Hey guys, Andy here. It was reported yesterday that the personal details of 18, 714 Afghans who had applied to come to the UK after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021 were leaked in February 2022. The information did not enter the public domain via a hostile breach or hack but rather a spreadsheet containing the information was emailed to someone who should not have received it. Due to a superinjunction the leak, and any disclosure of the leak, has been kept secret until now. This news is both disappointing and worrying on a number of levels.
The facts of the matter seem to be this;
18, 714; the number of individuals in the dataset who had applied for resettlement. Details of their application included family members, phone numbers and addresses.
100, 000; the number of Afghans (ie people connected to the individuals in the dataset) estimated to be put at risk of torture and death due to Taliban reprisals.
– it was on this basis that the superinjunction was imposed.
6, 900 Afghans relocated to the UK under a secret scheme called the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR) at a cost of £850m due to the leak. It is important to emphasis these individuals were impacted by the data leak. According the John Healey, the Secretary for State for Defence, “Most of those names on the list were people who didn’t work alongside our forces, didn’t serve with our forces, aren’t eligible for the special scheme (Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP)) that Britain put in place quite rightly to recognise that duty we owe those brave Afghans who supported our forces.”
A recent report carried out by retired civil servant Paul Rimmer concluded if the Taliban had acquired the dataset it is unlikely to substantially change an individual’s exposure.
– it was on this basis that the superinjunction was lifted.
As a British Army veteran who twice volunteered to go to Afghanistan (’06 and ’08) the leak is yet another UK failure in regards to Afghanistan. We fled the country in 2021 after close to 20 years of involvement, at a cost of over £300bn and 450 British lives lost. Today, the unintended consequences of our hurried exit from Afghanistan continues to haunt us.
As the son of a refugee, the leak of personal information is deeply disturbing. My mother and her family fled first from north to south Vietnam and then to the USA at the end of the Vietnam War. While I do not consider myself religious, I increasingly believe ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ when I look at the increased uncertainty in the world and consider the chain of events that all needed to have swung my mother’s way for me to be here today. The superinjunction means that Afghans whose details had been provided to the UK in good faith were not told about the leak. I would hope people already at risk of death would be taking necessary precautions; however for those under preexisting strain, more negative news both can not be easy to hear and also adds an additional layer of pressure.
As a photographer, my project ‘We Are Here, Because You Were There’, documenting Afghan interpreters resettling in the UK in collaboration with Prof Sara de Jong, was undertaken and completed under the shadow of this super injunction. During this time immigration has been a sensitive and headline generating topic. While I was trying to promote understanding and acceptance of people who had aided our efforts in Afghanistan, an administrative error means we have let 6 900 people with potentially little to no links to the UK into the country while some Afghans who served and worked with us remain trapped in Afghanistan due to concurrent administrative inaction.
Lastly, as a British citizen living in an established democracy, the unintended long term consequences of such a super inunction are cause for unease. The superinjunction, begun under the previous Conservative government and continued by Labour under Sir Keir Starmer, was unprecedented. The judge involved in the case said the superinjunction and the prevention of talking about the leak had, “given rise to serious free speech concerns. The superinjunction had the effect of completely shutting down the ordinary mechanisms of accountability which operate in a democracy. This led to what I describe as a ‘scrutiny vacuum’.” The journalist Lewis Goodall, the first journalist to be issued with a superinjunction by the MoD, speculates that the longevity of the super injunction was not in the interests of safety to Afghans but rather the result of political motivation to hide embarrassing and inconvenient truths. In such instances it is hard to maintain faith in the institution of government when there is neither transparency nor accountability.
There are two key questions; when will our Afghanistan failure end and what else don’t we know about?
andybarnham
I am a portrait photographer based in Cheltenham, UK. Born in Hong Kong to a Chinese mum and British dad, I had an international upbringing while I educated in the UK. I started photography as a hobby while serving as an officer in the British Army.
After my service I turned this passion into a career and became immersed in London's sartorial scene. I am now focusing my camera on portraiture and using this eye for detail which was refined over ten years. As a former Royal Artillery officer it is only fitting I shoot with a Canon camera.
