani ministers during the crisis, reportedly because he thought Afghanistan was “yesterday’s war”.
However, shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy told Times Radio: “The Foreign Secretary has been missing in action all the way through this crisis, he hasn’t been prepared and as a result, we are in the most weakened state that I can remember as a country. Reliant on the permission of the Taliban to get our own citizens out of Afghanistan, reliant on China and Russia, in order to agree a joint approach to the Taliban going forwards.
Leader of the Liberal Democrats Sir Ed Davey added: “Dominic Raab should have resigned three times by now: for staying on the beach, for his Department’s dismal failure to respond to thousands of cases of Afghans trying to get out of the country, and for the fact that potentially thousands of Afghans helped our soldiers are now left stranded.”
Many MPs particularly blame US president Joe Biden for the Afghan crisis for completing the withdrawal of US forces agreed with the Taliban by Donald Trump.
