The Afghan coverup and the assault on democracy

The government’s super-injunction is an attack on the British people

JACOB REYNOLDS AND CLAIRE FOX

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This article (The Afghan coverup and the assault on democracy) was created and published by Academy of Ideas and is republished here under “Fair Use”

Politics: the limit of tolerance

RICHARD NORTH

You have to give it to the Telegraph. While lefty rags like the Guardian are doing their best to bury the Afghan story, alongside the BBC, where there was not a trace of a mention to be found on its news website, this paper is churning over a raft of stories which is keeping the issue very much alive.

For once, I think this is right. Not only was this a huge blunder, the subsequent response shows up major errors of judgement and an abuse of the legal system which calls into question the very nature of our failing democracy. This should be kept in the public eye for as long as possible and those responsible should never be allowed to forget what they did.

One of the early stories of the current batch confirms what we already knew, with the heading “Vast majority of Afghans on ‘kill list’ were bogus asylum seekers”, with the sub-head: “Sources reveal as few as one in 16 people identified in data breach had genuine claims for resettlement”, putting the scale of the MoD blunder into sharp focus.

Before the coalition withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, it seems that more than 100,000 Afghans were trying to get to Britain in 2022, claiming that they had fought alongside or helped British forces, or were related to someone who had.

Most of them, it transpires, were chancers, exploiting the turmoil of the forced evacuation to scam a new life in the United Kingdom. The “vast majority”, the Telegraph confidently asserts – based on “multiple sources”, had no right to come to the UK because they had no connection to the Armed Forces.

This was known to the MoD at the time, and the paper says it helps to explain why the Home Office raised concerns on national security grounds about the scheme to bring them to the UK. But that issue was never put to the wider debate – instead, the MoD covered-up its blunder with a super-injunction, delaying the moment of accountability.

Given this, a later piece is calculated to make the blood boil. The headline tells us: “Afghan migrant brings 22 relatives to UK”, with the sub-head adding insult to injury as we learn that: “Family members previously rejected for asylum were allowed in following data breach”.

Initially, defence ministers had wanted to restrict arrivals to married couples and their children, but the UK courts had other ideas, repeatedly expanding the eligibility criteria, citing the European Convention on Human Rights.

There was. we are told, “a dramatic change in the criteria last November”, when High Court judge Mrs Justice Yip ruled, in a case brought against the Foreign Office by an Afghan already living in the UK, that family members did not have to have a blood or legal connection to the applicant.

Her ruling stated: “The term ‘family member’ does not have any fixed meaning in law or in common usage. Indeed, the word ‘family’ may mean different things to different people and in different contexts. There may be cultural considerations … there is no requirement for a blood or legal connection.”

The ECHR has since its inception interpreted the idea of a “family” pretty widely, but this seems to extend the definition still further, opening up a whole new can of worms.

On this, we are informed by court documents previously kept secret by the superinjunction that only 10 percent of the extended family members that applicants wanted to bring to the UK had been deemed eligible under previously existing routes.

Under the new Afghanistan Response Route criteria, though, the guidance document stated: “Given the increased risk to some AFM [additional family members] as a result of the data incident, officials expect the number of applications and success rate to increase…”.

It went on to say that: “Officials estimate that upwards of 55 percent of AFM will be eligible in light of the incident – up to approximately 12,500 AFM across all eligible cohorts.” Only 2,200 of those relatives have been deemed eligible under previous criteria, meaning that an additional 10,000 were to be admitted.

And such is the current situation that in the “chaos” that followed the data breach, criminals, including junior staff who had stolen from British bases and sold weapons to the Taliban, had come to the UK with large numbers of family members, while military commanders who had actually served alongside the Army had been left behind.

By any measure, this is intolerable to any fair-minded person, and wholly unacceptable to hard-pressed taxpayers, but we don’t get a vote or any say in the matter. Presumably, we are supposed to suck it up, smile sweetly as we hand over our hard cash, and then go on voting for the same bunch of degenerates who caused this problem and then made it worse.

We are, therefore, entitled to express impatience – and more – with the serried ranks of apologists who somehow reckoned that we owed these Afghans their safety, even to the extent of accepting than many people who should not be here should nevertheless remain.

Into this category leaps Charles Moore who argues that the data leak and the subsequent response was “not an unmitigated scandal, like that of the sub-postmasters and the Post Office, or of Grenfell Tower”.

It is, he writes, “the story of an uneasy but necessary rescue job following a terrible and expensive mistake. Seen politically, it is an understandable attempt to reconcile extreme public anxiety about immigration with a genuine moral duty to help those put at risk”.

When it comes to the “genuine moral duty”, though, not one of these buffoons mentions the moral duty that the Afghan armed forces had to protect their own people from the Taliban, nor seek to justify why these people deserve better treatment than the many millions they abandoned, not least those currently waiting in Iran and Pakistan to be deported.

It is also indicative of the mindset of pompous “above-the-liners” such as Moore that he writes so glibly of “extreme public anxiety about immigration”. The word “anxiety” doesn’t even begin to capture what the public are going through as we see our homeland ripped to shreds under the weight of decades of mass immigration which is turning parts of our cities and some complete towns into unrecognisable third-world slums.

But even the dismissive, patronising Moore cannot compete with the consistently moronic Fraser Nelson who writes his latest column under the heading: “Data leak was bad, letting in Afghans wasn’t”.

This clown, like so many, starts from the false premise that the Afghans who either fought alongside British troops or were active in some other capacity were somehow “helping us” in our efforts to bring security, education and human rights to a country whose government we helped to depose.

That “government” which we help depose was, of course, the Taliban. This only had a tenuous grip on power and was ousted in November 2001 by a partnership of about one thousand US special forces, the Northern Alliance, and ethnic Pashtun anti-Taliban forces. Most of the ground combat was between the Taliban and its Afghan opponents, who then went on to set up their own interim government.

Only then, under a United Nations mandate, were UN members invited to send peacekeeping forces to promote stability and aid the delivery of stable government.

From the get-go, therefore, the role of foreign nations was entirely supportive. We did not control Afghanistan or any of its provinces, and it was entirely up to the sovereign government of the country to manage its own affairs.

In the 20 years that the coalition forces supported the government, an estimated $145 billion was poured into the country as foreign aid, including £3.5 billion from the UK. The cost of military operations was estimated at $2.313 trillion, while the UK’s involvement cost an estimated £22.7-£37 billion, with costs peaking at £5.6 billion for the financial year 2009/10.

Despite all that, through corruption, fraud, criminal inefficiency, theft, bribery and all manner of barbarism, the Afghans failed to hold together a stable state, allowing the Taliban to return. The failure was theirs, not ours, and the price to pay should be theirs, not the British public who played no part in their downfall.

Yet, this singular issue is being entirely ignored. The British people owe nothing to Afghanistan, whose people are authors or their own misfortunes and only through state-imposed secrecy on the back of systemic blunders are we now held liable of a sum exceeding the military costs of our most active year, while having dumped on our communities potentially another 100,000 third-world ingrates.

For all the piffle from the likes of Moore and Nelson, to expect this from the British people is unconscionable. We have had enough, and it is fair to say that, amongst the majority on these isles, the limit of tolerance has been reached.

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For the first time ever, I am going to RIAT (the largest airshow in the world) at RAF Fairford on Sunday, along with Pete. Because of the distance and timing, this will necessitate an overnight stay and an early start. I am, therefore, just for once, going to break with tradition and miss out on my Sunday post. I will be back in harness, all being well, for Monday.

Featured image: x.com

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