The Men of the West’s Day Has Come – and Gone.

The Western Sun Sets: What nation, looking aghast at the chaos and confusion created by the United States precipitate withdrawal from Afghanistan, would consider putting its faith in American promises? What peoples, oppressed and abused though they may be by tyrannical regimes, will ever again look to the Western democracies for inspiration? What enemy of freedom and equality need any longer quail before the might of the West? The answers, tragically, are: “None.”

AS I WATCHED the big American helicopters circling the US Embassy in Kabul, I thought of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”. As the smoke of burning files billowed out of the Embassy compound, I recalled Aragorn before the Black Gate of Mordor. As Sauron’s Orc legions marched towards the uncrowned King of Gondor’s vastly outnumbered army, he rallied his quailing knights with a speech that has always stuck in my memory:

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!”

In those stirring lines, Fran Walsh captures perfectly the chivalric Western ethos. The idea that an oath, once given, cannot be broken. That protection offered and accepted cannot be withdrawn unilaterally and arbitrarily. Most of all, that there is no greater sin than the betrayal and abandonment of the weak by the strong. Through all the blood and sweat and tears of our history. In spite of them being honoured more in the breach than in the execution – these have been the animating ideals of the “Men of the West”. The principles they strove to live by.

No more.

What nation, looking aghast at the chaos and confusion created by the United States precipitate withdrawal from Afghanistan, would consider putting its faith in American promises? What peoples, oppressed and abused though they may be by tyrannical regimes, will ever again look to the Western democracies for inspiration? What enemy of freedom and equality need any longer quail before the might of the West? The answers, tragically, are: “None.”

The true measure of the Afghanistan debacle will not be calculated in terms of the blood and treasure expended in that unhappy country. It will be calculated in terms of the loss of faith in the West’s word, and the West’s values, that the West’s betrayal and abandonment of the Afghan people – especially its women and girls – has provoked.

Henceforth, whenever anyone hears the “International Community” (a mealy-mouthed euphemism for the nations of North America, Europe and Australasia) warning some international miscreant against earning its displeasure, all that’s likely to be evoked is hollow laughter. It is difficult to imagine a more compelling miscreant than the Taliban, but it is equally difficult to imagine the Taliban losing too much sleep over what the “International Community” might do to it. After all, it’s been demonstrating its displeasure for twenty years with “Daisy Cutter” bombs, Cruise missiles, and “pinpoint” drone strikes, and all the “International Community” has achieved is the restoration of Taliban power.

And what about the nations not generally included in the “International Community”? What of the Russian Federation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Peoples Republic of China? What will they make of the West’s forsaking of its friends; its breaking of the bonds of fellowship?

What has happened, they will ask themselves, to the West that responded to Stalin’s provocations of 1948 with the Berlin Airlift? The West that met North Korea’s sudden southward thrust with a UN “Police Operation” that drove its forces back across the 38th Parallel, and which, thanks to the United States, has maintained a strong military presence in South Korea for nearly 70 years? The West that massed its armies against Saddam Hussein in 1990-91 and made good the promise of President George H.W. Bush that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait “would not stand”. The West that, however imperfectly, and self-interestedly, kept its word?

Gone.

Writing for the Newsroom website earlier this week, Professor Robert Ayson, observed: “Kabul’s fall could be the last echo of a period when western governments believed their armed forces could knit together broken nations. Despite all of today’s talk about democratic values, the message is that we don’t really mind how you govern yourselves, or actually whether you govern yourselves, as long as you don’t harm us.”

But, cowering behind walls, while the rest of the world burns, is the policy of appeasers and defeatists. The Men of the West’s day has come – and they have not stood.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 August 2021.

The Failure Of The West.

Kabul, Afghanistan. 16/8/21:  There is always an enthusiastic audience for tales of imperial ruin. The Western Left will have watched the helicopters circling the American Embassy in Kabul with the same grim satisfaction as it watched the Hueys taking-off from the US Embassy roof in Saigon forty-six years ago. Such is the fate of all empires, the wise old intellectuals will opine. The only lesson of history is that men never learn the lessons of history.

THE WEST HAS FAILED. It is unlikely that we shall ever again see North American, European and/or Australasian ground troops deployed “overseas”. Naval and air forces, yes, but not “boots on the ground”. The Western powers no longer possess the ruthless conviction necessary to impose their will on weaker nations face-to-face. From 15 kilometres offshore, or 30,000 feet above the target, the West may still make its mark. (Although, with cruise missiles and drones, distances hardly matter anymore.) But the brutal confidence that once allowed illiterate British redcoats to make a gift of the world to their lords and masters. For better or for worse, those days are gone.

There is always an enthusiastic audience for tales of imperial ruin. The Western Left will have watched the helicopters circling the American Embassy in Kabul with the same grim satisfaction as it watched the Hueys taking-off from the US Embassy roof in Saigon forty-six years ago. Such is the fate of all empires, the wise old intellectuals will opine. The only lesson of history is that men never learn the lessons of history.

Before the Western Left breaks out the Champagne, however, it should pause for a few moments to consider what it has just witnessed in Afghanistan. For Afghan women, the withdrawal of United States and Nato ground forces represents an historic betrayal and abandonment. For 20 years, the emancipation of the women and girls of Afghanistan was held up to the world as the single greatest achievement of western intervention. Like Saddam Hussein’s “human shields”, they were paraded before the world. “Look!” cried the Americans and the Europeans, the Australians and the New Zealanders. “This is why we are here. This is why we cannot leave.”

Billions of dollars were spent to lift Afghan women from sexual abjection to full personhood and independence. “Girls can do anything!” The hip slogan of western societies which had long ago enfranchised and liberated the female half of their populations, became in Afghanistan a revolutionary rallying cry against the brutal “medieval theocracy” (hat-tip to Helen Clark) that first the Soviets, and then the West, expended so much blood and treasure attempting to supplant.

And it worked. Women and girls were uplifted. They thrived in the classrooms, filled the lecture theatres, took charge in shops, offices and factories. Like proud parents, the Western Occupiers looked on. Here, they told themselves, was the proof of the West’s moral superiority. Here was the vindication of neoliberal modernity.

