There are disturbing parallels between what occurred in Afghanistan and what occurred 50 years earlier in Vietnam. The accidental killing of innocents is one link. So, too, is the intelligence vacuum into which our expeditionary military tradition sucked us in both countries.
The Brereton Report has quite a bit to say about ‘false operational and intelligence reporting’ (p 78) and its routine manipulation within Australian Special Operations Task Group (SOTG) channels in Afghanistan.
Intelligence reporting was ‘controlled in a manner so as to avoid any inconsistency with operational reporting’ (p 453), which was itself chronically flawed. It was also ‘considered normal practice to change the Intelligence Summary that was supposed to drive activity to accord with what actually happened on the ground’ (p 524).
Since professional intelligence advisers are further said to have been ‘marginalised’ in ‘target development’ (p 457), it seems that those changing the summaries were relatively low-level commanders rather than the professional intelligence people.
The outcomes of such corrupted SOTG intelligence work were likely to be far reaching. The redacted Report leaves us reasonably to imagine two consequences: the blinding of higher staff and commanders to battlefield reality and increasing the likelihood of killing the wrong people.
Compounding the mishandling of intelligence within SOTG is a problem raised in a recent article in The Australian – “Afghan henchman ‘used ADF troops’ ” – by a Dutch Afghanistan scholar Bette Dam (with Amanda Hodge): the Australian Defence Force’s ‘reliance on dubious intelligence sources’ and ‘false intelligence’ during its service in Orzugan Province between 2006 and 2013.
Dam argues that the Australian military’s heavy reliance for its intelligence in Afghanistan on a notorious strongman led to ‘unnecessary killings’ that should be scrutinised in a broader review.
When Australian troops arrived in Afghanistan with the mission to build security by fighting the Taliban, the Australian government didn’t explain – most likely because it didn’t know – that its forces ‘were stepping into the outcome of a neglected peace effort [in the region] that had descended into revenge attacks and blood killings’.
Dam says there had been no Taliban in the region before 2002; those that emerged in the post-2004 insurgency ‘weren’t diehard anti-Westerners but locals with tribal grievances who shifted loyalties to latent Taliban commanders to avenge the antagonisms of the provincial strongmen’.
In 2010, NATO’s top military intelligence official in Afghanistan US Major General Michael Flynn was still reported as saying that allied intelligence officers were operating in an information vacuum, were ignorant of local dynamics and, in his words, ‘were unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which they were working’.
Australian forces were unaware of ‘the ulterior motives of some they chose to work with’. Directed by the Americans to a local warlord, Dam informs us that our Special Forces Commanders received much intelligence from:
“Matiullah Khan, Orzugan’s police commander and local strong man who – thanks to international intervention – became a powerful and wealthy political player. Anyone not with him was an enemy, and he labelled all his enemies Taliban. This dangerous man – notorious for having tied a man with a rope to the back of a car and dragging him around until he died – was ingrained in local deals and rivalries.”
The ABC’s Andrew Greene reported that Khan, who ‘was a key figure during Australia’s lengthy involvement in the Afghanistan War’ – and who was later assassinated in 2015 – regularly presented Australian Special Forces Commanders with ‘Rado watches worth more than $1,000’.
Tasked by intelligence derived from Khan, Australian soldiers, who believed they were killing Taliban, were more likely to be killing his enemies – and creating more Taliban – while bolstering his power.
Little surprise that, in all the personalised chaos, Australians could accidentally kill the wrong people. Dam’s article details a specific example of an Australian commando-led operation in Sorgh Morghab in 2009; it is alleged to have killed six members of an extended Afghan family, including five children, ‘because Australian intelligence was flawed. The wrong man in the wrong house and wrong village was targeted’.
This incident didn’t make the Brereton Report, which was preoccupied with the murder and torture of defenceless non-combatants. It is unknown how many killings resulting from cases of mistaken identity embedded in an intelligence failures or operational blunders. That other such killings occurred is nonetheless undoubted.
The Brereton Report makes numerous references to ‘throwdowns’ – the practice by which Australian soldiers attempted retrospectively to justify their improper or accidental killing of people by planting weapons or military equipment on their bodies. The report correctly notes that ‘throwdowns’ were also intended to disguise troublesome cases of accidental killing.
Throwdowns also occurred in Vietnam, although they might not have been as prevalent as the Report suggests; soldiers were too overloaded on patrol to carry extra weapons and equipment. Still, there were often indications of civilians being killed when they did not know they were in a ‘free-fire zone’, accidentally wandered into an Australian ambush, or were victims of something-like US Phoenix Program operations, which targeted presumed enemies in villages with clandestine death squads that became notorious for killing the wrong people.
