The Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan has now cost the taxpayer £58m, according to Ministry of Defence figures released to the BBC under freedom of information. The inquiry’s own expenditure to the end of the 2024-25 financial year was £14.68m. The larger sum includes the MoD’s costs and resources, with 74 departmental staff currently spending more than half their working time on it.
When Lord Justice Haddon-Cave opened the inquiry in 2023, he said it would aim to report, at least on an interim basis, within 12 to 18 months. It has now run for more than three and a half years and published no findings. The inquiry says its work proved “greater and more complex than it originally envisaged”, and that delays by the MoD in disclosing information have affected the timetable.
The Special Air Service Regimental Association, which represents more than 5,000 serving members and veterans, is not waiting. On 1 September it said it would “do whatever it takes” to shield its people from what it calls the “manifestly unfair treatment” produced by Northern Ireland legacy processes, and promised a “robust legal challenge” if the Government does not change course on the Troubles Bill.
That is the immediate flashpoint. But the argument SASRA is making runs deeper than the treatment of elderly veterans. It is about what the state’s habits do to the willingness of the next generation to serve.
Brigadier Ed Butler, SASRA’s president and a former commanding officer of 22 SAS who led British forces in Afghanistan in 2006, has warned that repeated legal action is already affecting the regiment’s intake. He told LBC: “The very worst case scenario is you have a completely whittled-down special forces capability. Because no one would be prepared to join it and do these high-risk, high-return operations if their back isn’t covered.” He told The Telegraph he knew two fathers, both with sons in the Army, who had considered attempting SAS selection and decided against it. Both cited the inquiry, he said, and “the whole lawfare matter”. SASRA is building a legal fighting fund, with Butler aiming to raise £2m a year.
Butler is not claiming the regiment has collapsed into a recruitment crisis. The evidence points to something quieter and harder to reverse: capable soldiers deciding that the risk is no longer worth it.
To understand why that matters, it helps to be clear about what the institution actually does. Special Forces personnel can be required to conduct counter-terrorism and hostage rescue, run covert operations and surveillance behind enemy lines, mount high-risk raids in hostile territory, and intervene at speed in situations where failure costs civilian or military lives. These are tasks the state asks a very small number of people to volunteer for, knowing they may not come home. Most civilians will never be asked to accept anything comparable.
That is the bargain in the background of every legal case. Britain asks a few hundred people to take risks the rest of us are spared. In return, it is reasonable for them to expect accountability that is rigorous, fair, timely and grounded in evidence, rather than an open-ended condition of service.
Nobody serious argues that soldiers should be above the law. A Policy Exchange report published the same week, with a foreword from the former Armed Forces minister Al Carns, a Royal Marine of 24 years’ service, makes the distinction cleanly. “No soldier should be above the law,” Carns writes. “Equally, no soldier should face endless legal jeopardy. Accountability is not the same as perpetual investigation. Justice is not served when the process itself becomes the punishment.” Labour peer Lord Glasman backed the report, warning that prosecuting elderly veterans is “a breach of our military covenant”.
That principle is the spine of the case, and it survives only if the article is honest about the other side of it. The Afghanistan inquiry examines allegations that SAS personnel murdered unarmed Afghan civilians, including children, during night raids between 2010 and 2013, allegations first reported by BBC Panorama in 2022. It has heard evidence from senior military personnel that they believed extrajudicial killings took place. These are serious allegations. They are also unproven, and the inquiry has published no findings. The reasonable position is not that accountability is unnecessary. It is that accountability must be competent, proportionate and timely, and that cases should close when the evidence does not support them.
The Northern Ireland Troubles Bill is a separate matter. It returns to the Commons in October, with committee sittings scheduled for the 19th and 20th. SASRA wants no proceedings without compelling new evidence, key decisions taken outside Northern Ireland, effective independent oversight, and a Bill that absorbs the provisions of the Remedial Order. The Government rejects the suggestion that it will expose veterans to needless repeat investigation. “There is no question of needless repeat investigations or of any veteran being prosecuted for having followed the rules,” a spokesperson said. Ministers argue the previous Legacy Act handed immunity to terrorists while leaving more than 1,000 bereaved families without answers, and insist there is “no equivalence between the lawful service of our veterans and the sickening deliberate actions of the terrorists”.
