Parliamentary inquiry finds UK Ministry of Defence Afghan data breach was a foreseeable failure

A parliamentary inquiry by the UK House of Commons Defence Committee has concluded that a major data breach by the British Ministry of Defence was a foreseeable systemic failure rather than an isolated mistake.

The leak exposed the personal details of over 18,500 Afghan applicants fleeing the Taliban. It occurred when a staff member at the UK Special Forces headquarters in England emailed an unencrypted Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing the entire applicant database to a third party.

The compromised individuals had applied for the UK’s Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy after working alongside British forces during the war in Afghanistan.

The committee’s report severely criticised the UK Ministry of Defence’s operational competence, stating that the British military department lacked the expertise to manage immigration casework and relied on a continuing cultural failure of using basic spreadsheet tools for sensitive data.

Defence Committee Chairman Tan Dhesi condemned the UK Ministry of Defence for using operational secrecy as a “shield against proper accountability”, highlighting that a UK court-issued super-injunction barred the public and British parliamentarians from knowing about the breach between August 2023 and July 2025.

The inquiry also highlighted administrative flaws in how former Afghan commandos were evaluated for UK resettlement. Internal records revealed a British Special Forces officer systematically rejected 1,585 applications from Afghan commandos in 2023 without approving a single case.

Following a UK government review, 884 of those rejections were overturned. With former Afghan commandos remaining in hiding from Taliban reprisals, the parliamentary committee urged the British government to fulfill its responsibility to expedite the safe relocation of affected families to the UK.