Time To Stop "Dribbling" And Start "Clouting"?

Boots On The Ground: The former head of the UK armed forces, General David Richards, suspects in his “bones”, that if the Islamic State is to be defeated, then the armed forces of the West will have to stop "dribbling" and start "clouting". In the General’s words: “tanks would have to roll and there’s going to have to be boots on the ground”.

 

ARE WE AT WAR with the Islamic State – or not? The Prime Minister says “Not”. Our role in the conflict between the Islamic State and its enemies is merely to assist the government of Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. Sixteen NZ Defence Force personnel are stationed less than an hour’s drive north of Baghdad at Camp Taji – a former US military base. Their mission: to help train Iraq’s army. A further 100 Kiwi troops have been sent to provide them with protection while they get on with it. That’s all.

 

This is what General David Richards, former head of the UK’s armed forces, and current member of the House of Lords, calls “dribbling” – the sort of one-handed military activity soldiers are required to engage in when their political masters would rather not have them wage war with both hands.

 

Lord Richards has warned UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, that, when it comes to defeating the Islamic State, “dribbling” will not be enough. What’s needed against the highly motivated and exceptionally well-led soldiers of the self-proclaimed Caliphate is “clouting”.

 

“Properly brought together with proper leadership and proper command and control it is a very doable proposition”, Lord Richards told the BBC’s Andrew Marr. “But I worry that […] if we dribble, which is really rather what we are doing at the moment, it is simply firing up the problem rather than dealing with it.”

 

The former head of the UK armed forces told Marr that he suspected, in his “bones”, that if IS to be defeated, then its army will have to “clouted” by his country’s soldiers – on the front lines. In the general’s words: “tanks would have to roll and there’s going to have to be boots on the ground”.

 

But the UK could not possibly do this alone. After 14 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the UK’s defence force is bruised, battered and in urgent need of repair and replenishment. Lord Richards knows full-well that what he is really calling for is the assembly of another great Western invasion force; comparable in strength to Operation Desert Storm, and guided by similar, strictly limited, objectives.

 

The mission of Operation Desert Storm was to drive the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait. The core mission of this new Western force would be the utter destruction of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. To render the defeat of IS permanent, however, it would, almost certainly, be necessary to accomplish the complete pacification of Syria and the disarmament of the Iranian-backed Shite militias operating in Iraq.

 

The elimination of the murderous regime of President Bashar al-Assad, and the disarmament of his many enemies, would lift a huge burden from the shoulders of Syria’s neighbours. Millions of refugees, driven across borders by civil war and religious extremism, would be free to return, and the arduous task of reconstructing their ancient homeland could, finally, begin.

 

An effort of such magnitude on the part of the West – especially the USA and the UK – is the only truly effective means of bringing the multiple tragedies of the last quarter-century in the Middle East to an honourable resolution.

 

The barbarity of IS is an affront, not just to the peoples of the Islamic world but to all humanity. And, in their heart of hearts, the USA and the UK both know its poisonous creed could only have been distilled from the seething cauldron of hatred and resentment which their 2003 invasion of Iraq created. “You break it, you own it”, quipped US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, back in 2003. Well, between them, the USA and the UK smashed Iraq into a thousand pieces, and now they must make her whole again.

 

Do the peoples of the West have the stomach for another great military effort in the Middle East. Many would say “No.” But they should fix their eyes on the tens-of-thousands, desperate and despairing, who daily make their way toward Europe’s borders. If the West does not bring peace to the Middle East, then the Middle East will bring chaos to the West. Lord Richards knows the efficacy of forward defence, that is why he is urging his prime minister to stop dribbling and start clouting.

 

Would it be asking too much of our own defence force, and prime minister, to do the same?

 

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, 24 July 2015.

Nothing To The Story

Nothing To The Story? The same Defence Force, reinforced by the same ministerial authority, which denied the truth of Jon Stephenson's "Eyes Wide Shut", now denies the truth of Nicky Hager's revelation that the NZDF used American-gathered metadata to monitor the movements and contacts of Jon Stephenson in Afghanistan. Will Defence Minister Jonathan Coleman, and the former CDF, Lt-General Rhys Jones, (above) be forced to acknowledge, eventually, the accuracy of Hager's story - just as they were of Stephenson's?

