'I felt sick': Former Army officer says UK failed Afghan allies left behind after data breach
A former British Army officer who served in Afghanistan has said some Afghans who supported UK forces are still living in fear nearly three years after the Taliban takeover – and now face fresh danger after a major data breach and years of silence from officials.
Speaking to BFBS Forces News, Ash Alexander-Cooper, who spent two decades in the Army, including four years in Afghanistan, said he felt sick when he heard about the breach and the superinjunction that kept it secret.
"This feels like just another kick in the guts when many of them feel so let down, even just with what had happened before. This is just an extra layer of stress and terror."
The leaked data relates to a secret relocation scheme for Afghan special forces and other personnel, separate from the Arap programme.
A spreadsheet containing names, contact details and some locations was accidentally shared by a civil servant in 2021.
It took three years for the breach to be made public, protected by a rare High Court injunction.
While the Defence Secretary John Healey has now apologised and Sir Ben Wallace has defended the injunction as a necessary legal step, Mr Alexander-Cooper said the bigger issue is the human cost.
"There's a long history of people's lives being treated as lines on a spreadsheet rather than as real people… it's terrifying for many of them wondering what comes next."
Many of those affected by the breach remain in hiding.
Mr Alexander-Cooper said he has been contacted in the past 24 hours by several Afghans who are still in the country and have formal emails from the Foreign Office promising help – but who have not heard anything since 2021.
"They are terrified… they see the UK as a partner they cannot trust, which is terribly sad."
He said Afghan allies went to extraordinary lengths to protect UK personnel during the war, often at great personal risk.
"An Afghan partner of mine stepped onto a mine just in front of me and just disappeared, you know, he exploded.
"They really did put their lives on the line."
He also warned against suggestions that the people whose names were leaked may not be in danger.
"For some, it absolutely is that [there's] a target on their back. And for others, it will just be another piece of the jigsaw that confirms that they are people of interest to the Taliban."
Mr Alexander-Cooper said many serving and former personnel feel let down.
"There was definitely a feeling of being let down systematically by many different programmes or processes that should have been in place to move fast and support the people that we know we should have been supporting… and to see them just ignored or treated again as just a line on the spreadsheet, rather than actually taking into account what they did for us and how valuable they had been, it's just sad, really."
He stopped short of commenting directly on the legal decisions made around the super-injunction but said: "A lot of effort seems to go into suppressing it, but then very quickly that was reversed.
"So one would question perhaps the justification or the basis on which the superinjunction was first applied."
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