Former Afghan Special Forces: Deportation

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Defence if he will make a statement on former Afghan special forces facing deportation from Pakistan to Afghanistan.

[The Minister for Armed Forces (James Heappey)]

I thank the shadow Minister for asking this urgent question.

The Afghan relocations and assistance policy is far more generous in design than predecessor schemes such as the ex-gratia scheme. None the less, ARAP is a specific scheme intended to support those who worked for, with or alongside the UK armed forces in support of the UK mission or national security objectives in Afghanistan. While we are acutely aware of the difficult circumstances in which many Afghans find themselves, not everyone will be eligible even if they worked for the Afghanistan security forces. Many Afghans have worked in proximity to UK armed forces but this may have been in service of the Afghan Government, in a nation-building capacity, or though working directly with other nations.

CF333 and ATF444, known as the Triples, were Afghan-led taskforces set up to counter drug trafficking and organised crime and they reported into the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs. They are therefore a component of the Afghan national security forces and are not automatically in scope for relocation under ARAP. Regrettably, we cannot relocate all former members of the Afghan national security forces under the ARAP scheme. That means that some Afghans, whose bravery and heroism are in no doubt whatever—indeed, I served alongside many of them myself—such as certain members of the CF333 and ATF444 taskforces, will not be eligible for relocation under ARAP. Each ARAP application is assessed on a case-by-case basis. All applications, including those from former members of the Triples, are scrutinised on their own merits and in line with our published policy and eligibility criteria, available on the Government website, and in line with the immigration rules. All applicants, irrespective of job role, will be eligible only if they individually meet these criteria outlined in the published policy.

I must emphasise this point for the record: any suggestion that we are making blanket decisions—eligible or ineligible —for any cohort of applicant, or that we have any preconceived position on any application to the scheme, is simply untrue. That is not the approach that Defence takes on processing applications as a matter of policy. The MOD consults the evidence provided from each applicant and our own internal records and engages with internal stakeholders and other Departments when determining eligibility in line with the Afghan relocations and assistance policy and the immigration rules.

[Luke Pollard]

Since before the fall of Kabul, the Government’s treatment of Afghans who worked alongside British troops has been a shameful saga of failure. Ministers have failed to deal with the ballooning backlog of ARAP applications, broken housing promises, data breaches and Afghans stuck abroad in limbo fearing for their lives. Today, we have learned from reports that former Afghan special forces who served alongside British troops are possibly facing deportation back to Afghanistan. Let us be clear: that means that lives could be put at serious harm from the Taliban.

All of us in this House want to see the Government finally and fully honour the commitments given by Britain as a nation to these Afghans. That is why we are all here today. Urgent detail is now needed from the Minister about this escalating situation. First, how many former Afghan special forces who served alongside our forces are at risk of imminent deportation from Afghanistan to Pakistan? What assessment has been made by the Ministry of Defence of the threat to these Afghan elite forces if they are deported back to Afghanistan? What assessment has been made of the threat to their families, and is it as grim as we all fear?

What is the current backlog in ARAP cases? In a parliamentary question answered last week about the safety of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, the Government said that they had

“received assurances from the Government of Pakistan that Afghans being supported…under the Afghans Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) and Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) will remain safe in Pakistan while they await relocation to the UK.”

In light of today’s news, what were the original assurances given to the UK by the Pakistani Government? Can the Minister confirm that zero Afghans pending ARAP or ACRS application decisions or relocations will be sent back to Afghanistan?

General Sir Richard Barrons, who served with the British Army for 12 years in Afghanistan, described the failure to relocate these former Afghan special forces to the UK as a “disgrace” and a “betrayal”. He is right, is he not? There can be no more excuses. Ministers must fix their ailing Afghan schemes and honour the commitment given to our Afghan friends before they are deported back to Afghanistan and potentially killed by the Taliban.

[James Heappey]

I am not sure where to start on that. What the hon. Gentleman I think is knowingly doing is conflating a number of separate issues. There is the issue over the processing of those who can legitimately come to the UK under the ARAP scheme. Finding those applicants in among tens of thousands of applications —many of which are duplicates and many of which are bogus, though plenty are not—has been a heck of a task for the team within the MOD that have been tasked with that over the past two years. However, we are getting to the bottom of the pile.

Crucially, those who are eligible under category 2, which is those who worked directly for the British armed forces, whether as patrol interpreters or cultural advisers and so on, are known to us. We have the employment records, so, as I have said to the House many times, we have been able to go into the list of applications, find those whom we are looking for and whom we know to have worked for us and accelerate their approval. As we get through the tail end of the applications, we are seeing lots of rejections, because frankly we have already gone ahead and found those who matched the employment records that we had from our time in Afghanistan. On those who are eligible for the core of the scheme, I have a great deal of confidence that we really are reaching the bottom of the list, and we are moving at pace to bring them out. I will first answer the hon. Gentleman’s question about the deportation of those who are eligible.

I spoke to both the UK high commissioner to Islamabad and the Pakistan high commissioner to London this afternoon before coming to the House. Both are entirely comfortable with the assurances we have received from the Pakistan Government that those for whom we have made an eligibility decision will not be deported. I know of one case where somebody who had received a rejection was deported before their appeal was heard. I am not sure that there is necessarily anything we can do to mitigate that—Pakistan is, after all, a sovereign country and has every right to say who can and cannot be in the country—but that person, whose review was successful, was successfully brought back into Pakistan and is now waiting to come to the UK.

As for those in Islamabad, wider Pakistan or any other third country and who may have worked for the Afghan special forces, the answer is that we cannot possibly know that, because we do not have the employment records of the Afghan special forces. Therefore, we cannot say who did and did not work with them. We know who has applied to ARAP, and every time someone does, we make an individual judgment about what that person did. Were they just a member of the Triples—heroic and important, but not necessarily working directly for and with us—or were they a member of the Triples who routinely worked with UK special forces or the intelligence community, who would thus be eligible under ARAP category 4? I appreciate that that is a suboptimal answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question, but if we do not know who worked for the Afghan special forces because they work for the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs or the Afghan Ministry of Defence, it is impossible to say how many of those people may or may not now be in Pakistan.