GREG PALAST is one of the USA’s most ornery investigative journalists. His well-researched articles regularly achieve everything that good journalism should: comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Sometimes, the more than comfortable. With a good story, Palast and his keyboard can bring the full weight of justice crashing down on the heads of the mendacious, the deceitful, and the just plain dishonest.

 

But Palast only gets to beat the bad guys with the cooperation of the mainstream media.

 

It’s fashionable nowadays for bloggers and tweeters to pour scorn on what they sneeringly abbreviate to the “MSM”. But, the hard, cold truth of the matter is that a great story that finds no space on the pages of the major newspapers, or in the bulletins of the big television and radio networks, is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest.

 

If nobody reads it, or watches it, or hears it, then it makes no impact at all.

 

This what happened to Palast shortly after the US presidential election of 2000. That’s the one that came down to a few thousand votes cast (or not cast) and counted (or not counted) in the Sunshine State of Florida.

 

Palast’s research had revealed an alarming series of political connections between the state administration of George W. Bush’s little brother, Jeb, and the company commissioned to update the Florida electoral roll. The story raised the alarming possibility that the roll had been deliberately purged of the names of thousands of electors who were more likely than not to vote for the Democratic Party candidate, Al Gore.

 

Palast pitched his explosive story to one of the big US television networks – and, boy-oh-boy, were they interested! Confident of a nationwide scoop, he waited for the six o’clock news-editor’s call. And waited. And waited. And waited.

 

“What the hell!” Palast rang back his contact at the network: “Are you guys running this story or not!”

 

“Oh, sorry Greg,” came his contact’s reply, “but, no, we’ve decided to leave it.”

 

Palast could scarcely believe his ears. “What do you mean? Why the hell not!”

 

“Well, we put your allegations to the Governor’s Office, and they put them to the Governor, and he told us there was nothing to the story – so we’re not running it.”

 

 

I WAS REMINDED of Palast’s cautionary tale earlier this week.

 

Nicky Hager, one of New Zealand’s most tenacious investigative journalists, had, with the help of the country’s largest newspaper, broken a story claiming the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) had enlisted the support of United States intelligence-gathering agencies in Afghanistan to identify the contacts and sources of New Zealand’s leading war correspondent, Jon Stephenson.

 

At the same time, Hager also released the contents of an NZDF “security manual” in which “certain investigative journalists” were deemed to be a “subversive” threat to both the operational effectiveness and the good reputation of New Zealand’s armed forces.

 

Is it possible, asked Hager, that the latter might be related to the former?

 

It took the NZDF and its Minister, Dr Jonathan Coleman, roughly 24 hours to nut out their response. Having spent the weekend  “trawling through a decade’s worth of records from the Afghan war”, the military’s top brass blandly reassured the nation that they had  “found no evidence NZDF had ordered surveillance on the investigative journalist.”

 

The Defence Minister instantly firmed that statement up by flatly denying there was any evidence of such surveillance. The clear implication being that Hager had, at best, got the story badly wrong, or, at worst, made the whole thing up.

 

Depressingly, a number of newspapers and broadcasters, treated Coleman’s “no evidence” statement as definitive. Hager’s allegations, like Palast’s, had been put to the Powers-That-Be and been told there was nothing to them.

 

So, naturally, they immediately stopped believing them.

 

Did none of these “official sources say” journalists have a sufficiently capacious professional memory to recall that the NZDF had come up with a remarkably similar strategy in relation to an investigative article Stephenson himself had written in 2011?

 

Bland denials, based upon “evidence” which no one else can verify, should never be taken at face value. Simply asking the Governor’s Office, or the NZDF’s top-brass, isn’t good enough.

 

When dealing with Greg Palast, Nicky Hager or Jon Stephenson – the assumption should always be that there’s a case to answer.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 August 2013.

The Contagion Of Evil

The Black Prison: The United States new detention facility on Bagram Airbase a few kilometres north of Kabul in Afghanistan. Recent revelations concerning the behaviour of the NZDF in that country - most particularly its use of US surveillance facilities to monitor the activities of freelance war correspondent, Jon Stephenson, raise real fears that the evil represented by Bagram's torture chambers is on the point of infecting New Zealand.

 

THE BAGRAM DETENTION FACILITY was a dark lake of evil, its opaque depths constantly replenished by a thousand tributaries of officially-sanctioned moral depravity. Behind the razor-wire and watch-towers; beyond the foot patrols and guard-dogs; far away from the searchlight-beams and the constantly turning CCTV cameras; deeds were done in the name of our “very, very, very good friends” that only the sickest kind of sadist could observe with equanimity.

