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........

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