Almost – but not quite. Because if the West had truly been committed to sexual equality; if it had truly wanted a democratic and modern Afghanistan to emerge from the theocratic brutality of the Taliban; then it would have driven through the one truly revolutionary reform that might have made that possible: it would have inducted women into the Afghan Army.

Why is the Taliban in Kabul? The answer is brutally simple: because the men of the Afghan Army were given nothing to fight for. The president of their country was a corrupt crook and coward. The ministers and provincial governors of the Afghan regime took their lead from the President. The Army commanders stole their troops wages and sold their rations in the marketplace. For what, then, were the men of the Afghan Army being asked to lay down their lives? Democracy? There was none. Freedom? They had none. A better life? After 20 years – where was it? Who was to say their lives would not be better under the Taliban?

Kurdish Female Fighter.

Only Afghanistan’s women had something to fight for – something to die for – and nobody from the armies of the West, let alone their own fathers, brothers and husbands, were willing to give them something to fight with – and teach them how to use it.

Had the West still possessed a skerrick of imperial statecraft, it would have recognised and armed the nation state of Kurdistan, and encouraged it to send its best female troops to teach the Afghan women how to fight. That it did none of these things proves that the billions it spent “liberating” the women of Afghanistan were drawn exclusively from the Public Relations Budget. Having decided it was time to leave Afghanistan, Donald Trump and Joe Biden simply turned their backs on the women and girls of that blood-stained country – and withdrew. The Taliban would look after them.

For more than two thousand years, the people of the West (among others) have built empires. Mysteriously, the more removed in time they became from the imperial powers of the past: Greece, Rome, Spain, France, Britain; the less adroit they became at holding on to their conquests.

The key objective of empire is not to occupy territory, but to prevent your enemies from occupying it. In other words, to make sure that, having conquered a people, you make it worth their while to stand with you, not against you. Peace, security and prosperity is what a clever imperial power offers: overseen and administered as far as possible by the locals themselves. (Or, at least, the local elites.) The British and the French got to be quite good at this. The Americans never got the hang of it.

Having been out-waited and out-fought in Afghanistan, the United States will now have to endure watching the Chinese play the role of the Afghan people’s new best friend. Aid will pour in from Beijing, infrastructure projects will proliferate, peace, security and prosperity will cement the new friendship in place. More to the point, not a single Chinese combat-boot will disturb the Afghan dust.

And the Uighurs languishing in concentration camps across the border in Xinjiang Province? Why, the Taliban will expend about as much energy on their behalf, as the Western Left will expend on helping the women and girls of Afghanistan.

Because it’s not just the statesmen, diplomats and generals of the West who have failed to live up to the achievements of their forebears; the aspirations and ideals of its revolutionaries have similarly dwindled. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ended The Communist Manifesto with the ringing declaration: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” What would the Western Left cry today? “Persons of every identity (except White, Cis-Males) make full use of intersectional opportunities whenever practicable. Break free from all imposed moralities, but do not attempt to impose your personal notions of right and wrong on the rest of the world.”

Especially not in Afghanistan.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 17 August 2021.

Why Isn’t An Injury To One Sister An Injury To All?

Barred Vision: The problem for western feminists is that, in spite of their cultural and political self-denying ordinances against criticising the treatment of women in other, non-western, societies, the only garden of equality currently showing unequivocal signs of flourishing, is their own. Across vast regions of the planet, not only are women’s rights not flourishing, they are being diminished.

ONE OF THE MOST PERPLEXING political phenomena of the twenty-first century is feminism’s silence in the face of Islamist oppression. For nearly a quarter-of-a-century, as the evidence of weaponised misogyny across the Islamic world has mounted, the absence of globalised feminist resistance has become increasingly difficult to ignore. The contrast between global feminism’s muted response to the oppression of women in the Islamic world, and its ongoing campaign against the sexist excesses of western males, is stark. Why one, and not the other?

To gain some appreciation of the discrepancy’s magnitude, it is instructive to compare the world’s reaction to the imposition of apartheid on South African blacks and the imposition of Islamic fundamentalism on Afghan women.

As news of deliberate and vicious gender discrimination filtered out of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, western women and men recoiled in shocked disbelief. Girls were being sent home from school. Women professionals: doctors, scientists, engineers, teachers and nurses were being dismissed from their jobs and ordered back behind the doors of enforced domesticity. Any woman found walking the streets unchaperoned, or wearing Western dress, ran the risk of being whipped (or worse) by the Taliban’s religious police. Women found guilty of adultery were being publicly executed in soccer stadiums.

Like something out of The Handmaid's Tale. Women faced public execution under the rule of the Taliban.

There was, of course, some feminist criticism of the Taliban regime, but it was sparse and uncoordinated. Those who waited for the leaders of second-wave feminism to place themselves in the vanguard of an international movement modeled on the global campaign against Apartheid, waited in vain.

When US forces and their Afghan allies finally overthrew the Taliban regime in the aftermath of 9/11, most of the women who openly and unashamedly celebrated its demise – and the liberation of their sisters – came from the Right.

Undoubtedly, left-wing western feminists were also thrilled to see the back of the hateful Taliban government and its religious police, but they were hesitant to say so too loudly for fear of giving the impression that they in any way supported the military adventurism of President George W. Bush. The presence of US forces in Afghanistan, regardless of its collateral benefits, was proof that western imperialism was alive and well. In the Left’s hierarchy of oppression, white people lording it over brown people was considered a more egregious sin than brown men lording it over brown women.

Correcting the violent sexism of brown men was not the responsibility of privileged white women. The only people who could, legitimately, liberate the women of the Third World, were Third World women. If white women were looking for sexist male dragons to slay, then they need look no further than their own workplaces – and homes.

Western Feminism checks its privilege.

Furthermore, the whole notion of there being a universal definition of right and wrong, by which the many and diverse peoples of the world could be judged, had itself fallen under left-wing suspicion.

