AN UNWINNABLE WAR: Australia in Afghanistan.
By Karen Middleton
Melbourne University Press, 382pp.
Reviewed: 1 October 2011
In tracing the politics of Australia’s military involvement in Afghanistan, this book says more about Australia than about Afghanistan. From John Howard’s emotional and instant commitment to George Bush’s “War on Terror”, through to the current government’s inability to articulate any coherent plan for extrication, Australia seems humiliatingly dependent on the whims and favours of dominant allies.
We are in Afghanistan in 2011 for the same reasons that Australians were in South Africa for the Boer Wars around 1900 – as minor contributors to the defence of a challenged empire that seems to offer us security in our isolated corner of the world.
Karen Middleton, senior Press Gallery correspondent for Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service, was with John Howard in Washington on September 11th 2001, and actually in a press conference with him at the moment an airliner flew into the Pentagon within view of their hotel. The assembled journalists could have seen that hijacked plane from the windows, but for a curtain drawn so that the news cameras could record Howard discussing his chat with George W Bush.
Without reference to Cabinet or Parliament, Howard publicly committed Australia to supporting the USA in whatever response it might choose to make. He had been a smart kid in short pants during World War II, his father and grandfather had fought in both World Wars, and Howard seems to felt 9/11 to be the nearest he would come to a Churchillian moment for epic and righteous heroism. It was also an agenda-changing godsend for the imminent Federal Election in Australia.
From the Canberra Press Gallery, Middleton has watched how that initial impulse for retaliation against an act of terrorism became inflated and diverted. The urge to punish Al Qaeda and its supporters grew in a steady “mission creep” to embrace objectives not only of regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also of culture change, with the idea that western-style politics (a.k.a “Freedom” or “Democracy”) was the only long-term answer to anti-Western terrorism.
This was how the war became unwinnable. The political objectives have been proven, yet again, not to be achievable by military means, regardless how superior may be the destructive power at one’s disposal. The Romans ruled Britain for four centuries, but our Anglo-Celtic ancestors reverted to near-barbarism when Rome withdrew its legions.
Whatever levels of resentment large sections of Afghan society may feel toward Taliban extremists, it is sheer conceit to pretend that suppressing the Taliban will result in a flowering of liberal democracy, so long as 25 million Afghans still lack basic education and economic security. Our own systems remain ridden with faults and imperfections, after a thousand years of often bloody struggle.
This Western campaign in Afghanistan has been going on so long that it is easy to forget how many twists and turns brought Australia to the present impasse. Middleton does an excellent job in reviewing the step-by-step politics of Australia’s expanding commitment to the US-led campaign. She interviews dozens of key players from all sides of the argument, including politicians, senior military figures, advisers and academic specialists. Many now express the doubts that politics previously constrained them from airing.
It’s useful to be reminded that Joe Biden, now Obama’s Vice-President, argued that the USA should not attempt any kind of nation-building role in Afghanistan, but should limit its engagement to pin-point targeting of proven terrorists. US Military (and some, but not all, of their Australian counterparts) have routinely argued for more hardware, more troops and more “victories” on the ground.
I had forgotten how firmly the Australian Labor Party, then led in Opposition by Simon Crean, had argued against Australian participation in the hugely costly invasion of Iraq, at a time when Howard and the media were eagerly swallowing every piece of tainted “intelligence” about Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction tossed their way by a US Defence establishment under the tendentious direction of Rumsfeld and Cheney.
The bleak landscape is not devoid of humour. In preparing for their Afghan assignment, our muscular SAS heroes knocked back proposals from Defence scientists that the ideal base colour for camouflage uniforms in the Afghan landscape would be pink or mauve. Once there, they found that their secret observation dugouts were being sniffed out by curious goats. An goat-deterrent perfume was distilled from tiger excrement, but th experiment failed when shepherds came to investigate what was stampeding their herds. Further blending produced an ideal “tiger mild” cologne that left nearby goats alert, but not alarmed, and the shepherds apparently unaware.
War is ultimately a human meat-grinder, and every Australian combat soldier is a courageous volunteer. Justifying the toll in deaths, wounds and minds broken by mortal conflict is a problem for any war-making politician. Karen Middleton has been studiously professional in balancing the views she presents throughout this sad chronicle of a conflict that, in retrospect, is unlikely to be seen as worth the human cost. Yet the book is punctuated by a complete account of each Australian fatality as it occurs, with names and circumstances, like the tolling of the knell. The numbers are thankfully few compared to US, British or Canadian casualties, yet our Prime Minister and our Leader of the Opposition seem to feel they have to appear at each individual funeral. Is this for the families, or for the news cameras?
The last word goes to Ric Smith, former senior diplomat, Secretary of Defence, and Rudd’s Special Envoy to international talks on Afghanistan, who acknowledges that staying in Afghanistan is necessary to maintain the status of our alliance with the United States. He notes that the importance of that alliance can not be publicly debated during a major operation (such as Afghanistan), but in less critical times the debate is forgotten.
Karen Middleton suggests it may be time for Australia to have that debate.
Richard Thwaites is a former foreign correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.