by Brian Toohey
Labor’s principled stand hurt it badly at the 1966 election, but became an asset in subsequent elections. However, Julia Gillard as PM trashed Labor’s opposition to the war in her address to the US Congress on 10 March 2011. She sought to gain US favour by stating: ‘We have stuck together. In every major conflict. From Korea and Vietnam to the conflicts in the Gulf.’ On the contrary, Labor is entitled to be proud of its opposition to the war in Indochina.
Indochina’s impoverished populations were no threat to the US or Australia, but the US and other foreign forces subjected them to death and disfigurement from carpet bombing, napalm, dioxin and prolonged torture. Some were massacred in villages, like in My Lai in March 1968. In that case, the head of US forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, initially congratulated the killers on an ‘outstanding action’.8 The truth emerged only because some American soldiers refused to stay silent and Seymour Hersh, then a freelance journalist in the US, in November 1969 revealed the slaughter of several hundred unarmed villagers by US forces.
Fraser later slammed the US for initiating the 1963 assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem, whom it had installed, and his brother Dình Diem Nhu. He warned that the decision was a ‘pointer to the character of American governments … [yet no high-level Australian official in Washington] asked whether the US had the right to order the removal of the head of a country with whom they were an ally, fighting this difficult war. They implicitly assumed that they did.’9 The assassinations followed French president General Charles de Gaulle’s call earlier in 1963 for Vietnam to be unified and neutralised. Diem’s brother Nhu had reportedly opened direct links with de Gaulle. Fraser said, ‘One of the most serious blunders of the US at this time was that it made no effort to explore de Gaulle’s option.’10
Fraser said he did not believe that any Australian government would have sent troops to Vietnam in 1965 ‘if they had known what the CIA and [Defence Secretary Robert] McNamara both believed at the time—that the cause for which America was fighting was hopeless … Either the Americans were derelict in their duty to tell an ally or they were deceitful.’11 However, while he was prime minister from 1975 to 1983, Fraser accepted the US’s insistence that Australia recognise Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, which killed 1.8 million Cambodians during its genocidal reign from 1975 to 1979. This recognition continued after the Khmer Rouge was no longer the government.
Australian author Paul Ham says the Saigon press corps tended to ignore stories about Americans killing Vietnamese civilians. The war ‘rarely impinged’ on the average reporter’s mind above the level of ‘a great story’.12 Although the ABC generally gave a fuller picture, he says the controller of news destroyed a reporter’s tape of an interview with journalist Wilfred Burchett because he saw Burchett as a traitor. Ham is no admirer of Burchett, but says Burchett had had unrivalled access to the highest levels of the Vietnamese communist hierarchy: ‘This idiotic act of editorial vandalism served neither the public interest nor the historical record.’13
Ham refers to Australian wire service reporter Jan Graham’s description of a common journalistic view of the war as being ‘like a big Luna Park every day of the week. Let’s try a new ride. Let’s jump out of a chopper … Let’s watch people getting blown up by mines. Let’s shoot a few gooks.’14 Ham says old media hands eschewed the terms ‘war crime’ and ‘atrocity’ as quaint, morally earnest phrases that had lost meaning in one vast war crime: ‘In time language itself became a casualty of war.’15
Gullible journalists were in for another surprise following the war. Saigon’s Hotel Continental, which opened in 1880, now displays photos and brief notes on famous guests such as Graham Greene, who wrote the classic novel The Quiet American while staying there. Greene’s photo is next to one of a lesser-known figure—Pham Xuan An. During the war, An reported for Time and other publications while befriending a wide circle of South Vietnamese officials and influential Americans, such as the CIA’s station chief, William Colby, and its renowned military adviser, Edward Lansdale. None realised that An was a spy smuggling information to the Vietcong in messages inside egg rolls.