Westerners might be entitled to judge other westerners by how closely they adhered to the moral precepts of their common culture. Much less certain, however, was their entitlement to judge the behaviour of people from other, non-western, cultures.

Among western leftists, morality had become culture-specific. If imperialism’s victims asked for support, then they would be given it, unquestioningly. If not, then they would tend to their own political gardens exclusively.

The problem for western feminists is that, in spite of these cultural and political self-denying ordinances, the only garden currently showing unequivocal signs of flourishing, is their own. Across vast regions of the planet, not only are women’s rights not flourishing, they are being diminished.

In the patriarchal cultures the western left consistently refuses to condemn, the misogynists look on with a combination of scorn and fear as powerful western men are forced to account for their past and present abuse of women. “There but for the grace of God, and our own unyielding adherence to His laws”, they mutter, “goes our own religious and political power.”

Just because western leftists turn a blind eye to the depredations of their brothers in the Islamic world does not mean that Muslim fundamentalists are similarly blind to the consequences of treating women as equal human-beings.

Prior to the American Civil War, the southern states argued for continued tolerance of their “peculiar institution”. Northern abolitionists rejected utterly the slave-owners’ self-serving cultural relativism.

Western feminists owe their Islamic sisters nothing less.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 January 2018.

Singing Away The War

From What? Are the Taliban laying siege to Buckingham Palace? Are Predator drones taking out shoppers in Slough? The carefully manufactured song Wherever You Are reaching No. 1 in the British pop charts represents not only a propaganda triumph for the UK's Department of Defence, but is also a sobering commentary on the British people's ability to look through the war crimes committed in their name.

WHEREVER YOU ARE, by Military Wives, is No. 1 on the UK pop-charts. And somewhere in the UK Department of Defence (DOD) the Champagne corks are popping. Why not? The song and its accompanying video, released on 19 December, represent the triumph of a truly masterful PR campaign in support of the United Kingdom’s participation in the Afghan War.

The most effective aspect of the campaign was to have it fronted by the wives of soldiers on active duty in Afghanistan. These women are not only a potent reservoir of patriotic emotion, but they also constitute an unchallengeable rhetorical vector for DOD propaganda. Who’s going to contradict the testimony of 100 military wives?

The story that ended this week with Wherever You Are at No. 1 began several months ago when the DOD convinced BBC-2 to take a hand-picked group of military wives as the raw material for the third season of the public network’s high-rating series Choir – hosted by Britain’s “inspirational” choirmaster, Gareth Malone.

As a propaganda force, this alliance between the DOD and the BBC proved formidable. Through its sponsors The Choir: Military Wives was able to secure the musical talents of celebrated Welsh composer, Paul Mealor, whose Ubi Caritas et Amor formed part of the ceremony at Prince William’s and Kate Middleton’s nuptials.

The lyrics to Mr Mealor’s appealing melody were stitched together out of hundreds of letters sent by the Military Wives’ choir to their husbands in Afghanistan. With such phrases as “my wondrous star” and “my prince of peace” prominently featured in Wherever You Are, it is pretty clear that the quest for the No. 1 Christmas slot was something more than fortuitous.

The finale of The Choir: Military Wives series was recorded at The Royal Albert Hall on 12 November as part of the Royal British Legion’s (the UK’s equivalent of the RSA) Remembrance Parade, with the Queen in Attendance. Wherever You Are was thus able to make its debut before a television audience estimated at 2.6 million viewers.

Like all hit recordings, Wherever You Are comes with its own “official” video. Images of the choir engaged in recording the song are interspersed with footage of the wives and their children preparing “Welcome Home” banners for their returning heroes, along with heart-wrenching scenes of family reunions. Throughout, the women are shown wearing black T-shirts bearing the words “My husband protects Queen and Country.”

From whom? One is moved to enquire. Have Afghan tanks rolled through the streets of London? Have Afghan attack helicopters strafed defenceless villages in the Home Counties? Do Afghan soldiers patrol the strategic passes of the Pennines? Is the Metropolitan Police Force being re-trained by advisors from Pakistan and Egypt?

Were all these things true, and if the Royal Army was engaged in a heroic defence of the United Kingdom against a foreign army of occupation, then those T-shirts might make some sense. But they are not true. The truth is that it is these women’s husbands who are driving the tanks, flying the attack helicopters, patrolling the mountain passes and training a Quisling government’s army and police.

And for every one of the “wondrous stars” and “princes of peace” who fall in battle, we must count ten, twenty, thirty Afghan resistance fighters and civilians. The “official” video does not show us these families. We do not hear the wailing of Afghan women, or the sobs of Afghan children, for Afghan husbands and fathers who never came home.

The brutal reality of the Afghan War is deliberately hidden in Wherever You Are. Indeed, the very name of the song, by denying the combatants’ theatre of action its true name, and its unique location on the globe, is itself an act of sanitation. It allows the “sexy, sexy supermen” of the Royal Army and Marines to “protect Queen and Country” in an anonymous country called “Wherever” without scrutiny or accountability.

Should the military wives be blamed for participating in this superbly executed propaganda exercise? After all, it wasn’t on their orders that their menfolk were unleashed upon the tragedy that is Afghanistan.

No, it wasn’t, and it’s not for that I condemn them.

What I condemn is their lack of empathy and imagination; their utter incapacity to acknowledge the all-too-real victims of their husbands’ “heroism”.

The men, women and children of Afghanistan.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 December 2011.

No Place For Partisanship

Hail To The Chief: Members of the New Zealand Provincial Reconstruction Team based in Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan, welcome US General David Petraeus to "Kiwi Base", 9 May 2011. According to Nicky Hager's latest book, Other People's Wars, the base also contains a communications post staffed by non-military US personnel - almost certainly CIA/NSA employees. Kiwi journalists embedded with the NZ Defence Force had not considered this US intelligence presence sufficiently newsworthy to be included in their reports to the New Zealand public.

