The Scandal Of The Century?

The last Conservative government perpetrated a vile deception on the British people - and Labour kept it going. This should be Britain's Watergate moment.

Does this photo of Afghan men watching a young boy dance give you the creeps? It should.

So here’s what we know so far. In February 2022 a Royal Marine officer, working for the Director of Special Forces, sent an email to several Afghans in Britain. These people were involved in the effort to rescue former interpreters and Afghan National Army special forces soldiers who were at risk of reprisals from the Taliban regime, and the Marine wanted to know whether some Afghans who claimed to be ex-special forces really were. The officer intended to attach a filtered list of around a hundred names from an Excel spreadsheet, but inadvertently attached the whole file - which contained around 25,000 names. One of the Afghans he sent the list to immediately passed it on to someone else - this time in Afghanistan. MoD sources are stressing that these were all trusted Afghans, but… well, we’ll get to that shortly.

And then nothing much happened for 18 months. The Taliban didn’t round up and shoot everyone on the list, even though they now claim to have had it since early 2022. But then, in August 2023, an Afghan man - a former soldier who had applied for asylum in Britain, but been rejected - popped up on Facebook. He promptly released part of the spreadsheet, then threatened to post all of it. At this point the government swung into action. First, it pressured Meta, which owns Facebook, to shut down the group the data was posted in and remove the user. Then the Ministry of Defence, under former defence secretary Ben Wallace, applied for a super-injunction to prevent the media from reporting anything about the leak, what the government planned to do about it, or what it was going to cost. It even banned anyone from revealing the existence of the injunction itself. That injunction was granted to Wallace’s successor, Grant Shapps, and the entire story was killed before it became public. The government was already drawing up a plan to bring tens of thousands more Afghans to Britain; the media and Parliament weren’t allowed to mention it; the British people, of course, were not to be allowed to know a thing. The degree of secrecy imposed was truly extraordinary.

And, over the last 18 months or so, the government has quietly been running a huge and very expensive operation to bring those identified as being at risk to Britain. From those listed on the spreadsheet, 23,900 former Afghan soldiers, policemen and intelligence officers were deemed to be in danger because of the leak. So, of course, were their families. How many people does the government plan to bring in under this scheme, in total? Nobody knows. Early estimates, according to court documents, were that 43,000 Afghans would be given asylum in Britain. Yesterday, officials insisted the real total was 6,900; even that dramatically lower number is a big addition to the 24,000 Afghans the government has admitted to bringing in under other, declared schemes. However, horrifyingly, last June three judges - Sir Geoffrey Vos, Lord Justice Singh and Lord Justice Warby - issued a written (but, of course, secret) ruling that up to a hundred thousand people could be at risk if the Taliban got their hands on the list.

A Fool’s Errand

We now know, of course, that the Taliban has the list. We also know that, on 4 July, the MoD concluded that the people on the leaked list hadn’t actually been placed in any additional danger. It doesn’t matter at all that the Taliban have the spreadsheet, because they already have the former Afghan government’s personnel files and biometric data on all its soldiers and policemen. If they want them, they can find them without the spreadsheet. So now we can analyse the horrific consequences of this massive, covert state-sponsored people trafficking racket while already knowing that it was completely unnecessary.

At this point I should point out that, when one Afghan gets into Britain, several more Afghans will probably come with them. When someone is granted asylum in Britain their spouse and any children under the age of 18 (or, at least, who claim to be under the age of 18) can come, too. Just for the record the average Afghan woman has 3.74 children, so even if the low figure of 6,900 are allowed to come here they could easily bring 30,000 dependents with them. And, thanks to the miracle of chain migration, every single relative of those 36,900 Afghans magically gains a “connection to Britain” - meaning that, if they make it to France and get on a dinghy, they’ll probably be allowed to stay here too.

