Latest news with #Afghans
Spectator
18 minutes ago
- Spectator
Base instincts: unease on the garrisons housing Afghan refugees
Helping Afghan refugees escape Taliban retribution has not proved easy; ensuring their integration into their host countries more challenging still. In September 2021, a month after the United States completed its mass evacuation of refugees from Afghanistan, a serving female soldier was reportedly assaulted by a group of Afghan men at Fort Bliss in New Mexico. The incident caused a brief scandal but that was swiftly contained. Within six months, 76,000 Afghan evacuees had been processed and resettled into American communities. The UK has taken a different approach. As part of the Afghan resettlement programme, around 39,000 refugees have been brought here since the fall of Kabul. Some 2,300 Afghans, many of them young men, are housed not in civilian accommodation, but on active Ministry of Defence property, including housing estates reserved outside military bases. This means they live alongside serving military personnel and their spouses and children. In some garrison towns, significant blocks of military housing have been effectively turned over to this purpose. Soldiers and local government officials say that it is not always a harmonious arrangement. One soldier told me that groups of Afghan men stand outside family homes at all hours. Unregistered vehicles, he claimed, appear in the middle of the night, revving their engines. Women on the bases, the soldier added, have altered their dog-walking routes to avoid these groups, as some of the men react aggressively to dogs, even in some cases kicking them. On Facebook groups for military personnel in the areas surrounding these barracks, similar complaints are made. One post from Alanbrooke barracks in North Yorkshire recently claimed Afghan teenagers were ganging up to fight local teenagers. Another post on a page about Durrington barracks in Wiltshire alleges an Afghan teenager stole flowers from a memorial on a bench outside a local Tesco. These are two isolated incidences, of course, but they illustrate unease among communities about the handling of Afghan resettlement. Several soldiers I spoke to said that when concerns are raised and sent up the chain of command, they go unanswered. The assumption among personnel, whether or not it is correct, is that this intransigence is political, because senior members of the military establishment are unwilling to confront integration issues. Simon Diggins, a former colonel who served as defence attaché in Kabul between 2008 and 2010, told me that while successive governments worked hard 'to get people into the country', they did 'not put time and money into integration'. The country's largest military base is Catterick in North Yorkshire. With a population of more than 14,000 and covering over 2,400 acres, since last September it has been home to around 64 settled Afghan families, housed mostly in MoD properties that were intended as service family accommodation. Catterick is a town entirely shaped by the military and its history, and the names of the streets where many Afghan families find themselves reflect this. Amiens Crescent is named after the first world war battle where there were 22,000 British casualties; Aisne Road takes its name from the three battles where hundreds of thousands of Allied troops were killed or wounded. There were cans and crisp packets strewn outside the homes. Nearby Allenby Road – Viscount Allenby led the Egyptian Expeditionary Force against the Ottoman Empire – had become a fly-tipping site, with stained mattresses dumped on its grass verges. The litter and tipping were unpleasant, but it was unclear who was responsible for the mess. While locals asserted that littering had increased recently, I could see no sign of groups of Afghan men standing around on the streets being intimidating, as some locals claimed. One ex-serviceman in Catterick offered a more nuanced perspective on the Afghan resettlement. He told me the problem was not those who had served alongside the armed forces, but those who 'bring their friends and family over', as 'this is how it starts'. He was not the only soldier I spoke to who equivocated. Some military personnel felt the need to caveat their complaints about their new neighbours with assurances that they were not racist and that they valued their allies. Some spoke at length about their admiration for the Gurkhas and had positive things to say about other Commonwealth units and their families in the area ('Commonwealth soldiers bring their families as well and nobody has an issue with that,' one told me). The concerns expressed about recent Afghan arrivals is to do with the speed and scale of the change which military communities have faced. Many soldiers have chosen to vote against these rapid changes with their feet. Serving and former personnel told me of colleagues who have quit the army in response to the Afghan resettlement – specifically for the safety of their families. And now many of them are also planning to vote against what's going on at the ballot box. One captain explained that when he was leading a training exercise during the 2024 election, almost every soldier under his command said they were planning to vote Reform. That was not just confined to the lower ranks. A local in Catterick said that of the five senior officers he knew, four intended to vote Reform at the next election. Centrist politicians have long claimed that a vote for Reform is just a passing protest. But if those who have served in uniform see both main parties housing thousands of Afghans in homes which were designed for hard-pressed military families, this reaction is unsurprising. The armed forces are the spine of the state – called upon when the NHS, the police, border force and prison services are stretched beyond capacity. If they feel their fears are going unaddressed, then their quiet quitting should concern us all.
