Eight years ago almost to the day, Australian soldiers Rick Milosevic, James Martin and Robert Poate were on deployment in Afghanistan at Patrol Base Wahab in Uruzgan. After an exhausting day of patrolling in over 50-degree heat, they returned inside the wire of the base they shared with their Afghan National Army allies.

Hekmatullah, an Afghan sergeant, moved about the bands of off-duty Australian soldiers playing cards to unwind after a trying day. He socialised with Aussies in the gym. He entered the Australian administration area, reconnoitring the area and studying force-protection measures like the piquet on duty. He left, because it was his turn to be on guard duty.

When Hekmatullah returned with his M-16 and a full ammunition clip, he closed in within five metres of the diggers playing cards and emptied his entire clip on our soldiers, killing three and wounding more. He escaped the base.

Hekmatullah later said he had decided to kill the Australians because a fellow Afghan army soldier showed him Taliban propaganda on his phone claiming to depict American troops burning the Koran. Another Afghan soldier saved many Aussies by refusing to lend Hekmatullah a machine gun, which would have enabled him to kill many more.

This ‘green on blue’ attack was part of an escalating campaign of Taliban insiders in the Afghan army (greens) killing international forces (blues, like our soldiers in this case). It was one of the darkest days of the Australian commitment to the war in Afghanistan. One hundred and forty coalition troops, including seven Australians, were killed in 85 such insider attacks.

Initially arrested by Pakistan, Hekmatullah was passed to Afghan authorities and sentenced to death, but he never received the death penalty. Last week, we learned that Hekmatullah, who has shown no remorse in prison and said he would do it again, was to be released by the Afghan government with the approval of the US as part of a broader peace deal.

The families of the three men killed by Hekmatullah have expressed their grief at news of his release. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Defence Minister Linda Reynolds raised Australia’s concern with their US counterparts at AUSMIN talks. Morrison has written to both US President Donald Trump and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani about Hekmatullah, and said, ‘Our position is that he should never be released’.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese and other opposition frontbenchers have called for the government to avoid a complete failure of diplomacy—which Hekmatullah’s release would absolutely be. Labor continues to call on all parties to reconsider Hekmatullah’s inclusion in this deal, in the interests of justice for the three victims and their families.

These events disturb me and, while I am not an expert on Afghanistan, in 2003 I provided security in Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban, to support the build-up of Afghan democratic institutions. Working with the Afghan Loya Jirga team on behalf of the United Nations mission, I saw a democratic process elect elders to go to Kabul to hammer out a constitution. This taught me a few things, one of which is that the Taliban, which are predominantly Pashtuns, observe a tribal system of justice called Pashtunwali.

Presumably, Hekmatullah is a Pashtun, in which case he must face justice under the principles of Pashtunwali. Of course, the Taliban have a history of using and abusing Pashtunwali as they see fit. But it’s worth pointing out that behaviour such as that displayed by Hekmatullah goes against the traditional institution of Pashtunwali.

Our three Australian soldiers, who were just playing cards and had caused no harm to Hekmatullah or others outside the base, were guests in Afghanistan invited to intervene not only according to international law but under core principles of Pashtun culture.

While the Taliban are majority Pashtun, so are their victims. Pashtun people have been the most devastated by almost 20 years of war. Hekmatullah’s murdering of three Aussie soldiers cannot be considered turrah (bravery) in Pashtun culture when melmastia (hospitality) and nanawati (protection) are even granted to your staunch enemy upon request.

The Afghan government must exclude the release of Hekmatullah on the basis of his actions. He is not just an ordinary Afghan who has wrongfully been captured and imprisoned. He is one of 400 hardened fighters and he has murdered Australian soldiers, not in battle but in a cold-blooded insider attack, and he is guilty beyond doubt, as courts have proven him to be.

I have made a commitment to Private Robert Poate’s father that I will fight for his son and his mates who never came home. The Afghan and Pakistani governments are not powerless to stop this. Neither are the Australian and US governments. All should do the right thing.

