3 w. ago This fiasco didn’t start when Britain leaked Afghans’ names, but when we invaded their country | Simon Jenkins

Even after Tony Blair’s bungled war, UK leaders still yearned to dominate the world stage. With the lifting of the superinjunction, we can all see where that has ledWhat odds on a public inquiry into the Afghan superinjunction? Gold-plated, judge-led, three years of fun and games, that is how British politics normally kicks an embarrassment into the long grass. And what odds on who will get off scot free – Tony Blair?The more we pick away at the stages of this fiasco, the more from the start one blunder seemed to follow inevitably from another. There was no reason for the British invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. If the US wanted revenge on the Kabul regime for harbouring al-Qaida after 9/11, it could have done what Donald Trump did last month to Iran. A savage retaliatory blow against the country’s rulers would have made the point.Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Events

3 w. ago 'We saved lives,' says Grant Shapps in defence of super injunction on leaked list of SAS, MI6 and Afghan names

‘There are times where you simply have to act in the most maximalist way in order to stop people from being murdered and executed,’ said the former Defence Secretary

Politics

3 w. ago 'We saved lives,' says Grant Shapps in defence of super injunction on leaked list of Afghan, MI6 and SAS names

‘There are times where you simply have to act in the most maximalist way in order to stop people from being murdered and executed,’ said the former Defence Secretary

Politics

3 w. ago MI6 operatives and UK special forces named in leaked Afghan database

Personal data of British officials was recorded in case notes of Afghans they were sponsoring for relocation to UK

Politics

4 w. ago Healey: ‘No justification for most names in Afghan data leak to claim asylum in Britain’

John Healey has said there is “no justification” for most of the names in Afghan data leak to claim asylum, stating that the majority of individuals had no connection to Britain’s armed forces.

Events

4 w. ago No automatic right to resettlement for Afghans in data leak, says Healey

Defence secretary says it was ‘never the plan to bring everyone’ on dataset to UK, while Ben Wallace denies Tories sought superinjunctionUK politics live – latest updatesThe defence secretary, John Healey, has said there is no automatic right to resettlement for Afghans named in a leaked Ministry of Defence database, as the former Conservative ministers Ben Wallace and Johnny Mercer clashed over whether “thousands of people with little or tenuous links” had been admitted to Britain.The controversy revolves around a dataset containing the personal information of nearly 19,000 people who applied for the Afghan relocations and assistance policy (Arap) that was released “in error” in February 2022 by a British defence official. Continue reading...

Politics

last month Inside 'Operation Rubific': How clandestine £7billion migrant scheme was sparked by a British soldier's email blunder

Amid great secrecy and alarm, Operation Rubific was launched. It was one of the biggest peacetime evacuations in modern UK history: rescuing Afghans whose names were on a leaked database.

Economics