afghanistan
13 Oct 2009
What Does The Australian Military Have To Hide?
Compared to the other Western nations fighting in Afghanistan, Australia is notoriously secretive about its military operations, writes foreign correspondent John Martinkus
In the five reporting trips I have made to Afghanistan for SBS TV since 2005, my relationship with the Australian military reached a laughably low moment in a Stanley-and-Livingstone-type encounter I had with two Australian soldiers in the office of the then Governor of Uruzgan, Abdul Munib, in May 2006.I was setting up for an interview with the Governor, having made the perilous trip from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt by road. This meant that to avoid being identified as a foreigner by the many Taliban in the area I was dressed in the local attire and sported the customary beard. At this moment, two Australian officers and an American, all bearing weapons and wearing body armour, were ushered into the office. The Governor, who must have known that the visitors were expected, then mischievously introduced me to the military men as an Australian reporter from SBS. The look on the faces of the Australians was one of utter shock and panic.
As I stood up, introduced myself and extended my hand, they turned on their heels and walked quickly out of the room leaving their embarrassed US colleague to stammer, "you must understand, we have very strict rules with the press". But my experiences in Afghanistan the previous year, and in Iraq the year before suggested that those rules only applied to the Australian media's contact with its own military, not the normally verbose Americans.
What followed was even more ridiculous. As I was leaving the building to accompany the Governor on a quick tour of the local hospital, the Australians were still outside and I tried to talk to them both on and off camera. When I approached them they ran away from me. All I got was a few shaky shots of two heavily armed soldiers in full flight and myself pursuing them in a style reminiscent of A Current Affair: "excuse me sir, excuse me, can I just ask one question?"
The fact that I, a commissioned reporter for a publicly funded, internationally renowned current affairs program, Dateline, could not get the officers in charge of establishing what would become Australia's most dangerous and significant military deployment since Vietnam to say one word to camera showed how absurdly secretive the ADF had become in its relations with the Australian media.
I had been sent to Afghanistan in April and May 2006 with the brief to get as much information as possible and film a story about the area where the Australians were to be based in Tarin Kowt. Advance personnel, I knew, were already there as well as SAS members. I didn't bother approaching the SAS knowing that any request for an interview would be refused, but I did try repeatedly to go through ADF Public Affairs to assist me with a military flight and possibly an interview with the non-SAS officers already there. They ignored all of my requests.
The fact I had no cooperation from the Australians led me to request an embed with the Canadians who had taken over control of Kandahar province in February 2006. My logic was simple: if I could not go to Tarin Kowt I would simply do a report on the situation faced by the Canadians in neighbouring Kandahar. The Canadians approved my request within a few days and I joined the sizeable Canadian press corps at their base in town. The Canadians, with a 2500-personnel deployment, had a permanent presence of reporters and technical support staff from CBC Television and CBC Radio News, CTV News, Global Television, The National Post, the Canadian Press wire service, The Globe and Mail, and The Toronto Star, who had a journalist embedded with troops at a forward operating base north of Kandahar, as well as a few freelancers covering other outlets.
The contrast with the Australians could not have been more stark and the Canadian officer in charge of the embed expressed dismay that I wasn't allowed to go and cover the Australians. That same officer later told me that after I turned up in Tarin Kowt the Australian military called him demanding to know why he had allowed me to leave the embed to go there. He had replied that I could do whatever I wanted to and if I was anybody's responsibility I should be theirs.
As I settled down in the Canadian camp my local fixer called to tell me that a police-escorted convoy would be going from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt early the following morning, providing a reasonably safe means of getting there. Before dawn the following day the fixer picked me up from the Canadians' base. We joined the convoy and headed out of town. The convoy consisted of about 40 fuel trucks from Pakistan, and the escort my fixer had talked about was two ute-loads of police with heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. They positioned themselves at the front of the convoy and we tried to stay close. On a road well known for ambushes, kidnappings and executions of anyone the Taliban believed to be supporting the Afghan government, this didn't feel like a very secure way to travel!
We arrived in Tarin Kowt safely but quickly realised just how small an area was then controlled by the government. Doctors at the hospital, the police chief and the governor all related how they could not travel more than two kilometres from the centre of town without fear of attack from the Taliban. Each of them lived in and worked out of guarded compounds. Was that what the ADF were trying to hide from the public?
