Our Prime Ministers and other senior Ministers must bear the greatest responsibility for atrocious decisions to involve us in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. They have shown repeatedly that they are not up to the task.
At least 39 cold-blooded murders have been committed in our name by Australian special forces in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. Appropriately there has been much analysis and wringing of hands at the official revelation of these atrocities, which have included experienced soldiers bullying newbies to commit murder so that they would be “blooded”. Can we sink any lower?
And where does responsibility lie? There is surely plenty for sharing.
War is a thoroughly bad idea, albeit very occasionally an appropriate last resort. Even when it becomes a last resort, one can usually identify errors and missed opportunities that might have avoided armed conflict – as in the case of the Second World War, in which, to his great credit, my father fought.
It has always been the case that troops on all sides get killed and injured in war. Going back to at least the First World War, one of the major negative consequences of war is the effect of what was called shell-shock in that conflict – severe psychological injuries. Since at least the Second World War, war has been as dangerous for non-combatants as to the fighters. Especially in earlier times, deaths from disease to combatants and non-combatants alike were massive.
Since at least the Vietnam War, Australia has been much too ready to follow the United States into conflicts which we should have avoided. We should have avoided those conflicts including because, in no particular order, Australian interests were not sufficiently at stake to justify intervention, in some cases, the intervention was likely illegal, the intervention was based on lies and deceptions, insufficient effort had been made to find alternatives to conflict, we partnered in the theatre of war with brutal strong men who were not obviously the white hats in the conflict, or in their own countries, there was no clear objective in the intervention, there was not a proper appreciation or assessment of the prospects of attaining whatever political or other objective was stated, we and our allies fundamentally misunderstood the situation in which we all elected to get involved, and there was no proper appreciation or assessment of the cultural and political environment of the intervention, which led almost inevitably to massive unintended negative consequences.
In Australia, LNP Governments have repeatedly committed troops to other people’s wars. Our Governments have been ever prepared to make speeches on Anzac Day and to take advantage of surprise battledress photo opportunities to Afghanistan or wherever, but they have fallen down badly in their OH&S obligations to the people they have sent to fight. They have failed both in terms of ensuring that exposure to the risks of e.g. PTSD are minimized; and that at all stages – to the end of life of the veteran – those veterans are given the very best of support that a wealthy country can provide. That remains the situation.
Mostly we assume that our political leaders know what they are doing and that they act sensibly and on the basis of the best advice. Rarely do we sit back and carefully analyse what has happened to see if those assumptions are borne out. Even then, at least in the Australian political context, we are greatly hampered until many decades after the event, when the key players are dead or demented, by a lack of information as to what has really occurred.
However, we can, I suggest, make intelligent deductions about how we got Australian military forces – and special forces in particular – into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The picture which emerges is not pretty.
Then Prime Minister, John Howard gave as the justification for going to war in Iraq that it possessed weapons of mass destruction and was developing nuclear weapons and that the UN’s disarmament efforts had failed. These assertions were untrue. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein proved easy. But the negative effects of his overthrow have been profound, and continue to reverberate through the Middle East and beyond – sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis, persecution of Christians and Kurds, civil wars and wars involving Syria and Yemen, increased terrorist activity, extending to Europe, mass killings, including of civilians across the Middle East, mass refugee movements, which have had a very destabilising effect in many European counties, as well of course as involving massive humanitarian suffering and death.
It is inconceivable that these profound impacts of the decision to remove Saddam Hussein were predicted – either by Australia or its allies. It is inconceivable because the price that is still being paid for removing that nasty dictator has been absurdly high. According to Kevin Rudd, the decision to go to war in Iraq was made “without independent Australian analysis of the legitimacy of American war aims, the credibility of American military strategy to both win the war and secure the peace, as well as the long-term consequences for Australian national interests.” That is appalling.
It was also Howard as Prime Minister who put us into the war in Afghanistan. Daniel Flitton of the Lowy Institute has written a recent article: “Australia’s mission in Afghanistan – what was it again?” It is an excellent question.
Flitton argues that the idea of Australian special forces committing war crimes:
“was not a risk to which any government, of any persuasion, was ever alerted. Ministers were briefed that the task was manageable. The responsibility lies in the Australian Defence Force, not with the government of the day. And the inquiry report is right in its emphasis that responsibility for the alleged behaviour lies foremost with the 25 current or former Australian Defence Force personnel involved, the bulk from the elite Special Air Service Regiment.”