WHAT SEPARATES the great from the merely successful prime minister is knowing when to leave partisanship behind. John Key, in responding to the Canterbury earthquakes and the Pike River disaster, spoke for all New Zealanders. He’s not an eloquent man, but on those tragic occasions it wasn’t important. Most Kiwis mistrust the easily eloquent, and are actually rather proud of having a prime minister who not only speaks for them – but like them.

After the high and solemn rituals of mourning associated with natural disasters, the most important responsibilities of national leadership are those attached to the grim exigencies of war and peace. Committing the nation’s blood and treasure in war is, perhaps, the most important decision a prime minister makes. Which is why, when confronted with serious questions about the conduct of his country’s armed forces, a prime minister cannot afford to be careless, or flippant, or dismissive in his responses. Above all, he cannot afford to be partisan.

And yet, last Thursday, when confronted with the plethora of serious questions contained in Nicky Hager’s latest book, Other People’s Wars: New Zealand in Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terror, Prime Minister Key’s response was careless, flippant, dismissive and partisan.

“I don't have time to read fiction,” quipped the Prime Minister, adding that the book contained “no smoking gun”, just supposition, which, “makes it business as normal for Nicky Hager.”

Lawyer, Stephen Price, captured the extraordinary rudeness of the Prime Minister’s response on his Media Law Journal blog:

“Just heard John Key discussing the book on [Radio New Zealand’s] Checkpoint. He said (a) there was no evidence for Hager’s claims; and (b) he hadn’t read the book. I hope other people find that as breath-taking as I do, given that the book contains more than 1300 footnotes, most of them referring to documentary sources.”

Curiously, our Prime Minister – more than any other New Zealander – has reason to honour Mr Hager. It was, after all, Mr Hager’s last book, The Hollow Men, which precipitated the downfall of Dr Don Brash, and elevated Mr Key to Leader of the Opposition. Without Nicky’s “smoking gun” back in 2006, it’s possible some other National Party MP may have become prime minister.

Perhaps it’s the fact that he’s peculiarly beholden to Mr Hager which explains why the Prime Minister feels obliged to add his own full measure of bile to those of all the other right-wing critics of Mr Hager’s work?

One can only speculate as to why the New Zealand Right responds with such irrational and defamatory fury to Mr Hager’s publications. He is, after all, an award-winning investigative journalist with an international reputation. His first book, Secret Power, on global intelligence systems (including our own Waihopai listening station) was described by intelligence expert, Jeffrey Richelson, as “a masterpiece of investigative reporting” and led to a year-long European Parliament inquiry.

In his own land, however, Mr Hager is without profit and seldom honoured. Victim of a right-wing demonstration of the Tall Poppy Syndrome? Perhaps. But I suspect there’s more to it than that. I suspect that Mr Hager represents what the Right fears the most – an effective Fourth Estate. In this country, investigative journalism is (just) tolerated in the fields of crime, business and public administration. When it comes to the dark arts of public relations, political campaigning, intelligence-gathering and national defence, however, it is not tolerated at all.

The revelations contained in Mr Hager’s book, augmented by fellow investigative journalist and war correspondent, Jon Stephenson’s, Metro article, “Eyes Wide Shut”, tell us why. Both men succeed in directing a very bright light into some of the most fiercely protected areas of “national security”.

It also explains why Mr Hager and Mr Stephenson arouse such animosity among less independent journalists. Bluntly expressed, these others stand exposed for the crude “stenographers of power” they have allowed themselves to become.

In Other People’s Wars, for example, Mr Hager reveals the co-existence, within the New Zealand Defence Force’s Bamiyan base, of an American intelligence-gathering operation almost certainly staffed by members of the CIA and/or the US National Security Agency. New Zealand journalists who’d been embedded with the NZDF in Afghanistan moved with indecent haste to pour scorn on Mr Hager’s revelations.

Once again, quoting Stephen Price: “The line on the CIA seems to be, simultaneously, that (a) they were not there, and (b) if they were, it was obvious to everyone.”

In which case, why wasn’t this “obvious” presence reported?

Serious though the failures of these embedded reporters may be, they do not approach the Prime Minister’s failure to leave petty partisanship behind. As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 looms before them, John Key owes New Zealanders a much more statesmanlike response to the serious questions Mr Hager’s investigative journalism has raised about New Zealand's longest engagement in somebody else's war.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 6 September 2011.

New Zealand Troops In Afghanistan: "Mentoring" What?

The Point Of The Spear: Far from "mentoring" (such a wonderfully un-military term) Afghan policemen from a safe distance, the New Zealand SAS always seems to be in the thick of the action. And, sometimes (as happened in the Tiger International raid of 24/12/10) the point of our spear gets driven into the wrong targets.

SOMEWHERE in the city of Kabul, the parents and siblings of two slain security guards, Mubin and Sadiq, still mourn the loss of their sons and brothers.

They died at the hands of New Zealanders: SAS troopers; acting in our name.

Local officials called the killings “murder”. It’s not hard to see why.

On Christmas Eve, 2010, Mubin, Sadiq and their co-workers, Hamid and Barialy, were keeping watch over the property of Tiger Group International – a local company contracted to supply logistical equipment to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Hardly surprising, then, that when the security team encountered bearded figures in the Tiger Group car-park, they assumed they were under Taliban attack, and challenged the intruders to identify themselves.

But, the intruders weren’t Afghans, they were Kiwis. And when the security guards challenged them the New Zealand SAS troopers opened fire on them at close range – killing Mubin and Sadiq, and wounding Hamid and Barialy.

The raid on Tiger International was a botch-up from beginning to end. The operation was launched on the basis of bad intelligence, and the required co-ordination between the ISAF, the Afghan authorities and the NZSAS was deficient. Our troopers killed Mubin and Sadiq for doing no more than their job.

To date, the New Zealand Government refuses to say whether it has formally apologised to the families of the slain security guards, or made any offer of compensation.

This refusal to accept responsibility for our soldiers’ mistakes will undoubtedly encourage ordinary Afghans to lump our SAS in with the rest of the ISAF. Little distinction will be made between New Zealand’s special forces and all the other Nato contingents operating in Afghanistan. The deaths of Mubin and Sadiq will be attributed to the same lack of care that sees village wedding parties decimated by US missiles and helicopter gunships.