Killing the wrong people is shocking to contemplate. That is, however, part of what happens when armies are sent to war: lethal mistakes go with lethal force. In complex counterinsurgencies involving civilians, the risk of mistakes by Australian commanders, intelligence officers and soldiers is then heightened when they can’t for the most part be expected to understand the histories, cultures, politics and languages of the countries, in which they are operating. Neither are the armies responsible for sending themselves to war; the government and people are.
The accidental killing of innocents by Australians in Afghanistan is not the only link with Vietnam. Something else that doesn’t make the Brereton Report is something we’d also prefer to forget: the intelligence vacuum into which the persistent historical absurdity of our expeditionary military tradition sucked us in both countries.
So ignorant was the Australian government of what was going on in Vietnam that it anticipated no need to talk with the local people. When the First Australian Task Force (1ATF) was ordered to occupy it base at Nui Dat in Phuoc Tuy Province in 1966, our force planners had forgotten to allocate funds for intelligence officers to hire interpreters. The officers had to purloin the monies from other allocations.
Inevitably, the go-to man for the Commander 1ATF was the local strong man, the Saigon government Province Chief. My book The Minefield: an Australian tragedy in Vietnam (2007) is then about one of the main outcomes of contact in 1967 between the two.
With the Province Chief’s concurrence and appearance of operational support, that outcome was the plan devised by the Australian Commander Brigadier Stuart Graham to lay the 11-kilometre barrier minefield containing more than 20,000 lethal M16 mines, which brought on the largest Australian military disaster since the Second World War.
Again, much as in Afghanistan, the government had not provided the army with adequate forces to fight the war, to which it had also willy-nilly committed them without adequate intelligence.
In Afghanistan, this eventually conditioned the alleged spate of Australian war crimes we’ve recently been talking about.
The importance of the Brereton report on our alleged war crimes in Afghanistan
Lest we also forget what happened when Graham laid the minefield to try to compensate for the shortage of manpower and armaments, with which the government had abandoned him in a highly complex tactical situation in Vietnam.
Regardless of Graham’s discussions with the Province Chief, people in the village he was trying to protect turned out to be his enemies. He left the village side of the minefield unguarded, so that the people there – young women – entered the minefield and began lifting them.
Before long, otherwise very lightly armed local guerrillas were lifting the mines in their thousands and, by replanting them, turning them back with deadly effect against 1ATF and its allies. Mines lifted from the Australian minefield killed and mutilated more than 500 Australian and allied soldiers and civilians.
Australian war leaders have failed a primary requirement of the art of war: know your enemy. Remarkably, those driving our wars for at least the past 50 years have had little, if any effective idea of who or where their enemy was.
The surface reason is no mystery. In at least Vietnam and Afghanistan, the American armies, with which Australian strategists have deeply desired an Australian military connection, have been no better at knowing their enemy than our armies have.
The mystery is, rather, that we don’t want to know this.
There has been justified criticism in relation to the war crimes issue that the government is still far from establishing responsibility at the highest as well as the lowest levels for what Major General Findlay described last June as the ‘poor moral leadership’ leading to the alleged commission of the crimes. We should add that the government also seems to be evading the even larger, persistent problem that goes beyond the issue of leadership itself: our systemic military failures.
The large historical question is why we participate in US campaigns with inadequate forces, even as the campaigns continue to feature US strategic failure as well as our own, and even as there is, in any case, no discernible connection between those campaigns and the defence of Australia.
The problem is not so much that Australian warmakers don’t know the histories and cultures of the countries that have repulsed our US led interventions over the past half century and more. It’s rather that they operate in a culture that prevents them from reflecting on the spurious sense of threat that drives our expeditionary military tradition from within.
The profound intelligence problem is that we don’t know our own history.
Greg Lockhart is a Vietnam veteran and an historian. Formerly of ANU, he has produced five books and many essays. His memoir Weaving of Worlds: a Day on Île d’Yeu, is just published.
Comments
13 responses to “Not knowing one’s enemy: fundamental intelligence failures in Australia’s Afghanistan and Vietnam”
Reading some of the comments below, makes me think of the appreciation expressed by the Vietnamese community in Australia (VCA) for the efforts that Australia made on their behalf. They did not want to live under communist rule and their families still there do not want to do so either. The human rights situation is abysmal, but who cares? The VCA are truly grateful for the efforts made on their behalf. As far as the suggestion that we (Australians) shot everyone without regard to the Rules of Engagement (ROE), this is not so. The following personal example explains:
I was a tank troop leader in Vietnam. The Rules of Engagement (ROE) were that we had to positively identify enemy before we engaged. In essence, this meant that they had to be carrying weapons. One night we were in an ambush. Using a first-generation night vision device, the sentry saw four legs … two followed by another two. Upper bodies were obscured. Whoever they were, they were breaking the curfew. This did not mean they were enemy, however. After ‘standing to’, I counted down over the radio and all tanks switched on their searchlights. There was no need to give the order to fire. Illuminated was the biggest buck deer anyone had ever seen. The four legs were explained.
