The recent revelations concerning the British government’s handling of the Afghan data breach – in which the identities of tens of thousands of Afghans who supported UK operations during the two-decade-long campaign in Afghanistan were allegedly exposed to the resurgent Taliban – have crystallised tensions within British conservatism. Suella Braverman, the former UK Home Secretary, was quick to denounce her own party’s cover-up of the leak and its resettlement of 4,500 Afghan collaborators. ‘We cannot take in the world’s vulnerable’, she wrote on X. Danny Kruger, a Conservative MP, expressed a different concern, calling on current Labour Defence Secretary, John Healey, to ensure that ‘nobody with a serious criminal history of violence or sex crimes was admitted’.

As a Swede – observing from a country grappling with its own tensions over immigration, crime, and social cohesion, yet one that also invested significantly in Afghanistan and relied on local interpreters and guards for the security of its personnel – I can acknowledge the merits of all perspectives. Nonetheless, if any group can lay rightful claim to asylum in the West, it is surely those who risked their lives in service of a war that Western elites, from Left to Right, once declared both just and necessary. In Sweden – a nation that relinquished its imperial ambitions more than three centuries ago – such a stance owes little to a romanticised officer-class gaze projecting noble virtues onto distant auxiliaries. Rather, it reflects a recognition of a moral debt – arguably made all the more pressing by the ultimate failure of the West’s nation-building enterprise in Afghanistan.

Yet, however one judges the British government’s response to the data breach, it can scarcely be considered worse than Sweden’s own treatment of its Afghan collaborators during the chaotic final days of Western-aligned governance in August 2021 – which was vividly chronicled in Robert Karjel’s still-untranslated account, Leaving Kabul (2023). Caught in what political science scholars James G. March and Johan Olson termed the ‘logic of appropriateness’, mandarins in the Swedish Foreign Ministry and the Migration Agency initially leaned towards abandoning the very individuals who had served Swedish interests – yet for whom Sweden, strictly speaking, bore no legal responsibility – as the Taliban closed in on Kabul. Afghan staff at the Swedish embassy reportedly looked on in disbelief as Stockholm’s diplomats departed in haste, leaving once-indispensable colleagues behind.

When Swedish officials sharply changed direction and sought to exfiltrate as many local collaborators as possible, it was the Swedish armed forces that applied the brakes. The military no longer held a mandate to use force in Afghanistan, which – at least nominally –  was now regarded as a sovereign state. Military lawyers insisted that any such intervention would require a new act of parliament. Eventually, the military relented and dispatched its equivalent of Britain’s SAS to the area. By then, a privately led rescue operation was already underway. With the tacit consent of the foreign ministry and the migration agency, operatives from a Swedish private security contractor – tasked with protecting the Kabul embassy and fiercely loyal to its Afghan staff – reached the airport, where desperate crowds had gathered, and began ushering individuals through a checkpoint en route to Sweden.

Some of those evacuated had been officially cleared. Others, it seems, had not. In any case, the outcome was that the authority to decide who may enter the country had been outsourced to a for-profit firm.

By comparison, the British government fares rather better. Upon learning of the data breach in August 2023, then-Defence Secretary Ben Wallace secured a super-injunction to impose a media blackout on the grounds of there being a threat to life. His successor, Grant Shapps, opted not to brief the opposition or relevant parliamentary committees. Military housing in the UK was repurposed to accommodate Afghan collaborators who may have been compromised. Mistakes were made, certainly. But one can hardly accuse the government of following any ‘logic of appropriateness’. Perhaps it was something else: a logic of necessity.