The Afghan people will, once again, hear the loss of innocent civilian lives described as “collateral damage” – and the foreign perpetrators will be reviled for their indifference.

NOT THAT our armed forces chiefs will admit to any of this. Following the most recent Taliban attack in Kabul, during which two SAS troopers sustained minor injuries, the Prime Minister, John Key, spoke approvingly of the “mentoring” role our special forces were playing in relation to the Afghan Government’s Crisis Response Unit.

“Mentoring”: it’s such a reassuring – and decidedly non-military – expression.

In the New Zealand context we tend to associate the word “mentor” with those public-spirited individuals who help young people, and young businesses, grow and mature. No doubt the public relations staffers who dreamed up the idea of calling military advisers “mentors” were well aware of such connotations.

It is, however, becoming increasingly clear that whether our SAS troopers are engaged in operations initiated by ISAF, or the Taliban, the role they play is very far from that of the passive advisor.

 On the contrary, all the evidence emerging from Afghanistan suggests that our SAS leads from the front, and that such Afghan Government support as may be found in these operations  is located (how to say this politely?) at some distance from the action.

In other words, when the Taliban come a-calling, our special forces are regularly being deployed as “the point of the spear”.

Spear-points don’t “mentor” anything: spear-points strike hard, and they strike to kill.

And, sometimes, as we have seen, they kill the wrong people.

WE SHOULD TRY to imagine how we would feel if those slain security guards had been called Bruce and Wiremu, instead of Mubin and Sadiq. How we would react if our nation’s skies were filled with helicopter gunships, and our city streets with foreign soldiers?

What, exactly, would we make of a prime-minister telling his people that their special forces were “mentoring” the security police of a corrupt government?

Mentoring them to do what? Rely on the same bad intelligence that our SAS relied on before unleashing the deadly force that killed Mubin and Sadiq? Trust the same people who unleashed the raid on the hitherto loyal village of Band E Timur on 24 May 2002?

Three civilians, including the village head-man and a six-year-old girl, died that day. Fifty-five were handed over to US personnel who no longer considered themselves bound by the Geneva conventions.

Our SAS spear-pointed that operation as well.

THE ONLY “MENTORING” the NZSAS is doing in Afghanistan is in how to kill. But, after more than thirty years of war, there is little we can teach the Afghans about death and misery.

My heart goes out to the families of Mubin and Sadiq.

If I could, I would tell them that their boys did not die at my bidding.

Not in my name.

This essay, originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 5 July 2011, could not have been written without the investigative efforts of journalists Jon Stephenson and David Beatson.

Code Red

"You can't handle the truth!" Colonel Jessep defends the darkness behind the wire in Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men. When it comes to the SAS in Afghanistan it would seem that the few good men are all in the field and that our military and political leaders share Colonel Jessep's view of the public's ability to deal with the realities of New Zealand's involvement in a brutal, dirty and illegal war.

TO MAKE a political lie work, writes American historian, Rick Perlstein, you need only two things: “A powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it.”

No institution is more powerful than the State, so when statesmen decide to lie they’ve always got a head-start on the truth.

And the sheer size of the State means they can lie on a grand scale.

It was Adolf Hitler who penned the infamous sentence: “When you lie, tell big lies.”

Most of us only dare to “tell small lies in little matters”. Judging people by our own timorous moral standards, we have real difficulty believing others can “fabricate colossal untruths”.

Hence Hitler’s confidence that: “The grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down.”

The State also enjoys another – and arguably even greater – advantage over its citizens: its legitimacy.

For a society to function, ordinary people must retain at least a modicum of trust and confidence in its core institutions. Each one of those institutions, therefore, has a strong interest in reinforcing and protecting the others.

This places the second most powerful institution in our society – the news media – in a thoroughly invidious position.

To retain the trust and confidence of its audiences the news media must tell them the truth without fear or favour. But, if it tells “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” about government, big business, the military, the police, the judiciary and all the other “powerful institutions” out of which our social fabric is woven, it risks unravelling it altogether.

According to Rick Perlstein, this is what began to happen in the 1970s when: “The investigative reporter became a sexy new kind of hero. A shaggy-haired loner, too inquisitive for his own good, played by Warren Beatty, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.”

It was the decade of Watergate and the Church Committee’s inquiry into the CIA and the FBI. An era of whistle-blowers like Daniel Ellsberg – who leaked ‘The Pentagon Papers’ to The New York Times. The period when consumer advocate, Ralph Nader, warned Americans that corporate capitalism might be “unsafe at any speed”.

“The truth hurt”, says Rick Perlstein, “but the incredible thing was the citizenry seemed willing to bear the pain.”

Perhaps. But the “powerful institutions” of American society – what the baby-boom generation called “The Establishment” – wasn’t.

Rick Perlstein argues that the counter-attack began when Ronald Reagan was elected US President in 1980. This, he says, was the moment when telling the truth ceased to be an act of patriotism and, almost overnight, became an act of treachery against God, Justice and the American Way. The shaggy-haired investigative journalist, with his subversive curiosity, ceased to be sexy and became, instead, a professional bore.

If the State lies, intone the ladies and gentlemen of today’s press, it no doubt has very good reasons for doing so – reasons that are in no way the business of the news media to challenge. A journalist’s job isn’t to hold the powers-that-be to account. On the contrary, the journalist’s first responsibility is to preserve societal cohesion by reinforcing and protecting its core institutions.

If you doubt this grim assessment, go out and buy the latest issue of Metro magazine and read Jon Stephenson’s article “Eyes Wide Shut”. Jon’s not exactly what you’d call “shaggy-haired”, but he’s cut from exactly the same cloth as those investigative journalists of the 1970s.

Jon’s story is about the conduct of New Zealand troops in Afghanistan – what they’ve done, and what they’re still doing.

I defy any fair-minded person to read this story and arrive at any other conclusion than that our military and political leaders have lied to us.