 

To the people of Afghanistan, the innocent as well as the guilty, Bagram became a byword for terror, torture, and the exercise of all the other brutal forms of utterly unaccountable American power.

 

In March of this year the Bagram Detention Facility, located within the sprawling American airbase of the same name, was handed over to the Afghan Government. It is now known as the Afghan National Detention Facility – proof – according to the American commander of the International Security Assistance Force, General Joseph Dunford, of ISAF’s success in building “an increasingly confident, capable and sovereign Afghanistan.”

 

Shortly before the formal handover, however, an undisclosed number of prisoners were allegedly moved to a new US-controlled facility – still located within the perimeter wire of the airbase – and known simply as the “Black Prison”. Former detainees also report that US personnel continue to have “access” to the prisoners (or what’s left of them) being held under Afghanistan’s putative authority.

 

The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) still has military intelligence personnel stationed at Bagram Airbase. A former NZDF resident describes it in terms of a small American town uplifted in its entirety and relocated within sight of the snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush. She did not reveal the purpose of her posting.

 

But now, thanks to the extraordinary investigative journalism of Nicky Hager, we all know what at least one of New Zealand’s military and intelligence personnel was doing at Bagram Airbase. He or she was spying on another of this country’s extraordinary investigative journalists (and our only war correspondent worthy of the name) Jon Stephenson.

 

Jon’s stories from Afghanistan, stripped of all their incidental detail, have been about only one thing: the contagion of evil.

 

Over and over again he has revealed how sending good-hearted New Zealand soldiers to Afghanistan, a war that was, most probably, initiated illegally, and which has, most certainly, been conducted immorally, was bound to result in their slow but certain corruption.

 

The most vivid confirmation of evil’s contagious effect came in Jon’s award-winning Metro magazine article, “Eyes Wide Shut”, in which he detailed how New Zealand’s troops had repeatedly been obliged to hand over prisoners to US and Afghan authorities, in whose custody, the Kiwis were reasonably sure, they would be subjected to assault and torture.

 

It was through the increasingly desperate attempts of the NZDF to deny that these events ever happened, and then to discredit the journalist whose detailed and highly accurate reportage constantly undermined those efforts, that some of Bagram’s evil began flowing into the bloodstream of the New Zealand body politic.

 

Nicky Hager’s story reveals an NZDF so rattled by Jon Stephenson’s investigative reporting that its own security manual included “certain investigative journalists” among its most dangerous antagonists. Or, in Mr Hager’s own words, putting probing journalists up there “on the same list as the KGB and al Qaeda.”

 

Both affronted and alarmed by Jon Stephenson’s unrelenting reportage, the NZDF turned to the Americans’ vast intelligence-gathering operation for assistance. They also enlisted the aid of New Zealand’s principal security and intelligence gathering agency, the SIS, to root out the journalist’s contacts and sources.

 

To the NZDF, Stephenson was no longer simply a conscientious journalist attempting to inform his fellow citizens of their government’s actions and hold it to account. He was now regarded as a “subversive”: someone determined to “weaken the military, economic or political strength of a nation by undermining the morale, loyalty or reliability of its citizens.”

 

Here we see the contagion of evil in all its chilling menace.

 

Telling the truth has become a subversive act. Informing the public that their soldiers are at risk of becoming embroiled in acts contrary to international law – to war crimes – is now tantamount to aiding the enemy: to treason.

 

And so, drop by drop, the Bagram poison enters our system. Our Government, determined to avoid further embarrassment by “certain investigative journalists” intends to empower our own Government Communications Security Bureau to assist the NZDF in tracking-down and identifying their sources.

 

As they did in Afghanistan, they will use the latest intelligence-gathering technology to acquire “metadata” – landline and cellphone logs, e-mail and text traffic - to identify the likes of Jon Stephenson’s and Nicky Hager’s friends and associates; contacts and sources.

 

Among them will be my own name and telephone numbers.

 

Bagram will have come home. The contagion of evil will be at my door.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 30 July 2013.

