The Afghan data breach was disastrous. The cover-up was worse

So we now know that, in February 2022, a Royal Marine twice accidentally sent a datasheet to contacts in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, containing the names, addresses and phone numbers of nearly 19,000 Afghans who were applying to the UK for asylum. These were mostly people who had helped Britain during the disastrous two-decades-long occupation of Afghanistan. They served as soldiers, translators, administrators – in short, they were our allies. And in an instant, the British state had unwittingly betrayed them. With their identities revealed, their lives were potentially at risk, certainly if the Taliban got hold of that datasheet.

The data breach was horrendous enough – the most serious of its kind in the UK’s history, according to the Telegraph. It is certainly of a piece with the British state’s inept and brutally careless approach to its forces’ withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Ministers and senior civil servants remained on holiday as Kabul fell to the Taliban. Foreign Office staffers continued to work from home while sticking strictly to nine-to-five work hours, as desperate Afghans sought help. There was no urgency, no appreciation of the gravity of the situation. It was a moment in which the absence of serious, capable people at the heart of the British state was felt all too acutely.

Yet as catastrophic an error as this data leak was, the state has somehow managed to compound it with a series of decisions that made a terrible situation even worse. Successive Conservative and Labour governments effectively mounted a cover-up of both the data breach itself and the response. They slowly undertook a secret evacuation and relocation programme for the Afghans without telling even the Afghans affected about the data breach and the fact their lives were at risk. At the same time, they sought to hide all this from the British public, too, even while thousands of Afghan refugees were quietly being deposited in hotels and in military accommodation across the country. All with no explanation.

It is this de facto cover-up, this attempt on the part of ministers and senior officials to hide state errors and actions from public view, which is the most disturbing aspect of this whole sorry affair. They set about shielding a data breach followed by a costly, large-scale asylum scheme from any form of accountability, criticism or debate. And they did so by exploiting a legal tool that has never been used before by a British government – namely, the superinjunction.

This effective cover-up did not happen immediately. In fact, it wasn’t until early August 2023, a whole 18 months after the data breach took place, that the leak was finally brought to the attention of officials. A support worker responsible for settling Afghans in the UK emailed Luke Pollard, Labour MP for Plymouth, and James Heappey, the then Conservative defence minister, warning them that he’d seen the database circulating online. Days later, journalists also became aware of the leak. It was this that finally prompted the Ministry of Defence and the government to launch a covert mission, codenamed Operation Rubific, to shut down the leak and help Afghans put at risk get to the UK (after being vetted in Pakistan).

It was at this point that the authorities took the unprecedented step of applying for a superinjunction. This legal tool doesn’t only prevent journalists from reporting on the subject of the injunction. It also prevents anyone from acknowledging that the injunction even exists. Ministers argued that this extreme free-speech-defying measure was necessary to prevent the Taliban from becoming aware of the datasheet’s existence. Granted in September 2023, the superinjunction acted like a form of legal dark magic, rendering the data breach and the government response to it invisible. It insulated both from even the possibility of scrutiny.

Members of parliament could have still used their parliamentary privilege to speak up. But since all reporting had been prohibited, MPs found themselves in the same place as the wider public – in the dark. For nearly two years, then, we have all borne blind witness to the state’s conspiracy of silence. Until this week, that is, when defence secretary John Healey decided the superinjunction was no longer necessary.

This government-sponsored omertà has done grave harm on both the overseas and domestic front. It has certainly not helped Britain’s Afghan allies, despite ministers’ claims to the contrary. After all, the datasheet had already been flapping in the virtual breeze for a year and a half. Those it put at risk should have been notified immediately. As one anonymous source told The Times, the Taliban clearly had hold of this de facto ‘kill list’ by August 2023 – as attested to by the subsequent murder of countless Afghans who had worked for the Western-backed Afghan National Security Forces during the occupation. ‘Lives could have been saved if everyone had been told about the leak back in August 2023’, the source said. ‘It would have enabled them to flee into Iran or Pakistan, which would have bought them some time.’

The decision to hide all this from the British public has had dire domestic consequences, too. It has exacerbated pre-existing social tensions generated by Britain’s persistently high levels of immigration and our dysfunctional asylum system. After all, this is a system that has been tearing at the social fabric for years. Successive governments’ attempts to tackle the huge backlog of asylum applicants by putting tens of thousands of them, at great public expense, into hotels, student accommodation, military sites and even leisure centres in some of the most deprived areas in the UK has proven as socially disastrous as you might expect. So the decision to secretly fly thousands more Afghan refugees into Stansted and RAF Brize Norton, before silently dispersing them throughout the UK – without explanation or justification – has only deepened those antagonisms.

Most have been moved to the UK using the existing Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP), which was set up in anticipation of the West’s withdrawal. But many others are in the process of being resettled under a top-secret evacuation and resettlement plan, devised by the Conservative government and eventually signed off by the current Labour administration in October 2024. According to defence secretary John Healey on Tuesday, this hitherto covert scheme (which has now ended) will eventually lead to the relocation of nearly 7,000 Afghans in the UK.

Quite how many Afghans have been granted asylum in the UK because of the data breach remains unclear. Some estimate that 24,000 in total will have arrived here by the conclusion of what amounts to the largest covert evacuation operation since the Second World War. And it will have cost nearly £7 billion in public funds.

The scale and expense of the government’s response to the data leak is one thing. But it’s the surreptitious nature of the relocation of Afghan refugees that has caused the most problems. The unexplained nature of the influx in certain areas was only ever going to heighten existing tensions. As the Mail reported on Tuesday, a behind-closed-doors briefing on the secret evacuation and resettlement plan last October warned that 15 out of the 20 areas worst afflicted by the post-Southport riots were in the ‘local authorities with the highest numbers of supported asylum seekers and Afghan resettlement arrivals’.

Hiding what was happening from the public was a terrible mistake. Many Brits would have understood the need to give refuge to those Afghans – properly vetted and provided for – who had helped British forces during their time in Afghanistan. They would have sympathised with their plight under the violent, repressive Taliban and understood the obligation we as a nation have to them.

But thanks to the superinjunction, not one politician put the case to the British public. As a local councillor from Bracknell in Berkshire, which has received a lot of Afghan migrants over the past year, put it: ‘[Politicians] need to explain all this to people, not brush over any inconvenient truths, because that is what fosters resentment.’

But no one explained anything. There was just secrecy and silence from Conservative and Labour governments alike, as the state once again appeared to be placing the burden of a broken asylum system on those who can least bear it.

What happened in February 2022 was a terrible error all too typical of the state’s brutally incompetent handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. But what has happened since has been an anti-democratic disgrace. Decisions that affect the lives of Afghans and whole communities in the UK have been entirely insulated from public debate. And now we all have to live with the consequences.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.