On Afghanistan, you’ll recall, a massive data breach of vast dimensions and bitter consequences has already been revealed, after years of secrecy and lies. The state has forked out billions to transport tens of thousands of entirely unvetted people into Britain, where they and their descendants will reside at public expense. And, to top it off, there was an immense cover-up, the fabricating of official numbers and a super-injunction to muzzle the press.
The only part of the whole debacle that the regime executed with any ability was the deceit and the cover-up. It is better at hiding the truth from the public than it is at doing anything else.
You might have thought it could not get worse. But the British state — and our Ministry of Defence — will always sink to the occasion. There are always new and innovative ways of failing to deliver.
Today, the BBC reports on a freedom of information request it made which turned up 49 data breaches (of which only four were previously known) by the unit handling relocation applications from Afghans. Each one means official incapability, a growing bill in litigation and implied responsibility.
The lawyers who represent the Afghans who have had their information carelessly handled or exposed by the British state are full of demands. Some of those are highly practical: we need to know where the gangrene is; the state cannot continue its paranoid mania for deceit and secrecy. It must be honest about its failures if we are to have any hope of stopping more in the future. But of course, they also have other concerns: money, this mostly means. They will want compensation and they’ll want a lot of it. And why not? The state has failed these people. Who knows, yet, how bad those failures are?
You can, it turns out, put a price on peace of mind – and that price is to be extracted in the form of years of litigation, extracted from the readers of this magazine in taxation, in interest paid on government borrowing, paid for by their children, by their grandchildren, paid forever.
Now here’s the scary part. This is only the beginning. These stories, reported by the BBC, are only the ones the regime is now permitting us to know about. There will be more horrors that we haven’t heard yet — that will only be fed to us in drips, or leaked unexpectedly by people whose movements and motives cannot be predicted. There will be awful stories the regime will fight viciously to keep from you for the rest of time. Be prepared for years of lawsuits, and years of payouts, years of your money being spent on these errors.
Almost everyone I speak to in the defence and security world now has an unrecoverable opinion of the Ministry of Defence. It can’t build drones; it can’t protect its own people from cyber attacks; it can’t procure anything. Its failures are endemic and flagrant. As one analyst of the Ukraine war, surveying the breathtakingly useless Watchkeeper drone programme that is now being wound up, said recently, everyone in the MoD should probably be fired.
The department should be completely purged and rebuilt from scratch with a less disastrous institutional culture and a wholly new collection of better people. It is completely incompetent at all of its functions. It must not survive to keep on failing.
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