Taliban death squads have been hunting down Afghanistan’s former soldiers, Special Forces, and police who fought for 20 years to build a free and democratic country since the day they came back to power four years ago. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t been paying attention.

And now British government and military leaders are wringing their hands over being caught out in a massive data breach, and subsequent cover up, that has reportedly affected up to 100,000 Afghans. Forced to confront the debacle, they now claim that there is no longer any danger of Taliban retribution to those left behind. 

The minister of defence, John Healey, betrayed his own ignorance – or, more likely, his lack of care – about how the Taliban deals with their former enemies, when he stood up in Parliament on July 15 to say: “There is little evidence of intent by the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution against former officials.”

The Taliban have been conducting a murderous campaign of retribution since day one of their second regime: August 15, 2021. They have murdered not only former military and police when they have found them, but their extended families and sometimes even their entire villages. 

This is how it works in Afghanistan. Collective punishment is not an oblique concept. It is put into daily practice by an unaccountable extremist regime that does not operate according to any rules. 

The revelations that a hapless Royal Marine, apparently inadvertently, in February 2022 leaked the private details of tens of thousands of people seeking refuge from Taliban revenge – and that the British government covered it up for more than two years – come as little surprise to the few remaining people who do pay attention to what is happening in Afghanistan. 

“The British authorities have failed to understand the Taliban. They have not understood that everyone is at risk. They just don’t care,” said Dr Neelam Raina, the director of the secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Afghan women and girls, and director of research at Middlesex University.

“They are saying that no one is at risk. How can they possibly know? Anyone who is against the regime is at risk, and that includes all who worked and fought for the previous government,” she told The New World.

Raina and others who have worked closely with vulnerable people in Afghanistan have collected evidence of Taliban atrocities. The United Nations and other non-government organisations, such as Human Rights Watch, regularly report on the extrajudicial detention, torture, rape and killing of people that the Taliban perceive as enemies. 

One independent source has documented dozens of murders of former special forces, including some who had sought safety in neighbouring Iran and Pakistan, but have been deported to appease the Taliban. 

British media coverage of this stupendous scandal has concentrated largely on the anti-democratic “super injunction” that prevented anyone from discussing not just the data leak but the super injunction itself. 

But it’s worth looking back at what led to this point. The leak and cover-up are symptomatic of the way British and Allied military and political leaders turned their backs on their Afghan allies once it became evident, early in 2021, that the Taliban were heading to victory.

In February 2020, during his first presidency, Donald Trump signed the Doha Agreement, a surrender deal with Taliban leaders that promised a full US withdrawal. It sidelined the Afghan government that America and its allies had supported since the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Nato allies and partners, eager to leave a war they had long deemed unwinnable, rushed for the exits. Although Nato combat operations had ended in 2014, Afghan forces, supported by 30,000 US military contractors, were still holding the line, aided by American air power.

They weren’t winning, but they were keeping the Taliban at bay. That changed when president Joe Biden chose to honour Trump’s deal. By July 2021, when the Americans shut down Bagram Air Field, most allies were already gone. Political and military leaders who knew better made liars of themselves, saying that the Taliban had changed from the murderous zealots of their first regime, when they held public executions without trial, hung severed hands in markets, and banned music and female education.

General Sir Nick Carter, who headed the British armed forces as the last foreign troops were pulling out, led the spin by saying that the Taliban were a misunderstood band of country boys. Dominic Raab, then the foreign secretary, said it was “unlikely” Kabul would fall in 2021. It fell within days.

Truth is, western leaders didn’t care about the people of Afghanistan – they just wanted to get out. Raab didn’t even raise himself from his sun lounger in Crete as thousands of people, including British citizens, tried desperately to get out of Kabul ahead of what they knew – and he had denied – was coming. 

Since then, it’s been curated carnage, enabled by an international community, including Britain, that is incapable of taking responsibility for its failure on the battlefield and betrayal of the people who were promised enduring support to build their country into a democratic state. “Shoulder to shoulder,” as the slogan went.

As they cleared out their bases and embassies and got ready to run, the foreigners left behind caches of information, including biometric data, on the locals who had worked alongside them. 

The collapse of the government, thanks to the cowardly flight of then-president Ashraf Ghani and his inner circle, meant that data held by the ministries of defence and interior, and the secret service, fell into the hands of the Taliban.

Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence agency had long supported the Taliban with funds, arms, and residences in its biggest cities. It swept in as they took over to help clean up the enemy detritus. 

“The Taliban know everything about the former soldiers,” said a resident of Kabul who previously worked with a foreign charity and requested anonymity for his own safety. “The majority of those who remain in the country are trying to keep their identities hidden or are living in other cities in Afghanistan.”

Scott Richards, whose company, Presidium Network, has provided support to people affected by the data breach, said its impact goes further than those Afghans associated with the UK. 

“We have cases where an individual may have held a command position as part of the US partnership, but his sons served with the British. If the Taliban can exploit the sons to access the father, then this becomes extremely dangerous, particularly in instances where these people had access to classified information,” Richards said.

Raina noted that the data breach is not an isolated incident, but part of a long chain of failures driven by indifference and political expedience. 

If the British government wants to salvage any credibility, it must act now to provide real protection and permanent refuge to those it endangered, hold those responsible for the cover-up to account – including criminal charges where appropriate — and stop pretending that the Taliban are anything other than what they have always been: a brutal, misogynist gang of murderous drug-dealing terrorists who use religion as a cover for a dictatorship of fear.