Sports diplomacy: How an Army polo match in Lahore played vital role in Afghan data breach fallout

A former defence minister has revealed he sent the head of the Army to a military polo match in Pakistan to help ease restrictions on bringing Afghans to the UK, following a massive data breach.

James Heappey was armed forces minister when he was faced with dealing with the breach in 2023. 

Whilst a secret court super-injunction prevented journalists from reporting the breach that potentially put thousands of Afghans who helped UK forces at risk from the Taliban, a lot was going on behind the scenes to figure out how to bring those thought to be at risk to safety in the UK. 

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Polo diplomacy 

Mr Heappey told MPs on the House of Commons' defence committee that one part of the plan was to get people to Pakistan but, once there, the plans for the movement of people from Islamabad to the UK were proving to be difficult because of restrictions imposed by the country's government.

"In October 2023, when we were sort of two months into the post-breach reaction, I was trying to deal with a very frustrating position by the government of Pakistan, where they wanted the full flight manifest for every voyager flight that we were trying to bring out to Islamabad 30 days in advance, well, really hard to do that," he said. 

The solution? It's unlikely anyone on the committee might have guessed the answer would be polo diplomacy.

Mr Heappey told the committee: "I ended up having to ask the Chief of the General Staff, Patrick Sanders, to go to meet the chief of the army staff in Lahore for the Pakistan army polo match, and Patrick and General Munir were able to, sort of, chat that through when we managed to get some movement on that requirement."

This gives a rare insight into what was going on behind the scenes during this time. 

The breach

The public only found out about the breach when the super injunction was lifted in July last year, allowing the case to be reported publicly for the first time. 

The leak originally occurred in February 2022 when a spreadsheet containing the personal details of almost 19,000 people who had asked to come to the UK to flee the Taliban was accidentally leaked by an official who emailed the document outside of the government, and it made its way into the public domain.

The Government didn't realise the leak had happened until the following year. 

Efforts to resettle people in a direct response to the breach were estimated by the MOD to cost around £850m, although a report released by the Public Accounts Committee in November 2025 noted that figure hadn't included legal costs or the potential cost of future compensation claims.