It is difficult to comprehend the true scale of the cover-up. Many of the facts are still disputed, making the whole affair murky, especially with regard to the precise numbers of people and sums involved. But what we know so far is this: the year after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021, an Afghan refugee threatened to publicize on Facebook an unencrypted spreadsheet containing personal data of thousands of Afghans associated with the NATO occupation of the country. The refugee had gained access to the confidential data because it had been accidentally distributed by an unknown UK official. The official had been trying to establish who was eligible for the Afghan relocation and assistance (Arap) scheme, which was established for Afghans who had worked with the UK military and were fleeing possible reprisals by the Taliban. Once UK state officials were alerted to the data breach, the government launched Operation Rubific, Britain’s largest covert peacetime evacuation — all under cover of a superinjunction that would muzzle the national press on an unprecedented scale.

Given that family members are eligible for both the Arap and ARR schemes, it is unclear how many Afghans have been and may eventually be relocated to the UK. Equally unclear is the full scale of the costs involved. At minimum, the scheme involves tens of thousands of people, and its costs run from hundreds of millions to possibly billions of pounds. It comes to light at a time when Number 10 has had great difficulty trimming the welfare bill by a comparable amount, and is apparently endeavoring to drastically cut immigration.

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War isn't in Britain's interests

By Kathleen Stock

Despite the uncertainty of the cost and headcount, plenty of facts are clear enough. Firstly, despite our elites’ routine and staggering incompetence, the UK state is evidently still capable of significant and costly logistical and infrastructural exertions when it comes to causes it deems worthy. Extensive state capacity is evident in the effort made to extract thousands of foreigners from one of the most unstable parts of the world, transport them thousands of miles, and provide them and their families with shelter, resources and security at significant financial cost — all while the UK itself is caught in the vice of economic stagnation, spiraling borrowing costs, and tremendous pressure on public spending. The state capacity that is so visibly lacking in the UK evidently exists; it is simply not put to the service of British citizens.

Secondly, it’s apparent that the UK state will go to extraordinary lengths to hide its activities from its own people. The superinjunction granted by the courts at the behest of the defense minister at the time, Ben Wallace, was the first of its kind in legal history in that it barred anyone, anywhere, from talking about the ARR scheme — and it was repeatedly shielded from press challenges. Since the scheme was uncovered, Wallace has publicly defended it, claiming that it is right that the UK helped its allies, whose lives were at risk from vengeful and cruel Islamist fanatics. But why didn’t he make this case at the time, justifying the decision to the British public in the same terms? Why take such repressive and extreme legal measures to cover up the mistake of an unknown civil servant? In the chaotic aftermath of the fall of Kabul, could the UK government not have made the case to the British public that further Afghan allies had to be evacuated, without needing to draw the Taliban’s attention to a data breach?

The fact that the UK state went to such lengths to hide its decision can only invite suspicion. Of the Afghans resettled thus far, there are reportedly 16,156 who were on the spreadsheet in question. This is the equivalent of nearly a tenth of the Afghan National Army, which evaporated in the face of the Taliban’s summer offensive in 2021; it is nearly twice the total number of British forces ever deployed to Afghanistan at any one point; and it constitutes over a fifth of the current British regular army. Even discounting extended family members, the UK has resettled more Afghans than there were Afghan special forces or interpreters who worked with British units. How many of these individuals played a role in the war on terror in the Hindu Kush, which was rife with war crimes and corruption? Why does the UK state feel beholden to so many Afghans that it will risk the public fury of its own citizens to defend them? 

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Even more significantly, the covert character of the ARR undermines its only meaningful justification. The best conceivable rationale for it is that aiding allies should help maintain the UK’s international reputation as a credible partner that will support its collaborators in any future military operation. Yet such a promise is only meaningful if it is publicly proclaimed and defended by political leaders. This week’s scandal will have the result that the UK state will have little if any credibility when making commitments to allies in future, as prospective collaborators will know that the history of the botched ARR will have left the British public suspicious, and less willing to support future such operations. This means that, from a strategic viewpoint, Operation Rubific is entirely self-defeating. It also prompts an unsettling question: why would the UK state feel the need to do such a thing unless it expected to be involved in nation-building endeavors on the scale of Afghanistan in the future?  

No less striking is the fact that no parliamentarian was willing to break with the government and bring a matter of vital national interest to the awareness of the electorate. This is despite the fact that the Tory government of the day was briefing members of the Labour opposition about the data breach. Even with the protection of parliamentary privilege — the right of MPs to publicly discuss matters in Parliament without fear of legal repercussions — nobody dared speak out. Leading opposition figures of the day, such as Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick, have defended themselves by arguing that parliamentary privilege is not limitless. Jenrick has also argued that parliamentarians are bound by the Official Secrets Act.

In making such a claim, the two MPs have called into question the compact between rulers and ruled. For if parliamentary privilege does not apply to such an extraordinary case, what is the point of it? Both Braverman and Jenrick resigned from their government over its mishandling of migration, but nonetheless failed to raise the scope of the covert ARR from the backbenches. The whole point of parliamentary privilege is nullified if it is exercised only at the behest of government and the civil service. Not only are the constitutional and legal rules surrounding parliamentary privilege less clear-cut than Jenrick suggests, it also stretches credulity to imagine that a government would invoke the Official Secrets Act to arrest sitting members of its own party for bringing a matter of public import to public attention.

