The Australian public are being fed a one dimensional view of Afghanistan by both sides of politics that is misleading and will only result in further domestic political frustration and a public continuing to question why our troops are not winning the war.
Our mission in Afghanistan will not be successful through military engagement alone. The Prime Minister must publicly acknowledge that our mission in Afghanistan will only succeed through the implementation of a range of mainly direct civilian engagements outside the safety of our Forward Operating Bases and a long way from the good coffee in the safe compounds in Kabul.
War is armed politics and counterinsurgency is an armed variant of domestic politics in which numerous challengers compete for control over the population.
Everyone sees Afghanistan differently, depending on your experience or how close or far you are from the “real action”.
The advice being given to many in the media and government comes from those who have either never been to Afghanistan or travelled in armoured vehicles and helicopters FOB hopping.
This means they are unable to comprehend an environment that is highly complex, ambiguous and fluid. It is extremely hard to know what is happening – trying too hard to find out can get you killed…and so can not knowing.
But you absolutely must understand the and influence the human terrain or we will crawl home with our tail between our legs like every other nation that has attempted to tame this tribal Byzantine society. Afghanistan is not known as the graveyard of empires for nothing.
Afghan people are not mobilised individually or by cold consideration of rational facts. At the same time the simplicity of life is a camouflage for their ability to prevail against asymmetrical threats.
This means the more our political leaders just focus on troops and the military aspect the more Australian’s will be baffled as to why this poor, illiterate, un-educated men in sandals can defeat a Coalition made up of the most powerful nations in the world.
The complexity of the issues in Afghanistan means that a multi-dimensional approach is required and in most parts of Afghanistan this has only really been tried since around 2007.
Don’t kid ourselves into thinking we have been seriously at war in Afghanistan since 2001. Yes, there was an initial brief period after the 2001 invasion but once the Taliban was defeated the US strategy was one of funding the warlords not on winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people so they don’t support imported terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda.
The Karzai government is being out-governed by the local Taliban at almost every level – security, law & order and reconstruction.
The unelected, Presidential appointed Governors in each Province are at best corrupt and at worse have direct links to the Taliban. The former Governor in Ghazni had a bounty on my head.
It was also well known that the sub-governor in Deh Yak received half of all ransoms paid to local insurgents to release kidnapped local NGO staff.
The ANP are often police by day Taliban by night.
Try asking local village residents (not the Governor’s staff) whether they trust the ANP or the local Taliban to provide security? Commander Ptang in the District of Andar was considered a “good guy” by the US PRT.
Yet the local Afghan’s were petrified of him and he was assassinated in May this year. But we are not there to create a reflection of our own society in Australia. This is a nation with deep ethnic divisions and has been bombed back to the dark ages over the last 40 years.
There is no doubt that more troops will enable Australia to dig deeper into Uruzgon with more tactical confidence but we should be making a larger civilian contribution too.
Without quickly addressing the other failing parts of the strategy Afghan villages will continue to be passively and actively support the local Taliban.
Given my own multiple near death experiences, I guarantee that the majority of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) that have killed Australian troops were NOT set off by the Taliban but by disgruntled, abused and disenfranchised local young men who made a decision out of money or survival.
It doesn’t mean the locals want the Taliban to become the Government – it just means they have not been given any reason to believe their survival can be guaranteed by anyone else.
There are many reasons the conflict in Afghanistan has not gone well. Most come down to failure to deal with corruption, criminal violence, government thugs and warlord intimidation as well as a local population that has been promised many development goodies by poorly focused NGOs and military with short tours and strict rules of engagement.
The Australian public are continually misled by our political leaders in how they describe the Taliban. They are not a homogenous group of insurgents. There are the Pakistan-funded and armed radicalised jihadists who flood over the border to fight foreign infidels.
There are the local Taliban who can be negotiated with and only care about their local area or district.