Spectator
18 minutes ago
- Politics
- Spectator
The lanyard class is imploding – and it can't blame Musk
I was surprised to read a report by Sunder Katwala's thinktank British Future saying the UK is a 'powder keg' of community tensions and warning of further unrest this summer. In a foreword by Sajid Javid and Jon Cruddas, who are co-chairing a commission looking into last year's riots, Britain is described as 'fragmented' and 'fragile', seemingly only one newspaper headline away from descending into civil war. Aren't these the same public intellectuals and politicians who, until ten minutes ago, were cheerleaders for multiculturalism? I thought the arrivalof hundreds of thousands of immigrants a year was enriching our street life, improving our cuisine and revitalising our art and literature? Isn't the absorption of millions of foreign nationals, many from countries with very different customs to ours, a great British success story? Diversity is our strength, don'tcha know. Now, suddenly, our cities are hellscapes, riven with ethnic and religious tensions that could erupt into violence any minute. Enoch Powell was a prophet all along. This loss of faith by our metropolitan overlords seems to have happened overnight. Have they all had their iPhones ripped from their hands by gangs of marauding cyclists? Their rose-tinted view of mass immigration has been replaced by a pathological fear of social disorder: anarchophobia. That was brought home to me when it emerged that one reason the government suppressed the news about rehousing 24,000 Afghans was the fear that it would light the blue touch paper and… kaboom! Our lords and masters really do think that ordinary people are a bunch of angry troglodytes milling about on street corners looking for the slightest excuse to start setting emergency vehicles ablaze. Needless to say, there's only one solution to this combustible state of affairs: more censorship. Forget about stopping the boats or doing anything about the grooming gangs. No, the reason the proles are on a hair trigger is 'misinformation'. It's all Elon Musk's fault! That was the conclusion of a cross-party group of MPs on the Science, Innovation and Technology select committee who issued a report two weeks ago claiming the Online Safety Act is basically useless because it hasn't given Ofcom the power to force platforms to remove fake news. 'The viral amplification of false and harmful content can cause very real harm – helping to drive the riots we saw last summer,' said the chair, Dame Chi Onwurah. No wonder Lucy Connolly has been banged up for 31 months. It was her tweet after the Southport attack saying people could set fire to asylum hotels for all she cared, and implying an illegal immigrant was responsible for the murders, that was single–handedly responsible for the worst outbreak of social disorder since 2011. If only Musk had trained his algorithms to delete such dangerous 'misinformation', we'd have had a summer of multicultural street parties with Progress Pride flags and big banners saying: 'Refugees Welcome.' I've been trying to work out the mental gymnastics behind such an 'analysis' and I think it goes something like this: 'We have no regrets about promoting mass immigration despite the electorate repeatedly telling us not to. That policy has absolutely nothing to do with the growing cynicism about politicians, collapsing trust in institutions and fraying social cohesion. Our vision of a rainbow Britain would have come to pass were it not for that pesky Musk and his hateful algorithms.' I'm exaggerating, but only slightly. Listen to Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a pro-censorship lobby group. 'One year on from the Southport riots, X remains the crucial hub for hate-filled lies and incitement of violence targeting migrants and Muslims,' he told the Guardian. Incidentally, Imran has fled to Washington, so great is his anarchophobia. At some point you'd think it would occur to these geniuses that the aggressive policing of social media posts – more than 30 people a day are being nicked for speech crimes– isn't having the desired effect. Last time I checked, Reform UK was riding high at 34 per cent in the polls. Maybe the real reason these people don't like their policies being attacked online is that, deep down, they've lost faith in them themselves and don't want to be forced to defend them. It's not British society that's on the verge of imploding. It's the lanyard class.