As the war intensified, so did heroin addiction among US troops. Because Sydney was designated a US R&R city, heroin use increased sharply in Kings Cross and spread to other parts of Australia. It is well established that the CIA facilitated the heroin supply after becoming deeply involved in the drug trade in its ‘secret’ war in Laos. Although secret in the West, it was no secret to the people of Laos, who were subjected to heavy bombing. The CIA’s proprietary airline, Air America, flew the drugs out of Laos and nearby countries to the global marketplace.16 The flights allegedly helped fund the CIA’s mercenary troops who grew opium poppies, but the secrecy also ensured that corrupt CIA operatives could help themselves to the proceeds. The CIA was also associated with Sydney’s Nugan Hand Bank, which financed drug trafficking, money laundering and international arms dealing (see Chapter 32).17
Even before Labor was elected in 1972, Coalition governments had accepted that the war in Vietnam was a strategic mistake. In August 1969, at the height of the nation’s participation in the war, Defence Minister Allen Fairhall announced a 5 per cent cut to military spending. He told parliament he could safely cut spending because the lack of any early threat to the nation’s security provided a ‘breathing space’.18 Goodbye, domino theory! Instead, Fairhall accepted that a communist victory in Vietnam posed no threat to Australia. The new focus on defending the nation closer to home remained until John Howard’s government restored the forward defence doctrine by joining the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Meanwhile, communist-led Vietnam has now given de facto support to the American policy of ‘containing’ China. In 1986, it adopted a market-oriented economy under a policy called Doi Moi, with many enterprising Vietnamese embracing the opportunities. Poverty remains and political freedom is constrained, but the country has become much more prosperous in recent years.
Although the US and Australia never paid reparations for the damage they caused, the Vietnamese now welcome almost all visiting Australians. Yet in August 2016 some Australians loudly denounced the Vietnamese for exercising their sovereign right to decide how many foreign visitors could crowd onto the congested Long Tan battlefield site on a farmer’s land. Much to the anger of some who enjoy this form of military tourism, the Vietnamese decided that the 3000 Australians who turned up wanting to celebrate the Long Tan ‘victory’ were unmanageable, and enforced an earlier policy of only allowing small groups around the site’s commemorative cross. Malcolm Turnbull and other ministers brusquely demanded that more Australians be allowed to celebrate/commemorate a ‘victory’ in a minor battle in a war that killed up to three million Vietnamese.
An Australian company commander at the Long Tan battle, Harry Smith, said in 2016 that if 3000 Japanese demanded the right to visit Darwin to commemorate its wartime bombing, ‘We’d be up in arms too.’19 Greg Dodds, a Vietnam veteran, said the local people were sick of a crowd of Australians arriving each year: ‘We are the people, after all, who killed their brothers, fathers, cousins and sons. Let’s just leave the Vietnamese to enjoy the peace. And the gains of that peace are not slight.’20
Tourists could have shared that peace ever since 1956, when the internationally agreed election to unify Vietnam was promised. Instead, the US intervened, stopping an almost-certain Ho Chi Minh victory. Vietnam would have been unified and there would have been no war, no military tourism, no commemorative crosses, no napalm and no dioxin deformities.
54
AUSTRALIAN TROOPS SHOULD HAVE LEFT AFGHANISTAN WITHIN A FEW MONTHS
‘For more than one hundred years Australian defence strategy has been based on “expeditionary” operations. If we are going to learn anything from the disasters of the last fifty years in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, it should be that this model has failed politically, socially, militarily and ethically. Simply put, the era has gone in which predominantly white, predominantly
European, predominantly Christian armies could stampede around the world invading countries their governments either don’t like or want to change … Without exception, wars lead to injustice and depravity.’
