Issues with the Government's use of the word 'eligible' when talking about Afghans left behind
The same goes for the word 'entitled'.
This is something that has been annoying me in the past few weeks but I've not really had time to properly highlight it. While I believe the Government is being technically truthful about the numbers of people left behind based upon the method they're using, I think that is still misleading people and I'll try to explain why here. For the purposes of this post I'm going to be talking about former locally employed staff/civilians (LECs) because that's what I know.
My background - In 2017, when I was still in the armed forces, my last deployment in Afghanistan was to work specifically with LECs and to help manage their redundancy packages, relocation to the UK was one option for some of them due to the nature of their jobs. I was also involved in the Intimidation Policy too, something the Defence Select Committee (and I totally agree with them, I voiced concerns at the time and subsequently) described as an utter failure.. The intimidation policy and the old redundancy relocation schemes were merged fairly recently into what's called ARAP.
I've been very reliably informed that for the evacuations recently and for the figures the government and MOD are giving when talking about 'eligible' staff, they are using ARAP definitions. Under ARAP there are four categories and the assistance offered and I'll try to go through and show why I have a problem with it, the main one is that ARAP wasn't designed for such a situation at all. All the full definitions are in the link to ARAP I've posted.
Cat-1 - This is supposed to be for anyone assessed to be at high risk or imminent threat. Considering the reports of the Taliban doing door-to-door manhunts for collaborators you'd think that all former employees would be defined as Cat-1 and therefore 'eligible'. However, as I understand it they're sticking VERY rigidly to the definition 'those who are assessed to be at high and imminent risk of threat to life' and here's my problem. Very few (if any) assessments have been made due to the utter chaos that's been going on and if there's no assessment then the person can't be Cat-1. When I was there there was only one person working full-time on assessing threats. A friend of mine reached out to me after his neighbours grassed on him for having worked for NATO for years, I and many others contacted the MOD about it and there was no response to us and nor did the MOD contact him to assess the threat, thankfully we worked that out for him and his family via an alternative route but there must be others.
Cat-2 - This very vaguely defines LEC roles where they're more likely to get relocation to the UK than others. In a nutshell the more important your job the higher your chance of relocation. That's fine when Afghanistan was 'safe' before all the recent changes but now it's just not fit for purpose. You could have someone who was employed as an interpreter for a week being eligible whereas a mechanic who worked for us for ten years, travelled to and from a NATO base every day, who wouldn't be eligible.
Cat-3 - These are the people I'm talking about who are being left out of the numbers because by default they're ineligible and can't be Cat-1 as they've not been individually assessed. These are the likes of mechanics, storemen, guards (some people may mention the Embassy guards getting out but they weren't LECs, they were contractors so I'm ignoring them here), clerks and cleaners. I know some of these people but unfortunately have no contact with them to try to see if they're even still alive.
Cat-4 - This is extremely rare and not really relevant to my point.
I have no problem with some former LECs being ineligible, particularly those dismissed for serious crimes or links to the Taliban, or those who were technically employed for a day as they signed a contract but then never bothered to turn up for work, that's fine by me. I have no problem with individual assessments not having being carried out yet because that would take months to do everyone, my point is that due to the current situation in Afghanistan almost all former LECs should really be classified as Cat-1, and therefore included in the eligible numbers because of the high threat to them now the Taliban are in charge and actively hunting for them. We are leaving behind a lot more people than the Government are saying we are, even though they're technically telling the truth.
As I said earlier, for this I'm only talking about LECs, that's because the danger they are facing now is specifically due to the work they they did for our armed forces and it's a topic I know well. There will be others, NGO staff for example, who are also in huge danger too but I don't know enough about them to go into that.
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