Why were we in Afghanistan?

Australia was in Afghanistan from October 2001 till 2021 with a brief pause in 2002. Prime Minister John Howard invoked Article IV of the ANZUS Treaty in support of Australia’s involvement—the only time the Treaty has been invoked. Article IV says that an attack on any other party would be treated as an attack on our own peace and security. Afghanistan has never attacked either the United States or Australia so, even if you accept the ANZUS treaty, the Howard governments actions were invalid. So too were the actions of subsequent Australian governments.

Pre and post 9/11, western democracies authorised the invasion of several countries and sent troops to occupy them. The military industrial complex made huge profits. In Iraq and Libya companies swapped blood for oil. Superannuation schemes in Queensland (e.g. QSuper) invest in the arms trade corporations. Evidence in Roberts-Smith v Fairfax Media Publications Pty Limited demonstrate that arms dealing corporations (e.g. Rheinmettal Defence Australia, Boeing Defence Australia, GM Defence UGL Pty Ltd) rub shoulders with representatives inside the Federal Parliament.

SAS war crimes

In 2014, Greg Rolles, Tim Webb. Sam Quinlan, and Dave Sprigg were brutally assaulted by SAS soldiers on Swan Island, a highly secretive training base off the coast of Victoria. Evidence suggest that these corporations have close relationships with senior military, e.g. Vice Admiral Ray Griggs, who claimed that “SAS assaults on protestors at Swan Island ‘reasonable’“. It can also be inferred from the evidence that Vice Admiral Ray Griggs had intimate knowledge of the affairs of Ben Roberts-Smith (Para 2067 Roberts-Smith v Fairfax Media Publications Pty Limited). The protestors at Swam Island SAS base were hooded, stripped naked, threatened with rape and drowning, dragged along the ground kicked and walked on. They were so bullied and threatened during subsequent court proceedings, eventually they signed a non-disclosure agreement with the authorities.

Media focused on the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan ignoring the inevitable war crimes. Courts looked into the murders. It is little wonder the people in those countries sought to drive out the US and its partners. In Australia there is just one finding against an individual soldier for war crimes when we have all been tainted with acts done in our name. This account relies heavily on the judgement of Anthony Besanko appointed to the Federal Court of Australia by attorney general, Phillip Ruddock, in 2006. Judge Besanko is also the chief justice of Norfolk Island and the ACT. Australian police and soldiers have a long history and are expert at deaths in custody of the unarmed and defenceless. There is nearly always a racist element to the killing.

It was Wikileakes that reported the unlawful killing of civilians in their 2010 release of the Afghan war logs. Chris Masters is the hero of the Australian Press for exposing SAS war crimes, meanwhile Assange is cooling his heels in Belmarsh prison awaiting deportation to a hellhole in the United States.

The court findings of assault, murder, war crimes by Ben Roberts-Smith

“I think the best thing I can say to people is to reiterate the words of Ben Roberts-Smith, our most recent VC (Victoria Cross) winner, he said to me and he said to the nation, ‘We are making a difference in Afghanistan’. Progress is being made.” – Prime Minister Julia Gillard, 24 May 2011 in Australia reaffirms commitment to Afghanistan.

I have read Judge Besanko’s 736 page judgement in the defamation trial Roberts-Smith v Fairfax Media Publications Pty Limited. The judge’s rulings are detailed and comprehensive no doubt assisted by the findings against Roberts-Smith by the earlier Brereton inquiry which was much redacted. Judge Besanko found it necessary to hold parts of the hearings in camera to protect what he called ‘national security’. He wrote two judgements, the one I have read and a second, secret one excluding these so called security matters. I find this puzzling given that Australia’s military adventure in Afghanistan came to an abrupt end after their ignominious defeat at the hands of the Taliban in 2021. It is clear that the Australian military and the governments that put them in Afghanistan lost their way a long time ago. I suppose the judge was most constrained by the nature of his inquiry. It was a defamation trial, essentially between two media empires and the ABC. Channel Seven on Ben Roberts-Smith side and Fairfax Media Publications Pty Limited (Channel Nine) and the ABC on Chris Masters’ team.

I know little of the field of battle despite having been inducted into compulsory service in army cadets at school where, as a 14 year old, I learnt how to shoot WWII .303 rifles and Owen machine guns. At 15, I was put in charge of the school armoury which contained many weapons. I disliked my stint in the army cadets and sought ways to get out. Eventually I did so by offering to do weekly service at a soup kitchen run by St Vincent de Paul society in lieu of my military service. At that time Australia was in the throes of another American military adventure in Vietnam. A war which I opposed, even as a schoolboy. It is hard for me with such limited knowledge to understand the conduct of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan but I realise this much, many of them were there for economic reasons, they had limited employment opportunities in Australia.

