So Australian forces in Afghanistan have recently killed a Taliban leader called Mullah Noorullah. Noorullah’s death has been mostly reported as an admirable achievement, a manifestation of the fighting prowess of those scrappy Aussies. But Mark Dodd’s account in the Australian contains a remarkable couple of sentences:
The incident occurred in Deh Rafshan district in southern Oruzgan, where the Australian Special Operations Task Group is based. The SOTG tag is commonly used by defence as a synonym to describe elite Special Air Service operatives authorised to hunt and kill Taliban leaders in an Afghan variation on the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program.
Say what? When did we decide to revive Phoenix, the most notorious US assassination program of the twentieth century? The Phoenix Program was synonymous with the normalisation of murder and torture throughout Vietnam — and we’re using it in Afghanistan?
Here’s a participants’ account of Phoenix in Vietnam:
The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, “Where’s Nguyen so-and-so?” Half the time the people were so afraid they would say anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, “When we go by Nguyen’s house scratch your head.”
Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, “April Fool, motherfucker.” Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members.
One would like to say that such things couldn’t be happening now — except that we’ve heard so many stories from both Afghanistan and Iraq about misguided house raids that leave civilians dead. Consider the raid by Australian commandos trying to kill a Taliban leader called Mullah Baz Mohammed. According to Time magazine, a witness described commandoes bursting through doors and gunning down six members of the same family. The problem there was false information — the same difficulty that led the SOTG in September to kill a man named Rozi Khan, who subsequently turned out to be the district governor and close ally of Hamid Karzai.
It’s not just the Australian involvement in Afghanistan that seems to be going through a prolonged and brutal process of Vietnamisation.
You might recall how, in August 2008, Barack Obama caused howls of outrage from the American Right by arguing that US troops in Iraq should be sent to Afghanistan to help rebuild the country. He explained: “That requires us to have enough troops that we’re not just air raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.”
It’s now May 2009, and President Obama’s running the war. So what’s the latest news?
Afghanistan is in an uproar following US airstrikes that may have killed more than 100 civilians in the western part of the country. Reports from Farah province said that on Thursday a mob of several hundred protesters chanted anti-American slogans and threw rocks outside at provincial governor’s office before being disbursed by police gunfire.
In Kabul, outraged lawmakers called for new laws to clamp down on foreign military operations. Ahead of talks with President Obama in Washington, Afghan President Hamid Karzai bluntly said the deaths were “unjustifiable and unacceptable.”
Naturally, Hilary Clinton has apologised. What she didn’t mention is that Obama has authorised a massive escalation of the air war in Afghanistan.
In the past month, warplanes released 438 bombs, the most ever. April also marked the fourth consecutive month that the number of bombs dropped rose, after a decline starting last July. The munitions were released during 2,110 close-air support sorties.
The actual number of airstrikes was higher because the AFCent numbers don’t include attacks by helicopters and special operations gunships. The numbers also don’t include strafing runs or launches of small missiles.
We saw the same thing in the latter stages of Vietnam, and for precisely the same reason. Air power promises victory without casualties. Or, at least, without American casualties — the results for the local population are predictably disastrous. Though the latest strike represents the greatest civilian death toll in a single incident since 2001, over the last year 2 118 non combatants have been killed in Afghanistan.
In their study of the bombing of Cambodia, Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen argue that the huge civilian toll was directly responsible for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Something similar seems to be happening today, with the equally odious Taliban making a remarkable resurgence both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan (where the renewed fighting within the Swat valley is expected to produce half a million internal refugees).
Given all of this, the insouciance with which Australia has just signed up for greater involvement in this bloody mess seems all the more remarkable.
Sadly, it is not at all remarkable. Australia has signed up for this latest example of western imperialism for the same reason it signed up for all the others: because a great power, in this case the US, told it to.
There are a number of parallels with Vietnam apart from the Phoenix program. Space precludes a detailed analysis, but it is useful to reflect on two aspects in particular that do not get the attention they deserve.
The first is the drug link. The war in SouthEast Asia had as one of its major components the CIA’s control of the SE Asian drug trade, with factories in Laos processing the opium into heroin, Air America doing the drug running, and the body bags from Vietnam providing one of the major means of entry into the US. The CIA is likewise heavily involved in the Afghanistan drug trade that accounts for 93% of the world’s heroin production.
All of this has been well documented, for example McCoy, Scott and Ahmed.
The second parallel is that a false flag operation was used to justify the proceedings. The Gulf of Tonkin non-attack by North Vietnamese in 1965, and the 2001 alleged Muslim attacks on New York and Washington.
As far as Australian soldiers assassinating local “militant” leaders are concerned, the Defence dept might care to reflect that the protection for soldiers for killing in wartime against charges of murder does not exist when the war is an illegal war of aggression. The invasion of Afghanistan is an illegal war. It was not justified under the limited terms of article 52 of the UN convention.
It follows that Australian and other foreign soldiers are no better than war criminals and the Nuremburg principles accordingly apply.
A lot of what you say sounds unfortunately plausible (though little of what I read in James O’Neill’s comment). One major difference between the Vietnam War and the current ones (apart from an extraordinarily reduced tolerance for American casualties despite the US Army being a volunteer army and recruited disproportionately from amongst the poor) is that conscription has gone and the Army consists only of professional soldiers. A fortiori Australian participants are an elite force. It should be possible to reduce the incidence of barbarous behaviour enormously. Is this not happening? Perhaps the level of tolerance for bad and incompetent behaviour has been reduced in recent decades which is why we do not see a marked improvement, at least subjectively.
“Generals always fight the last war”. Unfortunately so do politicians. As with police, why would any half sane, decent human being want to be a soldier, “learn new skills, meet foreigners and kill them”, etc ad nauseam?
Militarily in Afghanistan, we will win every time. Societally and culturally, we are inept. We can win every engagement but, we will still lose the war because there is very little appreciation within the Australian military of what it takes to be relevant to the society they are supposed to be there to win over.
The White Paper’s only reference to the import of the societal/cultural engagement we will always need to deal with is, to train more linguists. Yes, this is important, but they fail to see the urgent need to develop a professional anthropological advisor capability and to have them at the operational sharp end, helping to shape the operation.
My perspective has been formed from operational experience in Africa, Timor Leste, and three years of fulltime employment at Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan Province, employing the local people.
Perhaps Mr Guest should acquaint himself with some facts. He might not like what I have written, but it was hardly original or for that matter implausible. The claims are certainly well documented. Because the Australian mainstream media prefers not to dwell on uncomfortable realities and instead serves up a diet of public relations pap is not any reason to avoid the issues. The professionalism of the Australian army is not the issue. Attention should rather focus on the purported reasons for being there. If those reasons are invalid, as I would strongly argue, then the debate should be about whether or not they should remain. Pointing to some alleged “success” such as the assassination of an alleged militant leader completely misses the point.
I would also resepctfuly suggest to Mr Roberts that he acquaint himself with Afghan history. No country has ever won there militarily and there is no reason to believe that the current invasion will fare any better. This current war has already lasted longer than WWI. Yet the Taliban control more than two thirds of the countryside, travel except under heavily armed escort is impossible, Karzai heads one of the most corrupt governments in the world (177 out of 180 according to the UN), illegal drugs account for more than 50% of GDP, the civilian death toll far exceeds the body count for militants, and our main local allies are a collection of brutal and corrupt war lords.
Reality may not be very pleasant, but unless one is prepared to look at the evidence and argue on the facts, one is never going to see this particular misadventure for other than what is is: a misguided and illegal war for which Australia has no conceivable national security interest. Our continued presence there is in my opinion counterproductive.