Politics
16 July 2025
The great Afghan cover-up
This data breach is a humiliation of the British state – and its pretensions to intervene abroad.
By Andrew Marr
British armed forces work with the U.S. military to evacuate eligible civilians and their families out of the country on August 21, 2021 in Kabul, Afghanistan. Photo by MoD Crown Copyright via Getty Images
On the great Afghan leak and cover up, where to start? The answer – the only decent answer – is with the principal victims, the volunteer soldiers, translators, support staff and their families who helped British forces during the so-called war on terror. They did so in the hope of forging a better country, but were then betrayed by a butter-fingered official (still employed) and left in great danger.
That their state enemy, the Taliban, did not use the leak of more than 18,714 names – and not just names but telephone numbers, personal details, family members’ details – to institute a general slaughter of the up to 100,000 people thought to be affected in total, is fortunate. Although, come to think of it, how would we know if any of our former allies were killed or tortured because of the leak? All of this is still shrouded in secrecy and yet another government injunction. But this week I spoke to one former Afghan interpreter who told me about the recent public murder of the brother of a former pro-British soldier.
Even as we lean on the possibility of an effective and assertive state to bring us greater economic growth and equality, we are left slack-jawed and embarrassed at the continuing incompetence of the actual British state as it exists today. From our military blunders to our shrivelled aid programme, British state failure has often been, as it were, foreigner-facing. In this case, at least the government tried to remedy things by bringing some 24,000 Afghans affected by the data breach to this country, either already or soon. The total cost, over time, could be up to £7bn.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/07/the-great-afghan-cover-up