In fact, the ADF were much more sensitive about the operations the Australian SAS were conducting at the time and the civilian casualty figures that resulted. This was an issue that came up repeatedly in my discussions with locals. Unfortunately much of the information they provided about these incidents was unverifiable due to the problem of my being unable to visit the districts where these operations were taking place. They were firmly under Taliban control and even the local police did not go there. I was, however, left in no doubt that in the course of SAS operations substantial numbers of Afghan civilians were being killed and injured.
Unable to spend the night at the nearby military base I was forced to accept the hospitality of the Governor, a former Taliban Minister who was still on a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees wanted list for crimes committed under the Taliban regime. He had only been appointed a few months before. His predecessor, Jan Mohammad Khan, Governor of Uruzgan from January 2002 to March 2006, had been sacked for corruption and abuse of power and was now making life difficult for his successor. When he was dismissed he had taken all the government weapons and vehicles, distributed them to his people and told them to fight the government.
As night fell everybody in the Governor's compound carried a weapon, and boys as young as 15 manned the walls. Gunfire continued to sound in the surrounding neighbourhoods. Explosions could be heard all night. It was rumoured that the Taliban and the followers of Jan Mohammad had retaken the town, and as a result nobody ventured out. Beyond the confines of the town, explosions and gunfire could be heard coming from the direction of the main base where, from what local people told me, the foreign troops, including the Australians, never ventured out. It truly was a town under siege every night.
Why were the ADF so reluctant back then to allow reporters into Camp Holland, their base at Tarin Kowt? Was it that they were instructed to downplay the seriousness of the situation in Tarin Kowt so there would be less public opposition to the deployment? Was it their fear of being accused of indifference to civilian casualties in their ongoing operations? Or was it just the culture of secrecy, the fear of being quoted in the press that I had encountered with the Australian troops in Iraq in 2004?
I really don't know the answer to that question. When I made my report for Dateline in Australia a few weeks later, I concluded that this Afghanistan deployment would be the one where the ADF — which had had such luck in avoiding casualties in Iraq — would be likely to suffer a number of casualties. I was criticised for that prediction as somehow supporting the other side or wishing harm upon the troops. Far from it. The lack of government control around Tarin Kowt had scared me and I had realised how big a job was ahead for the Australians and how exposed they were.
So you can imagine my surprise when, returning to Kabul in January 2007 to organise an embed with the British forces, I was discouraged from covering them by the NATO press officer — who, incidentally, was Australian — in favour of doing an embed with the Australians in Tarin Kowt. For whatever reason, whether it was pressure on the ADF to open up, a desire for more favourable publicity from Afghanistan to justify higher troop levels, or maybe just a desire to get the ADF back on Australian television, Australian policy had done a complete turnaround. The ADF were now doing their utmost to ensure that I went down to Tarin Kowt and filmed Australian, not British, operations.
Embedding with the Australians was very different from my experiences with the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the US forces in Baghdad in 2004, and even in 2005 in Afghanistan's remote Kunar province, I received my press pass from headquarters, made some enquiries and was given the contact of the public affairs officer at the base where I wanted to go. I then arranged a time when he or she would meet me at the gate to the compound, and so my embed would begin. Often with the US forces I was asked what I wanted to film: a patrol, a raid, or whatever they were doing. I was then assigned to a sergeant, or at most a lieutenant, who took me out with his squad. The US troops almost always answered the questions I asked them on camera and explained what they were doing and why. I was often ignored by the officer assigned to look after me. This worked for both parties. He had more important matters to take care of, and I just wanted to film what was happening around me.
When I embedded with the Australians I was escorted by no less than a Major who was with me 24 hours a day for the whole week. We slept in the same room, generally ate our meals together, and he came out on patrol with me. In one sense this made the trip a lot smoother. We had good luck catching flights from Kabul to Kandahar and on to Tarin Kowt and back. We slept in beds, not on the floor in transit tents which is usually what happens to journalists with the US forces. But the flip side of this privileged access to transport and other facilities was that because the Major was always present I couldn't help feeling that the comments I was getting to camera, particularly from the enlisted men, were the ones that they perceived the Major would like them to make. With the Australian troops, unlike their US counterparts, there was a strong sense that they could be reprimanded for what they said on camera.
