In the wake of the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation verdict, some serious questions must be addressed.
The attacks of 9/11 triggered a chain of events that eventually ended in ignominy for the West and its coalition of the willing, when its forces in Afghanistan were expelled in a chaotic withdrawal a few years ago.
Australia’s longest wartime involvement had come to a disastrous end.
No long-term solutions had been achieved; defeat came at the hands of a wily, brave and savage enemy armed with little more than small arms, aided by revolving-door Western governments and the shifting weight of public opinion.
How did Australia end up fighting an unwinnable war thousands of kilometres from home and why persist in such a fruitless endeavour?
Our politicians exhibit all the signs of immaturity on international issues. They want to “play” on the big stage to assuage their egos and self-importance.
Regardless of treaties such as ANZUS (more suited to all-out war), Australia has a propensity to “run off” to conflicts at the behest of Big Brother (the United States) merely to be included.
From the outset, the Afghanistan war was an act of American revenge. It was very successful initially but then the familiar question arose: “What is the overall strategy and what are the metrics that indicate success or failure?”
The fact is, there never was an overall strategy and once the initial successes were achieved, the US and its allies were sucked into a morass piece-by-piece, with no clear vision of how to end it or withdraw.
The following from Joel Fitzgibbon (defence minister in 2007) illustrates the point. At a meeting of ministers in Edinburgh, Fitzgibbon said he wanted answers to three simple questions:
“Were we clear in our minds that we still required combat troops in Afghanistan? What was the benchmark for success? Was there a clear plan to achieve our objectives?”
The honest answer to all three was a resounding no.
Had those questions been posed more regularly throughout the long deployment, we might not be dealing with the shame of alleged war crimes or bemoaning the employment of Australian troops and the staggering financial and human cost.
The history of Afghanistan is littered with the corpses of would-be invaders. Rudyard Kipling aptly labelled it “the graveyard of empires”.
In our arrogance, we ignored the lessons of history, especially recently when the Russians, deploying pretty much the same arsenal as ours, were sent packing by the same bunch of sandal-wearing, AK-armed opponents.
An old fighter in Parwan Province once showed me where he had ambushed Russian convoys and said his forefathers had used the same location to do so to previous invaders.
Apart from some token infrastructure projects confined to major population centres, there was never any intent to engage in proper nation-building. Former US president George W Bush made that very clear, as did his successors.
This was a mistake.
You must give a man a reason to not pick up an AK47 and by improving lives through power, clean water, medical facilities etc, you will encourage them to live peacefully by reducing discontent at the village level.
Unfortunately, Australian special forces were blinded by the opportunity to play with the big boys — the US Army’s Delta Force and the US Navy’s Seal Team 6.
Both American units are structured to conduct direct action missions of short duration – usually a raid to kill or capture high-value targets (HVT).
Traditionally, the Australian Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) has played a very different role, specialising in long-range reconnaissance and unsupported independent operations.
In Afghanistan, the appeal to our boys was: “We’re matching it; we’re in and out — HVT killed or captured; showered and back on the piss in a few short hours.”
Raids to neutralise HVTs are legitimate, but they come at great expense in that collateral damage is very difficult to avoid, if not in a physical sense, then in a psychological way.
The population hardens its stance, martyrs are lauded, raids become counter-productive, the raiders become inured to killing and so the vicious circle is perpetuated. “Find, fix, finish, assess” becomes the mantra.
But nothing is as it appears in Afghanistan and “old scores” dating back to long-forgotten origins are often posed to coalition forces as warring on the Taliban, when in fact revenge is the motive. What better way to exact that revenge than to have a bunch of foreigners do it for you?
So, was there a better way? Yes, but it would not have given the coalition partners the instant “big bang” wins they craved.
This better alternative would have been guerilla warfare, where small highly skilled teams are embedded in villages and local warlord combat teams to “enable” the locals to do the killing.
The problem for politicians is that it’s not sexy — it is stealthy, very dangerous, time-consuming and frustrating for the troops involved.
The payoffs are, however, worth the effort.
Local militias are supported and developed, low-tech operations are maintained, local intelligence is leveraged and more precise targeting can be undertaken. Most importantly, the locals do the hard yards; they are fighting for their existence and for hope in the future.
A glance at the Special Operations Task Group order of battle in the latter stages of the Afghan war reveals, not surprisingly, a force designed for killing. It was heavy on shooters supported by “targeters” and other enablers.
This met coalition expectations, gave Australia a dog in the fight, was relatively low profile and most of all — because of the quality of the troops involved — was light on home country casualties.
A more diverse deployment should have been considered; perhaps, at best, an SAS detachment of about 20 to 30 men for special operations and an infantry company for day-to-day patrolling, with the remaining deployed personnel comprising doctors, nurses, midwives, dentists, nutritionists, veterinarians, engineers, agronomists, educators, police and most importantly, interpreters from Australia. (Surely there are enough Pashto speakers in this country to support that.)
