From Kabul with Baggage
Operation Rubific and our Political Class’s Refusal to Live in Reality.
The revelation that successive governments conspired to secretly import nearly five thousand Afghans into Britain - codename ‘Operation Rubific’ - brings immigration to the conscious fore once more. This bizarre saga - part bumbling incompetence, part James Bond impression - throws yet another example atop the heap of evidence attesting to our political class’s treasonous temperament. I’m torn between embarrassment at how unserious we look as a nation, despair at the calibre of our leaders, and sheer fury at the contempt they show to the British public through yet another betrayal.
I no longer expect honesty from our political class. With every lie I become less a subject of surprise - and still, their refusal to live in the real world astounds me. Without missing a beat, the response of liberal public figures - regardless of party affiliation - has been to trot out the delusional multikulti script en masse. Echoes of ‘Britain is an island of immigrants built on the back of their labour’ and ‘we’re all one race: the human race!’ have once again flooded the national conversation - and we are expected to pretend that Britain’s magic soil can make an Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman, or Welshman out of anyone whose feet touch it.
Yet, culture does not vanish at the border, as we all well know. The larger the immigrant population grows, the more cultural differences raise their inconvenient little heads. Unassimilated behaviours and values play out on our streets with increasing regularity, many of which are deeply troubling. A recent FOI request from the Centre for Migration Control found that migrants are three times more likely to be arrested for sexual offences than British citizens. When it comes to Afghans, that figure rises to twenty-two times. Their overall arrest rate? Nine times higher than the British average (Daily Telegraph, 2025).
And let us be clear: that is in comparison to British citizens, not natives. Were the comparison made between migrants and natives, I dare say that disparity would be even starker.
However it is not just crime rates that lay bare this cultural incompatibility, we see it in general day-to-day attitudes, preferences and practices. Cousin marriage is a glaring example of this. According to data collected between 2016 and 2019 by the Bradford Institute for Health Research, nearly 50% of Pakistanis in Bradford are married to a cousin. For context, even among the 19th century British aristocracy, cousin marriage rarely exceeded 5% (Nancy Anderson, Cousin Marriage in Victorian England, 1986).
This is not fringe behaviour in many Muslim societies; it is mainstream, often religiously and legally sanctioned. Whilst Islamic scholars around the world routinely assert the theological grounding for the practice’s permissibility, we have Members of Parliament lobbying on its behalf in the House of Commons. Just last year, independent MP for Dewsbury and Batley, Iqbal Mohamed, stood up in Parliament to oppose any legislative effort to ban cousin marriage. He said ‘it is important to recognise [that] for many people, this is a highly sensitive issue, and in discussing it we should try to step into the shoes of those who perhaps are not from the same culture as ours.’ He said it there, didn’t he? This is a clear example of cultural difference. Regardless of this practice being anti-British by definition, he justified it by saying ‘ordinary people see family intermarriage overall as something that is very positive,’ and implored Brits to stop ‘stigmatising those who are in cousin marriages.’ In other words: we don’t care about British norms - we are here, so is our culture, and you must adjust to us, not the other way around.
The same logic now applies to the Afghan arrivals. There is an implicit expectation that we accept the cultural frameworks they bring with them. What sort of frameworks? Consider bacha bazi, a common pastime in Afghanistan involving the enslavement of underage boys who are forced to dress as girls and dance for groups of men, all while enduring severe and persistent sexual abuse. Or the cultural acceptance of honour killing. Or the criminalisation of homosexuality, blasphemy, and free expression. The list goes on. These are not imagined horrors, they are documented foreign norms that, for those who grow up within such cultures, create attitudes that diverge significantly from the British norm.
