FREDERICK EDWARD

Another day, another scandal. This one, however, is an order of magnitude greater than the others. It is the Mother Of All Blunders.

For years, the British government has been secretly importing thousands of Afghans due to some big brain Royal Marine sending an Excel spreadsheet detailing the particulars of 19,000 people who fought for us during our idiotic excursion into that unforgiving country.

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Each aspect of this cock-up points towards a different failing of the British state. In a way, it is the perfect disaster: it shines a 10,000 watt bulb directly on the manifold inadequacies and perversities of the Yookay circa 2025.

Let us take some in sequence. Firstly, we have the much-fabled super-injunction. This legal sledgehammer – or rather, ball-gag – not only prevents information being disclosed, but it also prevents any disclosure of the injunction itself. A more stifling instrument to stifle free speech could not be conceived of. While in this instance one had been in effect to cover-up the utter shambles of the state, others have been taken out for far less: Andrew Marr, for instance, had a super-injunction taken out when he was banging someone who wasn’t his missus.

It begs the question: what else is being hushed up by this grotesque legal weapon? How many tales regarding rent boys – just to take a wild example – might be forbidden from public debate by this obscene instrument? Well, that’s the kicker: we are not permitted to know.

The first fall-out from this disaster must be a clarification of how many super-injunctions are in effect and, ultimately, their abolition. To have such a thing in a society which declares itself ‘free’ and ‘liberal’ is, to put it lightly, hilariously hypocritical.

Then, of course, we have the demographic implications. Around 20,000 are apparently eligible to be resettled into the UK. Add to this the inevitable family members who will want to come here so that they can live off Universal Credit and the number will undoubtedly grow exponentially. The first law of government projections on how many people will want to come to the UK is that it is always wrong by a factor of many tens.

There is the fact that British population has, repeatedly, consistently, voted against immigration every time it has been asked. There is also the fact that Afghans are 20x more likely to commit a sexual crime than a native Brit. The revelation that we have been busily importing rapey Afghans will not go down well with a public whose scepticism of the sexual mores of Muslim populations has reached an all-time-high.

What else, of course, to expect from a medieval, tribal nation? We are not importing Scandi furniture designers, after all, but borderline medieval villagers from the arse-end of Nowhereistan. This fact alone underlines the fundamental absurdity of our failed adventures in Afghanistan, whereby we tried to impose superficial Western liberalism on to a society whose modes of thought have remained many centuries behind. The arrogance and stupidity of that folly – with untold thousands killed and wounded, our moral prestige tarnished and our treasuries emptied – is an epoch-defining one.

Let’s not stop there. What is more delicious still is that this disaster implicates the whole political system. The disaster happened under the Conservatives and was perpetuated by Labour. While we all know that they have long been two cheeks of the same stinking derrière, this is yet more confirmation. Moreover, who was immigration minister at the time? Born-again Jenrick, no less!

Thus far, nobody has lost their job. Nobody in the public sector loses their job, ever, unless they’re caught red-handed plunging a knife into a helpless grandma or the like. Otherwise, you can dish out untold damage to the nation and waste billion of pounds and still be promoted to eventually enjoy your cushy public sector pension. No heads ever roll, no matter how great the scandal.

What’s more – the cost, the cost! A mere £7 billion. Some of that to rehouse the Afghans, some of it as likely damages awarded to them. As a nation we cannot give pensioners a winter fuel allowance, but we can find a few bill here for Johnny Foreigner. The government tries desperately to cut spending in pathetic ways – with designs even on Cash ISAs as a means of hoovering up a few spare quid to prop up the creaking, rapidly disintegrating locomotive that is the British state – yet, simultaneously, it can somehow find the cash for anyone who isn’t British.

Your taxes: forever wasted, forever rising. You are to be immiserated for the greater good.