The prime minister needs to stop an unrepentant killer of Aussie diggers from walking free.

The judicial inquiry into claims that members of the Australian Defence Force committed war crimes in Afghanistan is now examining 55 separate incidents, most of which involve the alleged killing of unarmed civilians and prisoners.

The inquiry is also examining allegations of ‘cruel treatment’ of prisoners.

The inquiry was set up in May 2016 by the Inspector-General of the ADF, James Gaynor, at the request of the chief of the army to examine rumours and allegations that members of the Special Operations Task Group committed war crimes during deployments in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.

The inquiry is also considering the possibility that aspects of the organisational, operational and cultural environment enabled breaches of the law of armed conflict to occur.

It is clear from the information contained in the carefully worded IGADF annual report, tabled in parliament today, that that tangle of rumours has given way to significant amounts of firm evidence gathered in Australia and abroad from 338 witnesses.

In 2016, the then special forces commander, Major General Jeff Sengelman, is understood to have been concerned enough about the persistent allegations to have raised them with Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, who was then chief of the army. General Campbell, now chief of the ADF, is also a former special forces commander.

They commissioned a sociologist, Samantha Crompvoets, to interview soldiers from the special forces and other ADF units and members of agencies who worked with them to assess whether there were serious cultural issues in the units.

Crompvoets’s report confirmed that there appeared to be serious problems with the behaviour of some members of the Special Operations Task Group in Afghanistan that may have extended to unsanctioned and illegal violence.

Journalists had also been made aware of claims which emerged separately from former special forces members that Australians had killed unarmed civilians.

The ‘operational security’ cloak contributed to an unintended consequence of making it possible for individuals involved in questionable behaviour to keep it under wraps. Those who did object to actions they considered potentially illegal or immoral could find themselves ostracised or driven out of the unit for betraying their brothers.

This was an environment where the warrior’s experience in battle could mean more within the unit than the formal rank of more senior people outside it.

Campbell and Sengelman called in the IGADF, and New South Wales Supreme Court judge Paul Brereton, an army reserve officer, was appointed to head an inquiry with an initial brief to separate fact from fiction and to ascertain whether there was truth in the allegations.

In September 2017, Brereton made a public call for anyone with relevant information to come forward. An increasing number of former and serving soldiers responded.

The annual report stresses that the inquiry is not focused on decisions made in the ‘heat of battle’.

‘Rather, its focus is the treatment of persons who were clearly non-combatants or who were no longer combatants.’

The annual report says the inquiry is now approaching the final stages of evidence-taking concurrently with the drafting of sections of the inquiry report.

It says the inquiry’s task has been very difficult, not only because of the serious subject matter. ‘Most other inquiries commence following specific allegations where not only the incidents and events themselves but also potential witnesses are known or can be easily identified.

‘The starting point for the IGADF Afghanistan inquiry—vague rumours of special forces soldiers’ very serious wrongdoing over a period of more than 10 years—was much less well defined’, the annual report says.

‘The inquiry team had to find out what rumours there were, and then try to track each rumour through multiple witnesses and documentary records back to its source.’

The annual report also notes the difficulty of carrying out such an inquiry in the environment of deep operational secrecy that cloaks the activities of special forces units. ‘It has also taken some years for members of the special forces community—both those who continue to serve and former members—to develop sufficient confidence in the inquiry and the genuineness of Defence senior leadership’s desire to find out if the rumours are true, to be prepared to make disclosure to the inquiry.’

Gaining the confidence and trust of some of these witnesses, whose ADF careers have been spent in an environment in which secrecy is treated as fundamental, has required considerable effort and time, the annual report says.

As that had been progressively achieved, more witnesses had been prepared to disclose information and new evidence had continued to emerge. Some of that evidence resulted in new lines of inquiry and other material reinforced or corroborated existing lines of inquiry.

Even now, some witnesses were only just becoming willing to make disclosures.