Me Vietnam War x 3 and now 83.
Landed Saigon via PANAM from Singapore early March 1968. The airport terminal had several holes in the roof and shrapnel littered the floor. Transit to Vung Tau via USAF C-130 seated on the floor among locals, chickens, ducks. My first impression en route through the open loading ramp was what a pretty country. Alas; the USAF dumped around 96,000 tonnes of Agent Orange on tiny Phuoc Tuy Province (Operation RANCH HAND) and we were complicit because we also sprayed the bloody stuff.
The perceived enemy military and the population generally functioned cooperatively and establishment of the 1ATF base at Nui Dat (acknowledged at Chief of Army History Conference 2002 as a mistake) alienated the locals through arrogant disruption of their established domain. Subsequent civic aid programs may have given Australian politicians and military leaders warm fuzzy feelings, but were largely ineffectual in winning hearts and minds. Australia committed to an unwinnable military venture.
The Vietnam War was a CIA operation with the military just being their façade – Google ‘The Secret Team’ by USAF Colonel Fletcher Prouty. There was no appreciation that the conflict was really an independence movement largely supported by the national populace to shed the yoke of colonialism and the so-called ‘Domino Theory’ was just western propaganda. Ongoing phobia re communist systems of government is astray considering how well China Russia Vietnam have adapted to the capitalistic world.
Hello Bruce Cameron,
Very young Australia has never had the internal conflict of many older nations, apart from the undeniable persecution of the original inhabitants during colonization.
There have historically been recriminations in many older countries of the world after conflicts, which generally fade as reconstruction and development progress.
Russia for example lost 28 million people in WW2 (and still counting), but today has around 300 plus McDonalds outlets, all of the world fashion houses, Irish pubs, etcetera. Younger generations speak better English than Australians, the boys have neat haircuts and the girls are nicely groomed.
Undoubtedly, the surviving older Vietnamese boat people have psychological baggage from the Vietnam War era; but much has since changed in their country of origin.
Vietnamese are very enterprising and their advancement over the past 50 years has been enormous. Have a peep at Google Earth and view the extensive development between Ho Chi Minh City and Vung Tau, including areas once within the 1ATF Tactical Area of Responsibility.
Also; go to ALDI and note the superior quality of packaging for their seafood products. A friend in the building industry comments similarly re their hardware.
Communism is just a system of government that has adapted well to a rapidly changing world, as evidenced by China Russia and Vietnam. But Australia in my view is following the Brits and Americans into decline, fostered by capitalistic greed.
If I were 40 years younger, I would seriously consider emigrating to China or Russia, but perhaps not
Vietnam. Although I much like the people and their land, I would feel too guilty about what I did to many.
I saw Communism in Poland and DDR in mid-80s. There were very good reasons for the Wall coming down. And that’s because essentially Communism imploded from its own lies and contradictions.
Back in Sydney, I found it very difficult to explain the constant, grey awfulness and depression of it all. That was until I met Vietnamese boat people. I write with no sense of self flattery of how a Vietnamese Catholic priest said that I was first to really understand why they’d fled. And I found he understood me.
I’m not surprised they’ve done well because they value freedom. We don’t.
The Russians who profit from Communism’s fall bring their dirty money to places like London and Vienna. They’re not nice people. Putin is a thug.
The Chinese are certainly different. Those coming coming to U.K. (where I am now) and Africa don’t want to stay and rule. They just want to strip out and go home. They are utterly ruthless in social control and squashing dissent. China has an appalling human rights record. For example, if you think that harvesting prisoners’ organs are the right thing to do, then China could be the place for you.
The irony is we were the invaders in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan for no legitimate reason – unless you count blindly following the US a legitimate reason. Therefore we were the enemy.
These countries did not play by the “rules of war” and did not parade in uniform. We had no idea who our “enemy” was so we shot everyone. So much for winning the hearts and minds of the local populace. Our snipers acted mainly on US intelligence (oxymoron) so the local tribal leaders were able to have us do their dirty work for them.
