A spokesman for the Taliban junta in Afghanistan claimed that no Afghan needs to fear persecution after a data breach at the U.K. Ministry of Defense leaked information about thousands of Afghans.
“Intelligence agencies have no need to monitor those who have been granted amnesty. All relevant documents are available in the Ministries of Defense and Interior and the General Directorate of Intelligence, and there is no need to rely on political records from the U.K.,” sniffed Taliban spokesman Hamidullah Fitrat.
Fitrat was referring to the “amnesty” ostensibly offered by the Taliban to Afghans who worked with the internationally recognized elected government, which the Taliban overthrew by force during President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal of American forces in 2021.
The Taliban, which styles its military government as the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” periodically offers “amnesty” to the thousands of Afghans who fled in panic when the extremist group seized power. Prime Minister Mohammad Hassan Akhund most recently repeated the offer in June after President Donald Trump announced a U.S. travel ban on Afghanistan.
“Afghans who have left the country should return to their homeland. Nobody will harm them. Come back to your ancestral land and live in an atmosphere of peace,” Akhund said in June.
There have been some takers, but most of them were Afghans who fled across the shortest distance, taking refuge in the not-terribly-appealing hinterlands of Iran and Pakistan. The Taliban was spectacularly unprepared to handle the returnees — thousands of them were reportedly violently deported by Iran and Pakistan — so now they are shivering and starving in camps on Afghan soil, instead of shivering and starving in camps on Pakistani and Iranian soil.
Afghans who fled to more agreeable havens in the Western world seem much less inclined to trust the Taliban’s offer of safe return — especially those who were spirited to safety in the United Kingdom in a top-secret evacuation operation after the Ministry of Defense (MoD) data leak in 2022. The breach was caused not by hackers, but by human error at the MoD.
The data leak exposed information about some 19,000 Afghans who worked with British forces after the first Taliban government was ousted in 2001, including hundreds of Afghan special forces troops who would be especially ill-advised to bet their lives on a Taliban “amnesty.” Many members of those special forces units have already been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by Taliban thugs.
The U.K. managed to exfiltrate about 4,500 Afghans who were part of the data breach in a secret operation that was conducted nine months later but kept under wraps until recently. Details of the breach and rescue operation were revealed to the public this week, when a High Court judge lifted a gag order on the incident. The operation reportedly cost over half a billion dollars and counting.
The data breach has become a comprehensive political disaster for the British government, prompting public outrage over the incompetence of the data leak, the betrayal of Afghans who worked with British forces, the staggering cost of the rescue operation, and the heavy veil of secrecy drawn across the whole affair until now. There was even a gag order on talking about the gag order.
One of the judges who worked on the case questioned his very sanity when he saw projections that the total cost of dealing with the data breach, including huge settlements paid to every person threatened by it, could top six billion pounds.
“It is not possible to lose that amount of money down the back of the sofa,” the judge remarked.
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