Spectator
18 minutes ago
- Politics
- Spectator
The High Court's war on truth
In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice: 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.' The assertion is intentionally absurd. If every-one adopted their own idiosyncratic lexical definitions, language wouldn't function, and we'd all blither unintelligibly in a Tower of Babel. But then, Humpty missed his calling as a British High Court judge. Sitting on the bench rather than a wall, the big egghead might never have had that great fall. During this Afghanistan data leak scandal, we've learned that Afghans deemed at risk of Taliban retaliation for collaborating with British troops have been allowed not only to resettle in Britain but to bring along as many as 22 'additional family members' (AFMs). The Ministry of Defence believes the 'vast majority' of 2022's preposterously profuse 100,000 claims to have worked with British armed forces were bogus. Obliged to house the purportedly endangered and their relatives, the MoD restricted AFMs at first to spouses and children. Yet UK-resident Afghans sued the Foreign Office in the hopes of importing fellow nationals with no legal or blood connection to them. One petitioner pleaded before an imaginative High Court judge, Mrs Justice Yip, who has a future as a postmodernist in her nearest philosophy department. (AI explains that the 'yips' are 'characterised by a sudden inability to execute a familiar and previously mastered skill' – in this instance competent jurisprudence.) 'The term 'family member',' her ruling states, 'does not have any fixed meaning in law or in common usage. Indeed, the word 'family' may mean different things to different people and in different contexts. There may be cultural considerations… there is no requirement for a blood or legal connection.' This novel lingual latitude greatly expanded the population of AFMs covertly airlifted to the UK. Funnily enough, the Oxford Desk Dictionary at my elbow doesn't identify 'family' as 'a word with absolutely no meaning', for a word with no meaning isn't apt to appear in a dictionary. Page 276 also says nothing about 'family' meaning whatever different people choose it to mean, because a dictionary doesn't have Carroll's sense of humour. Instead, it is shockingly specific: '1. Set of parents and children, or of relations. 2. Descendants of a common ancestor.' Though perhaps Mrs Justice Yip would countenance the third definition, 'brotherhood of persons or nations united by political or religious ties', as that definition potentially encompasses billions of people and would therefore mean that our Afghani petitioner could bring just about anybody to Britain. Which, thanks to her ruling, appears to be the case. This is important because – sorry to state the obvious – laws and regulations are drafted in words. Government can only function if language functions. MPs vote on bills written in words that must mean roughly the same thing to every other MP. Citizens are told what laws to follow in words as well. Yet if judges may subsequently interpret legal text like Humpty-Dumpty, there are no laws. The whole set-up falls apart. We're ruled by arbitrary court decrees, which are not bound by the Oxford Desk Dictionary or any other staid reference book insisting that words mean something in particular. Through the Looking-Glass ceases to be a satire and becomes a primer. Language joins truth – my truth – as capricious, mutable, mercurial and subjective. Presumably, then, maybe to you a law against 'theft' prohibits taking other people's stuff. But maybe to me 'theft' means crossing the street against a red light, so you can't put me in jail for lifting your laptop. Surprise – Justice Yip's ruling acknowledges the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the basis of so many similar decisions deeming 'asylum seekers' legitimate and impervious to deportation regardless of their nonexistent persecution or their criminality. The ECHR is itself notoriously vague, broad and flabbily written. It's this lexical blobbiness that enables judges to regard it as a 'living document', whose scope can expand without limit and whose meaning can be twisted to suit a judge's whim on a given day. The nebulous 'right to family life' has proven especially elastic, even preventing candidates for deportation from being separated from their pets – and the provision grows only more usefully ambiguous now that 'family' refers to people to whom you have no connection. I gather the ECHR was never intended to be the basis of adjudication in the first place. But then, pleas from countless pundits such as yours truly for Britain to please withdraw from this catastrophic charter for crooks and charlatans fall without fail on deaf political ears. Contorting once-standard vocabulary whose meaning we recently all agreed upon is a commonplace technique on the left. Aside from its secondary definition (the proportion of a property whose debts are paid off), 'equity' in my 1997 Oxford Desk Dictionary means 'fairness'. And who could oppose fairness? Except that, thanks to the wokesters, equity now means 'achieving an equal outcome', aka Marxism. 'Inclusion' means exclusion. 'Gender' used to be a synonym for sex and otherwise only applied to grammar; now it's a sensation of wearing a frock or growing a beard in your head. Most famously, of course, 'woman' now means 'man'. The lesson here? Not only should parliament renounce the ECHR, but lawmakers must routinely draft all legislation as plainly and simply as possible, nailing its purpose down so that activist judges cannot conveniently misunderstand complex syntactic constructions such as 'dog' and 'go'. Parliament might also pass a bill obliging these postmodernist adjudicators to rule in accordance with words as they are understood by ordinary people – some of whom may be stumped by 'eschatology', but none of whom scratch their heads over the meaning of 'family member'. The bill could even cite a reference book to which these befuddled jurists might resort when confused by challenging vocabulary ('a', 'an' and 'the' come to mind) whose precise meaning might be obscured by 'cultural considerations'. I'd be willing to loan out my Oxford Desk Dictionary for a good cause.