I remember the first time I encountered this clash of cultures. I spent the first decade of my life living in a working-class part of inner-city Townsville.* During this period, South Asian immigrants were dropped into our community at such a rapid pace that, within a year or two, we were the only white British family living on our street. This resulted in my mother being mocked and laughed at in the street in a language she did not understand; my sister and me being ignored by the local kids; a sharp rise in the rate at which my father’s car was broken into - from not at all to nearly every day; and children literally defecating in the street. Luckily, we were able to relocate to a rural village where there was still some semblance of England. However I will never forget just how quickly ‘home’ was transformed into a threatening, foreign place.
But don’t worry, say our liberal elites: as far as these recent Afghans are concerned, we only brought the good ones.
Herein lies the fundamental delusion of our political class. They assume - or act as if they assume - that every Afghan granted asylum under Operation Rubific was motivated by liberal values, freedom, democracy, human rights. But that is, quite frankly, a crock of nonsense. Resistance to the Taliban was often tribal, not ideological. Many so-called ‘collaborators’ were not champions of the Western way, but members of rival ethnic factions - Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks - resisting Pashtun dominance. Their allegiances were local and strategic, not grounded in Enlightenment ideals.
I have no doubt there exist Afghans with British-like instincts who hope for the chance to fully embrace our way of life - but such people are a minority. As inspiring as they may be, Afghans like Malalai Joya and Malala Yousafzai are few and far between. Afghans are, after all, Afghans. They are culturally distinct from us. Different cultures, while not monolithic, breed different kinds of people. That is valuable and desirable, in my book - it is one reason why the world is an interesting place. But ‘interesting’ does not sustain a nation. Nations require the kind of cultural homogeneity that creates a defined national identity which, in turn, creates strong social bonds, trust, and cohesion. Importing yet more people with the kind of cultural baggage that undermines that is not sensible - it is national suicide.
Let us say for example, you were to place the average Afghan collaborator and a Taliban member in the same room without telling either of them who the other is. I’m confident you’d witness them agree on most core values: women’s rights, homosexuality, religion, authority, morality, and so on. Only if the conversation were to drift towards very specific issues of Afghan politics would they be likely to disagree in any meaningful way. The real differences between them lie in tribal loyalties, not philosophy, culture, or values.
However, a good liberal never lets reality get in the way of ideological conformity, right? Enter Iain Dale. On his LBC show last week, a female caller voiced a very genuine concern that Afghan migrants ‘bring their ways with them’ - ways she does not like. Dale responded with patronising disbelief: ‘How do you know how they live?’ He then capped it off triumphantly: ‘You’re talking as if these people are coming over here and they’re part of the Taliban themselves.’
Not quite, Iain - but good try. Despite his attempt to dismiss the genuine concerns of an ordinary British citizen with obnoxious questions and strawman caricatures, Dale’s rebuttal holds no water if thought about for even half a second. The Afghans resettled in Britain at the taxpayer’s expense - to the tune of over £2 billion, I might add - need not be Taliban to share deeply rooted cultural dispositions that are alien to the Britain. These are not cosmetic differences. They are differences so incompatible with our cultural norms that they are resistant to integration - especially when those who hold them are imported in such large numbers. The persistent failure of migrants from similar backgrounds to conform to British norms speaks to this incompatibility with ease.
And yet, despite the rising number of ethnic enclaves being carved into British towns, surging crime rates and violence against women, and persistent integration failures, our elites continue to import culturally dissonant populations while accusing dissenters of ignorance, bigotry, or a combination of the two.
The truth is simpler, and more sobering: multiculturalism has undermined social cohesion, eroded trust, and diluted a once-confident national identity. The liberal class may sneer at ordinary Britons, but it is they - not you - who are in denial. So, the next time you hear a politician wax lyrical about our duty to resettle yet another batch of culturally incompatible migrants, or a broadcaster scoff at your legitimate concerns, remember this: they are either lying, deluded, or stupid. Whichever it is, they are not fit to lead our nation or control its conversation.
(*A pseudonym).
About the author: DK is an English psychotherapist and essayist. He writes about philosophy, psychology, culture and politics for his own Substack, Idling On, and other publications.
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