Our Diminishing Capacity For Empathy

 A Failure Of Empathy: The casual cruelty of Barbara Sumner-Burstyn's Facebook posting about the death of Lance Corporal Jacinda Baker offered swift corroboration of Dr Bruce Perry's claim that social media are diminishing our capacity for empathy.

 

ARE SOCIAL MEDIA making us crueller? Dr Bruce Perry, an American neuroscientist currently touring New Zealand, argues that the explosive growth of communications technology is diminishing our capacity for empathy. By undermining face-to-face relationships and weakening the intimate and ethical bonds that hold communities together, claims Dr Perry, social media are changing the way our brains work.
 

A challenging thesis, but Dr Perry’s disturbing ideas received almost instant corroboration. In an extraordinary outburst on Facebook, the New Zealand film-maker, Barbara Sumner-Burstyn, delivered the following, scathing, ‘testimonial’ to Lance Corporal Jacinda Baker, the young New Zealand soldier killed in action in Afghanistan on 19 August:
 

“Oh, so fallen soldier Jacinda Baker liked boxing and baking – did they forget she also liked invading countries we are not at war with, killing innocent people and had no moral compass. She 100 per cent does not deserve our respect for her flawed choices. We are not at war. We are helping America invade another country for their oil. No more than that.”
 

It is difficult to know where to begin with this thoroughly obnoxious piece of writing. Perhaps with Ms Sumner-Burstyn’s simple errors of fact.
 

Lance Corporal Baker did not invade Afghanistan, she was posted there as a serving member of the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) which was in Afghanistan at the behest of the New Zealand Government, which had agreed to supply the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) with a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Bamiyan province. The ISAF is in Afghanistan by virtue of a UN Security Council resolution authorising UN member states to aid the creation of an effective and democratic Afghan government.
 

Lance Corporal Baker, far from “killing innocent people” was a medic – duty bound to assist all those wounded in combat or injured by enemy munitions – regardless of status or nationality. When she was killed, Lance Corporal Baker was escorting an injured comrade to medical assistance. It is extremely difficult to reconcile these facts with Ms Sumner-Burstyn’s charge that Lance Corporal Baker “had no moral compass”.
 

Ms Sumner-Burstyn’s final claim: “We are helping America invade another country for their oil” is similarly false. Afghanistan possesses no oil fields worth expending US blood and treasure to secure. The Americans are there for only one reason. Because the Taliban Government of Afghanistan had offered safe haven to Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida: the terrorists ultimately responsible for the murderous attacks of 11 September 2001.

Lance Corporal Jacinda Baker

 

Natural reticence, not to mention fear of instant retaliation, would almost certainly have prevented Ms Sumner-Burstyn from uttering such false and hurtful accusations in front of people who did not share completely her opinions on the Afghanistan conflict. The classical injunction De mortuis nil nisi bonum – Of the dead speak only good – invokes a simpler world in which people confronted one another face-to-face. By placing a computer screen between herself and the family, friends and comrades of Lance Corporal Baker, Ms Sumner-Burstyn lost the inhibitive effect of close human proximity. Without its protection she had nothing to shield her from the full emotional and practical consequences of her actions.
 

These followed with terrifying speed and intensity. Ms Sumner-Burstyn’s comments appeared on her Facebook Page on Friday, by Saturday a new Facebook Page – Sumner Burstyn Give Back Your NZ Passport! – had attracted more than 15,000 followers. By Sunday that number had grown to 20,000.
 

Reading the comments posted on this new page, Dr Perry would no doubt suffer an embarrassment of evidential riches for his diminishing-empathy thesis. If Ms Sumner-Burstyn’s comments were ignorant and insensitive, the response was nothing short of homicidal. The reactive firestorm’s flames leaped across the Pacific Ocean to Canada – where Ms Sumner-Burstyn is working – and she hurriedly took down her Facebook Page and changed her e-mail address.
 

Too late. On the Internet everything is recoverable – including screen-shots of Ms Sumner-Burstyn’s original comments. By Sunday, family members had been driven from their homes by the public fury. Threatened with rape and murder, Ms Sumner-Burstyn fears to return to New Zealand.
 

A recent photograph of Ms Sumner-Burstyn shows a middle-aged woman posed in front of a large book-case filled with academic literature. Studying her face, and reading about her many awards for documentary film-making – many of them on “progressive” themes – it is difficult to fathom how Ms Sumner-Burstyn could be capable of such casual cruelty. As a clearly gifted artist and feminist, it is extraordinary that she was so utterly unable to empathise with Lance Corporal Baker – the first female member of the NZDF to lose her life on active service.
 