Indian Express
7 hours ago
- Politics
- Indian Express
Afghan man helped US military against Taliban, almost got a green card. Then, immigration officials came for him
A 35-year-old Afghan translator who aided American troops during the war in Afghanistan has been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Connecticut, in a move that has sparked bipartisan outrage and raised questions about the Trump administration's treatment of wartime allies. Identified as Zia S, the man entered the US legally in October 2024 on a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) and humanitarian parole. He was arrested last week after attending a routine biometrics appointment for his green card in East Hartford, according to his attorney and multiple officials. He is currently being held at a detention facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Zia, a father of five, fled Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover in 2021. His visa was part of a US programme meant to protect foreign nationals who risked their lives to support US military operations abroad. 'This is the worst kind of abhorrent violation of basic decency,' said Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) in a statement quoted by The Guardian. 'He actually worked and risked his life in Afghanistan to uphold the values and rights that are central to democracy.' Congresswoman Jahana Hayes, also from Connecticut, said Zia's family had been left in the dark. 'Our credibility is at stake. We have families who have risked everything not just for themselves, but for their entire family … in the name of standing up for the promises of our American democracy,' Hayes told The Guardian. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told Reuters that Zia is under investigation for a 'serious criminal allegation,' though no specifics have been made public. His lawyer, Lauren Petersen, said she has no knowledge of any charges. 'Zia has done everything right. He's followed the rules. He has no criminal history,' she said. 'If he is deported … he faces death.' A federal judge has issued a temporary stay on his deportation, but Zia remains in custody. Zia is the third known Afghan ally to be detained by ICE since Donald Trump returned to office. More than 70,000 Afghans were brought into the US under President Biden's 'Operation Allies Welcome,' but many still face legal limbo. The Trump administration has also moved to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for nationals from countries including Afghanistan, Haiti, and Venezuela, despite ongoing unrest in those regions.
Newsweek
7 hours ago
- Politics
- Newsweek
Green Card Applicant Who Served in Afghanistan Detained by ICE Agents
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. An Afghan man who served with U.S. troops and has a pending green card application was detained by federal agents following a routine immigration appointment. Zia S., a 35-year-old father of five and former interpreter for the U.S. military, was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents outside a USCIS office in East Hartford, Connecticut, on July 16. A senior Department of Homeland Security official told Newsweek that the man "is currently under investigation for a serious criminal allegation." Newsweek reached out to the man's attorney for comment via email. Why It Matters After the U.S. military's two-decade presence in Afghanistan ended in 2021, many Afghans who had supported American forces were granted entry into the United States through refugee programs, Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs), or Temporary Protected Status (TPS). However, changes under the Trump administration have led to the termination of TPS for some individuals, raising concerns about deportation. President Donald Trump ordered his administration to remove millions of migrants without legal status to fulfill his campaign pledge of widespread mass deportations. The White House has maintained that anyone living in the country unlawfully is considered to be a "criminal." File photo: The Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status from the Department of Homeland Security. File photo: The Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status from the Department of Homeland Security. AP/Jon Elswick What to Know Zia, whose full name is being withheld for safety reasons, had been living in Connecticut since October 2024 after arriving in the U.S. on humanitarian parole. He and his family had reportedly received Special Immigrant Visa approvals and were in the process of applying for permanent residency. He spent about five years assisting U.S. troops in Afghanistan before he and his family fled the country in 2021, after the Taliban regained control. He legally entered the U.S. in October 2024 at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Zia was placed in expedited removal proceedings. However, a federal judge has since issued a temporary stay, halting his deportation for the time being. "Zia has done everything right. He's followed the rules. He has no criminal history," his attorney, Lauren Cundick Petersen, told reporters. After initially being detained in Connecticut, Zia was transferred to an immigration detention facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts. His detainment comes amid growing outcry against Afghan allies being detained by ICE even as they comply with legal procedures. Senator Chris Murphy lambasted the Trump administration's immigration policy and told Newsweek that it's a "disgrace." "The Trump administration's decision to turn its back on our Afghan allies who risked their lives and the lives of their families to support American troops in Afghanistan is unconscionable," the Connecticut Democrat said. "They stood shoulder to shoulder with our men and women in uniform, and our country made a commitment to protect them and their families. Now, Donald Trump has ripped the rug out from under them, a betrayal that will be a death sentence for any Afghan national sent back." Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, also said it was "disgraceful" that ICE agents arrested a man who risked his life for the U.S. "For masked agents to snatch someone off the street with no warning, no counsel, no opportunity even to know who is doing it while it's in process, is un-American," Blumenthal told reporters on Tuesday. "He actually worked and risked his life in Afghanistan to uphold the values and rights that are central to democracy. And for now, for him to be, in effect, violated in his rights when he has fought for those rights here is completely disgraceful." What are People Saying Senator Chris Murphy told Newsweek: "It's a disgrace that will have long-term consequences for our national security as foreign nationals simply refuse to help the U.S. abroad because they know we'll just abandon them in the end." A senior DHS Official told Newsweek: Zia is "a national of Afghanistan, entered the U.S. on October 8, 2024, and paroled by the Biden administration into our country." Senator Richard Blumenthal told reporters on a press call on Tuesday: "Zia thought he was safe when he arrived in America, the land of freedom and opportunity. Where in the world are you safer than in America? And as it turns out, he was totally unsafe because of this administration." Zia's attorney, Lauren Cundick Petersen, told reporters on a press call: "Following the rules are supposed to protect you. It's not supposed to land you in detention. If he is deported, as so many of the people have articulated today, he faces death."