‘Once evidence gathering is complete, given the seriousness of the allegations, there will necessarily have to be a rigorous procedural fairness process.’

Once the inquiry is complete, the IGADF will give its report to Campbell.

The report will be substantial and will include a summary and analysis of the evidence relevant to each significant line of inquiry and a conclusion as to whether there was evidence of a breach of the laws of armed conflict or other misconduct.

Where there is evidence of misconduct, the report will include ‘appropriate and nuanced’ recommendations, having regard to the evidence and its strength, for consideration by the chief of the ADF as to what action should be taken to address that misconduct.

The report will also include a review of the structural, operational, command and cultural environment in which these acts may have occurred and which may have enabled them, and recommend measures to addresses them to minimise any risk of recurrence.

The report is intended to provide closure for Special Operations Command by exposing past misconduct ‘where appropriate to do so’, enabling it to be considered separate from but informing the present and future development of the command.

It is also intended to ‘provide closure for the many serving and former soldiers who have lived with concerns about the subject matter of these rumours for many years’.

If there’s a reassuring aspect of what has allegedly happened, it’s that the atrocity allegations were exposed in large part by other members of the units horrified by what a small minority were getting away with. In some cases, witnesses within the ADF suffered serious mental health consequences that drove them to leave the ADF or to redeploy within it.

There’s been a lot going on in Australia’s near region this week, the closest of which is the continuing conflict in the Philippine city of Marawi. RAAF Orion surveillance aircraft are already providing intelligence support to the Philippines, but it’s possible that we’ll soon see more of an ADF presence on the ground—albeit limited to advisory and training roles. The director of IPAC Jakarta, Sidney Jones, has some thoughts about the conflict’s effects on the Mindanao peace process, and hints that President Duterte’s war on drugs could ignite a second insurgency: the Communist NPA. On that note, the Guardian has published some new photojournalism on the impacts of the Philippine drug war.

Slightly further afield, North Korea continued to be a thorn in the side of pretty much everyone by launching a missile through Japanese airspace. Residents of the Tohoku region of Japan were advised to seek shelter. There’s some discussion of whether Japan’s and America’s ballistic missile defence capabilities in the area could or should have shot the missile down at high altitude, but it flew well past Japan, anyway. Interestingly, the US Navy did complete a test to shoot down a ‘complex’ medium-range ballistic missile target a day later.

Not all the regional news has been bad; things have calmed down in the Doklam dispute between India and China. The foreign policy wonks are out in force, asking questions about what it all means for the future. A trio of pieces at The Diplomat examine the affair from multiple angles: what China learned about India; how India is discovering its own assertiveness; and what it all means for the BRICS summit next week. Meanwhile, the head of the ANU’s National Security College, Rory Medcalf, asks ‘who won?’ And a piece at War on the Rocks wonders what the rest of us can learn about countering Chinese coercion in the future.

Moving on to more thematic matters, women’s roles in terrorism and violent extremism are getting an increased amount of attention. This week, Monash University presented the executive summary of its upcoming report exploring the links between women’s roles and perceptions, gender relations and extremist violence. The evidence-based research—collected across four sites in Indonesia—provides a list of recommendations for policymakers working in the prevention/countering of violent extremism space with a specific focus on gender.

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, there have been a number of pieces documenting the rise of the far right. This piece from Jamie Bartlett explains how the anti-establishment, revolutionary subcultures of the internet and the far right are inherently sympathetic to each other. Social network companies are clamping down on the far right, which means we have to be ready for where their forums end up in the future.

Carnegie comes in with a fantastic op-ed analysing the rising global middle class. It’s well worth a read to get a comprehensive understanding of how middle classes have grown at different rates in different places, and what the economic and political consequences of that growth may be.

This piece from The Intercept deals with tricky questions about post-disaster reconstruction and the bodies responsible for doling out the dosh. Recovery and rebuilding in the wake of Hurricane Harvey will reignite a longstanding row between the National Flood Insurance Program and various environmental councils, who’ve long argued that the program ‘encourages irresponsible forms of coastal development’.

