Colin Brazier: Afghan translators and women at risk of enslavement deserve legal route to Britain

I wonder if you saw the haunting pictures of Afghans falling from a plane yesterday? They were a pitiable reminder that desperate people do desperate things. But they also tell us something else.

If someone is willing to leave their country by clinging onto a jet as it thunders down a runway and into the sky, how many more Afghans will find other, safer – or at least less suicidal - ways out.

And if they leave where will they turn? Many would choose America, the super-power that has spent billions trying, and ultimately failing to change Afghanistan for the better. But America, the great magnet for the world’s huddled masses for a century and more, is hard to reach, legally at least.

No, when it comes to starting a new life, Western Europe will be the destination for many. This was true even before the Taliban took over. Half of all the migrants currently in Greece’s refugee camps are Afghan. And do you remember all the Syrians encouraged West by Angela Merkel in 2015?

When the dust settled it turned out many of THEM were Afghans too. Of those that made it to Sweden in 2015, for instance, two thirds of them were Shia Hazaras from Afghanistan.

How many will head for Britain? There are good reasons to think a multitude will. The Afghan diaspora in Britain is at least 100,000-strong, and they will act as a magnet and enablers for incomers. How will they get here? Some will take their chances with the Bangladeshis and Eritreans boarding boats on the French coast.

It's emerged this week that the Home Office is building a new £2m Reception Centre for migrants in Dover. For all this Government’s talk of a clampdown, the migrant landings are intensifying. Afghans will swell their numbers. They could turn a flotilla into a small armada.

But other Afghans will find legal routes to asylum. Some will deserve the privilege of British citizenship. The translators. The educated women who fear enslavement. But others will not. Some will try and ride a wave of public sympathy, whipped-up by campaigners who will say Britain has a moral duty to help Afghan migrants who’ve somehow been let down by the West. In reality, Afghans have been let down by Afghanistan. Not for the twenty years of western involvement, but for decades, if not centuries.

Beware those activist voices. The Naïve ones want to believe what they’re told, want to believe that every migrant is a vulnerable refugee and a victim. Ironically, it’s a colonialist mindset that sees foreigners as the white man’s burden. It denies migrants agency which, having travelled thousands of miles to get here, they obviously possess.

These activists are what Stalin called useful idiots. And they often get played as fools. They want to believe the migrant who wants to game the asylum-seeking process by claiming to be a child or a gay man escaping persecution. There’s no excuse for credulity. I repeat: desperate people do desperate things.

If you want an example look no further today than the bearded figure of Gholam Ruhani. He was sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and released in 2007, after a panel believed his story that he was a simple shopkeeper desperate to return to Afghanistan and care for his sick father.

At the weekend Ruhani goaded Western forces on television. He spoke from behind the desk of the president who’d just fled the Taliban advance he, it turns out, was a key figure in leading. Gholam Ruhani was many things, but a simple shopkeeper, he was not.

Gholam's story is a modern parable for those who want to believe the best in people. It’s a laudable aim, and easier if you’ve grown up in a comfortable, law-abiding country like ours. But Britain is not like many parts of the world, which is why so many people want to move here.

It behoves those of us who have a clear sense of how the world really is, not how some would like it to be, to ensure that the next few weeks and months do not see Britain succumb to an unfounded sense of guilt about Afghanistan. Angela Merkel regretted her decision to open Germany’s borders to all-comers in 2015. Britain mustn’t do the same.

That's tonight's Viewpoint.