The UK defence committee has found a data breach which left UK-aligned Afghans exposed to the Taliban was “completely foreseeable”. The 2023 breach, kept secret until 2025 due to a court order, meant that a spreadsheet containing personal details of 18, 500 Afghans was made public.
Afghan resettlement programme
The Taliban took over Afghanistan after the US and UK left in defeat in 2021. The details were part of the UK’s so-called Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP). This British governmental scheme was meant to help relocate Afghans who had worked for the Brits in roles which made them targets for reprisals.
The BBC reported on 29 July:
In a report published on Thursday, the Commons’ Defence Committee said the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had lacked the expertise to run the UK’s Afghan relocation scheme after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban and had used secrecy as a “shield” against proper accountability.
They added that:
The breach came to light in August 2023 but an unprecedented super-injunction prevented it from being reported on until July 2025.
By law, the super-injunction existence could also not be reported.
The committee found:
The leak was not “an individual mistake” but a “foreseeable systemic failure” caused by “inappropriate tools, weak operating procedures, insufficient training, poor organisational continuity, and an inadequate culture of data protection and accountability”.
The BBC said:
The breach, just one of 19 reported between February 2022 and November 2023, was caused by a member of MoD personnel sharing a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with a “trusted third party”, the committee added.
The BBC previously revealed the breach had originated from UK Special Forces (UKSF) headquarters.
Bizarrely, the UK special forces ended up running what was effectively a refugee scheme. Committee chair Tan Dhesi said:
The Ministry of Defence should stick to defence – it should never have been left to run immigration casework schemes.
Continuing culture of failure
The scathing report found the defence ministry had a “continuing cultural failure” and that the scheme was “utterly and obviously inadequate”.
The committee also found that the injunction went on for far longer than originally intended:
It was originally expected to last four months, the report found, but remained in place for almost two years.
serious costs on accountability and trust.
The Ministry of Defence said:
This incident should never have happened and we acknowledge the significant impact it has had on many people.
Thousands of eligible Afghans have already been safely relocated to the UK, where they can rebuild their lives and we are committed to ensuring that we conclude the Afghan resettlement programme by the end of this Parliament.
We are learning the lessons from this incident and important reforms are already in place, including improved data protection standards, strengthened case-working processes and better programme governance.
We welcome the public and parliamentary scrutiny of our actions, so we can learn more and be held to account, and we’ll continue to work closely with the committee on this issue.
In 2025 it emerged that:
a British Special Forces officer personally rejected 1,585 resettlement applications from Afghans with credible links to special forces in a matter of weeks, in 2023. The UKSF officer did not approve a single application during that period.
The special forces role in the scheme and UK government’s policy of not commenting on their operations compounded a lack of transparency. Tan Dhesi said:
Secrecy has been too easily used as a shield against proper accountability in areas far removed from sensitive operations.
Incompetence and secrecy against the public interest seems to be the order of the day at the MOD. And not for the first time. But this incident also sends a powerful message about a country which often talks up its soft and reputational power… be an ally of Britain at your own peril.
Featured image via the Canary
By Joe Glenton