In a rather bleak, but incredibly worthwhile, read, The Guardian dissects the story of a young Parisian teenager who live-streamed her own suicide on Periscope (a social media platform). It presents the effects of ‘trite uncaring relations’ between people and the monotony of life. It highlights the hollow ‘meditisation’ of the social media generation and the paradox of sharing inane personal information and the desperation of accompanying fame.

Podcasts

There’s a pair of new podcasts from CSIS. The new episode of CSIS’s flagship podcast discusses the Trump administration’s new Afghanistan policy. And this week’s Smart Women, Smart Power podcast discusses the challenges of geopolitical forecasting, covering elections, conflicts and artificial intelligence.

Episode 12 of Pacific Pundit, titled ‘Conspiracy theories, devil’s bargains, and Asian security’, looks at multiple topics of interest to Australian listeners, including US–China relations and Singaporean politics. There’s a fascinating couple of minutes on how the ‘Taft–Katsura agreement’ of 1905 factors into Korean strategic culture today, despite there being no actual policy element to it.

Video

A new episode of ‘Military history visualized’ looks at the impacts of Stalin’s Great Purge (1936–38) on the Red Army. The loss of experienced leadership and plummeting morale had profound impacts on the Soviet defence against the German invasion (10 mins).

CSIS has a great explainer video on how US satellite and radar systems would detect and track a North Korean missile launched at Guam, and what capabilities might be available to shoot such a missile down (3 mins).

And just because we can, here’s a calming five-minute video of views over the Atacama Desert. Beautiful landscapes and incredible views of the night sky, all in 4K resolution.

Events

Canberra: The Australian Women Peace and Security Coalition is hosting two roundtable discussions in Canberra on what WPS means in practice for Australia and the Asia–Pacific. The first is tomorrow morning (the 2nd) and the other is on the evening of 12 September.

Melbourne: There’s a free public lecture on multidisciplinary approaches to cybersecurity at the University of Melbourne next Tuesday evening.

Sydney: The National Security College at the ANU is taking registrations for a 12 September event on foreign interference, citing examples like the allegations of Russian interference in America’s 2016 election.

The appalling carnage in the Middle East and Afghanistan hasn’t dampened the appetite for war. It would be absurd to lay the total blame on the US and its allies for those calamities. They faced real threats. Still, the US-led West appears to have won little for the immense expenditure of resources. The main issue those countries now face is what have the democracies lost?

The legitimacy of allied military actions has been hotly debated since 2001. After 9/11 there was a robust justification for the military intervention in Afghanistan. The subsequent 2003 invasion of Iraq is held to have been either within international law or illegal. There were, on the other hand, sound arguments for the reluctant return to combat in Iraq in 2014 to protect the Yazidis and US personnel, and to Syria in response to ISIS atrocities. A rough cost benefit sum might question the strategic return.

The amount of national treasure expended by the US on the war on terror is astonishing.The US has spent an estimated US$4.79 trillion in current dollars between 2001 and 2017 ‘on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria and on Homeland Security’. Add to that the long term individual and societal burden from the veterans of those conflicts. What has been achieved?

Sixteen years later, in January 2017, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported to Congress that ‘reconstruction remains tenuous and incomplete’ and that the risks associated with corruption and the ongoing weakness in the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) mean that ‘reconstruction efforts could ultimately fail, to the detriment of our national-security goals in Afghanistan’. That’s a significant admission of failure as up until 2016, Congress had appropriated US$70.6 billion to support the ANDSF—60% of the total Afghan reconstruction budget since 2002.