The financial cost of this, of course, is enormous. The direct cost of it is hard to work out - the government says £850 million; several judges who tried to have the injunction lifted were citing a much higher figure of £6 billion. However, the direct cost will be dwarfed by the long-term drain of supporting these people. Almost all Afghans who settle in Britain will be a burden on the state for the rest of their lives. Afghan culture is intensely clannish, and doesn’t work well in a modern secular democracy with an advanced economy. It’s even more intensely misogynistic, meaning few women will be allowed to work. Finally, education standards are absolutely abysmal; just 52% of Afghan men, and less than 23% of women, can read and write, and most of them can’t read and write in any non-Afghan language. Only a tiny fraction of Afghans - a percentage in the low single figures - will ever put more money into the system than they take out. And, appallingly, the financial cost is the least of our worries.

Afghans Are Sexual Predators

I’ve already mentioned Afghan culture’s horrific misogyny. This leads to some truly dire attitudes towards women who don’t comply with Afghan society’s draconian rules of female behaviour (which boil down to having no rights and not being allowed to leave the house without a burqa and a male relative). One of the consequences of this is that Afghan men have unleashed a tidal wave of sexual assaults across Europe. At least one migration expert has noted that as well as their frequency, assaults by Afghans are remarkable for their brutality, audacity and often downright stupidity. Austrian political scientist Cheryl Benard wrote:

Can these men possibly expect that their attempts will be successful? Do they actually think they will be able to rape a woman on the main street of a town in the middle of the day? On a train filled with other passengers? In a frequented public park in the early afternoon? Are they incapable of logical thought—or is that not even their aim? Do they merely want to cause momentary female hysteria and touch some forbidden places of a stranger’s body? Is that so gratifying that it’s worth jeopardizing their future and being hauled off to jail by scornful and disgusted Europeans? What is going on here? And why, why, why the Afghans? According to Austrian police statistics, Syrian refugees cause fewer than 10 percent of sexual assault cases. Afghans, whose numbers are comparable, are responsible for a stunning half of all cases.

Type two words into Google—Afghane and Vergewaltigung—and a cornucopia of appalling incidents unfolds before you.

Incidentally, to all you lefties who’re undoubtedly sputtering with fury as you read this, don’t even think of writing Benard off as an anti-Afghan racist. Her husband is former US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who is Afghan.

Country after country has released statistics that show the appalling behaviour of Afghan men. In Sweden Afghan men, who make up around 0.3% of the population, are responsible for 24.8% of gang rapes:

For comparison ethnic Swedes, who make up 64.6% of the population, are responsible for 6.7% of gang rapes.

In Germany, AfD politician Marie-Thérèse Kaiser was fined €6,000 for publishing statistics showing that Afghan men were forty times more likely to perpetrate gang rapes than ethnic German men. Nobody disputed the actual statistics she cited; her figures came from the Bundeskriminalamt - the federal police agency - and they’re accurate. She was fined simply because the German government thought the German people might become prejudiced against Afghans if they knew… er, the truth:

That’s specifically gang rapes; for rapes overall Afghans were “only” ten times as rapey as German men, at 80.3 per 100,000 against 8.3 per 100,000 for Germans. Afghans are also by far the most common perpetrators of sexual assaults at outdoor swimming pools.

And finally there’s Britain. The government has been very reluctant to release - or even admit it possesses - statistics on the link between nationality and crime, but under pressure from independent MP Rupert Lowe it finally did so in March. This showed that among Afghans in Britain, 59 per 10,000 have been convicted of a sexual offence - 22.18 times higher than British men, at 2.66 per 10,000:

By the way, yes, I know the graph is from the Centre for Migration Control - but the data is from the Ministry of Justice and was obtained by a Freedom of Information request. I’ve checked the graph against the data, and it’s accurate.

Type the name of any European country into a search engine, followed by the words “Afghan” and “rape”, and you’ll be confronted with a catalogue of appalling crimes. As Benard observed, these often stand out by their extreme boldness and depravity. Wherever countries collect data on offenders by nationality, Afghans are always near or, most often, at the top of the list for sexual offences. It is impossible to deny that Afghan men, introduced into a western society, are at least as much of a danger to women as they are back in Afghanistan.

It’s not only women at risk, by the way. Afghan men aren’t averse to raping young boys, either. One of the most revolting aspects of Afghan culture - and that’s saying something - is the tradition of bacha bazi (Dari for “boy play”). Prepubescent boys are forced to dress up as girls then dance for, and “entertain”, men. This strain of paedophilia was common among anti-Taliban warlords and the Afghan security forces, particularly the police. The Taliban claim to be against the practice; their founder, the late Mullah Omar, actually was violently opposed to it. However, many prominent Taliban commanders also enjoy a spot of recreational pederasty.