On the other hand I found the average Australian soldier a lot better informed about the society and political situation in Afghanistan than his or her US counterpart. I was also impressed by the way they handled the local population. One particular incident that stuck in my mind was the disarming of a man found with a pistol. He had a Police ID card from the district of Chora, which had been falling in and out of Taliban control since my last visit. This was done in a professional manner with none of the unnecessary aggression I have seen many American troops use in similar circumstances. The man was given the benefit of the doubt and allowed on his way.
Back at Kandahar airfield I was also given very good access to the Australian Army's Chinook Helicopters and their crews, and I filmed a second story detailing their work. As for filming any of the Commandos or Special Forces troops who are the ones carrying out aggressive operations, as the Major put it, "not a snowflake's chance in hell". The fact is, though, that throughout the entire Australian involvement in Afghanistan, the majority of the fighting has been done by SAS troops and Commandos. We in the press are never allowed to even know about these operations let alone cover them until long after they have taken place or if they have resulted in Australian casualties.
Major actions have been and continue to take place without any information at all being released to the press and the Australian public until well after the event, if at all. The only information we get is filtered through second-hand accounts given to "friendly" journalists such as News Limited's Ian McPhedran. Nothing approaching real, factual and balanced reporting of these ongoing and significant operations is possible given the current constraints on press access to these units.
In many ways the blame for the current culture of secrecy in the Australian military could be laid at the feet of the Howard government who, particularly in Iraq, were able to enjoy the prestige and benefits accruing from the US alliance without suffering any of the downsides of having to explain away Australian casualties. Australian troops there were under much higher degrees of operational restrictions intended to avoid casualties and press access was severely limited. Even if Australian troops were under fire in Iraq, the political leadership did not want the Australian public to see it. This is the attitude that seems to have taken hold within the ADF and dictated their approach to military-media relations in Afghanistan.
If the ADF's commanders want the efforts of their personnel in Afghanistan to be recognised they should behave with the same openness as many of the US commanders. If they are ashamed of their forces' efforts then they should continue with the draconian restrictions they have placed on Australian journalists in the past. The ADF's determination to control the media will only result in deepening scepticism among Australian journalists about the reasons for their eagerness to massage the coverage of the conflict in Afghanistan.
This is an edited extract from What Are We Doing In Afghanistan? The Military And The Media At War, edited by Kevin Foster (Australian Scholarly Publishing).
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What’s not mentioned here is how the Dutch have saved our skins in Afghanistan a few times. Few Australians probably want to here that our vaunted SAS aren’t invincible. Fortunately the Dutch have much better defence media transparency.
Article: Afghanistan battle bonds brothers in arms
Come, on, John. That was 2006. Things have changed a lot since then, mate. Why only last week the military was actually reporting our casualties. I’m quite aware of the "control" the Australian government likes to exert on the media (having been an Army PR Officer for 23 years). Given that their head of public affairs in an ex-SAS member, it’s no wonder they have this attitude.
http://theprlab.blogspot.com @prlab
No doubt the ADF is concerned about media reportage "collateral damage" i.e. civilian deaths that are inevitably going to happen in a war of foreign invaders versus indigenous fighters.
I have faith in the integrity of our soldiers and that they certainly do NOT intend and indeed try to minimize non-combatant civilian casualties, while no doubt having a clear priority orders to act to preserve their own lives and the lives of their comrades.
However I have zero faith in Australian Mainstream media , politicians and academics who strenuously IGNORE the horrendous civilian deaths due to war criminal US Alliance violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (see: http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/y4gcpcp.htm ) - and thereby all become accessories after the fact of war crimes.
In the case of Australia the mainstream media, politicians and academics KNOW of this war criminal violation because I for one have been telling them for 8 years.
My latest message sent (11 October 2009) to Mainstream media (including the SBS and the ABC) and politicians about Australian and US Alliance GOVERNMENT war crimes in Occupied Afghanistan - they cannot say, like many Germans in 1945, that "we did not know".
