Politics: official incompetence

By Richard North - July 17, 2025

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.