Flitton writes that “Afghanistan was a war where most of the Australian public – let alone the government or the top-level military commanders – couldn’t really define what the mission involved … what, really, was the mission?”
Flitton recounts that on 22 October 2001, just after 9/1, Howard sent the special forces to Afghanistan invoking the ANZUS Treaty and that a few days later he declared: “The immediate goal is to seek out and destroy al Qaeda and ensure that Afghanistan can never again serve as a base from which terrorists can operate.”
Just over a year later they returned home. But in August 2005, Howard sent them back, saying that their mission was now to uphold democracy. Over the years, the SAS would have 20 rotations involving 3000 personnel.
Flitton quotes Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister saying that the Australian government remained committed “to assisting the people of Afghanistan and their democratically elected government to achieve a measure of the stability and prosperity that we take for granted in our country.”
In October 2011 Julia Gillard as Prime Minister said: “I’m also very conscious of the need to see the mission through”. She reiterated that in August 2012, and spoke of progress being made.
Tony Abbott as Prime Minister finally pulled the plug on the deployment to Afghanistan in October 2013, “not with victory, not with defeat”. Politicians can spin anything.
Flitton’s conclusion is that:
“this was a mission where the prospect of victory had long been surrendered. The insistence of ‘seeing the mission through’ gradually replaced any actual purpose for the mission. As one SAS trooper is now reported to have said when confronted by atrocities in 2012, ‘No, we’re definitely not trying to win the war any more’.”
What was achieved on the positive side of the ledger?
Liberal MP and former SAS captain Andrew Hastie have spoken about his Afghan experience. Hastie is Chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security: “I had soldiers who deployed three, four, five and six times and people were tired, they were calloused, and it was a very, very challenging environment.
Hastie said it should be no surprise that sending soldiers repeatedly back to Afghanistan with insufficient accountability led to war crimes: “War is incredibly degrading. It’s inherently violent, and it’s escalatory”.
Back in full colonial times, the objectives of military interventions in small countries were straightforward enough – it was about using just enough force to keep the natives quietly terrorised so that the economic business of colonization could prosper. For a whole lot of reasons, the world is much more complicated today. Our political – and perhaps also our military leaders – seem to be slow to learn that lesson – to the cost of many.
I disagree with Flitton that the fault lies primarily with our military leadership. Fortunately, we live in a country where the military is subservient to the political leaders. Our Prime Ministers and other senior Ministers must bear the greatest responsibility for atrocious decisions to involve us in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. They have shown repeatedly that they are not up to the task.
Lawyer, formerly senior federal public servant (CEO Constitutional Commission, CEO Law Reform Commission, Department of PM&C, Protective Security Review and first Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security; High Court Associate (1971) ; partner of major law firms. Awarded Premier’s Award (2018) and Law Institute of Victoria’s President’s Award for pro bono work (2005).
Comments
6 responses to “Australia’s unnecessary involvement in various wars”
As I have written in other responses, I was a conscript sent to Vietnam in 1970 under false pretenses, a fact I will never forgive the politicians who sent me there. I was never told on return to my public service employment that I could seek compensation for the mental and physical impacts of that War had on me and my family . If I had not attended the Welcome Home Parade and subsequent reunions of my Unit, it is likely I would never have known to seek redress through the DVA. It took a decade to sort that out. Thanks goes to the Pensions Officer at the Vietnam Veterans , Page ACT, who sorted it out for me and my GP who went well beyond the call of duty to convince DVA that my conditions were war service related .
Governments, particularly of the conservative mold are all too ready to send young people off to fight their wars but they are not so ready to assist them on return from conflict. I just hope our young men from the recent adventures will get a better deal than we did.
Ian was absolutely spot on in his article . I don’t hold any faith that those ultimately responsible for these atrocities, will be held to account for the crime of sending our boys to illegal and unwinnable wars .