Then there are the criminals and thieves who take advantage of the mayhem conducting kiddappings, illegal checkpoints and highway robbery.
One of my vehicles was riddled with machine gun bullets, a worker shot in the arm and $US30,000 stolen – not by the Taliban but by local thugs.
When we asked they Afghan National Police to provide us with security the Commander in Logar Province said “it was too dangerous.” But if I paid him a large sum of money it wouldn’t be so dangerous for us to travel in his area.
From working with Coalition forces in Afghanistan many US troops I worked with observed how Afghanistan had become a politically correct war.
Ralph Peters hit the nail on the head in his 2006 New York Post article when he observed it is hard enough to bear the timidity of our civilian leaders - anxious to start wars but without the guts to finish them - but now military leaders have fallen prey to political correctness.
Unwilling to accept that war is, by its nature, a savage act and that defeat is immoral, influential officers are arguing for a kinder, gentler approach to our enemies.
Much of this is not due to the military commanders but an omnipresent media and well meaning civilian advisors with a Western democratic mind-set. In 1901, Winston Churchill said, “the wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings.”
While Churchill was not concerned with counterinsurgency he foresaw the challenges of implementing war in a democratic age, waged among a civilian population under the spotlight of Western democratic sensitivities.
While entering a village in Waghez District, Ghazni in April this year we came under machine gun and rocket attack. I saw two men on a motorbike fire an RPG before they sped off behind a building at a distance of about 200meters.
Coming out the other side they no longer had the RPG and because of the rules of engagement the gunner in the MRAP I was in could not fire on the motor bike and the two insurgents.
Most reasonable members of the general public reading this account, knowing this is war, would shake their head and ask “aren’t the Coalition Forces meant to shoot those people?” If the insurgents had been shot the media reports would have said “two unarmed civilians were shot by US forces…”
Finally, we must also stop using the word win. The Coalition forces may succeed and we may not like the look of that success.
Success will mean negotiating with the local Taliban, removing corrupt government officials, arresting warlords and drug barons and publically confronting Pakistan in multinational forums for its duplicitous approach to the foreign Taliban insurgency who flood over the border into Afghanistan.
None of this is neat and tidy and none of it will be done by our Australian soldiers alone.
Don’t miss: Get The Punch in your inbox every day
Get The Punch on Facebook
Facebook Recommendations
Read all about it
Punch live
Up to the minute Twitter chatter
@AndrewCatsaras Agreed. Kills more people than AIDS. Yet tolerated. Meanwhile: Good Insiders piece again Andrew.
RT @JamieTravers: I'm in Europe and don't care for Eurovision, why is my twitter feed filled with Aussies recounting the bloody thing!?
Ukraine song pinches chord progression from The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony. Fo real #sbseurovision
Recent posts
The latest and greatest
Abbott’s crass logic: trash the Parliament in order save it
An email was sent to almost every politician in Australia this week saying that someone should cut off…
Our special forces don’t always need special treatment
We admire them, but we’re not entirely sure why. We allow them to operate in the shadows; we rarely…
A good holiday is about unrest, not rest
Like a fat full-stop, it lay in my hand. A small orange – not exactly fresh, but purchased anyway…
Nosebleed Section
choice ringside rantings
From: They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
Michael S says:
"A teacher at Geelong Grammar had criticised her for using words that were too long, which had left her confused and had made her doubt her ability to write essays. She became ''quite distressed'' when her English marks began to fall." I can sympathise. My scholastic mentors conveyed to me a causal relationship… [read more]From: Welfare for breeders is a bonus for everyone
Change Up! says:
I have no problem paying my taxes. As a single, childless person on a very decent income, I can afford it and not have my life severely altered. Plus I understand that my taxes paying for things like schools, childcare and infrastructure is ultimately a good thing. A better community is better for me… [read more]Gentle jabs to the ribs
They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
A private school girl’s family is sueing her elite, extremely expensive private school for not… Read more
Most commented