Updated July 17, 2025 at 2:09 PM MDT
In the summer of 2021 as Taliban forces rapidly approached then encircled Afghanistan's capital of Kabul, thousands of Afghans grew nervous. Many had worked alongside British diplomats, aid workers or some of the 140,000 troops who had served on behalf of the United Kingdom in Afghanistan over two decades.
As interpreters for the British military, or as members of Afghan special forces who fought alongside the British Special Air Service (SAS), a significant number had helped with identifying, attacking, even killing Taliban fighters. That was sure to leave them as targets for potential reprisal.
The British government quickly agreed with that assessment, and set up a program designed to help resettle thousands of Afghan citizens in the United Kingdom as a way not only of thanking them for their service to Britain, but also safeguarding them for the future.
But by February 2022 a new threat emerged — from an unexpected source. An official inside Britain's Defence Ministry inadvertently released details of some 19,000 individual applicants.
That personal data included their names, contact details and family information. Those who had sought safety in Britain, who had placed their trust in Britain, now faced a fresh, potentially life-threatening danger — thanks to a single, careless oversight.
Yet senior Defence Ministry officials, including the politically appointed ministers who run the department with its 220,000 workforce, were not made aware of this data breach until August 2023, more than a year after it occurred.
"That is regretful," said Britain's then-Conservative Party defense secretary, Ben Wallace, in an interview with the BBC Wednesday. "Of course, I was angry with it."
But what a court ruling this week has revealed is that Wallace — alongside his colleagues and successors at the ministry — soon sought out a special legal ruling that would prevent the media from reporting on the data breach for more than two years.
They also kept secret a new relocation program established in the wake of that breach, called the Afghan Relocation Route. It has now brought more than 4,000 Afghans to Britain, with more anticipated, with a price tag that is expected to top $1 billion.
Such a ruling — known as a "super-injunction" — was sought to protect the Afghans most at risk during that relocation process, Wallace has insisted to British media this week. But that also "shut down the ordinary mechanisms of accountability which operate in a democracy," according to the judge who finally revealed its existence this week — with the approval of the Labour Party government that took office last summer.
Britain's current defense secretary, John Healey, revealed details of this program and the data breach that led to it before Parliament on Tuesday, before answering almost two hours of questions from his fellow lawmakers.
The revelations have prompted mounting scrutiny from across the political spectrum. They have also sent a chill down the spine of hundreds, if not thousands, of Afghans who now fear retribution from the Taliban.
For those Afghans already in the U.K., it could also mean a potential inability to ever return home while the Taliban remains in power. And for the estimated 600 former Afghan government soldiers and their 1,800 dependents still in Afghanistan, their safety remains at risk until the U.K. fulfills its promise to relocate them.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer thundered in Parliament about the "extent of the failings that we inherited," in reference to his Conservative opponents in office until last July.
"A major data breach, a super-injunction, a secret route that has already cost hundreds of millions of pounds," Starmer said in an address to the legislature Wednesday. "Ministers who served under the party opposite have serious questions to answer about how this was ever allowed to happen."
Meanwhile, the former veterans minister, the Conservative Johnny Mercer, added his criticism of both major parties, as well as the bureaucracy inside the Defence Ministry.
"Now the public can see for the first time the true scale of the ineptitude of the British state, through two successive governments, concerning Afghanistan," he wrote in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
"Even after the loss of 457 British personnel, and the billions of pounds it cost to prosecute," Mercer wrote, "the war in Afghanistan reveals yet another cataclysmic skeleton in the cupboard when it comes to how we have treated our Afghan allies."
The program's high cost has underscored the financial burden created by the data breach and the subsequent need for an emergency relocation program — a stark reminder of the long-term costs associated with such security failures.
But it also raised questions about Britain's responsibility to those Afghans who risked their lives working alongside U.K. forces.
Jim Townsend, a former U.S. deputy assistant defense secretary during the Obama administration, said such relocations were not just a moral obligation, but they held future national security implications too.
"It's something that we have to do," Townsend said. "If we expect to have people from the local areas where we might have to operate, for one reason or another, if we want them to help us."
An initial review, commissioned last year by Britain's current government, suggested no Afghans have suffered harm directly tied to the data breach. But parliamentary hearings into the failure — and the subsequent secrecy — could soon follow, the head of the country's parliamentary Defence Committee said this week.
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