You wouldn’t know it from the press reaction, but for once the previous Conservative administration can say it did a good thing. When the names of Afghans at risk from the Taliban became public, it tried to get them out of the country.
This fact seems to have been lost in the debate following the revelation of the story. Instead, we’re lost in the usual buck-passing and name-calling. Defence secretary John Healey is trying to place as much blame as possible on his Conservative predecessors. Former defence secretary Ben Wallace is defending the government’s use of a super-injunction. Reform deputy leader Richard Tice is criticising both parties. People’s responses are defined by whatever is most useful to them.
In fact, one chief element of this story deserves our attention. Did we keep Afghans safe? Did we show the most basic moral requirement you could expect of a country launching a military operation and protect those who we claimed to be helping? Did we keep their information secure from those who might harm them? Did we get them out when it became clear they were exposed? And what are we doing for them now that the story has come to light?
Hardly anyone seems to care about this element. It barely features in the mountain of coverage over the last 24 hours. But it is the core moral component of our national responsibility.
The basic story of what happened here is simple. In February 2022, a soldier working out of Regent’s Park Barracks made a terrible mistake. As part of an attempt to authenticate the names of Afghans asking for sanctuary in the UK, they sent out a spreadsheet with the names of applicants and family members.
There has been an attempt to plaster over the egregious nature of this action in the coverage, which simply will not wash. That breach is indicative of the lackadaisical and amateur way Britain treated those trying to flee the Taliban.
As the Foreign Affairs Committee Inquiry on the withdrawal found, messages begging for help were collated into spreadsheets by people with no expert knowledge of Afghanistan and allocated a risk assessment without any guidelines as to how it was defined. Sometimes there was simply no one there to assess the claims at all. The breach is just the latest evidence of a civil service machine that cannot function seriously in a crisis.
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In August 2023, an Afghan who was sent the list threatened to disclose it. At that point there seems to have been a dispute about how to handle the situation. Government sources speaking to the Times suggest a split between Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence officials.
The former group believed anyone on the list now had to be helped out of the country regardless of the validity of their claim, because their mere presence on the list would make them a target for the Taliban. The MoD, on the other hand, apparently thought it wasn’t an issue. “The tone from the MoD was that people on the list would never have qualified, so who gives a shit,” the source said.
This is the core of the issue. Regardless of what happened up to this point, Britain now had a responsibility to the people on that list. It has exposed them to Taliban reprisals because of its administrative incompetence. How would it respond?
Shockingly, the Conservative government appears to have done so with genuine conviction and decency. Ministers set up a new secret settlement scheme, called the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR), designed for people who were not eligible for the initial scheme but judged to be at a high risk of Taliban attack as a result of their presence on the list. It began with a target cohort of 200 principals and was broadened to nearly 3,000 principals, although far fewer than that were ultimately helped.
Defence secretary John Healey said he was “deeply concerned” about the lack of transparency about the leak of Afghan’s data by the MoD. (Photo: House of Commons/UK Parliament/PA Wire)The initial error was egregious in the extreme, but the response was, at least, morally clear-sighted and practical. In fact, it was the incoming Labour government that changed the approach.
When Healey came to power he commissioned Paul Rimmer, former deputy director of Chief of Defence Intelligence, to conduct an independent review. He found little evidence of Taliban plans for reprisals and decided that the data breach was so severe that if the Taliban planned on using it they’d have done so already. He decided it was “highly unlikely” those on the list would be targeted now.
Healey took that as his cue and closed the ARR scheme. He has also closed the original Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP). The safe routes to the UK from Afghanistan have now been shuttered. The attempt to help those let down by the UK has ended. “To all those whose information was compromised, I offer a sincere apology today on behalf of the British government,” Healey said yesterday. Evidently that apology does not go so far as to actually help them.
You can see why – just look at the response. Tice is attacking Tories and Labour in the Telegraph for being “more interested in protecting and providing for foreign nationals than for British citizens”. His reasoning is that “we may be letting in sex offenders, potential terrorists and criminals”. The High Court was told that there could be “public disorder” if people learned of a secret relocation programme.
This is the kind of political debate we have now. You can see it very clearly in the assumption about people from Afghanistan. Are they terrorists and sex offenders? Or are they people to whom we owe a moral obligation, both as a military power which operated in their country and as a recipient of their applications for sanctuary?
The latter view is the only moral position you can adopt, the only truly patriotic priority you can pursue. The Conservative government, which handled the retreat from Afghanistan with such utter ineptitude, deserves credit for having recognised that, at least. The fact that hardly anyone seems to be offering shows how ugly our debate on asylum has become.
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