“I want the truth!” yells Lieutenant Kaffee in A Few Good Men, to which Colonel Jessep scornfully replies: “You can’t handle the truth!”

That’s what all political liars believe to be true.

It’s time we opened their eyes.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 April 2011.

Forgotten Lessons

Cry Havoc: To hand over prisoners to mistreatment and torture is a clear breach of the Geneva Conventions - but this is what New Zealand SAS troopers serving in Afghanistan have been required to do. Those responsible for placing New Zealand servicemen in this situation must be held to account.

YESTERDAY was ANZAC Day. For most of us, 25 April 2011 was simply a day of remembrance: a day for recalling the 25,000 New Zealanders who, in the 97 years since the outbreak of World War I, have lost their lives on active military service.

For New Zealanders with some knowledge of their country’s history, however, ANZAC Day is about a lot more than remembrance.

It’s about the dangers of blindly committing ourselves to objectives we had no part in setting.

It’s about the folly of believing that any country, other than New Zealand, has the interests of New Zealanders at heart.

It’s about how easy it is to send young men to kill and be killed in far off lands – especially when those responsible for sending them are seldom, if ever, required to witness the killing or the dying.

When the casualty-lists ran into the tens-of-thousands we used to think that dying was the worst part of war. We look at all those names, weathered to near illegibility on a thousand memorial plaques, and we ask ourselves: “Why?”

Time passes and the answers change. Once we told ourselves it was for King & Country. More latterly, we’ve reassured ourselves our servicemen and women died for Freedom and Democracy. As New Zealanders, we’re willing to fight and die only for causes that are just and good.

Because what happens to a country when it finds itself on the wrong side of war’s moral ledger? When it’s no longer a matter of dying but “killing in the name of”? What happens when it’s no longer fighting to put an end to the torture and killing of innocent civilians – but alongside the torturers and killers?

Specifically, what happened in the little Afghan village of Band-e-Timur?

If the international award-winning investigative journalist Jon Stephenson’s account of this engagement, published in the latest edition of Metro magazine, is accurate, then New Zealand’s finest troops, the troopers of the Special Air Service (SAS) were ordered to involve themselves in something wrong and shameful.

According to Mr Stephenson, SAS troopers led the assault on Band-e-Timur in May 2002. During the raid, in which the village headman was shot and killed and a tiny six-year-old girl, fleeing in terror, tumbled into a well and was drowned, the SAS took scores of prisoners – including men as old as 70 and a boy as young as twelve. These prisoners were entrusted to the “care” of Americans – who then proceeded to abuse, terrorise and torture them.

This was not what the troopers signed up for – and they said as much to their commanding officer. We wouldn’t expect Kiwi servicemen to do anything less.

But what about their military and political bosses?

Sadly, they do not appear to have learned the bloody lessons of the Gallipoli Campaign.

New Zealand’s decision to participate in the Afghan conflict, like its decision to participate in World War I, was an act of imperial solidarity.

The United States had been attacked and we had no intention of staying out of the fight. After 16 years of cool-to-frigid relations with the world’s sole remaining super-power (not to mention the frowns and finger-wagging of all the other members of the Anglo-Saxon Club) here, at last, was an opportunity to once again become a member in good-standing. Or, as the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, put it: “Very, very, very good friends.”

Except the America we opted to march alongside in 2001 was not the America of Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt. Twenty-first Century America was an altogether darker and more dangerous beast.

The America of President George W. Bush decided to ignore the Geneva Conventions. His war in Afghanistan would be fought according to an entirely new rule book: one in which the abuse, humiliation, terrorising and torture of prisoners would become a routine aspect of battlefield practice.

“You are either with us”, President Bush admonished an astonished world, “or you are with the terrorists”.

If New Zealand wanted to fight alongside the Americans, it would be according to rules no decent New Zealand soldier – or citizen – could possibly, in good conscience, accept.

At this point our government should have withdrawn New Zealand service personnel from Afghanistan altogether. But it did not. Instead, politicians, civil servants and the military’s top-brass contrived a form of words which they believed would protect our servicemen and women from charges of complicity in the torture and murder of suspected Afghan fighters.

But it doesn’t, it hasn’t, and it won’t. International law on this matter is unequivocal. Everyone involved in the arrest and detention of persons – of whatever status – has a legal obligation to protect them from harm.

In 1915 blind colonial subservience cost us 2,700 young lives. In 2011 we stand to lose something even more precious.

Our national honour.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 26 April 2011.

The Price

Blood on Our Hands: Is the price of New Zealand’s re-admission to the Anglo-Saxon club now to be measured in the blood of her children?

IT’S THE OVERPRESSURE WAVE that poses the most immediate threat.

The detonation of an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) compresses the surrounding air and blows it outward in a deadly shockwave. The speed at which this shockwave travels is measured in milliseconds and the resulting high-energy pulse can cause serious damage to the human body’s "hollow organ systems" – that’s your ears, lungs and abdominal cavity.

An overpressure pulse of just 4 psi is powerful enough to kill any human-beings located in the immediate vicinity of the blast. At 10 psi human bodies simply disintegrate.

The shockwave is followed by the fragmentation effect. The enormous heat and pressure generated by the explosion disintegrates all but the most solid adjacent objects - sending superheated fragments flying outwards at supersonic speed.

Following the detonation of an IED, the metal container in which the explosive mixture is packed is instantly transformed into hundreds of lethal shards called "shrapnel". Depending on the sophistication of the bomb, the shrapnel may simply disperse in all directions, or be "shaped" to discharge in a single direction, like a shotgun blast.

The effect of a sudden large explosion is extremely disorientating. The flash, the overpressure pulse, the fragmentation effect and the deafening noise simply overwhelm the senses and render the individual acutely vulnerable for at least several seconds.

This is why the detonation of IEDs is such an effective military tactic. Deployed in conjunction with carefully positioned machine-guns and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, they give the attacking force a deadly window of opportunity to pour fire into an enemy who is, at least momentarily, incapable of fighting back.