The idea that a person can be “bullied” by an NCO into committing murder is the most cowardly concept. That time and again units of men allowed themselves to commit murder and torture and not resist it nor report it as soon as possible after the event is organised cowardice of a high order. I believe some must have resisted and some must have reported it. After all, the Afghani relatives of dead and other civilian witnesses did. And the Army found nothing to be amiss. Yet no one is talking about the reports and investigations which took place in Afghanistan. This failure allowed the process of murder and torture become normalised and routine. Afghan civilians gave numerous reports of murder to the Australian Army in Afghanistan and investigations followed. The investigations claimed nothing was amiss. The reports given to Australian Army in Afghanistan were formal and were provided by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission – that organisation having received them from the civilian witnesses. Why is this failure to investigate properly not an issue? It is a nub of the matter. Something is terribly wrong here. There were reports made and received at the relevant times and the investigations were flaccid and flawed. Had they not been, the serial killers would have been stopped far sooner.
“No man is an island unto himself …”.
“In all cases where ADF personnel have been deployed overseas to “assist” the US, our armed forces have been under US control.”
julianp is spot on in drawing attention to US control: US influence is everywhere especially among our special forces, a large element of whose training is US supplied, necessitated to a large extent by interoperability requirements. How much of the gung-ho attitude that led to war crimes came from American military ethos and training? Not that this should exculpate ‘our boys’ but it should be recognised and guarded against.
At the beginning of this piece, Ian Cunliffe names the crimes committed, and then he writes, ‘Appropriately there has been much analysis and wringing of hands at the official revelation of these atrocities, which have included experienced soldiers bullying newbies to commit murder so that they would be “blooded”. Can we sink any lower?’
The answer to his last question is ‘Yes we can, and yes we have.’ According to media reports I have read over the weekend, there are moves afoot to blame these soldiers whose personal morality was subverted and degraded when they succumbed to being blooded and killing unarmed prisoners. They are to be individually punished and their companions collectively punished and driven out of the armed forces in disgrace.
Claims by those higher up the chain of command that they didn’t know that any of this was going on should be treated with the utmost suspicion. Journalists in the outside world were alerted to it and stories circulated in the wider world, unproven and officially denied. But surely these rumours, as they were at the time, would have been checked out.
It is said that fish start rotting at the head, and while that may be a simple figure of speech, it seems to me that responsibility for these events belongs squarely with those at the highest level, and that includes prime ministers.
Menzies, Howard & RAbbott all have never fired a shot in anger on country. Menzies even resigned his Australian Army commission on the first day of WWI and sent Australian troops into the American imperialist war in Vietnam in 60s on the pretext of a disgraced American strategy of ”the Domino Theory’ of Communist revolutions rolling south through Asia to Australia. Really it was to assuage his guilty conscience for missing out on WWI.
Similarly, Howard sought brownie points with Shrubya Bush after 9/11 and the WMD, ”Words of Mass Deception” campaign by the American POTUS, at enormous cost to the Australia taxpayer and the loss of too many fine young Australian lives overseas and suffering PTSD with too little care from the Australian government.
There can be little doubt that these COALition politicians bear the responsibility for these expensive, disastrous decisions. However, holding those politicians to account will be almost impossible under Australian law.
Our political leaders “…have shown repeatedly that they are not up to the task.”
Agreed Ian, but expecting any of them toaccept a measure of responsibility for their “atrocious decisions” is asking too much IMO.
It has been said elsewhere in this blog that Australia’s participation in the various overseas conflicts, especially since the mid ’60’s was simply as a mercenary force “to assist” the US. The conventional thinking behind this being that our participation in these matters is simply insurance for the US to fulfill its treaty obligations, but even if that is accepted, it’s only partly true.
In all cases where ADF personnel have been deployed overseas to “assist” the US, our armed forces have been under US control. Certainly there was/is a measure of independent action, but our troops could not have functioned without US air and logistical support – especially in Vietnam. Also, and whether or not you believe this to be so, the US military-industrial complex has to keep growing and that requires almost constant conflict – how else do you maintain profits?
The sad fact is that generations of Australian policy-makers have either naively believed in the “insurance policy” argument or realized very early that you don’t say NO to such interests.
I have said elsewhere in this blog that the last Australian Prime Minister who firmly believed that a foreign power should not control his country’s resources nor dictate its economic and foreign policies was Gough Whitlam. We now have a better idea of just who it was that his government was upsetting. So as not to make
the same mistake, every Australian Prime Minister since then has been acutely aware that Australia’s foreign policy is, for the most part, not decided here.