By the same token, it is profoundly depressing to read the spittle-flecked responses of her detractors.
 

Lance Corporal Baker lost her life on a mission to re-build and heal a damaged province in a ravaged land. Her empathy merited a much more generous memorial.
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 28 August 2012.

Ghosts That Walk In The Dark

Turbans and Kalashnikovs: The mental image most New Zealanders hold of the Taliban is of Taliban 1.0 - the religious student army that won the Afghan civil war back in 1996. But the new Taliban - Taliban 2.0 - is as likely to be kitted-out in business suits and carry lap-tops. According to Kiwi war correspondent, Jon Stephenson, Taliban 2.0 are "ghosts that walk in the dark" - guerrilla fighters against an army of occupation. And because the soil they walk on is their own, they will not be beaten.

 

WHEN WE HEAR the word “Taliban” most of us think of turbans and Kalashnikovs. In our mind’s eye we see an embittered Pashtun tribesman, his lungee as black as his bristling beard, squatting in the mouth of a mountain cave. Such fighters still exist, of course, but this mental picture much more closely resembles the Mujahedeen who drove out the occupying Soviet forces back in the 1980s. The word talib means, simply, a student of the Koran, and it was an army of such holy scholars – taliban – that ended the Afghan civil war in 1996. Think, Salvation Army – with machine-guns.

 

The first Taliban administration – let’s call it Taliban 1.0 – entered into the complexities of government with very little experience. Raised and educated in the deeply conservative religious schools (madrassas) of Pakistan’s tribal territories, many of its fighters were the sons of refugees who had fled the Soviets’ murderous attack helicopters. Hardly more than teenagers, the Taliban relied almost exclusively upon their religious teachers (mullahs) for political and legal guidance. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan became an Islamic Emirate, governed according to Sharia law.

 

That was the Taliban the West defeated in the aftermath of 9/11.

The insurgent force which has grown up in Afghanistan during the occupation of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is, however, very different from the first Taliban army. Let’s call it Taliban 2.0.

 

The guerrillas of Taliban 2.0 are as likely to be dressed in a Western suit and carry a lap-top as they are to wear a turban or tote a Kalashnikov. They are highly skilled, highly motivated and highly dangerous. Like the French Resistance and the Viet-Cong, the new Taliban’s strategic and tactical objectives are brutally simple: wear down the occupiers’ will; sap his morale; undermine his faith in the “mission”; cause him to fear and mistrust the local population. In short, make him want to leave.

 

The New Zealand war correspondent, Jon Stephenson, based in Kabul, warns that this “fighting-season” the insurgency and its insurgents “are everywhere”. With typical bluntness, he says that were he to set out alone from the Afghan capital and drive for twenty-five minutes in any direction: “I’d be dead.” His description of Taliban 2.0 is chilling. They are, says Jon: “Ghosts that walk in the dark”.

 

And they’ve been walking our way.

 

Because the Hungarian Government’s rules of engagement do not permit its ISAF contingent to do any more than escort and protect its aid workers, a tactical window has opened in the south of Baghlan province. Unharried by regular forward patrols, the Taliban appears to have established a base of operations from which its fighters sally forth into neighbouring Bamiyan Province to attack the Afghan National Police and install deadly Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) along roadsides patrolled by ISAF troops from New Zealand. In less than a month, the Taliban have killed five Kiwi soldiers – three of them by means of a massive IED.

 

Their tactics have already borne fruit. According to a report in The New York Times: “New Zealand announced Monday that it would probably withdraw its small troop contingent from Afghanistan months ahead of schedule, aiming for early 2013 rather than October of that year.”

 

This is, of course, exactly what the Taliban wanted to hear. The more ISAF members who bring forward the date of their withdrawal, the less tenable the whole occupation becomes.

 

The Graveyard Of Empires: An American GI whistles nervously past the cemetery of previous occupiers' hopes.

 

As the Times report points out: “New Zealand now follows France, a much bigger coalition partner, which in January announced it was accelerating its troop withdrawal.”