Dear Sir, Madam, Dr, Ms, Mrs, Senator etc,
Consult UNICEF and you will discover that 338,000 under-5 year old Occupied Afghan infants die each year, 90% avoidably and due to war criminal non-supply of life-sustaining food and medical requisites unequivocally demanded of Occupiers by Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.
Thus 0.9 x 338,000 = 304,000 under-5 year old Occupied Afghan infants die avoidably each year due to US war crimes under Obama - that’s 304,000/365 = 833 per day or 833/day x 262 days = 218,000 avoidable Occupied Afghan under-5 infant deaths in the 262 days in which Obama has been in office.
By this utterly disgusting decision - awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to Obama who has killed over 200,000 innocent infants in Occupied Afghanistan alone (so far) - the Nobel Peace Prize Committee is saying, like Big Brother in George Orwell’s "1984", that "War is Peace".
Of course Obama is a relative newcomer to the war criminal US Alliance mass infanticide in Occupied Afghanistan (and Occupied Iraq, Occupied Palestine, Occupied Haiti, Occupied Somalia, NW Pakistan) – the whale-killing, war crime accessory, Orwellian Norwegians overlooked the lengthier participation of Bush, Blair, Brown, Harper, Merkel, Sarkozy, Howard, and Rudd in the mass murder of Muslim Asian children.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Gideon Polya
Melbourne, Victoria 3085, Australia.
Consult WHO (see: http://www.who.int/countries/aus/en/ ) and you will find that the “total annual per capita medical expenditure” permitted by the Occupiers in Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan is US$124 and US$29, respectively, as compared to US$3,122 and US$6,714 for Occupier Australia and Occupier the US, respectively.
That is fundamentally why (in addition to living in a war zone) 338,000 under-5 year old infants die each year in Occupied Afghanistan (population 26 million) as compared to 2,000 in Occupier Australia (population 21 million) (see UNICEF: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/index.html ).
Anyone who votes for the pro-war Lib-Labs (Liberal-National or Labor Parties) becomes an accessory to passive mass infanticide, passive mass paedocide, passive mass murder of children and war crimes.
Tell everyone you can.
Peace is the only way but Silence kills and Silence is complicity.
Ive been an admirer of brave John Martinkus, who has been able to navigate his way through a battlefield without help from the Australian Defence Force.
Martinkus tells of his frustration at being denied access to speak to Australian troops on camera in Afghanistan. Having been to Afghanistan myself I can empathise with Martinkus but also understand that the ADF’s micro-management of the news flow is because during the Vietnam War the Australian Army got its fingers severely burnt and soldiers’ lives were destroyed by a bogus Viet Cong water torture story that was not true.
It propelled reporter John Sorrell to fame and fortune whilst Vietnam Veterams were tarred with the brush of brutal savages.
read more…. at http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/
"Media hissy fit at Afghan news"
best wishes
Sasha Uzunov
Their faces, John. Armed soldiers do not run away from reporters because they’re scared of questions. At a guess, they run away because of concern photographing their faces for public television could endanger operational security and their lives.
Experiences related by Vietnam veterans illustrate the different approaches to infantry tactics by American and Australian regular forces. Regular American units were often motorized, sometimes preemptively fired upon likely ambush lines, and sometimes used explosives to dig protective pits. Regular Australian units, even in large formations, followed tactics more typical of the Vietnamese forces (both sides) and of American special forces such as Delta: avoiding roads or main tracks where possible, communicating by hand signals, and generally travelling much more slowly and quietly.
The relevance of this to Afghanistan is that Australians have a history of taking stealth and operational security much more seriously than the regular US forces.
Some Australian SAS and Commandos may be operating almost incognito alongside local forces. In some cases even knowing their faces without photographing them could place them at risk if you are captured and forced to identify them from photographs.
Good on you for going to such effort and for reporting as well as you could. But you might get much more candid interviews with troops who have come back home or been taken to hospital. Even if rear-echelon interviews are not as sexy and lack the all-important sound of gunfire in the background.
"troops who have come back home" …I meant to say, the ones who didn’t come home in a box.
