The retreat from Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover in 2021 began as a farce, then it was a scandal and now it’s a shoddy cover-up.
The farce was when the then foreign secretary Dominic Raab remained on his holiday sunbed in Crete rather than return to work during the height of the evacuation crisis.
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It was a scandal because around 200 people were killed in the chaos, with distressing pictures of terrified Afghans clinging to the wings of moving aeroplanes at Kabul airport.
And now we learn that in a massive cover-up, the Tory government of Rishi Sunak took out a superinjunction to gag the media from reporting a data breach that put 20,000 Afghans in danger.
Over the years, superinjunctions granted by UK courts have been condemned for enabling celebrities and sports stars to cover-up extra-marital affairs, drug-taking and other secrets.
The superinjunction granted to the government in 2023 to conceal a secret scheme to relocate Afghan nationals was obviously entirely different and no doubt sought for honourable motives.
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But it was a cover-up nonetheless and not so honourable because it hid a data blunder exposing names and contact details of 18,000 people who had applied for asylum in the UK under a resettlement scheme.
The scheme had been set up by the government in 2021 to provide asylum for people who had worked with the UK armed forces and could be at risk of Taliban reprisals for working with western forces.
In the Commons, the current defence secretary, John Healey, said it was “deeply uncomfortable” to be prevented from reporting the data breach blunder to MPs until now.
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The ministers involved in seeking the gagging order were the former defence secretary Ben Wallace and the then armed forces minister James Heappey, he said.
But while most MPs welcomed Mr Healey’s apology, it’s probably fair to say that if it hadn’t been for tenacious campaigning by media organisations the superinjunction might not have been lifted by the High Court.
One Tory MP, Mark Pritchard, accused the defence secretary of “wriggling” and said: “The fact is that he is justifying this superinjunction and not telling parliament, the press, the public and, unbelievably, the Afghans who were potentially in harm’s way.”
And, among a number of individual cases highlighted by MPs, Liberal Democrat Calum Miller told MPs that “in the chaos of withdrawal” a constituent who left Afghanistan was promised by British officials that his pregnant wife could follow him.
“Two years later, we have still not kept that promise,” said Mr Miller. “My constituent’s wife and child continue to move around in Afghanistan to evade the Taliban and my constituent is so desperate that he is talking about returning to Afghanistan – despite the risk to him – to be reunited with them.”
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Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf hit out at the Tory government’s asylum policy, writing on X: “24k Afghans secretly granted asylum, costing British taxpayers up to £7bn.
“The government covered it up. Who was in government? Home secretary: Suella Braverman. Immigration minister: Robert Jenrick.”
Later, Mr Healey was asked on LBC’s News Agents podcast if the official responsible for the data breach is still employed by the government. “They are no longer doing the same job on the Afghan brief,” he replied.
Hmm. That suggests the person hasn’t been fired, which will alarm those MPs who remain extremely concerned about this whole fiasco.
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Asked whether he would have taken out the superinjunction if he had been defence secretary in 2023, he replied: “Very, very unlikely.”
But when he was asked if he could rule out the use of superinjunctions by the Ministry of Defence in the future, Mr Healey said: “Well, you can never say never.”
So while Mr Healey will obviously be determined to avoid a farce in future, it appears that the threat of another Ministry of Defence cover-up in future hasn’t gone away.
