Britain’s latest quiet betrayal of Afghans will cost more lives

I felt angry, ashamed and helpless listening to my friend Ali. “I don’t feel human. I am degraded. I will never forget what I went through. I am exhausted and covered in sewage,” he said. All night and morning, we had been on a three-way call/text with a British officer to get him inside Kabul airport. Amid the chaos, nothing worked. Hours later, an ISKP suicide bomber detonated his belt, killing more than 183 desperate men, women and children on the spot where Ali had been waiting.

Left behind and traumatised, Ali had one option: to make an application to go through the British government’s Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) scheme. It was launched in April 2021 to resettle Afghans who had worked with British government agencies in Afghanistan, and I thought and expected that the system would work. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Ali is still stuck and in hiding in Afghanistan.

The news that the Home Office has quietly tightened the eligibility criteria for Afghans to be resettled as part of the ARAP scheme is a betrayal, yet again, of those who risked their lives and those of their friends and relatives to help Britain in Afghanistan.

Under the new rules, ARAP applicants must prove they are facing “high and imminent risk” to their lives in order to be considered for relocation. They must also have made substantive contributions to Britain’s interests as part of their jobs in Afghanistan.

The changes to ARAP means the already dysfunctional system will make it effectively impossible for those eligible to be safely relocated to Britain. How can someone on the run from the Taliban prove the extent of risk they are under? The Taliban doesn’t set a hierarchy or risk levels on those it violently pursues. A mere association with the west and their operations in Afghanistan, civil or military, is enough to warrant imprisonment, torture and death.

From the outset, having been working with many MPs and others who worked incredibly hard to help evacuate at-risk Afghans as the tragedy was unfolding in Kabul and across Afghanistan, I dreaded we would get to where we are now. Boris Johnson and his ministers’ promises of a “warm welcome” sounded hollow. The damning evidence provided to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee by a former Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office employee brought shame to Britain, demonstrating the extent of dysfunction and incompetence at the heart of the government agencies involved in evacuating at-risk Afghans.

The Kabul evacuation debacle, restrictions to the ARAP scheme, and the long-promised but never delivered Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) are shameful abdications of responsibility by Britain, which has cost many lives already. At-risk Afghans are stuck between a deeply dysfunctional FCDO and a deeply hostile Home Office.

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Priti Patel has made hostility to asylum seekers and immigrants the cornerstone of her agenda at the Home Office and of her political identity. Her new Nationality and Borders Bill effectively shuts the door to those seeking alternative routes to Britain to at-risk Afghans.

Thousands of Afghan men and women who worked shoulder to shoulder with Britain in Afghanistan are left abandoned and betrayed. Not a day passes without appalling human rights abuses committed by the Taliban across Afghanistan. Our government must change course and honour its obligations not just to those who worked for us, but also to those who share our values and are at risk because of them.

If Global Britain is to mean anything, it should mean our government sticking to its promises and obligations.

Roh Yakobi is a former refugee, a commentator and an associate fellow at Human Security Centre, an independent foreign policy think tank