Then, of course, there is the question of data. Our idiot leaders are very keen on gathering as much data about is as possible. Naturally, the more you know about your citizens, the more you can control them. However, one berk with an email account can leak the personal details of tens of thousands and cost the nation billions. Do you trust these people with your private information? With rumours of digital IDs circulating – we must seriously ask ourselves to what extent the idiots which inhabit our public sector can be trusted with our vital info.

One last point. No doubt there are people who can come with many more. But there is this: we entered Afghanistan – foolishly no doubt – and asked Afghans to help us fight. Presumably they were paid and did so either for that pay or for the chance to ‘free’ their country from the Taliban. It is a risky business, no doubt.

As far as I can understand there was no promise that, eventually, these people would be able to move to the UK. Engaging in a war on behalf of a foreign power they, surely, took on a great deal of personal risk, both immediately and later on. There was never any guarantee that our mission there would succeed. There was never an agreement that should it fail, and their complicity with Western powers become known, that we would offer them everything on a platter.

We have taken far too many immigrants. Had we not done so there would likely be an appetite to help those who had fought alongside our troops: look at the public sympathy for Gurkhas for proof of the British people’s innate willingness to help those who have mucked in on our behalf.

However, after many millions, many crimes and the impending sense that our country’s dysfunction is reaching critical levels, any appetite to help such people is waning. Such is the risk of abusing a population’s good nature for so many years.

And so, dear reader, here are some of the stupidities that his whole debacle highlights. No doubt you can think of many more. This is a significant landmark in the nation’s collapse of faith in its elite, another diabolical failure underlining to what extent those in power detest those they claim to represent.

There is no way back for this Establishment. Only their complete turfing out will do.

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This article (The Afghan leak: the Mother Of All Blunders) was created and published by A Last Bastion of Sanity and is republished here under “Fair Use”

Politics: official incompetence

RICHARD NORTH

When a story as big and as complicated as the “Afghan leak” breaks cover, with hundreds of journalists at the sharp end, working on developments and filing reports, there is no way that a single blogger like myself is going to make sense of it all and post a coherent report covering all aspects of it.

That presents the choice of walking away from it and letting the legacy media make the running, or dipping into specific aspects and running with those to see where they take us. In a story this important though, with its huge constitutional and political implications, I don’t see how I can leave it, so my plan was to attempt a focused (i.e., limited) round-up with some pertinent comment.

However, even that is not as straightforward as it sounds – the legacy media is no longer the monopoly news-provider, and much of the action (and commentary) is taking place on Twitter and other social media platforms, with incomplete cross-over into the traditional coverage.

Moreover, this is against background detail which is emerging, confirming that this was a shitshow of galactic proportions, overlaid by a political shambles swirling round an inept and secretive MoD, with other departmental ministers fighting over the entrails of a botched relocation scheme.

It is probably going to take many months before the narrative gels – if ever – but at the heart of the storm for the moment is former defence secretary Ben Wallace, who is most definitely in the firing line and battling to save his tattered reputation.

One of Wallace’s earlier challengers has been Johnny Mercer, former minister for veterans’ affairs, who questions the scale of the relocation. He concedes that some Afghan soldiers should have been pulled out, and makes a special note of the Afghan special forces personnel.

These brave souls, he says, fought alongside us cheek by jowl; they carried stretchers of dead UK soldiers; they fought hard and battled bravely. But there were only ever about 1,000-1,200 badged members special forces units, leading Mercer to remark that “I couldn’t understand where all these Afghans were coming from”.

Wallace, though, has also been taking flak on Twitter from Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson who asserts that “British parents do not want more men from misogynist cultures in our country posing a threat to their daughters”.

She tells Wallace: “Your ‘most important priority’ as a minister was not to guarantee the safety of Afghans but to protect British citizens. Some who came here are bad men!”.

Wallace rises to the bait and posts a lengthy thread justifying his actions while admitting that there were a lot of bogus applications for relocation “but amongst the claims were people that saved British soldiers lives and were in danger”.

How many were truly in danger we will never know, but Wallace stresses the need to “protect those at risk” to whom we owe a debt, these essentially becoming the working criteria for the relocation scheme.