The expedition in Iraq has killed over 1m (mainly civilians) and for what result?. Iraq was not involved in 7/11 (how did the Saudis miss a bullet?) and the country at last count still was made up of over 80 tribal groups which have been in play for thousands of years. We reckon if we set up a Westminster/Federal Republican style Government they will all accede, go home, tired but happy. Same with Afghanistan. Naive and pathetic and tragic for the innocent folk at the receiving end of our military hardware.
And let us not forget the US funded the genesis if ISIS/ISIL which has backfired and the US have withdrawn. Thankfully I am not a Kurd.
What a mess for no advancement or gain.
The US Investment Banking and Equity Funds are doing pretty well – hotly pursued by the UK.
Many lives lost, much despair and we simply do not care.
Erik
Thank you Greg, well said. And four good comments. As US funded ASPI does it’s best to take us to war against China, how much do we know about China? Or indeed any country within our region? Our pathetic coat tailing from Pretoria to Tarin Kowt.
The real common thread between our atrocities in Vietnam and Afghanistan is not that we didn’t kill the “real” enemy. It is rather that we had no enemy in either war. Why were we there?
The mindset has not changed since the brutal colonial wars of the 19th Century. There is no need to understand the language or culture of the people you are attacking: in fact it could be a hindrance since some pansies might develop qualms about killing them. They are racially and culturally inferior in any case; it is up to them to submit and adapt to our dominance.
By the way, are they going to strip that tattooed thug of his VC? Just askin…
He is working as a CEO in the Stokes media company in Queensland. Stokes started out installing TV antennas in Perth and then became a landlord extracting rents from shop keepers. Now an Australian oligarch he has never put a dollar into making anything (except BS) in his life. The intelligence of this clown is evidenced by his four marriages. Our hero has found his bolt hole.
“The profound intelligence problem is that we don’t know our own history.”
I would add ‘because we don’t accept responsibility’.
One might further say that we ‘neither accept nor acknowledge’ responsibility. This has been the case since 1770.
The Government isn’t responsible, because it believed what it was told by the Chief of Defence; he isn’t responsible because he believed what he was told by the Chief of Army; he isn’t responsible because he believed what he was told by the Commander, Australian forces in Afghanistan; he isn’t responsible …
Obviously, there was a failure in training, ie. forces were deployed ill prepared for their operational task. Some will say that such things couldn’t have been foreseen.
Material provided to our school children by DVA states that Australian forces in Vietnam killed enemy who were wounded or otherwise unable to defence themselves. When I asked the Government in 2005, I was informed that these incidents had not been investigated. I then asked the Minister if he could assure the Australian people that appropriate training had been put in place so that such things could never happen again. He said it had.
Seems to me that responsibility is something that’s in the eye of the beholder.
Hello Bruce. I would add that we have never accepted that we did the wrong thing or that we never accepted responsibility for doing the wrong thing. In Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan we were on the wrong side and we did the wrong thing by going to war in those countries. Have we ever apologised to these countries? Paid reparations? Despite the evidence above our military can do no wrong. Until the government and armed forces leaders admit that we were/are the ‘bad guys’ and not the ‘good guys’, that we did the wrong thing and take responsibility for it we are going to keep on getting involved in wars we shouldn’t be in.
As a Conscripted Vietnam Veteran like thousands of other Nashos I just did my job; but as a Medic thank God. I soon realized the ‘enemy’ was just like us, shit scared,doing his/her job , often in conditions I would not let my dog endure. I treated a number of V.C. captives in my time.They were short, malnourished, poorly equipped but incredibly brave people .They just wanted us to ‘go home’ and leave them in peace. They had endured at least a century and a half of conflict, the French, Japanese ,the Americans and finally China (tried to) run roughshod over their thousand year old culture. Our Government had no idea of its objectives – just all the way with LBJ! Iraq and Afghanistan followed . Same script, same result. God help us if we follow the U.S. willingly and blindly into a conflict with the PRC.
There’s a second part to “know thine enemy”, that is to “know yourself”. We fail dismally in both essential elements to improve the odds of winning a war according to the Art of War. But of course, the most important part of the Art of War is knowing you have won before engaging in a war. In practical terms this means knowing what it is we are trying to achieve by having a war – is it to establish an Anglospheric 5-eyed global empire or is it to defend Australian identity and independence as part of Australian sovereignty? Is it to sacrifice our economy and values for the security of a new Pax Americana or is it to improve the wealth and wellbeing of this nation and its people? What is the endgame and how is our current strategy moving us towards it?
And Greg’s central point here of course – we can’t read or speak Chinese but they can read and speak English. We get our information third hand, via the spy agency minders who in turn get them from people who do read and speak Chinese but are partial to ensuring their financial and influential niches.