Female soldiers are a must. Only a female can deal with many aspects of Afghan life.
The logic is simple: improve the lot of the locals, give them hope and a reason to resist the threat posed by the Taliban’s intimidating night letters and show them that our people are willing to share the hardship of life in Afghanistan.
Like previous invaders, we never understood the local population with the ability to endure way beyond what Western cultures will put up with. Add to that a terrain topped by sheer mountains and riven by deep gullies where the folks in one valley view the crowd in neighbouring valleys as we would someone from the other side of the moon.
The locals knew Westerners did not have the stomach for protracted operations; they knew we’d eventually leave with the job unfinished.
They took steps to insure against that by often having sons in both the national army and the Taliban or by fence-sitting. And who could blame them? Just look at the current situation: those who did hook up with coalition forces are now on the run from retribution. Very few will make it and the little piles of stones and fluttering rags that mark graves across the country will proliferate.
I cringe when I reflect on the numerous offensive incidents I witnessed in Afghanistan. Soldiers sitting with their legs apart in front of women, exposing the soles of their boots to hosts, tossing lollies to kids, ignoring the village power structure — the list is endless, and in most cases, mindlessly conducted because the troops knew no better.
We cannot go into these deeply traditional countries and apply our own values, no matter how much we despise the oppression within.
Perhaps our greatest mistake was to attempt to build an Afghan National Defence Force in the image of our own military.
There was no recognition of the competing cultures in the force; no acknowledgement that most of the troops could not read or write and that Afghans have relied traditionally on stealth and treachery to get the business done.
Instead, we opted to build a force closely resembling a “mudguard”: shiny on the top and filthy underneath. The speed with which it crumbled before the Taliban was testament to that.
Other crucial mistakes included the use of multi-national contractors who simply profiteered from the war, corruption at the highest levels of the Afghan government and the growth of the drugs trade.
But perhaps the most egregious of all is the fact that Australian governments and the commanders of the Australian Defence Force chose to ignore the impact of repeated deployments on the small number of elite troops who were doing a job they should not have been involved in.
Some special forces soldiers became inured to killing and disillusioned with the obvious lack of strategy from higher up. Even though the strategy of pursuing HVT was highly questionable, Australian special forces, as they always do with any form of tasking, became highly proficient in those forms of operations.
Throughout the entire war, the various “head sheds” either in Australia or the Middle East were informed of every detail of operations either by secure connectivity or personal visits to the battle space. It should have been obvious that the strategy was not working and that, as in previous conflicts, body count would become the only metric that mattered.
It also raises the tricky question of why, in the current witch hunt, some officers are being targeted to be stripped of their medals when more senior personnel — safe and well looked after in their respective camps – were awarded ‘’gongs’’ for outstanding leadership in the field.
These are the very same officers who were briefed daily on the conduct of operations and who, in many cases through visits, were able to witness events from the grandstand. They should have been questioning the operational paradigm, should have recognised the inherent weaknesses and taken steps to change to a more sustainable and successful outcome.
It was not even an open secret that Camp Russell (the exclusive special forces enclave) inside the sprawling coalition base at Tarin Kowt, was awash with booze despite the edict from coalition headquarters that booze was not permitted in theatre. No heed was paid to the mores of the local population and instead, an unlimited supply of grog was made readily available to certain elements of the Australian deployment. That supply must have been approved by higher command.
Parts of the Australian press and in particular the ABC and Channel 9 have established themselves as arbiters of our collective conscience. Names are bandied about with no thought of consequences, especially where the alleged charges have not yet been proven by Australian criminal law.
Little thought or acknowledgement has been given to those who have served the country so well in the SAS. Similarly, little thought has been given or acknowledgment made of the detritus that remains in a once proud regiment now beset by “woke solutions” that will frankly neuter its combat efficiency.
Many Afghans can read and do have access to our press. They see the hubris and are encouraged that, as usual, the West is destroying itself from within. That surely was a morale booster for al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Without the strategy and metrics to inform progress, the war drifted from one disaster to another while at home folks became disillusioned with an ongoing casualty list and the flagrant expenditure of national resources for no obvious results. And the Taliban and good Afghanis knew the US-led coalition did not have the willpower or stamina to commit to a long-term strategy.
Now is the time to acknowledge that the strategy was completely wrong. What is also uncomfortably evident is that senior government and ADF personnel were not astute enough to recognise the combined effects of reinforcing failure through continual deployments of small numbers of special forces troops, the change in role from ‘’poacher’’ to hunter and the break-down of discipline that resulted.
There must be a call to account to prevent further misemployment of limited military resources if future similar fiascos are to be avoided.
The next steps will be extremely painful, as one by one the charges against those involved are paraded through the courts and the media.
If crimes are proven, the law will decide their fate. But who will have the stomach to decide the fate of those who presided over this awful situation?
That is the question many Australians are now asking.
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