Directing his final comment to Allison Pearson, he asks rhetorically: “Can any of us guarantee that no one coming here either as resettled immigrant or even as a tourist won’t commit a crime?”. Answering his own question, he declares: “No we can’t. But that doesn’t mean we turn our back on people who saved British lives”.

There is a sense, though, that Wallace is covering his back, making an emotive case about “lives saved” which doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Certainly, that is a charge laid against James Heappey, the armed forces minister, who was tasked with implementing the new relocation scheme.

From the very beginning, we are told, Heappey, a former Army major who fought in Afghanistan, clashed with Cabinet heavyweights as he tried to get the secret resettlement scheme up and running.

At this point, Suella Braverman, formerly attorney general and then at the Home Office, “got into serious arguments” with the MoD, one source having her tell Heappey she “just didn’t believe” that all of the people on the leaked list were genuine claimants.

However, one former minister claimed Heappey “had a religious fervour” about the scheme and would “constantly try to emotionally blackmail people” by referring to his service in Afghanistan and the need to protect those who had helped British forces.

Enter Robert Jenrick who picks up the comment made by the current defence secretary John Healey, who says that “most of those names on the list were people who didn’t work alongside our forces, didn’t serve with our forces”, and were thus not eligible for relocation under the original scheme.

From these strands, it is possible to draw conclusions about the early days, to the effect that the contributions of those on the data leak list – or many of them – were overstated. Furthermore, it is well recorded that, upon taking control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban announced an amnesty for former government officials and members of the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF).

This included those who had worked for international forces, as well as the Afghan police, apparently part of a longer-standing policy during the Taliban insurgency phase, designed to support the narrative of the failures of the “Western-backed (former) government”, appeal to potential recruits and/or garner support for the Taliban amongst the population

Of this, the government was very well aware and, although there were reports of the Taliban not respecting the amnesty in practice, the government report noted that not all incidents committed by the Taliban should be considered a systematic campaign of targeting.

They may, the report stated, be due to personal disputes, feuds, or rivalries with individual Taliban members, thus stating: “Each case must be considered on its facts with the onus on the person to demonstrate to the requisite standard of proof that they would be at real risk on return”.

Similarly, it stated, “there is limited – if any – current evidence in the sources consulted in this note that all groups are at real risk of persecution from the Taliban. It will also not be sufficient to qualify for asylum based on a vague, or no specific, fear of the Taliban”.

Thus, as The Times drily observes, the MoD claimed for two years that the security risk to Afghans implicated in the breach justified the unprecedented gagging order, but it was able to abandon its injunction at short notice – a complete U-turn, apparently at the flourish of a pen. It now cites a risk review concluding the Taliban probably already has the information or is unlikely to target the subjects of the leak.

If one then links this with the picture of what was happening on the ground between May and August 2021, which I touched upon yesterday, a different picture begins to emerge.

That the ANA simply “melted away” when faced with the Taliban is graphically detailed in the Washington Post at the time. The whole piece is worth reading, along with a Reuters report which noted that, despite about $89 billion budgeted on training the Afghan Army, it took the Taliban little more than a month to brush it aside.

In short, the people being given a free pass to a better life at our expense, are not heroes and have contributed very little to the UK effort. In some cases, they have actually murdered British troops. As such – except in very rare instances – we owe them nothing, and the risk to their own safety has been largely overstated.

In the broader context, one can quite see why the MoD wanted a super-injunction, with The Times saying that, while the superinjunction was [ostensibly] put in place to save lives, it arguably became a mechanism to spare government blushes.

The “data leak” was but a single mistake. But the response seems to have been one cock-up after another, with poor judgement displayed by ministers and officials, comprising – as The Times puts it, a “hat-trick of cock-up, cover-up and stitch-up”, making the government’s response “a full house in a game of fiasco bingo”.

Now the lid is off the can of worms, there will be a reckoning of sorts, but there is no great confidence abroad that the guilty men will get their come-uppance. And, as always, the British people will pay the price for official incompetence.

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