Britain promised them a warm welcome. We lied

When the Afghan relocations and assistance policy (Arap) was announced by Boris Johnson two years ago, he declared: “This country has been extremely generous – more generous than most countries around the world – not just in bringing people immediately from Afghanistan, but in setting out a safe and legal route for 20,000 more to come.

“That is a big number – and the route for those people is clear.”

Such promises fell easily from the lips of ministers in 2021, in the aftermath of the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul. But “Operation Warm Welcome”, the name given to our “generous” efforts, now has an unpleasantly bitter and satirical edge to it.

The latest official figures show that, under the Arap scheme, only 11,474 Afghans have come to the UK, while many hundreds of successful applicants have been left behind in a dangerous limbo in neighbouring Pakistan.

For months, they have been subjected to harassment by their reluctant hosts, and, as we report, many have only been saved from deportation back to Afghanistan, and certain death at the hands of the Taliban, by the intervention of the British High Commission in Islamabad.

That it has come to this is a disgrace. Promises have been broken and trust betrayed, and it should shame the nation.

The situation is intolerable, or it should be, because there can be no question that these people are genuine refugees. To have qualified for the Arap scheme means that they had to have “worked closely with the British military and UK government in Afghanistan, and risked their lives in doing so”. In return for that sacrifice, and the subsequent loss of a homeland, they were promised a “stay in the UK without any time restrictions”.

These are not the bogus asylum seekers imagined by the home secretary, but people who were willing to die with the British forces they served; many of their comrades fell during their time with crown forces and British agencies, and in revenge raids by the Taliban.

So why are they still in Pakistan – and some presumably still in Afghanistan, in even greater jeopardy? It is not through any fault of their own, but thanks to the UK authorities, who have imposed impossible conditions on their “warm welcome” in Britain.

One of the most forbidding is that they must find accommodation in the UK before they travel here. This is an absurdity, and an obscene one, given that many moderately well-off people in Britain today find it difficult to rent a place. Thus, only a handful of the Afghans offered refuge by the UK for their part in helping British forces have been brought to safety from Pakistan in the past months.

There is also a wider penumbra, covering those such as the Afghan air force pilot whose cause has been championed by The Independent – those who fought alongside Western forces and were also prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. These people, too, deserve the right to live in the UK.

If they were able to settle safely on an indefinite basis in Pakistan, things would be superficially easier, albeit still a scandalous deflection of pledges accepted in good faith by those beleaguered people. But Pakistan is far from a safe place, and has its own problems with extremism.

An Afghan in the country will always be under suspicion that they are there because they helped the West in some way. That makes them vulnerable, even before the Pakistan authorities come to take them away to torture and death.

Our political leaders in the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office should end this situation immediately, and send some planes to rescue our erstwhile allies before it is too late.

Britain has made a solemn commitment to them – they have qualified for asylum under the demanding criteria of the Arap, and in any case, they plainly qualify for asylum under the law and the much-maligned European Convention on Human Rights. If the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office cannot sort this out between them – and that does seem to be the case – then the prime minister must intervene.

Dawdling much longer will inevitably mean loss of life and further dishonour.

The Independent is calling on the government to act now. It must live up to its promise to all those who served alongside the British military in Afghanistan.