The UK has been accused of leaving Afghan allies with “no safe route out” of Afghanistan after a “shocking” decision to end evacuation support for those promised sanctuary in the UK.
Defence minister Luke Pollard announced on Tuesday that the nearly 9,000 Afghans eligible to come to the UK but still awaiting relocation would get no help from the UK to flee the Taliban.
They will instead have to make their own way to a third country, such as Pakistan, to receive housing and visa support.
MPs, campaigners, and lawyers who support Afghans who worked alongside the British armed forces but who have been left in limbo said the decision was “shocking and deeply disappointing”.
Chair of the defence committee, Tan Dhesi, said that MPs will look to quiz the minister in May about the decision, asking: “We will want to ask why the government’s policy has changed, and why only now, and what help, if any, will be available to eligible Afghans who are unable to self-move?”
He said that the committee had heard some Afghans eligible for relocation to the UK were now living in hiding and in poverty, “having exhausted their resources while being advised by the UK government to stay and wait for instructions on when and how to leave”.
Former Afghan interpreter Rafi Hottak, who has campaigned on behalf of Afghans who served shoulder-to-shoulder with British troops, said the decision had left Afghan allies “trapped in Afghanistan with no real support, no safe route out, and no practical alternative”.
He added: “Many served alongside or supported British forces and UK operations at great personal risk, yet for almost five years they have been left waiting, appealing and hoping. During this time, families have survived with little or no income, selling assets, borrowing money and living under constant fear.”
He said that the move was a “moral and legal failure” by the government, saying that approval letters meant little if there is no evacuation support.
“Why were these people given hope for almost five years if there was no genuine plan to support them?”, he added.
Erin Alcock, lawyer at Leigh Day, who has represented Afghans left in limbo by the UK, said the announcement was “a shocking and deeply disappointing development”.
"We have clients stuck in Afghanistan, unable to afford the inflated costs of visas to travel to a third country for onward processing by the Home Office. They have patiently waited in fear to be helped, only to now be told help is not coming,” she said.
Colonel Simon Diggins, who served as a defence attache in Afghanistan, said that it was harder to bring Afghan refugees to the UK now the government’s attitude to immigration has become more hostile.
He said: “The government is trying to deem Afghanistan a safe country to return illegal immigrants to. It feels like a repetition with where we were right at the very beginning with Theresa May and her hostile environment policy.
“I still believe that we have a moral responsibility to them [those who served alongside UK troops], because the Taliban is still coming after them. These reprisals are mostly personal now.”
He suggested a “pragmatic” approach that saw frank discussions with the Taliban government about how they would be sent back from the UK and who could be brought to sanctuary in Britain.
Wendy Chamberlain, Lib Dem MP and chair of the parliamentary committee on Afghan women and girls, said the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) decision would “effectively force some of the most vulnerable to find their own way to safety in third countries”, and said it risked abandoning women who “face a systematic erosion of their fundamental human rights”.
Person A, an independent caseworker who was one of the first people to alert the MoD to a huge Afghan data breach in 2023, said that they had “grave concerns that the minister and the MoD do not appreciate the huge levels of financial debt that Afghans are taking on to self-move to a third country”.
They said $20-30,000 was not uncommon, and warned that once in Pakistan, Afghan families can be targeted for deportation even when their visas are valid.
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