Into this argument walked Monica Grenfell. She is 75, a former journalist, and spent three years as a civilian employee at the SAS headquarters at Credenhill, near Hereford, between 2015 and 2018. She has given evidence under oath to the Afghanistan inquiry and, in an interview with The Times, described some members of the regiment as “feral”. “The SAS are not always the legends and heroes they think they are,” she said, complaining that “nasty characters” had “really ruled the roost”.
Her central complaint, though, was about language. Troops, she said, would “swear all the time”, which was “not acceptable in other workplaces”. You cannot walk into Marks and Spencer, she observed, and use that sort of language. It is worth separating what she described. She gave evidence about a culture. The more lurid claims in her testimony were things she said she had been told, not witnessed. And swearing is not a crime. It is not evidence of criminality, and it says nothing either way about whether unlawful killings occurred, which is the only question that should decide who ends up in a courtroom.
Coarse language and dark humour are not, by themselves, grounds to question a soldier’s fitness to serve. Commentators made the point quickly. The Telegraph and The Spectator both noted the obvious: the SAS have a rather different job from sales assistants in a clothes shop. Grenfell spent part of her time at the base as a kitchen assistant, then a storekeeper. Marks and Spencer does not select staff to parachute into hostile territory, storm buildings held by armed terrorists, or accept that a working day may end with them being shot at. The standards governing criminal conduct must be identical. The workplace culture plainly will not be.
Special Forces selection deliberately seeks traits that civilian employers have little use for: physical courage, endurance, initiative, emotional robustness and aggression held under control. None of those qualities excuses unlawful conduct. All of them are required in combat. Britain should be able to distinguish between the culture that produces them and the crimes that some are accused of, without pretending the two are the same thing.
All of this is playing out against a security picture that does not allow for complacency. Five British men in their 20s, all from London, were arrested near RAF Fairford, the Gloucestershire base used by American bombers flying missions against Iran, on suspicion of offences under the Explosives Act and of preparing a terrorist act. They have since been released on police bail. Counter-terrorism police confirmed on Tuesday that no improvised explosive devices were found in the vehicles, though a quantity of petrol was recovered. The men remain under investigation. Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, said the incident involved “the hands of a foreign actor” and called it “very serious”, offering no evidence, while Iran denied any involvement. Nothing has been proven against the men, who are entitled to the presumption of innocence.
In the same week, the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, reopened the UK Resettlement Scheme, with around one in four referrals expected to be Afghan women and girls or Palestinian refugees. On the watchlist, a Henry Jackson Society report published in October 2021 said that as many as 39,000 of the roughly 43,000 individuals then associated with MI5’s wider terror watchlist were Islamist extremists. That figure is dated, and should be read as such. The threat it describes has not gone away.
There is one source of encouragement for the veterans. In December 2025, the Prince of Wales became patron of SASRA, believed to be the first member of the royal family to take the role. “The SAS has long stood as a symbol of courage, resilience and unwavering dedication to duty and the service of this country,” he said. In Hereford Cathedral, a nine-metre stained-glass window called Ascension, unveiled in April 2017 to mark the 75th anniversary of the regiment’s founding, carries its motto: Who Dares Wins.
Richard Thomson, former Royal Marine Commando and National Director of the Great British PAC said:
“This country does not show loyalty to its armed forces community. That is the truth of it. We ask young men and women to defend Britain. Then, when they come home, the same state that sent them spends years investigating them, attacking them, and dragging them through the courts for the rest of their lives. Service becomes a life sentence of suspicion. No wonder the Army has struggled to hold its numbers. People are not stupid. They watch how veterans are treated and they draw the obvious conclusion: you can have our backs in a war, but do not expect this country to have yours when the shooting stops. They had our backs. We should have theirs .Until we do, do not be surprised when fewer and fewer people volunteer to stand in defence of this nation.”
Britain has every right to investigate credible allegations of unlawful killing, and it should prosecute where the evidence justifies it. It also has a duty to conduct those investigations fairly, competently and without leaving generations of servicemen under permanent suspicion. The country asks the SAS to accept risks few others will. Accountability must follow the evidence, not become an endless condition of service.
