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.

Who Dares Wins - Cash!?

Hero - or side-show attraction?: It's hard to see how hawking the reputation of Victoria Cross winner, Corporal Willie Apiata, to fee-paying Boy's Own businessmen is going to boost the Special Air Service's morale. Blurring the line between the mission of our our armed forces and the objectives of private sector interests can only set a very dangerous precedent.

THE SPECIAL AIR SERVICE (SAS) agrees to host a group of senior business leaders for a cool $35,000. The Government’s Defence White Paper encourages Public/Private Partnerships in our armed forces. Both stories are broken in the same week. Are we supposed to believe this is a coincidence?

That’s not how the world works.

Quite obviously the SAS story was leaked to The Sunday Star-Times’ Jonathan Marshall – but by whom?

Did it come to him from an SAS source outraged at what is happening within the unit, and even more fearful of the changes about to overwhelm the New Zealand Defence Force as a whole?

Or, was it released to Marshall by the Top Brass of the NZDF as a sort of pre-emptive strike against SAS dissidents passing-on the details of the businessmen’s Boy's Own adventure to a genuine investigative journalist like Jon Stephenson?

Did Stephenson (whose series of painstakingly researched, impeccably sourced and on-the-spot reports from Afghanistan in The Sunday Star Times has seriously embarrassed the NZDF) already have the story? Was that why the Top Brass leaked it to a celebrity-chasing reporter like Marshall – who stands for everything genuine journalists despise?

If so, it was a shrewd move. While the Defence Minister, Dr Wayne Mapp, has vowed to investigate the civilian use of SAS weaponry and ammunition, the Prime Minister has airily dismissed any suggestion that what occurred constitutes either a serious breach of military regulations, or a dangerous precedent.

I beg to differ. It is inconceivable to me that allowing civilian businessmen to fraternise with our special forces personnel, be admitted to their base, learn their identities, handle and discharge their weapons, and study (albeit at the most rudimentary level) the principles and protocols of their leadership training could be anything other than the most egregious breach of military regulations.

I also fail to see how introducing Corporal Willie Apiata to these businessmen in exchange for a substantial monetary donation to the unit’s private family-welfare fund can be interpreted as anything other than a gross insult to this country’s highest military decoration, as well as a gratuitous affront to the honour and dignity of a courageous soldier.

Turning a hero into a side-show attraction doesn’t strike me as the best way to improve SAS morale.

Nor, I must say, does the White Paper’s idea of blurring the lines between Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, the Civil Service, and private sector businesses.

Even the most cursory examination of the United States’ experience of "outsourcing" traditional military functions to private sector contractors should have been enough to warn our government off the idea. Do the names Brown & Root, Haliburton and Blackwater mean nothing to Dr Mapp? To Bill English? To the PM?

They should, because the effective privatisation of many of the United States’ most sensitive and vital security and military functions has not only resulted in a massive transfer of taxpayer wealth to private business interests, but it has also tangled-up the lines of military authority.

American army officers swear allegiance to the American Constitution and the popular sovereignty which it enshrines. But, who do Haliburton business executives and Blackwater security guards swear allegiance to?

It is clear that the neoliberal project has moved well beyond its original acceptance of "The Night-Watchman State", in which the military, police, judicial and custodial functions of the polity remain firmly in public hands. Neoliberalism now proposes a radically new "Neo-Feudal" model of social control in which the coercive powers formerly monopolised by the State are transferred into private hands.

Free Market Leninists that they are, the neoliberal revolutionaries have clearly come to the conclusion that, with the destruction of all other independent centres of non-market power, the armed forces will be the only institution capable of physically overthrowing the neoliberal order. Far better to decommission its potentially dangerous service ethos and disperse its coercive military power among private corporations and individuals. Only then will the Neoliberal Revolution truly be safe.

Fiji knows all about this blurring of the lines between businessmen and soldiers. It was, after all, the treasonous collaboration between a shadowy group of Fijian businessmen and the Fijian Army’s SAS equivalent – the Counter Revolutionary Warfare Unit – which accomplished the coup d’etat of 2000. Just as it was Commodore Frank Bainimarama’s energetic reassertion of the Fiji Republic’s executive authority which brought "Speight’s Coup" to an end.

It was Bainimarama again, in 2006, who carried through the neoliberal Right’s worst nightmare – by ordering, in the name of the people, the military overthrow of the corrupt racist kleptocracy which was bleeding Fiji dry.

The Royal New Zealand Army, Navy and Air Force remain this country’s last line of defence – in more ways than one. They deserve not only our moral and political support, but also the full measure of public spending required to preserve the safety and dignity of service personnel, their families, and the free citizens of New Zealand.

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.