A parliamentary inquiry has concluded that the Ministry of Defence's data breach, which exposed the personal details of thousands of Afghans seeking refuge in the UK, was a "foreseeable" failure. Shocking, we know. The Commons' Defence Committee's report, published Thursday, paints a picture of an MoD that lacked the expertise to run the Afghan relocation scheme after Kabul fell, and used secrecy as a "shield" against accountability. The breach came to light in August 2023, but thanks to a super-injunction - the legal equivalent of a magical cloak of invisibility - it couldn't be reported until July 2025.

Committee chairman Tan Dhesi offered some sage advice: "The Ministry of Defence should stick to defence - it should never have been left to run immigration casework schemes." The report specifically called out the MoD's use of Excel as a "continuing cultural failure," which is about as damning as it gets in the world of spreadsheet-based bureaucracy. The breach itself was caused by a staffer sharing an Excel spreadsheet with a "trusted third party," containing data on over 18,500 applicants to the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) scheme. That's every single person who applied by January 2022, for those keeping score.

But wait, there's more. The report also highlighted that this was just one of 19 breaches between February 2022 and November 2023. And the secrecy? The super-injunction was originally expected to last four months but stuck around for almost two years, because why let accountability get in the way of a good gag order? The committee also questioned the government's policy of neither confirming nor denying special forces involvement, which made it rather difficult to figure out how the breach happened in the first place.

Speaking of special forces, BBC Panorama revealed in February 2024 that British Special Forces had been given a de facto veto over Arap applications from their Afghan counterparts. One UKSF officer personally rejected 1,585 applications in a matter of weeks in 2023, approving exactly zero. Since then, 884 of those rejections have been overturned, which the committee noted "demonstrates the seriousness of that failure." Many of those Afghans are still living in fear, with one telling the BBC, "I feel I have been left alone in the midst of hell." The defence secretary now faces a legal challenge, with one family reportedly down to their last $200.

An MoD spokesperson said the leak "should never have happened" and welcomed the opportunity to learn from the incident. The report suggests there's a lot of learning to do.