Nevertheless I have no reason to doubt the findings of Judge Besanko against Roberts-Smith and his mates. I do know a little about other aspects of the judge’s findings. He spent a lot of time (100 pages) dealing with a domestic violence issue where Roberts-Smith was accused of bullying and punching his lover. To protect her identity, the judge referred to the woman as person 17. I agree with the judge’s analysis of facts in that matter, facts which were murky and complex. At one stage there was conflict where Roberts-Smith was bullying his lover to get an abortion. Although not mentioned in the judgement, termination of pregnancy was still illegal in Queensland. Hence doctors at hospitals like Greenslopes Private Hospital and Townsville Base hospital would not perform abortions for fear of criminal conviction. There was a clinic at Greenslopes that did perform abortions under a common law loophole in the Criminal code. Person 17, under pressure from Roberts-Smith, initially claimed to have had a termination at Greenslopes. Roberts-Smith paid an ex-Qld copper to put his lover under surveillance and discovered that her claim that she had an abortion at Greenslopes Private Hospital to be false. Person 17 then claimed to have had a termination at Townsville Base hospital. Even Roberts-Smith knew this was not possible. It turned out person 17 had a miscarriage. This whole sordid affair did shed light on Roberts-Smith’s character but had little if anything to do with numerous murders committed by SAS soldiers in Afghanistan.

In his judgement Besanko wrote: “However, the applicant (Roberts-Smith) said to Person 17 that if she did anything stupid or turned on the applicant, he would burn her house down and “it might not be you that get’s hurt, but people that you love and care about.” – Para 2115.

The judge managed to navigate the lies and deceits by this couple and I agree with his finding:

“In my opinion, if the assault took place, the likely explanation is that the applicant was very
angry at the way in which Person 17 behaved that night (at an awards ceremony in parliament house). At the same time, to frame the issue in terms of whether the applicant took the “opportunity” presented, as the respondents appeared to submit, seems to me to distract attention from the real issue.“

Fourteen (14) years after war crimes were committed by Australia’s most decorated soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith, this Australian court ruled that the SAS veteran is a murderer. The judgement was part of a defamation action by Ben Roberts-Smith against the media, not part of a criminal trial. Roberts-Smith has never been charged with murder even though it has been long known by his superior officers that he a murderer. Only one soldier has been charged for multiple murders committed by SAS troops in Afghanistan. From 2006 till 2014 Australian SAS were involved in a spate of unauthorised murders as part of an occupation led by the United States.

Canadian troops have long been accused of involvement in the torture of Afghan prisoners. In 2009, WikiLeaks published an internal Bundeswehr (German army) field report of a massacre in the Afghan province of Kunduz, which resulted in the deaths of up to 142 people, including “children and adolescents.” Both governments in Canada and Germany sought to cover up these and other war crimes involving the death of thousands of civilians. British troops have been murdering Afghans since 1839 having suffered humiliating defeat in that country. Even Tories don’t like sending their sons and daughters there, so they were pretty upset when Blair signed up for not one but two wars alongside the Americans. Bush and Co. concocted some pretty flimsy reasons for this latest US military adventure. It lasted over 20 years and saw out three US Presidents until the Americans and their ‘coalition’ were driven out.

The United States routinely made air and drone strikes against civilian targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So much so that former President Imran Khan led a movement against the killings in Pakistan that resulted in him being ousted from office by the military and placed illegally under house arrest. President Obama routinely authorised extra-judicial killings by drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

One of the best known war crimes during the American war in Vietnam was the My Lai Massacre. First Lieutenant William L. “Rusty” Calley, Jr., and his platoon murdered at least 300 Vietnamese civilians (and perhaps as many as 500) at a small South Vietnamese sub-hamlet called My Lai. One little known aspect of that war crime, was the helicopter pilot who landed between Calley’s platoon and the villagers to prevent further massacres from happening. A US soldier in the helicopter said: “Then we saw a young girl about twenty years old lying on the grass. We could see that she was unarmed and wounded in the chest. We marked her with smoke because we saw a squad not too far away. The smoke was green, meaning it’s safe to approach. Red would have meant the opposite. We were hovering six feet off the ground not more than twenty feet away when Captain Medina came over, kicked her, stepped back, and finished her off. He did it right in front of us. When we saw Medina do that, it clicked. It was our guys doing the killing.” Calley was never brought to justice. Calley was released from house arrest under orders by President Richard Nixon three days after his conviction.

