The latest report from the Commons public accounts committee (PAC) is a damning indictment of the way the Ministry of Defence has dealt with the resettlement of Afghan nationals who’d served the UK in various capacities during the long “war on terror” that ended in some disarray in August 2021.
Despite long efforts – successful for a time – to cover up the astonishing and extremely costly incompetence on the part of the officials at all levels, the truth about the scale of the bungling emerged at last a few months ago when a superinjunction was lifted.
That would not have happened without the efforts of The Independent and other media organisations to act in the public interest and, even under the ban on publication, to continue investigating the tardy response and successive data breaches that must count as one of the most serious failures in public administration so far this century.
The bravery and dedication of Britain’s armed forces, and allies such as those who died alongside them in Helmand province and other vicious, dusty battlefields, is not matched by those who should be supporting them.
The political reluctance even to “do the right thing” and repatriate Afghan forces at risk of torture and execution at the hands of the Taliban was apparent almost from the first days after the hasty evacuation of Kabul.
It was highlighted by The Independent’s successful campaign to secure asylum in the UK for one Afghan pilot and his family; however, many remain in hiding in their homeland, marooned in Pakistan (with the constant threat of deportation to their deaths), and in the UK or trying to cross the English Channel. The treatment of the “Triples” – the Afghan special forces named after their numerical regimental designation – has been especially shameful.
It was all made far worse, however, as the PAC sets out in excruciating detail, by a series of data breaches that kept happening even as the Ministry of Defence (MoD) continually tried to strengthen measures to prevent them from happening. The largest and now most notorious occurred (and was kept secret) in February 2022, when a spreadsheet containing 33,000 lines of personal data was emailed to someone outside government.
The accidental leak was only discovered in August 2023, when parts of the database appeared in a Facebook group, with the great risk of disclosure of vulnerable people and their pursuit by the Taliban. It was this breach that prompted the government to seek an unprecedented superinjunction to prevent reporting.
It also triggered a huge secret evacuation programme for many thousands of people. Not all of them actually had a valid case for protection from persecution by the Taliban before the leak; however, after it, their claim could not be denied. (One of the many consequences was that the incident thus further undermined the whole concept of refugee status in the public mind.)
If the initial response – to prevent the further spread of sensitive, life-and-death data – might have been justified, the attempt to extend it indefinitely was, as the PAC says, indefensible. It means that one of the most grievous of blunders stayed out of sight and well away from the scrutiny of MPs, the media and indeed the public, for far longer than could possibly be justified. As the National Audit Office points out, it meant that as much as £2bn of public money on the various Afghan resettlement schemes, including the secret post-leak emergency programme, couldn’t be properly accounted for.
The large accidental release of information in February 2022 due to human error could and should never have happened – but lessons had not been learnt from previous, albeit smaller, incidents. In the words of the PAC report, “the department made targeted improvements but continued to experience data breaches”.
It is an appalling saga, and one that, according to the chair of the PAC, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, could all too easily happen again: “The MoD knew what it was doing – it knew the risks of using inadequate systems to handle sensitive personal information as the security environment in Afghanistan deteriorated. We lack confidence in the MoD’s current ability to prevent such an incident happening again.”
While nothing can now be done to undo the failures of the past, the least that the defence secretary, John Healey, and his colleagues can do now is to make sure the Afghans concerned are settled safely in Britain, and to undertake a rather more effective review of their department’s procedures – and its evidently casual culture.
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