Ask Hein van Rijckevorsel what the Afghans did for the Dutch during the long war against the Taliban and he’ll take you on a ride up Rollercoaster Hill. He describes the landscape as if he was there last week, even though it’s been 17 years since he spent five months serving as second in command of one of the Dutch bases in Uruzgan.

“On the one side of the Helmand river was our camp, Camp Hadrian in De Rawood,” he says. “And on the other side, not visible from our camp, further into the mountains was Camp Volendam, where an infantry platoon was stationed. The only way to get to Volendam from our camp was to cross the river. There was only one place you could do that, and that was on the other side of a valley by Rollercoaster Hill.

“As the name says, it was a hill that you had to ride up like a rollercoaster that gave you a perfect view of the crossing. And to make sure that the Taliban couldn’t place any hindrances and our peloton could cross over safely, the ASG were posted on Rollercoaster Hill 24/7.”

The ASG were the Afghan Security Guards, locally recruited personnel who were the first line of defence for the 1,400 Dutch troops stationed at Camp Hadrian, Camp Volendam and Camp Holland. The Dutch mission in Uruzgan began in 2006 as a rebuilding project, but the forces soon became embroiled in a prolonged struggle to protect their base from Taliban advances.

“The Taliban regularly tried to take the hill at night,” Van Rijckevorsel says. “The ASG did an incredibly good job of supporting us. We were in direct contact with the commandant of the team at Rollercoaster Hill so that if something happened we could send a unit to support them. We would get a call and pass it on to the operations room, so that the police commandant could take the right steps to ensure that we held the hill.”

The last cabinet initially refused to include ASGs on the list of evacuees from Kabul when the embassy was shut down in August 2021, partly because they were not directly employed by the Dutch government.

But a commission headed by former civil servant Maarten Ruys found serious shortcomings in the preparation, planning and execution of the evacuation. One of its conclusions was the ASGs were left in limbo because the Dutch authorities had not kept registers of contract workers. MPs then passed a motion by the GroenLinks-PvdA MP Kati Piri calling for security guards and translators to be offered protection on the same terms as embassy workers.

The outgoing defence minister, Kajsa Ollongren, and home affairs minister Hanke Bruins Slot accepted the Ruys commission’s findings and pledged to reconsider 130 applications that were originally turned down, to assess whether their lives were in danger under the Taliban.

But in September the new right-wing cabinet led by Dick Schoof announced it was backtracking on that promise. Van Rijckevorsel was shocked: “I thought: is this really happening in the Netherlands? In a democracy, with all the standards and values we hold dear? It felt like a betrayal,” he says.

At a roundtable discussion in The Hague, convened by Piri, he called it his “moral duty, as a leader, a human being and a Dutchman”, to secure a safe future for the Afghan guards in the Netherlands. “They risked their lives for us and our mission and it is time we gave them the protection they deserve,” he said.

Three cabinet ministers – asylum minister Marjolein Faber, defence minister Ruben Brekelmans and foreign affairs minister Caspar Veldkamp – claimed as many as 4,500 Afghans could have been entitled to protection under the previous cabinet’s rules. That figure is strongly disputed by Afghanistan veterans, who point out that only 168 applications have been received so far and that figure is unlikely to grow ¬ not least because at least 15 former guards are already believed to have been murdered by the Taliban.

Killed

Nesar Ahmad Naeemi, who led the ASG group in Uruzgan, told the roundtable meeting that one of his ex-colleagues had been killed 100 metres from his front door. “These people need our protection, but I have to tell them they won’t get it,” he said.

The ministers also mentioned the cost of accommodation, estimated at just under €28,000 a year per person, plus flights and transit hotels. “I get the feeling people are looking at spreadsheets, not real people of flesh and blood with a pulse,” Van Rijckevorsel says. “They are living in constant fear, in hiding, moving from place to place. Their lives are no longer safe.”

Van Rijckevorsel, 47, is a quietly energetic man who, after more than a decade out of service, retains the physique and poise of a serving officer. After returning from Uruzgan in 2007 he was deployed on two other missions in Israel, Lebanon and Syria and reached the rank of major.

He spent the last three years of service in The Hague before working for a decade in logistics, then studied for an MBA before setting up his latest venture, Classic Car Companions, with an old school friend three months ago. “So really I’m on my third career, turning my passion into my work,” he says.

He feels the Netherlands has changed since his days in Afghanistan. “We were always known for being a country where everyone pitches in and solves things together, and I don’t see that happening now,” he says. “The Netherlands has hardened and we’re less willing to accept each other’s backgrounds, our norms and values and cultures, and I think that’s a shame. To me the Netherlands became a great country through immigrants and people of different backgrounds working together. Now it’s as if we’ve forgotten all that.”

The Dutch military made a point of recruiting ASGs in Uruzgan from other parts of the country, because local officials were too susceptible to the influence of regional Taliban commanders. But when they returned home, they became a target in their own communities.

Ostracised

“They’re living in constant fear of being seized by the Taliban,” Van Rijckevorsel says. “It’s a very different system and administration from what we have in the Netherlands. They operate through tribes and clans and families. And the Taliban are very systematic. These people are ostracised because of their loyalty to us. Think about how we behaved towards collaborators in the war. In the eyes of the Taliban they’ve colluded with the enemy. That usually doesn’t end well.”

The national ombudsman, Reinier van Zutphen, has described the letter in which the ministers said they had made a “different assessment” of the Afghan guards’ situation as a “violation of human rights”. He told NRC that the guards could have a legal case against the government because the previous cabinet had already promised to evacuate them.