Of course the obvious answer to this is “But most Afghan men aren’t rapists!” I agree; most of them aren’t. But an alarmingly high percentage of them are, and our governments clearly can’t keep the rapey ones out. The graph and its underlying statistics prove that beyond any possible doubt. And while it’s easy to downplay the statistics by saying it’s still “only” 77 sexual offences committed by Afghans over a two-year period, bear in mind that a) that’s 77 offences that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t let any Afghans in and b) this number is only convictions. In Britain just 3.1% of sexual offences reported to the police (around a third of which are rapes) lead to a conviction, which brings the potential number of Afghan suspects up to 2,484. The police estimate that only 10-15% of sexual offences are even reported; that could mean Afghans committed between 16,500 and 25,000 sexual offences across that same two-year period. Afghans would have to be bringing stupendous benefits to this country to make 25,000 sexual offences a worthwhile price to pay; indeed, many (emphatically including me) would argue that it wouldn’t be an acceptable price under any circumstances.

In reality, of course, Afghans bring us no benefits at all. Thousands of women are suffering for nothing.

Soldiers Are At Risk Again

Just to add insult to injury, to hide this massive, covert influx of Afghans from the public, thousands of them have been accommodated in married quarters on Army bases far from major towns. The luckless troops who now find themselves with Afghan neighbours know what these people are like. The media is currently full of MPs and senior officers talking about how British soldiers want their heroic Afghan allies rescued and brought to Britain. The reality is that a psychological study published in The US Army War College Quarterly found that a major source of trauma among British veterans of Afghanistan was having to watch sexual abuse - often of children - perpetrated by the aforementioned heroic Afghan allies. They were forbidden to intervene to avoid offending the irascible Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who repeatedly refused to deal with the problem.

I note that, among the military-adjacent community in Afghanistan which I was part of for two years, stories of Afghan soldiers and police being killed by outraged British and US troops were quite common. Were they true, or wishful thinking motivated by revulsion at the sexual behaviour of Afghan men? Who knows? Personally I hope they were true.

What’s certainly true is that at least two American Green Berets were disciplined for beating Afghan police commanders they caught raping boys; Captain Dan Quinn was relieved of command of his A Team, while Sergeant First Class Charles Maitland was dismissed from the Army. US Marine Corps Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Jr was murdered by Afghans after complaining about a local police commander’s bacha bazi boys.

Anyway, British soldiers know what Afghan men are like. They remember how, for the first time in the history of the British Army, every soldier was issued a pistol - not because of the Taliban, but to guard against the risk that one of their allies, in the security of a camp or patrol base, would suddenly scream “Allahu akbar!” and open fire on them. They remember the rape of women and small boys. They remember the Afghan propensity for treachery and sudden changes of allegiance. And now they have to go away on a two-week exercise, or a two-month course, or a six-month deployment, knowing that they’re leaving their spouses and children surrounded by these always unpredictable, often violent and perverted, men.

Heads Must Roll For This

It isn’t racist speculation to say that at least some of the Afghans brought to Britain under this secret programme are violent or perverted, either. We already know some of them are, because a significant number of the people on the spreadsheet had applied for asylum under publicly known schemes and been rejected. Reasons for rejection included collusion with the Taliban, rape and murder - and yet our government decided to bring these men to Britain anyway, and hid it from us.

The scale of this betrayal is staggering.

Yesterday, social media was full of useful idiots proclaiming that the Tories created this mess and now Labour was fixing it. Well, that’s half right. The Tories certainly asked for the super-injunction and started bringing in the Afghans, but when Labour took office last July they carried right on from where their predecessors left off. The secrecy continued. The Afghans kept coming. The cancer is still growing - and Labour has fixed nothing.

The present government is just as guilty as the last one. Neither of them can be allowed to get away with this. Answers must be provided. The damage must be reversed. And, most importantly, those who made these awful, dangerous decisions must pay a suitable price.