Media wars

Chris Masters was one of the main respondents in Australia’s biggest defamation trial. Outside the court after hearing the judge’s verdict against Australia’s most decorated soldier, Masters used the classic ‘bad apple‘ defence on behalf of the Australian military. According to Masters, Ben Roberts-Smith was found to have committed war crimes, but good people in the armed forces came forward to dob him in for war crimes. This was a sickening and extraordinary statement in view of the findings that 25 SAS soldiers participated in the unlawful killing of 39 people. It is at odds with the judge’s findings. For example Judge Besanko relied heavily on Afghan witnesses to determine that Ben Roberts-Smith and two other Australian soldiers murdered Ali Jan on 11 September 2012. It was evidence from the Afghan witnesses (Mohammed Hanifa, Mangul Rahmi, Shahzada Fatih) that led the judge to conclude Roberts-Smith and his accomplices were liars and murderers. Despite this, Chris Masters had this one-eyed view of soldiers employed in Australia’s occupation of Oruzgan Province in Afghanistan:

“I don’t want people to think of this as a bad day for Australian soldiers. I think of those soldiers that not only had physical courage, but also moral courage, Nick and I know them well, we’ve spent a lot of time with them. And, you know, I’m proud that they’re out there that as journalists, we can make Australian people who are prepared to tell a difficult truth and stand up to it. – Chris Masters, Australia’s most famous investigative journalist outside the court on 1 June 2023. Masters credits include: The “Big League” , French Connections – Sinking of the Rainbow warrior, The Moonlight State, Jonestown: The Power and the Myth of Alan Jones, No Front Line: Australia’s Special Forces at War in Afghanistan.

None of the war crimes committed by Australian troops comes as any surprise to even the most cursory observer of soldiers’ conduct in their occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. In September 2009, I spent a day with an Iraqi family that had been shot and brutalised by Australian soldiers in Baghdad, not far from the Green line. On 1 April 2005, a senior military officer attended their home and gave them two envelopes.  The first envelope contained $3,000US for their 8 year old child shot and the second contained $4,700US for the child’s mother. Her daughter told me this: “the soldier was drunk but the rest is a dream, it couldn’t happen, Mum’s body shielded mine. I took refuge behind her and then the car was full of blood.“

The family had noticed four soldiers on the road near the Australian High Commission (in Baghdad) in their homeland Iraq. They stopped their car. It was then an Australian soldier fired into their car causing horrific injury and terror for their family for rest of their lives.

Do the families of the Australian soldiers who get killed in their occupation of other countries ever think about how Iraqi parents must feel about their kids being shot by soldiers of occupation forces? Australians are racist‘ said the girl’s younger brother with one eye that cannot look straight because of a bullet wound inflicted by the drunken soldier who is now based at Enoggera army barracks and never the subject of an inquiry like that of Ben Roberts-Smith.

A Taliban spokesperson told the ABC that these murders by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan were just a ‘drop in the ocean‘.

At no point has the media challenged the court decision to conduct much of the proceedings in camera. What did go on inside the closed court? Chris Masters knows, but is he telling?

So what is the best Australian governments have to offer as their defence of the killings? One argument is that it is to protect Afghani women. How is bombing and executing Afghani civilians possibly helping the women of Afghanistan?

I have been critical of the reporting of Chris Masters but the same could be said of the Australian media generally. They never asked the critical questions necessary and were often sidetracked into meaningless personal and sordid tales of an extra-marital affair by Ben Roberts-Smith with a woman denoted in the court record as Person 17. Nearly 100 pages of Judge Besanko judgement is devoted to this affair. This also reflects badly on the court and the administration of justice that war crimes are pooled with trivia about who was having sex with whom. It is a reflection of the superficiality of a society and the type of people who are attracted to serve and run the armed forces. At what point did Roberts-Smith’s superiors decide enough is enough and why? Worse still the Channel 7 network owned by Kerry Stokes not only underwrote the $$Ms Roberts-Smith’s has incurred in legal expenses but also paid the legal costs of his witnesses whom the court found were less than truthful in their support of Roberts-Smith. According to the judgement (Para 2389) Person 11 received approx $125,000; Person 5 received approximately $65,000; and Person 35 received approximately $86,000 is for legal work done on their behalf. These three people conspired with Roberts-Smith to cover up murders, assaults and war crimes.

The judicial examination of the Roberts-Smith war crimes over a period of more than 14 years never questions what possible reason Australian governments had for being there and how the war on terror was really a war of terror on the people of Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. Without an moral authority for being there it is little wonder our troops and their political backers were driven out.

Ian Curr
5 June 2023

Federal Court judgement against Roberts-Smith

Podcast including judges comments and journos response outside the court

Click to access J230555.pdf