The Afghan data breach was not an isolated incident. Between 2023 and 2024, there were 569 known cases in which the Ministry of Defence (MoD) failed to keep sensitive information safe: software compromised, devices missing, documents mishandled.
On 16 July it was revealed that a UK official had accidentally leaked information on 18,714 Afghan nationals applying for a government relocation scheme for those who had helped the British military. Before that, the MoD had made public the identities of 265 Afghan collaborators, most of whom were interpreters, in a stray email in 2021. It had left its payroll system vulnerable to hackers who gained access to the names and bank details of British military personnel. And it had admitted to losing hundreds of government assets, from laptops and memory sticks to a Glock pistol and a First World War machine gun.
What explains this pattern of failings? It appears that by removing security checks, foregoing proper data protection, cutting back on staff and hiring outside contractors, the MoD laid the foundations for the unfolding national scandal. The leaks thus reflect the deeper maladies of the British state: a decrepit structure, starved of skills and resources, which is willing to meddle in the affairs of foreign countries yet incapable of running its own IT.
It is equally the latest reverberation from the new century’s version of imperialism, when Tony Blair hymned overseas conquest like Kipling reborn, and the British army marched through deserts it had last seen in 1880. The New Labour era was a period of peculiar political and geopolitical arrogance. Today, Keir Starmer praises the record of these governments and cites it as a model for his own, even as their legacies threaten to undermine his leadership and give succour to his right-wing opponents.
Nostalgists for the Blair-Brown era tend to bracket its foreign policy, presenting the war on terror as a blunder that needn’t detract from domestic achievements like Sure Start or the national minimum wage. But the Afghan debacle shows that these two spheres cannot be separated; the national and international dimensions of Blairism followed the same economic logic. As New Labour embarked on its state-building projects abroad, it simultaneously hollowed out the state at home, marketising those parts of it that hadn’t yet been sold off by the Tories. The MoD was the second biggest departmental spender on private finance initiatives, raining hellfire down on Iraq and Afghanistan with the help of an emboldened private sector, to which it handed billions worth of contracts.
This strategy left public institutions increasingly unable to function by themselves. They made little effort to develop their internal expertise, not least when it came to the new frontier of digital services and databases.
Both New Labour’s military adventurism and its private finance agenda emanated from a belief that the market-led “liberal democracy” would conquer the world after the Cold War, replacing backward governments with modern ones, fusty bureaucrats with dynamic entrepreneurs. Authorities in Kabul and Westminster alike would be swept away by this emerging order. Since the arc of history supposedly bent in its direction, the transformation would be mostly spontaneous. Policymakers were encouraged to step back and let it take its course. Their main role was to remove the obstacles to this telos via targeted interventions: overthrowing unfriendly dictators, repealing onerous regulations and waiting for peace and prosperity to follow.
But such progress never arrived. Instead, the Middle East was drenched in blood: cities bombed to oblivion, ancient heritage sites razed and ethnic conflicts inflamed, with a network of torture facilities springing up across the region to deal with popular resistance. The puppet government in Afghanistan hid out in its securitised Green Zone, siphoning off foreign aid while the rest of the country suffered an endless social crisis. Inequality widened, with basic services in short supply. Political opposition was monopolised by the Taliban, who could bide their time until the occupiers exhausted themselves.
Nor was New Labour’s “modernising” vision realised on the home front, where opening the state to market competition brought no benefit to anyone apart from the successful competitors. Just as external actors took over what passed for public provision in Afghanistan, private entities assumed many of the traditional functions of government in Britain, creating a culture of kickbacks and corner-cutting, soaring costs and deteriorating services. Blair had assumed that he could remove the constraints on his “Third Way” model – “rogue regimes”, nationalised utilities – and bask in its success. But in practice the elimination of those fetters led to perpetual crisis, which the government was forced to step in and manage: staying in the Middle East far longer than expected to attend to the aftermath of its invasions, while struggling to limit the blowback from its free-market reforms.
This sequence of events unfolded not just in Britain but across the Global North, as governments joined foreign wars and delegated authority to big business. It soon gave rise to a paradoxical situation. New forms of international dependency were created, with impoverished client states becoming completely reliant on the imperial powers. At the same time, those powers themselves became dependent on predatory investors and asset-stripping corporations, with dire results for states and wider societies. So, as elites in Kabul looked to Western governments to stabilise their rule, they realised that the latter were grappling with their own set of instabilities, caused by the forward march of neoliberalism. Politicians in the developed world had forfeited their own sovereignty while trying to assert it over others.
