Taliban fighters might have been granted asylum in Britain after slipping by means of vetting course of following evacuation of Kabul, ex-defence secretary Sir Ben Wallace warns
Taliban militants may have been given asylum in Britain after the fall of Kabul, a former defence secretary has suggested.
Sir Ben Wallace could not rule out the possibility that some fighters managed to slip through the vetting process after the chaotic and bloody evacuation of the Afghan capital in 2021.
The former Conservative minister made the comments while giving evidence to the Commons defence committee as part of its inquiry into the Afghan data leak disaster.
This saw the Government admit it had put 100,000 people ‘at risk of death’ from vengeful Taliban warlords by a catastrophic leak of a database of those who had applied to the UK for sanctuary.
As exclusively discovered by the Daily Mail, but kept hidden by a superinjunction, in 2023 ministers launched one of the biggest peacetime evacuations in modern British history – Operation Rubific – to rescue thousands and airlift them here in secret.
The data breach cost UK taxpayers £7billion over five years – with the counts set to mount even further due to a string of compensation claims.
Questioning Sir Ben about the scandal yesterday, Lincoln Jopp, the Conservative MP for Spelthorne, asked: ‘Do you think that we probably did let some Taliban in?’
British and US soldiers help Afghans evacuate from Kabul during Operation Pitting in 2021
He replied: ‘I’m sure in a large-scale evacuation we didn’t get everything right, but ultimately we tried to vet and did as much as we could and that’s where we got the leak.
‘What I can’t talk about is the ARR [Afghanistan Response Route], when the ARAP [Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy] morphed after I’d left, and what they did under the pressure of that leak and whether people dropped the bar.’
The Taliban quickly reconquered Afghanistan after US president Joe Biden pulled out the last American troops in August 2021.
This prompted a rapid increase in applications to the UK’s ARAP scheme, which was intended to help Afghans who had worked with British forces.
The UK and its Western Allies then launched a last-minute evacuation from Kabul airport, named Operation Pitting.
Sir Ben dubbed it ‘Dunkirk done by WhatsApp’, in a reference to the famous mission to save British and Allied troops encircled by Nazi forces in France in May 1940.
The former minister said he was ‘determined’ that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) controlled the ARAP scheme and kept it separate from the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS), the Home Office programme to offer sanctuary to vulnerable civilians.
Taliban fighters controlling the streets of Kabul, in 2021
Sir Ben admitted that his decision forced the MoD to ‘effectively design and make immigration databases from scratch’.
‘Maybe, in retrospect, I should have just handed it over and let the Home Office run its own immigration system,’ he added.
‘I think none of us in this room are ever impressed with the Home Office immigration system under any government, so I think it was rather better to just run it ourselves.’
Damaging revelations are continuing to emerge about the Afghan data leak, including the fact that ministers misled the High Court.
The public and Parliament were deliberately kept in the dark about the secret Afghan airlift for two years.
But, as the Daily Mail revealed earlier this month, even the judge was not given the full picture.
Behind the scenes, while they were signing off £7bn of public money without taxpayers knowing, ministers were supposed to be keeping Mr Justice Chamberlain strictly up to date.
Afghans queue at the main entrance gate of Kabul airport hoping to leave Afghanistan
With MPs not told anything, he was the only person allowed to know the secret details of the decision to spend hundreds of millions of pounds airlifting migrants to Britain.
The judge had granted the draconian gagging order allowing ministers to do this covertly despite his grave concerns the super-injunction was ‘completely shutting down’ democratic accountability.
Yet, the MoD misled him over the timing of a crucial internal review that was key to the whole scheme.
This prompted MPs to question whether the MOD had been cynically ‘buying time’ to extend its unprecedented shutdown of the democratic process.
A spokesperson for the MoD said: ‘There is no evidence to suggest any member of the Taliban has been relocated through the ARP.
‘As the public would rightly expect, anyone coming to the UK must pass strict security and entry checks before being able to relocate. If they don’t pass these checks, they are not granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK. ‘
