Afghan interpreters at mercy of Taliban after Whitehall ‘failure’
A GOVERNMENT programme to help former interpreters for British forces in Afghanistan has been heavily criticised in a report which found it failed to bring a single one to safety in Britain.
The Intimidation Scheme “dismally failed to give any meaningful assurance of protection”, the report by the defence select committee found.
Many Afghans felt abandoned by the UK government’s “utter failure” and have resorted to people smugglers to escape the “revenge of the Taliban”, evidence also showed.
The investigation, Lost in Translation?: Afghan interpreters and Other Locally Employed Civilians, called for a more “sympathetic approach” to those who risked their lives to aid British forces in the conflict.
Conservative Julian Lewis MP, the committee’s chairman, said: “This is not only a matter of honour. How we treat our former interpreters and local employees, many of whom served with great bravery, will send a message to the people we would want to employ in future military campaigns – about whether we can be trusted to protect them from revenge and reprisals at the hands of our enemies.”
Set up to help civilians at risk of reprisals from the Taliban after working for British forces during the Afghanistan campaign, the scheme had instead gone to “considerable lengths” to stop the relocation to the UK of Afghan nationals who were threatened and intimidated, the committee said.
The failure of the scheme was in marked contrast to a second “generous and proportionate” programme. The Redundancy Scheme, which saw 1,150 Afghans re-homed in Britain, only applied to those who were still working for the armed forces at the time of the UK’S withdrawal from Afghanistan, provided they had been working for over a year in Helmand Province.
About half of the approximately 7,000 civilians who worked for the British in Afghanistan were interpreters and they often worked in dangerous situations. The committee called for a more sympathetic approach and urged the Government to abandon its “relocation only in extremis” policy.