I have admired Johns work since he uncovered that the Americans were burning dead taliban and insulting Islamic pratices by doing demented things to dead taliban bodies. Who is to say that the SAS from any country are not planting IED’s, heck they assasinate people routinely don’t they. The SAS through history has been used for non conventional war, like execution squads during the Northern Ireland unrest (read the Nemesis File by Paul Bruce). Even recently in Iraq the British used a whole battalion and armour to rescue 2 plain clothes SAS men caught by the Iraq police on suspicion of planting bombs. What makes our SAS so godly that we don’t think they are the worst weapon of war fighting. Didn’t our SAS actively participate in the phoenix program? This no surprise the army hides from difficult questions.
"the worst weapon of war fighting"? A British soldier who was attached to a Mujihadeen unit during the Afghan-Soviet war reported in detail what they did to a captured Russian soldier. Without going into details, the soldier (who was probably a conscript) was gruesomely mutilated in a variety of ways and left on a hillside still alive, with one eye deliberately left in place to watch the wild dogs come and eat him. A psychological example for the Russians, who responded by figuring out how to skin a man alive. My biggest worry about our highly professional soldiers there is not what they bring to the conduct of war there but what they’ll bring home from it.
Oh Great prlab, "having been an Army PR Officer for 23 years"
Perhaps our troops are running from reporters because they don’t want to face questions on issues like this…
http://uruknet.info/index.php?p=m%2058886&hd=&size=1&l=e
I understand that we are one of 17 nations that have depleted uranium munitions.
Whatever reason, I’m sure that Prez Hamid Karzi’s brother, as one of the biggest opium merchants in Afghanistan, is appreciative of all the foreign troops that safeguard his opium production.
As a side note, could you perhaps give us any insight as to who former Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon was referring too when he said he has been the victim of … "Judas.. in my midst"?
Is there a chance, you think, that he was referring to Mike Kelly - Member for Eden-Monaro Parliamentary Secretary for Defence, just because he’s married to the cousin of Israel’s former PM Ehud Olmert?
Where’s the local perspective on all of this? Brave as you sound it is absolute stupidity to be there in the first place.
Obama thinks it’s ‘a war of necessity’ whereas I believe it is an unwinnable war and therefore ‘a war of stupidity’.
Not one Afghan opinion to be heard about the occupation of their country.
Not one complaint about the increased level of violence inflicted on their population by this war of stupidity.
I thought you might be truly revelatory and the ADF might be hiding the fact that we are losing this stupid war.
Or you had something even more scandalous, like some of the ADF are addicted to smack.
Hi Denise, please see http://afghanistan-analyst.org/blogs.aspx
particularly the second column: "Blogs by Afghans in Afghanistan".
Hi Skeptic.
Excuse my scepticism, but after spending over an hour reading about a dozen + random blogs, and not having read one cursing/damnation of America or NATO or mention of Proposed Gas Pipe Lines or mention of Depleted Uranium or other ‘new age’ weapons; although I did see brief mention of Karzai’s Opium Dealing brother in a blog by ‘Afghan Corner’ even though it was presented in a manner which could have been construed as some sort of fabricated slur;
I’m a bit suspicious as to the possible bias in this blog selection.
I’ll be sure to read some more, thank you.
http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/
Here are some voices Denise
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krHV9iT20zw
Poor souls.
And here are our American allies in 1979; stirring shit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYvO3qAlyTg
See Obama at the end, showing respect for the shit stirrer.
Same shit, different day.
You know, this is a radical theory, but what if that’s because most Afghans are scared of the Taliban and not of the Americans & allies?
John, a problem with a lot of your reporting - in print and especially on TV is that there is far too much use of the word ‘I’. You seem far too preoccupied with making yourself the centre of the story.
The ADF have every right to manage how and when they engage with the media. The success of their operations and the safety of their people and the people they are helping are their primary concern and that’s the way it should be.
Given this, I think they’ve actually been very accomodating of the Australian news media. Making a comparison between the much larger and much longer established Canadian Task Force in Kandahar and the early advance elements of the Australian 1st Reconstruction Task Force in Uruzgan in 2006 (which was yet to fully deploy) is unfair. Tha Canadians were established and able to manage media visits (ie the safe transport of journalists etc) where as the Australians were no where near ready to do the same. As you saw yourself, by January 2007, things were beginning to change in that regard.