This dynamic contributed to the failure of the regime-change doctrine. These weakened states – internally atrophied and externally overstretched – were not up to the task of neocolonial governance. Their operations were often haphazard, their intelligence flawed. They never established hegemony, which requires the maintenance of power through a careful balance of coercion and consent. The mode of rule was based on the first far more than the second: domination pure and simple.
Under this system, the original sins of colonialism began to proliferate. According to a BBC investigation, scores of Afghan civilians were executed by British special forces, with one SAS squadron reportedly competing internally to attain the highest body count. One veteran described it as “routine” for soldiers to handcuff and kill detainees – including children – and then cover up their crimes by removing the restraints and planting weapons on the corpses.
Killing, said another former fighter, was “addictive”. “On some operations, the troops would go into guesthouse-type buildings and kill everyone there… They’d go in and shoot everyone sleeping there, on entry.”
Countries that are run in this way tend to rebel against their rulers. The abrupt Nato withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, allowing the Taliban to regain control rapidly, was an open acknowledgement of that fact. Two decades of engagement had cost an estimated 243,000 lives without leaving behind any durable power structure. While some clung to the dream of an indefinite occupation, most of the political and military establishment recognised the urgent need to jump ship. Yet the notion that Britain could easily escape this quagmire was no less misguided than the decision to enter it in the first place. Relations of dependency do not disappear overnight. UK officials had to work out what to do about the significant number of Afghans who lent their services to the war effort, and who now have a legitimate claim to asylum. Once again, their response was astoundingly inept: first presiding over a leak-prone MoD that broadcast the collaborators’ details on an unencrypted spreadsheet; then failing to notice the mistake for 18 months; then refusing to inform those it endangered; and finally launching a belated resettlement scheme under the cover of a super-injunction.
Britain has now abandoned even this fleeting attempt to make up for its reckless activities. The Defence Secretary, John Healey, has announced that no more Afghans whose data was exposed will automatically be offered relocation in the UK, nor will they be given compensation. He assures us there is “little evidence of intent from the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution against former officials” – even though there is already a well-documented record of similar revenge attacks, and Healey admits he is “unable to say for sure” whether people have been killed as a result of the breach.
Naturally, the families of those featured on the spreadsheet are not as sanguine as he is about their possible fate. All this follows Labour’s earlier decision to shut down safe routes for Afghan asylum seekers, abolishing both the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy and the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme. These were designed for those who had assisted UK forces along with other vulnerable groups, but have now been closed with immediate effect, as part of a broader attempt to outflank the anti-migrant politics of Reform UK.
Starmer’s intention, it seems, is simply to ignore the inconvenient fallout of the war on terror. The fantasy of building a harmonious Western-orientated Afghanistan has been swapped for the fantasy of evading the consequences of that project. It will not turn out well. The Labour Party’s wars of aggression have reshaped 21st-century Britain, not to mention the Middle East, in ways that are impossible to repress.
In particular, by promoting the narrative that Muslims are incapable of running their own countries and attempting to modernise them at gunpoint, they have legitimated the kind of Islamophobia Nigel Farage is now wielding against the main Westminster parties: calling for a hard-border regime to keep out those lacking in “British values”. Farage has used the data breach to further incite such paranoia, claiming with no evidence that sex offenders have been allowed into the UK under the resettlement programme.
The only principled and effective antidote to this reactionary tendency is a full rupture with the legacy of New Labour. The first step would be to reckon with the scale of suffering caused by foreign interventions and accept Britain’s obligation to alleviate it to the greatest possible extent: by welcoming refugees, easing sanctions that continue to strangle the Afghan economy, and paying reparations.
The real test of whether we’ve learnt from the 2000s, however, is whether we continue to repeat its mistakes. The current Labour government might be more wary of dispatching troops to faraway places. But it still sent RAF spy planes to aid Israeli intelligence operations in Gaza, and has supplied components for Israel’s F-35 jets that are being used in air strikes, all in the service of a protracted regime-change campaign against Hamas. It refuses to rule out supporting a US-Israeli assault on Iran, which would inevitably cause mass death and displacement as well as creating many more refugees.
If the government’s main foreign policy ambition is to act as Washington’s henchman, this is in part because its domestic policy is not designed to reclaim the sovereignty that was relinquished during the neoliberal period; it is characterised by the same mix of deregulation and deference to private interests. In this sense, the data leak offers a glimpse of a much wider problem: the ability of Blairism to survive amid the wreckage it has made.
[See also: Israel and Gaza: A question of intent]
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This article appears in the 23 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Kemi Isn’t Working