It seems that there was not a single MP who thought it in the national interest to draw attention to the rank incompetence of officials in the Ministry of Defense, or to question the scope of a limitless superinjunction, or to ask what measures were being taken to vet tens of thousands of veterans of a two-decade long war before they were allowed to settle in Britain. The odds are against the immediate cultural compatibility of this wave of Afghan immigration; Afghans are significantly over-represented in UK convictions for sexual offenses. In all, this suggests that we have few public representatives worthy of the name. What it suggests instead is that the UK is ruled by an elite state class, in which parliamentarians can hardly be distinguished from civil servants. Instead of having political representatives who imprint the will and interests of voters on the machinery of state, we have politicians who collaborate with the civil service against the interests of the public.

The fact that the UK state proceeded with this resettlement scheme on such a large and costly scale, despite Home Office officials fearing the possibility of riots once the scheme became publicly known, suggests pathologies that go deeper than the inability to encrypt spreadsheets or store confidential data securely. It indicates a globalist state that routinely prioritizes its international allies and commitments — extending even to defunct Nato puppet states — over any obligation to its own people. And it demonstrates that the globalist commitment to open borders extends far beyond human rights NGOs, decolonialist academics and business leaders, reaching deep into Britain’s civil service and political elite. How much longer can the UK state maintain its opposition to the national interest? What is certain is that this week’s scandal has accelerated the forthcoming clash between a globalist UK elite and a seething British nation.

Speaking about the refugees the Government spirited into the UK, Defence Secretary John Healey said that anyone who has come into this country “is checked carefully” in advance, telling Times Radio that known criminals would naturally be precluded from coming. I’m sure Healey speaks in good faith, having been assured by Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Home Office officials that the correct protocols were followed. 

But there are reasons to worry. Robert Clark, a former soldier who worked on the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) suggests that many of this latest cohort weren’t properly vetted. They are here purely because their data was leaked. The suggestion, then, is that there haven’t been adequate checks to establish whether individuals had been radicalized or had extremist connections. Even the individual who threatened to leak the dataset to the Taliban has apparently been allowed into the UK, along with his family. I would suggest he has already provided ample evidence of his character. 

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Not that vetting is an exact science. As a counterterrorism officer, I held “DV”, or developed vetting status, for over 20 years. This clearance allows someone to routinely handle top secret material unsupervised in order to assess intelligence. I worked in anticorruption, the department responsible for investigating suspect officers and recruits. I know, in short, how the process works, and it’s a far from watertight process — and that’s before you factor in the data abyss that is Afghanistan. 

Vetting foreign nationals allows authorities to assess risk. But without access to basic records from a newcomer’s place of origin, Britain is unable to perform even the most basic due diligence. Especially given this country’s rising community tensions, you don’t have to be especially cynical to suggest this might explain Whitehall’s frantic attempts to keep this operation secret. 

At the outset, it’s worth emphasising that the British authorities aren’t completely blind when it comes to the Afghan arrivals. Operation Herrick, the UK military deployment to the country, operated for 12 years. British intelligence officers, from the military and Secret Intelligence Service, ran a range of local agents and informants in-country. At the same time, the Army has a proven, professional intelligence capability — UK police forces closely followed their intelligence corps model when developing their own information management models. And, to be fair, Afghans arriving on other refugee schemes do seem to have been checked out. 

But the question I would ask here is how much their intelligence-gathering envisaged a situation like “Operation Rubific”. Presumably, while in Afghanistan, army sources would have been pointed towards operations against insurgents, not harvesting routine data of the sort often invaluable to vetting officers — the sort which would include employment and family histories, as well as financial records. Yes, there might be tangential or collateral intelligence, whether criminal records or local gossip. But there will also be gaps.

Then there’s the problem of local recordkeeping. Even if we were able to access pre-Taliban police records, I doubt that would yield a great deal of useful information. Add to this cultural differences, whereby matters considered noteworthy here would never be recorded in Afghanistan. This is a country with an unenlightened attitude to women and safeguarding. 

If, meanwhile, relocated Afghans have ever been to the EU, or have family there who they might seek to bring here, we’ll also need to access foreign records. That poses yet another information headache for hard-pressed British officers, especially when European standards aren’t always great. I remember dealing with the Polish police force and receiving an impressive amount of data, including criminal records and case files, allowing me to make an informed assessment of risk to an individual. On the other hand, asking the same questions of a police force in the Low Countries or Romania only got me the basics. 

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There’s a broader problem here too. Basic police checks run the names of individuals through a range of systems. As someone’s vetting level increases — in other words, the risk their role or presence poses — inquiries will include character references and financial disclosures. “Developed Vetting”, the highest level, involves officers holding intrusive one-to-one interviews with candidates. The point here is that all these procedures rely on the quality of data available. And, again, that poses real challenges for arrivals from somewhere like Afghanistan, especially when Operation Herrick was wound down over a decade ago, leaving a significant information gap.

The data gap, then, is full of risks — and that’s before we consider the broader political dimension. As former Defense Secretary Ben Wallace assures us, his motives for hushing up Operation Rubific were primarily for those of operational security. But concerns around the public reaction — including serious disorder — would surely have featured. As one Cabinet Office official noted, “15 out of the 20 primary disorder hotspots” during last summer’s riots were in the 20% of local authorities hosting the highest numbers of resettled Afghans.

Might this explain why the superinjunction lasted so long? Our politicians know our multicultural model has the potential to turn into a powder keg. They would surely have been keen to prevent Operation Rubific from lighting another fuse.