In 2025, the revelations of war crimes committed by the British Special Air Service (SAS) in Afghanistan have sparked yet another round of media outrage, following a BBC Panorama investigation that exposed allegations of extrajudicial killings and deliberate cover-ups. But to any objective observer of Britain’s military history, this is not a scandal—it is a pattern. And it is far from surprising.
British military violence did not begin in Helmand or Kandahar. The SAS and institutions like it are descendants of an imperial war machine whose record is soaked in the blood of those it claimed to “civilise.” From India to Kenya, from Palestine to Malaya, British forces built an empire not through diplomacy, but through domination. The violence now under investigation in Afghanistan is not an exception—it is a continuation.
In Kenya during the 1950s, during the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion, British colonial forces detained over 100,000 people, subjecting them to torture, rape, castration and execution. In India, British troops massacred unarmed civilians, most notoriously at Amritsar in 1919. In Malaya, the counter-insurgency campaign relied on forced relocations, village burnings and collective punishment. In each case, military force was used not to protect but to subjugate, and always with the tacit approval of the state.
So why, in 2025, would anyone expect institutions like the SAS to uphold principles of justice, fairness, or humanity? These forces were not created for such ends. They were forged in colonial battlefields to maintain British supremacy, to terrorise and suppress, not to liberate or defend people. The language may have changed—now cloaked in talk of counterterrorism and stabilisation—but the objectives and methods remain strikingly familiar.
The post-9/11 era gave these institutions renewed global license. Under the cover of the War on Terror, Britain’s military elite returned to the Global South with impunity, just as their forebears had done under the empire. Afghanistan and Iraq were not exceptional theatres of conflict—they were new stages for old habits. The illusion of professionalism and moral superiority, endlessly marketed to the public, concealed a brutal reality: secretive raids, the killing of civilians, falsified reports, and a total lack of accountability.
Sodomy, rape, the murder of children, the deletion of evidence from military servers—none of this shocks those who understand the history. These are not isolated abuses; they are part of the institutional DNA. What has changed is not the conduct, but the exposure. In the digital age, footage, documents and testimonies are harder to bury.
Waving the Union Jack and pretending Britain has played no part in global war crimes is a national pastime. However, the Panorama programme did not reveal anything new. It simply validated what many communities across Asia, Africa and the Middle East have known for generations: that British military institutions are not symbols of order, but enforcers of empire.
This is not a moment of “shock horror.” It is merely another confirmation of what has always been true. The question is no longer whether these crimes happened, but who will be brave enough to say so next. Britain will not confront the violence woven into the fabric of its military institutions—because that violence is not a deviation, but their very foundation. Every whistleblower, every inquiry, every leaked document only reaffirms what countless victims have long known: this is business as usual.