There will be no Marshall Plan for the Middle East. The West cannot afford it. For decades to come millions of people displaced by war will struggle to survive in areas where infrastructure and productive capacity have been destroyed. Nearly half a million Syrians have died in their civil war and the fight against ISIS to date and 11 million people have been displaced, 6.3 million internally and 5.3 million have fled the country. Half of those are children. 10% of the refugees have gone to Europe. By the end of 2015, 4.4 million Iraqis had been displaced internally and over a quarter of a million were refugees. The picture is repeated in Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen.

Across the region the physical destruction is only overshadowed by the tragic loss of human capital. The long term impact on children of the trauma of war in the Middle East and Afghanistan will be significant. The world can look forward to a generation of children who have grown up with a legacy of loss of family, friends and neighbours, shattered communities, no access to adequate health or education, or employment. They will grow up amongst the rubble in a region still marred by vicious sectarian and ethnic rivalries, and struggles by regional and external powers for influence and control. And those that come to maturity in this shattered world will be no less susceptible to inflammatory rhetoric about crusaders and infidels.

In strategic terms, it isn’t sensible to look back with regret or remorse. But it is a useful exercise to learn lessons for future conflicts. The vast investment in the War on Terror has almost certainly created the potential conditions that will give rise to the next wave of violence in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

The new tactical approach won’t help to stem the contagion. It’s not the returning foreign fighters that pose the greatest risk; surely intelligence and security agencies can track and manage them. It’s the new tactic of annihilation and deliberate killing of foreign fighters in the Middle East, combined with treating civilian casualties as an unfortunate externality, that’s the problem. That will bring home the sense of loss and feelings of injustice and resentment to ethnic communities in Europe, US and elsewhere that already feel discriminated against. Home-grown extremism will become more entrenched.

However, at the end of a decade and a half of war, will the Western democracies retain the resilience needed to resist extremism and anti-liberal anti-democratic forces? Commitment to many civil liberties, human rights and previously unquestioned values like habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence and the right to a trial has waned already. The imposition of constraints on democratic rights in the interest of the security of citizens has been a necessity. However, it’s possible to preserve or reclaim some values that distinguish Western democracies from barbarians and extremists.

The way NATO and coalition partners conduct the closing stages of the conflict; the integrity they display in their adherence to the rules of war, international law and norms; and the concern they show for the civilian populations will be crucial. It would be a great statement if, wherever possible, foreign fighters were tried for their war crimes in open courts—simultaneously exposing their criminal ideologies and the West’s commitment to justice.

A small opportunity exists to exhibit the alternative to the fanatical creeds the West has been fighting. There’s a chance to convert military victory in the field into a victory of values. But pass up that opportunity, and the West will have lost.

On 6 September, 2001, a bunch of journalists and military officers met at the National Press Club in Canberra to discuss why the military and media don’t get along.

The Australian Defence Force had media problems and wanted to talk to hacks.

The meeting launched ‘an ad hoc working group discussing military-media relations during ADF operations.’

We hacks assembled under the umbrella of the C.E.W. Bean Foundation. The military were from Defence Public Relations.

The media shambles of East Timor in 1999 was a wakeup call for Defence. Hacks had turned up in Dili from all over the world. Suddenly Defence discovered it didn’t have a system for Oz journos, much less all the other hacks.

The 6 September minutes summarised the hack view:

‘There were lessons learned by the media during the East Timor operation, with only limited access available to ADF assets. Arrangements were ad hoc at best and often badly organised.’

The Defence response:

‘Defence acknowledges that it is at a cross roads in its operational relationship with media. Defence also acknowledges that its existing policies as applied during East Timor are in need of overhaul with many lessons being learnt… Defence acknowledges that it has not embedded media arrangements into its current operational doctrine with existing policy dating back to the late 1980s.’

Defence promised ‘a major overhaul of its operational arrangements for working with media’ within 12 months, covering:

• survival training for hacks;
• a new media accreditation process for operations; and,
• new ‘cooperative arrangements for the handling of information in the field.’

Fifteen years later, it’s still a useful ‘to do’ list.

The working group laboured for a year. Good people in Defence pushed. The hacks leaned in. Big events overwhelmed the effort.