Van Zutphen said the about-turn appeared to be driven by PVV asylum minister Marjolein Faber’s determination to implement the “strictest asylum policy ever”. Three of the parties in the current coalition supported Kati Piri’s motion last October to give the ASGs the same protection as embassy guards: the exception was the PVV. “But the other ministers could have said: ‘This isn’t about asylum, Mrs Faber, this is something we have to do,” Van Zutphen said.

Anne-Marie Snels, former chair of the armed services union AFMP, does not try to conceal her anger at the cabinet’s treatment of the Afghans. “In the armed forces we always say ‘no man left behind’, but that’s what’s happening now,” she says.

“And what makes it far worse is that we fought tooth and nail for these two groups, the military guards and the embassy guards, to be allowed to stay. The previous cabinet ate humble pie, embraced the conclusions of the Ruys commission and accepted they needed to find a solution, and now this cabinet has gone back on it.”

Human rights

Human rights organisations have criticised western countries’ resettlement schemes for being slow, cumbersome and over-restrictive, but other nations have been far more accommodating than the Netherlands, which has accepted just over 4,600 Afghan interpreters, guards and NGO workers since the fall of Kabul.

The British government’s resettlement scheme has enabled nearly 25,000 people to move to the UK. Some 88,500 Afghans have settled in the United States under the Operation Allies Welcome programme, and in March the Biden administration issued another 12,000 Special Immigration Visas.

Australia, a country with a population of 27 million – one and a half times as many as the Netherlands – and a reputation for one of the strictest asylum policies in the world, has promised 10,000 humanitarian visas and 5,000 extra visas for family members by the end of 2025.

The Dutch, meanwhile, are quibbling over a scheme that experts say will bring around 100 Afghans to the Netherlands, despite ministers’ claims that it could open the floodgates for thousands of applications.

Reputational damage

Van Rijckevorsel says the decision will damage the Netherlands’ reputation as a security partner. “In the future local parties will think twice about whether they want to team up with us,” he says. “Moreover, it makes us look bad in the eyes of our allies. The Netherlands was lead nation in Uruzgan. We had other nations with us at Camp Holland, such as Americans, Canadians and British. Their countries have taken in a share of the ASGs while we as lead nation haven’t accepted our responsibility. I’m ashamed of that.”

According to the government’s own figures, 137 guards and another 31 staff who worked at the Dutch embassy in Kabul stand to have their claims reassessed. Some have disappeared or been killed by the Taliban. Around one-third of the group has already relocated to Australia under that country’s humanitarian visa scheme. “What the government is doing is fiddling the figures,” Snels says. “This is about a very limited group and we know from experience that not all of them will come.”

She explains: “The Netherlands has pretty restrictive policies. There is a rule that you can only bring children under the age of 18. So if you have an unmarried daughter of 20 who’s still living at home, or an older sister who’s single, or your parents are dependent on you, they have to stay behind. That puts people off from coming.”

Maybe 80 men

“We’re talking about maybe 80 men,” Van Rijckevorsel says. “I can well understand that the cabinet has some tough decisions to make and needs to take a nuanced view of its immigration policy. But these are more than just people asking for asylum. These are individuals who worked and fought with us. And they’re easy to identify, it’s a small group: what’s stopping us from sorting it out?”

He says the group is easy to identify because he spoke to them on a daily basis. “Once a week I went to see the ASG commandant, who had a camp right beside ours. We had dinner together and we talked everything through: who was sick, who needed to go home, who wanted leave, who would replace them. It was a close personal working relationship. And I paid them in cash, in dollars, every two weeks. And I did that at their camp, to make sure every single Afghan got his money.”

Van Rijckevorsel holds out little hope that the cabinet can be persuaded to change its mind. Only one of the four coalition parties, NSC, was present at the roundtable discussion convened by Kati Piri. “It was a unique chance for the coalition to see what the situation was actually like,” he says. “And only one of their MPs turned up. I think everyone who has worked for this can hold their heads up high, and what’s happening in The Hague is frankly a damp squib.”

Taliban

NSC’s Isa Kahraman, the only MP from the coalition parties to attend the meeting, said there was “no evidence” that the Taliban would violate an agreement with the United Nations not to target Afghans who served with the US-led military operation. But Snels says there are documented cases of the Taliban hunting down, kidnapping and torturing former ASGs in Kabul.

“A lot of them fled to Kabul because they hoped to be able to leave the country quickly. And now they can’t go back to the villages where they came from because people have started asking questions. They’re constantly on the move because they’re not safe anywhere. This government is just denying everything and that’s something I really can’t stand.”

Snels vows to “fight to the bitter end” to reverse the decision. “My anger is my driving force,” she says. On November 12 the senate passed a motion tabled by D66 senator Paul van Meenen calling for the cabinet to resettle the ASGs in the Netherlands. “And after this cabinet there will be a new cabinet,” Snels says. “But the question is whether people in Afghanistan will be able to hold out for that long, because their lives are so lacking in perspective.”

Van Rijckevorsel says the debate about refugees in the Netherlands ignores the grim reality that the Afghan guards live in. “Nobody should think that these men are all keen to come to the Netherlands because it’s the land of milk and honey,” he says. “These are proud Afghan men with children and families who would much prefer to live their lives there. They’re not moving to Europe for economic gain: these men are in genuine danger.”