Williams Foundation policy paper1
Australia sent an expeditionary force to the civil war in Somalia in the early 1990s as part of an almost impossible UN-sanctioned attempt to enforce a peace and deliver humanitarian assistance. The Australian Army arrived in 1992 and left in 1994. A total of 1500 served; four were injured and one was killed. The Australians left when it was clear that it was time to go—unlike what later happened in Afghanistan.2
The US, Australia and other countries began an expeditionary war against Afghanistan after nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists flew planes into American buildings on 11 September 2001. None of the terrorists were Afghans—fifteen were Saudis—and their flying training had occurred in the US. But Afghanistan copped the brunt of the military response because al-Qaeda’s Saudi leader, Osama bin Laden, had established training camps there. The military response should have concentrated on capturing bin Laden rather than subcontracting the job to Afghan warlords who were more intent on seizing territory for themselves.3
The Taliban religious movement, supported by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, had been largely in control of Afghanistan since 1996. The Mujahideen, a group supported by the CIA, ISI and Saudi intelligence, had earlier won a ‘holy war’ against the Soviet-supported secular government based in the capital, Kabul. Bin Laden, with the CIA’s support, had provided logistics and other help to the Mujahideen.
While in power, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar imposed a severe form of Islamic law but failed to provide government services to make the lives of the Afghans, especially women, slightly less miserable. However, he showed no interest in undertaking global terrorist acts, correctly seeing bin Laden’s support for international terrorism as endangering the Taliban. His government contacted US officials offering to hand bin Laden over before 11 September,4 but President George W. Bush made it plain he was only interested in revenge. Bin Laden escaped from Afghanistan not long after the US-led forces invaded on 7 October 2001. The US’s puzzling priority on regime change in Kabul facilitated bin Laden’s escape with a hard-core group of 200 al-Qaeda members.5 A few remained, but there is no evidence they engaged in international terrorism.
With bin Laden gone and the Taliban showing no sign of turning to international terrorism, the original rationale for the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan vanished. Western troops stayed to kill Afghans as US presidents continued to treat the Taliban as synonymous with al-Qaeda. Toppling the Taliban wasn’t difficult, but a competent and honest government didn’t replace it in Kabul and the Taliban soon led an effective insurrection. The US assassination of bin Laden in his home in Pakistan in 2011 without bothering to interrogate him for intelligence purposes made no difference to the insurrection or global terrorism.
Prime Minister John Howard quickly dispatched an Australian special forces contingent to Afghanistan in line with the UN resolution authorising this action after the terrorist attack of 11 September. The usual difficulties for foreign forces fighting amid a civilian population soon emerged. On 17 May 2002, Australian SAS troopers mistakenly caused the death of at least eleven civilians they had wrongly assumed to be al-Qaeda members. Defence Minister Robert Hill was confident they were al-Qaeda, telling me, ‘There are well-defined personnel identification matrices used by our special forces to identify al-Qaeda. In general, the tactical behaviour and the weapons and equipment they are carrying are quite distinct from the behaviour and weapons carried by the local Afghan people.’6 But they weren’t al-Qaeda: a New York Times report on 3 June 2002 established that the SAS had been sent to the area on the basis of false intelligence.7 The report said two tribes opposed to the Taliban had been battling for control of the area for several years. When one villager raised his rifle at the Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers, they shot him dead. Members of both villages then opened fire on the SAS soldiers, who killed another three people before American air support killed at least eight more and wounded sixteen others.8
Howard withdrew the 200-strong Special Operations Task Group (SOTG) in November 2002 to prepare for the impending invasion of Iraq. In August 2005 he sent them back, followed by a small construction group. The deployment eventually reached 1550, supported by another 800 personnel in the region. All combat troops had been withdrawn by December 2013, but 300 advisers and trainers remained at the end of 2018.
Although the Taliban was armed with little more than man-made roadside bombs and old AK-47 semi-automatic rifles, a US victory was never likely while it adopted tactics that caused heavy civilian casualties from bombing and ground assaults, often based on false intelligence. As a Williams Foundation paper said, ‘The deployment of expeditionary forces to invade another country immediately alters the dynamics of war. The land component of those forces has to fight amongst the people of the invaded country—a circumstance which almost invariably creates profound social, cultural, and political tensions.’9 US libertarian advocate and author Scott Horton makes another point about Afghans: ‘Their religion is not why they fight … Virtually all men of any culture would fight back against a foreign army occupying their country.’10
Many Afghans were disaffected under the Western-supported government because they became victims of police corruption, violence and government neglect, particularly outside Kabul. In contrast, the Taliban offered a quick resolution of disputes over stolen goats and so on.11 In government, the Taliban had largely eradicated the opium-based drug trade, but under the new government the trade again flourished after CIA-supported drug barons ignored the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s anti-drug efforts. The insurgents adjusted to the change by embracing opium growing to assist in funding the Taliban.