That the twelve person unit of New Zealand infantry ambushed this morning (4/8/10) in Afghanistan’s Bamyan Province, by a so-far unidentified insurgent unit utilising a combination of IED and small-arms fire, emerged from the engagement with only one fatality is remarkable. It speaks volumes about the superb training of the New Zealand foot-soldier.

As the independent NZ war correspondent, Jon Stephenson, observed on Radio New Zealand – National’s "Nine to Noon" show, if an ambush is properly organised there should be no one left to walk away. And yet we are informed that the Kiwis were able to return fire, and in spite of the misty conditions (which prevented effective air-support and the swift evacuation of the wounded) held off the insurgents until the arrival of a relief force.

Even so, the casualty rate of this engagement was a sobering 25 percent (not counting the Afghan interpreter who was one of the three persons wounded in the attack). New Zealanders should, therefore, take the opportunity provided by this deadly encounter to consider the wisdom of their country’s continuing participation in the Afghanistan conflict.

Our participation in the Bamyan Provincial Reconstruction Team had been blessedly casualty-free up until today. Bamyan, we were told, was a "safe" and "friendly" province where the winning of hearts and minds by the Kiwis was proceeding apace. Clearly this is no longer the case.

Though the local Hazara population may be the historical enemies of the largely Pashtun Taliban militiamen, this has not prevented the insurgent forces from repeatedly infiltrating the province. Today’s attack suggests that those forces are now moving backwards and forwards across the mountainous terrain with increased freedom and enhanced military effectiveness. If New Zealand’s soldiers remain in Bamyan more casualties are unavoidable.

The Prime Minister, John Key, has declared that, in spite of this morning’s fatal attack, it is not New Zealand’s intention to "cut and run". Viewing the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, however, "cutting and running" seems like an eminently sensible suggestion.

If Bamyan is no longer safe (and the failure of locals to pass on their usual warnings to the Kiwi patrol is as worrying as it is significant) then nowhere in the whole war-torn country is safe.

More and more of the participants in the ISAF are declaring the battle for the Afghans’ hearts and minds to be lost, and that the US counter-insurgency strategy has failed. The government in Kabul is simply too venal, too corrupt, too ineffectual and too compromised by its relationship with the occupying NATO forces to command the loyalty of the Afghan people. They simply will not send their sons to die for Hamid Karzai and his drug-running mates.

And if the Afghan people themselves are not willing to die for the discredited and dysfunctional Afghan State – a regime installed, funded and protected by the armies of the West – then why should young New Zealand soldiers?

Is the price of New Zealand’s re-admission to the Anglo-Saxon club now to be measured in the blood of her children? If so, then the price is too high. We must not allow the bravery of our soldiers to be harnessed to the folly of our politicians.

It’s time to go.　

Leaders & Followers

A war host at their back: The anti-mining march up Auckland's Queen Street on May Day, in terms of providing powerful images, was much more effective than the photographs of "Warrior John" Key in Afghanistan.

JOHN KEY in body-armour. Thirty-thousand protesters marching up Queen Street. What are these images saying to us? Both events were deliberately contrived to convey a powerful message. So, what was it, in the language of symbols, that the image-makers were hoping to communicate – and to whom?

The first image, of "Warrior John", is all about the leader facing danger. Here is a man who, in his own words, is "not prepared to send people to a destination [that] I am not prepared to come to myself."

In propaganda terms it’s an old trick. As long ago as the First World War government publicists realised the value of having the nation’s leaders photographed in solemn (and potentially dangerous) communion with the troops. King George V did it. Prime Minister Lloyd George did it. Even New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Bill Massey, did it. Wartime presidents and prime ministers have been doing it ever since.

Symbolically speaking, the image taps into the deepest wells of human memory. Since men combined to bring down woolly mammoths one hundred millennia ago, leadership and danger have, conceptually-speaking, marched hand-in-hand. At its most basic level, leadership is about persuading people to trust you with their lives.

War-correspondent, Dexter Filkins, writes about leadership in The Forever War. With the US Marines "Bravo Company" in Falluja, he shadowed Captain Read Omohundro:

"It was an odd thing about leadership; people talked about it and CEOs wrote books about it. But there was nothing like facing death to feel it in the flesh. It was as if Omohundro wore a mask, and with that mask he gave everyone more courage than they knew they had."

Anyone who has seen combat says the same. Leaders are the people other people follow.

Will the image of Key in body armour encourage us to go on following him?

Probably not. New Zealanders no longer look upon the conflict in Afghanistan as their fight. In fact, polling suggests that a majority of voters would like to see, at the very least, the combat elements of New Zealand’s contribution withdrawn. Why? Because, to put it bluntly, the Taliban is not regarded as an existential threat.

In the aftermath of 9/11, with the images of the twin towers falling still vivid in their minds, New Zealanders were more than willing to throw in their lot with the aggrieved Americans. They were not alone. A visceral desire to avenge the victims of Al Qaeda’s devastating terrorist attack send military contingents flying towards Afghanistan from all over the world.

But that was eight years ago. Al Qaeda survives. Osama Bin Laden still lives. The Taliban have not been defeated. The democracy we promised to bring to the Afghan people has not materialised. And, according to The Sunday Star Times’ Jon Stephenson, 64 percent of the people we’ve supposedly been "assisting" in Bamiyan province don’t think very highly of our efforts.

In an existential struggle – like the Second World War – images of the leader at the front are extremely effective. That’s because, in an existential war, the troops on the ground are, literally, the nation’s children in arms, and the leader is there representing their parents and siblings back home. When they see him reach out to shake the hand of a soldier, it is their son or daughter, their brother or sister, that he is touching. His hand is their hand. The identification is deeply emotional and unequivocal: perfect propaganda.

In the case of Afghanistan, however, the emotional connection is weak, and the level of equivocation high. Instead of coming across as heroic, Key in body armour looks faintly ridiculous. As a consequence, most New Zealanders are going to decode the official images with their heads, not their hearts. His meeting with the troops will be perceived for what it actually was: a photo opportunity.