Five days after that first meeting at the Press Club, the planes hit the towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

The terrorism decade dawned.

Afghanistan happened and then Iraq. What didn’t happen was a rethink of the way Defence deals with media.

Instead, the control on ADF information out of Afghanistan was ‘draconian’. Those controls were imposed and policed from Canberra by Defence and the Minister’s office.

The ‘draconian’ view is from an ADF commander in the Middle East. The quote is in this column describing Defence media policy as shut ‘em up or shut ‘em out.

The stated reasons for secrecy and control are to protect lives and operations. The unstated reasons are political advantage, embarrassment protection and a diet of government-approved messages.

Come down the chain of command to get the Afghanistan perspective of Andrew Bird, who served as a media adviser and left the Army after eight years with the rank of Major. Bird told The Age:

‘The way that we communicated is all government-centric. It just relayed the Minister’s and Prime Minister’s message, reinforcing the government’s message. Every image we took, every interview we did and every bit of vision … was to support the government’s view.’

Australians weren’t told what their troops experienced. Former Chief of Army, Peter Leahy:

‘Apart from occasional glimpses of their work, centred around big battles and visiting politicians, we didn’t see much of what the Diggers were doing. Along with Iraq, Afghanistan must be one of the most little reported wars in Australia’s military history. The military, the government and the media can share the blame. They might argue over who was most at fault, but the end result is that a substantial slab of the Australian Army’s history has not been told.’

In response, Thom Cookes wrote it was disingenuous to lament Afghanistan’s untold story when the ADF kept journalists away:

‘The ADF’s public relations bureaucracy is so risk averse that getting even the most basic information on what was happening in Afghanistan often proved to be impossible. Simply confirming information we already knew either took months, or was deemed to be a “breach of operational security”. Many of the most enterprising Australian journalists went straight to the Dutch and US forces, who were far more candid and confident in their dealings with the media.’

While the ‘ad hoc’ talking started in 2001, it wasn’t until 2009 that the ADF even trialled a journalist embed system in Afghanistan.

In a study of the ADF’s approach to embedding journalists—aptly titled ‘Herding Cats’—Lieutenant Colonel Jason Logue commented that the Australian deployment to Afghanistan in 2001 and in the Middle East from 2003 ‘highlighted the ADF’s lack of capacity and intent to effectively support the media in areas of operation that were far from home.’

Reflecting on Army service in Afghanistan, James Brown wrote that a vacuum of information and understanding was created by a Defence culture unwilling to engage with the media and a political culture obsessed with controlling the media cycle.

The only narrative the Australian public received, Brown argued, was the return of the bodies of dead soldiers. No surprise, then, that popular support for the mission evaporated.

By 2013, the Lowy Institute opinion survey found a majority of Australians (61%) considered that the Afghanistan war was ‘not worth fighting’. Only 35% said the war was worthwhile.

The shut-up/shut-out instincts of Defence (and its political masters) triumphed in Afghanistan.

Many officers were deeply frustrated by draconian controls. But back in Canberra, Defence and the Minister were satisfied. So, game won, then? As media strategy, this worked. Defence just needs to repeat the recipe.

Such a conclusion would misunderstand Afghanistan’s lessons. Shut-up/shut-out made Canberra comfortable but failed to convince Australia. Control triumphed over communication.

More than hacks were unhappy. Defence’s policy eroded popular support. Australians embraced the Diggers while hating a mission they knew little about.

Australia’s longest war would always be unpopular. Yet unlike Vietnam, both sides of Oz politics remained committed throughout. The politicians argued the cause while Defence stifled the facts. In this game, silence ain’t golden—it’s a vacuum.

The communications/media failures in Afghanistan are a case study in how to create a vacuum. This history offers many lessons.

Defence today isn’t prepared for the great digital disruption and a Media Age consuming the old media verities—it’s almost as unprepared as it was back in September, 2001.