With the war floundering, the chairman of the chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, told Congress in 2008, ‘We can’t kill our way to victory.’12 But the military upped the tempo of the killing. The Afghan government complained, with good reason, that ill-conceived home invasions to kill or capture alleged Taliban members only produced more recruits, particularly when the accusations were false.
Australia was already outwearing its welcome. During a night-time operation in the Oruzgan province in November 2008, Australian special forces wrongly identified a fiercely anti-Taliban district governor, Rozi Khan, as an enemy and killed him. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) never explained how it made the damaging error.13
General Stanley McChrystal, who became chief of the US forces in Afghanistan in 2009, acknowledged, ‘The Afghan people are the insurgency.’14 He said if US forces killed one insurgent, relatives would supply ten new recruits, and ‘We’ve shot an amazing number of people [at roadblocks]. None was proven to have been any real threat.’15
McChrystal’s point was illustrated on 12 February 2009 when a group of Australian commandos made a night-time raid on an Afghan home. The pre-raid surveillance was sorely deficient, failing to detect the presence of children. The commandos threw grenades into the home, killing five children. In September 2010, the director of military prosecutions, Brigadier Lyn McDade, charged two commandos with manslaughter by negligence, but the military judge heading the court-martial did not proceed to trial because he decided the charges were wrong in law. The prosecutor, who had come under intense public criticism, did not pursue the issue. However, Defence was keen to clarify that the prosecutor’s decision didn’t mean there was never a duty of care to civilians. A spokesperson said, ‘The Law of Armed Conflict imposes obligations to take “constant care” when conducting military operations to minimise causing harm to civilians.’16
At Defence Minister Stephen Smith’s request, McDade submitted an account of why she had laid the charges. She said that on the weight of the evidence, the Afghan man killed in the raid was ‘not an insurgent but an Afghan national defending his home and his family fro
m attack’.17 The ADF revised its initial description of the man as an insurgent to ‘an Afghan fighting male’, but has never explained why the compound was raided.18
Labor PM Julia Gillard retained her enthusiasm for this doomed expeditionary war and the continued presence of the 1500 Australian troops in Oruzgan Province. Speaking in parliament on 19 October 2010, she said Australia would stay ‘for at least another decade’. In contrast, Democratic US president Barack Obama famously declared he would not stay another decade, nor spend another trillion dollars.
During 2011, Western special forces conducted night-time raids on more than 1000 homes a month, despite the military estimating that only 14 per cent of them had any real links to the insurgency.19 The Australian government let its special forces increase the tempo and the risks by undertaking targeted assassinations of nominated individuals—a practice that doesn’t fit the traditional view of how the ADF fights a war.
In a detailed investigation, ABC journalists Dan Oakes and Sam Clark reported that classified documents showed there was a growing sense of unease at the highest Defence levels about the ‘desensitisation’ of some members of the special forces who kill insurgents but also unarmed men and children.20 They also reported that a decorated special forces soldier, who could not be named, said, ‘Ultimately, the behaviour of some elements of SOTG led to the indiscriminate, reckless and avoidable deaths of innocent civilians, caused by an institutional shift in culture that contributed to the decay of moral and ethical values towards armed conflict.’21 A former Australian soldier, August Elliott, wrote that a former task-group member told him new fly-in fly-out missions using Black Hawk helicopters ‘saw the entire concept of operations switch from “clear, hold and build territory” to “land, kill and leave”.’22