Scott Morrison insists that Australian soldiers didn’t die in vain in Afghanistan, despite the Taliban’s return to power. Photo: AAP
Forty-one Australians lost their lives in Afghanistan “fighting for freedom”, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison put it. Their sacrifice was in a good cause, “whatever the outcome”.
“The reason we went there was to track down Osama bin Laden. The reason we went there was to stop al-Qaeda and stop them mounting operations from there,” he added.
Memo Prime Minister: Osama bin Laden was dispatched from this earth a decade ago, but a UN assessment published last month states that al-Qaeda remains “present in at least 15 Afghan provinces”. Those who aided and abetted al-Qaeda before 9/11, the tyrannical, misogynist and murderous Taliban, are back in charge of that God-forsaken country.
Why were we there again?
You’ve got to hand it to our Prime Minister: he has a throw-away slogan for any occasion. From a COVID-19 ‘snapback’ that never happened to this week’s “million doses of (Pfizer) hope”, the marketer-in-chief is rarely short of an Orwellian buzzword to dazzle the masses and discombobulate journalists at a presser just long enough for a chance to call on Peter van Onselen for his obligatory Dorothy Dixer.
This week, he’s justifying our pointless, 20-year expenditure of blood and treasure with that old chestnut “freedom”, a term used by PMs from Menzies to Howard to defend indefensible foreign adventures from Vietnam to Iraq. Promoting freedom in Afghanistan is hardly a Scott Morrison original, but you can’t expect marketing gold at short notice after the Taliban took around five minutes to re-take the place.
Let’s have a look at that term “freedom”. When al-Qaeda took down New York’s World Trade Centre and trashed the Pentagon in September 2001, was the need to free 38 million Afghans from the tyranny of Taliban rule at the forefront of American and Australian minds?
Of course, it wasn’t. In weeks following the attacks, there was a surge in incidents of harassment and hate crimes against anyone thought to be “Middle Eastern” in appearance.
“I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people … and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” President George W Bush told an angry crowd at ‘Ground Zero’ in New York just days after the attack.
Revenge was the watchword, not freedom, when George W Bush addressed an angry crowd after 9/11. Photo: AP.
Clearly, ‘freeing Afghanistan’ wasn’t on most western minds, a fact borne out when opium-harvesting warlords were courted as national leaders and brought to Bonn, Germany, where they installed as President Hamid Karzai, a former consultant to big oil portrayed in Wikileaks cables as corrupt, weak and erratic.
“Diplomats described (Karzai as) paranoid and beholden to criminals to maintain power,” the Guardian reported. “On some occasions Karzai’s own ministers accused him of complicity in criminal activity … and then-US ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, adopted a weary tone when describing often bizarre meetings with the mercurial president.”
In a country governed by warlords for centuries, democracy and freedom are unlikely on the back of flawed ‘leaders’ like Karzai, who, as President for 13 of the 20 years of western intervention, squandered much of the impetus for true change.
There was cause for hope around some of the building blocks of democracy – education and the establishment of democratic institutions – but in perhaps the most important area, that of economic prosperity, most locals remained in poverty. A quarter or more of Afghans were unemployed as of 2019, and overseas investors balked at the country’s corruption – among the worst in the world, according to Transparency International.
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A tragic sidebar to this futility was that many more girls went to school during the western intervention. That – of course – will now come to a shuddering halt under the Taliban.
Ben Roberts-Smith pictured cheering a soldier drinking from the prosthetic leg of a man he shot (left) and wearing what appears to be a Crusader’s cross. Pictures: The Age, ADF
Nothing promotes western-style democracy like the winning of hearts and minds, so when the Brereton Report into alleged abuses by our soldiers in Afghanistan found 39 unlawful killings were committed between 2005 and 2016, it was clear that “freedom” had nothing to do with it. Fairly or not, the Australian face of these alleged abuses is that of Ben Roberts-Smith (above) who denies he was the “big soldier” who kicked a handcuffed Afghan villager down a steep embankment (among other allegations) before the man’s body was later seen being dragged into an orchard.
The primary and defining characteristic of the armed conflict in Afghanistan since 2001 has been harm to civilians caused by American drone strikes, massive human rights abuses and war crimes (by all sides) which have in turn fuelled the cycle of conflict and driven many Afghans into the arms of the Taliban. How, for the love of God, could Morrison expect the “freedom” of a stable western-style democracy (a form of government which, by definition, requires the “consent of the governed”) to emerge from such a traumatic, murderous maelstrom?
If Morrison was in the slightest bit invested in “freedom” for Afghans, he might have at least moved a bit quicker to secure life in a free country (Australia) for those Afghan “Locally Engaged Employees”, including translators, who played a critical role in the success of our operations. Those who remain are now Taliban targets, and many of them face death.
Admiral Chris Barrie, ADF chief when we went into Afghanistan, said the government left it too late, and that there was not much hope for the people who helped Australia and their families. “It’s terrible. I think it’s a horrible story,” he told ABC radio.
In Afghanistan, local translators who worked with western forces plead for help to escape. Photo: Getty Images
Some argue that the attacks of 9/11 were blowback for imperialism, our “chickens coming home to roost,” if you will. True or not, from a western perspective there was a compelling security obligation to go in there and root out the threat from al-Qaeda and its Taliban landlords.
However, rooting out the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan for good was never going to be as easy as, say, tossing out a zinger at a media conference. Resources, strategy and planning were required to give that wretched country and its people half a chance, but as with other foreign misadventures throughout history, the focus was on the occupying power’s priorities, and how it all played to the audience at home.
Scott “Freedom” Morrison is the king of the one liner, the titan of the 24-hour news cycle. Just don’t expect him – after the bushfires, after COVID-19 – to come up with anything resembling a long-term, viable plan.