 

Prime Minister John Key’s decision to move up New Zealand’s withdrawal date is a wise one. Had he attempted to “tough it out”, it’s highly probable the Taliban would have continued to seek out and kill New Zealand soldiers. The public announcement of this country’s early departure from Afghanistan is, however, almost certain to satisfy the Taliban’s strategic ambitions vis-a-vis New Zealand. Their tactical priority now will be to melt back into the population before ISAF Special Forces (including, most likely, members of the New Zealand SAS) locate and destroy the unit responsible for the latest deadly attacks.

 

This is the enemy against whom we have deployed our soldiers. He will not be beaten. Because, no matter how many Taliban are slain, the ‘ghosts that walk in the dark” walk upon their own soil. 

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, 24 August 2012.

Theatre Of The Absurd

Whose Hands? It's not what's happening out on the political stage that we should worry about, but who is directing this theatre of the absurd from behind the scenes.

“THE WORLD”, said Benjamin Disraeli, “is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” Just as well. Because the poor players currently strutting and fretting their hour upon New Zealand’s political stage clearly learned their craft in the Theatre of the Absurd. Incoherent and disconnected posturing may now be de rigueur, but even the most sophisticated audience grows weary of a play without a plot.

If the players and the play are mere distractions, however, and Mr Disraeli’s unseen personages, operating behind the scenes, do truly govern the world; then this theatrical, National-led government’s failure to develop either plot or character is of no real consequence.

In fact, to discover that there is nothing remotely resembling logic underpinning the Government’s public statements comes as a huge relief. Some of us were developing the most acute headaches trying to reconcile Education Minister, Hekia Parata’s, unwavering commitment to placing teachers of the highest possible quality, possessing all relevant qualifications, in every one of the nation’s public classrooms, with her Associate Education Minister, John Banks’, advocacy of privately run “Partnership Schools” staffed by unregistered teachers lacking even the rudiments of professional training. Now that we know the Government’s education policy is supposed to be absurd, incoherent and posturing, the pain grows less.

Behind the scenes, of course, the personages who really call the shots are gearing up for the incremental privatisation of New Zealand’s education system. Their logic is impeccable. First: Make it easy for middle class people, with money, to identify the public schools that are failing, so they can send their children somewhere else. Second: Set up “Partnership Schools” next to these failing schools and fill them up with the best and brightest children from the surrounding neighbourhoods. Third: Expand the network of “Independent” schools to take advantage of middle-class parents’ headlong flight from what they now regard as a fatally compromised public system.

Not only do the Personages get to clip the ticket all the way down the line, from the humblest early-childhood education centre to the flashest secondary school, but they also achieve their much larger purpose. The egalitarian and meritocratic public education system, built up over more than a century by the parties of the Left, can now be replaced with the sort of privately run, socially exclusive and unashamedly elitist system New Zealand’s deeply unequal society so obviously craves.

National Standards, League Tables, Partnership Schools, Public-Private Partnerships. It seemed to be nothing more than the politicians’ sound and fury. Now it all makes perfect sense.

The Afghanistan War’s sound and fury burst on to the stage last weekend in the most tragic fashion. And, once again, there was no sense to be made of the on-stage dialogue. The absurdity of the politicians was only matched by the opacity of the Army’s top brass.

In each of the nearly ten years New Zealand troops have been stationed in Afghanistan we have been told that their only purpose was to help the Afghan people to help themselves. In Bamiyan Province that involved Kiwis helping the local tribesmen to build schools and medical clinics. Our Provincial Reconstruction Team was lucky in its mission, we were told, because Bamiyan was one of the safest places in that unhappy country.

Why then are our soldiers dying? If, by our presence, we were supposed to make the country safer, why has it become more dangerous?

Now that our troops have become targets for Taliban forces supposedly reeling before the American “surge”. Now our “reconstruction team” is expected to confront an enemy capable of fighting highly-trained Kiwi infantry to a standstill. What purpose is served by remaining?

The Prime Minister and his Minister of Defence speak confidently about “restoring stability” to a country that grows more unstable by the day. But, like that other tragic military theatre of the absurd, the Western Front, no politician’s answer makes the slightest sense. Back then, the Diggers sang: “We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here.” The explanation for New Zealand’s presence in Afghanistan seems to boil down to: “We’re there because we’re there, because we’re there, because we’re there.”

“Oh, and to keep our American and Australian friends happy”, add Mr Disraeli’s  “very different personages’, in a loud stage whisper, from behind the scenes.

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, 10 August 2012.