The contrast with the May-day anti-mining demonstration up Queen Street could hardly be more telling.

Here, too, the imagery stirs memories lodged deep into what Carl Jung called "the collective unconscious". For all humans, the sight of a large body of people moving purposefully towards them is invariably registered as a threat. What they see is a war-host – someone’s enemies on the march. And the first question they ask themselves is: "Who are they marching against? Is it me – or someone else?"

The protest demonstration is, thus, a double-edged weapon. It’s intended to frighten and intimidate those whose actions it opposes, while inspiring and encouraging those who share the demonstrators’ views.

That’s why estimates of the true size of an obviously large demonstration are so contentious. Those targeted are naturally concerned to minimise its significance. If they can make the march smaller, it not only becomes less threatening to people on their own side, but also less inspiring to their opponents.

It’s one of the first things protest organisers learn: never put a figure on the expected turn-out. Failure to meet a stated target will invariably be represented by the news media as proof that the organisers’ have inaccurately gauged public opinion. Further proof, perhaps, of the political demonstration’s double-edged character: "Suppose they organised a protest march – and nobody came."

But that certainly wasn’t the case on May-day in Queen Street.

The Government and its supporters were quite clearly shocked by its size, its energy, and even more importantly by the broad cross-section of the electorate represented in its ranks.

For Greenpeace and Forest & Bird – the demonstration’s organisers – the goal of intimidating and frightening their pro-mining opponents was achieved with stunning effectiveness. Even more stunning, however, was the environmental lobby’s success in inspiring and encouraging its supporters.

Crucial to that success was their choice of Lucy Lawless and Robyn Malcolm as the "faces" of the protest. Lawless is, of course, "Xena – The Warrior Princess", and Malcolm, in her role as Outrageous Fortune’s gutsy matriarch, Cheryl West, represents the quintessential "Waitakere Woman" – the precise demographic National cannot afford to lose if it is to win a second term.

In a curious way, therefore, the two images we have been discussing blur and merge. "Warrior John" turns out to have no more substance, in reality, than Princess Xena or Outrageous Cheryl.

The crucial political difference, however, is that while Key had a camera in his face, Lawless and Malcolm had a war-host at their back.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 13 May 2010.

What are we fighting for?

"We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky": Afghanistan has laid low the hubris of conquerors for two-and-a-half thousand years - and still they come.

THE detonation of the IED rattled off the walls of the narrow mountain pass in ever-diminishing echoes. Alerted by the blast, SAS snipers hidden among the crags knew immediately that their comrades were under attack.

None of them moved a muscle.

The deadly chatter of small-arms fire rose fitfully from the road, interrupted every now and then by the thwack and thump of rocket-propelled grenade-launchers.

Like the grey rocks they resembled, the snipers remained motionless.

A few minutes later the low drone of an American gunship filled the valley, followed by the murderous roar of its Gatling-guns. As the Lockheed AC130 banked and flew away, a grim silence settled over the landscape.

For what seemed like an age, the snipers heard only the hiss and rattle of the wind threading its way through the rocky outcrops and sprawling scree. Then, faintly at first, but growing louder and stronger as the aircraft neared the site of the ambush, they heard the familiar thudda-thudda-thudda of helicopter rotor-blades. If any of the marksmen’s support team were left alive, medical attention was now at hand. If not, at least the bodies of their comrades would be laid to rest in the soil of their homeland.

At daybreak, a small column of the same Taleban irregulars whose deadly improvised explosive device had killed three New Zealanders just eighteen hours earlier, attempted to escort one of Afghanistan’s leading opium-growers over the pass. In the glare of the morning sunlight none of them noticed the tell-tale dots of the snipers’ laser gunsights playing over their bodies.

Not one of them made it out of the valley.

　
ONLY a fool would question the courage or competency of the New Zealand Special Air Service. It’s high reputation among the world’s special-forces is well deserved and has been dearly bought. Nor should anyone doubt the Service’s capacity to inflict serious damage on the Taleban – our men always make a difference.

But, that’s not the point. In the light of John Key’s decision to once again commit New Zealand combat forces to the Afghan War, the question we must ask ourselves isn’t: "Can we make a difference?" But: "Is it a difference worth making?" When, inevitably, some of our finest soldiers find themselves in situations like the imagined incident described above, and more and more of them start arriving back home in body-bags, will it have been worth it?

Mr Key’s argument for re-engagement derives its force from the counterfactual proposition: "What will befall the world – and New Zealand – if the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) cuts and runs, and the Taleban are once again permitted to take over Afghanistan? His answer is brutally simple: If the ISAF’s mission to bring security and stability to Afghanistan is allowed to fail, then sooner or later this country will be attacked by terrorists.

In other words: Let’s get them, before they get us.

Is this a credible argument? Is there any evidence that countries which attack terrorist-harbouring "rogue states", make themselves less vulnerable to terrorist attack?

The answer, of course, is: "No."

In fact recent history suggests that the opposite is true.

Just look at the pattern of terrorist attacks since 2001. Australian citizens became the prime targets of the Bali Bombers after their government openly supported the US invasion of Afghanistan. British citizens were targeted on the London Underground after Tony Blair and George W. Bush illegally invaded Iraq. In Spain, another "Crusader State", two hundred people lost their lives to Islamic terrorism. Countries guilty of attacking Muslim states actually appear to make their citizens more – not less – vulnerable to terrorist attack.

But if we don’t go, aren’t we guilty of selfishly allowing other mothers’ sons to die for Afghanistan’s freedom?

That would be true if the conflict in Afghanistan was a genuine war of liberation. But, it’s not. An enraged United States, backed by its allies, invaded and occupied that unfortunate land. But, as the Soviet Union discovered (to its great cost) any attempt to impose one’s core ideological precepts from a helicopter gunship is doomed to fail.

The evolution of freedom and equality in any given society is a process only the members of that society can (or should) determine.

The brave men of the SAS cannot deliver security and stability to Afghanistan.

Only the Afghan people can do that.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 14 August 2009.