It is hard to believe people are now adults that weren’t born when the September 11 tragedy struck, claiming 3000 lives in 2001. Memories of the day are so fresh in everyone’s minds old enough to remember, and it seems hard to believe 18 years has passed.
While the four terrorist incidents happened in the United States it was a tragedy of global consequence not least because more than 90 countries lost citizens in the attacks. It also led to the war in Afghanistan, a conflict that remains unresolved to this day, with Australian forces still in the country as they have been since 2001.
Chris Masters has written one of the few books that looks deeply into that involvement. No Front Line is a massive 600 page book (a story that resists abbreviation, as Masters notes) that looks into the role played by Australian Special Forces from 2001 to the book’s publication in 2017.
It is a story he says, Australians have been largely disconnected from despite the glorification of the Anzac legend through all the 100 year anniversaries of the First World War.
Australian governments have always justified involvement in Afghanistan by stressing that national security is greatly enhanced by denying al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups a haven, and that this is best done by helping to build a more secure and democratic Afghanistan.
That future seems as far away as ever, with the Afghan government – although elected – maintaining only a tenuous grip on the capital Kabul and outlying area while the Taliban forces, displaced in 2001, remain de facto rulers of much of the country. It is wild ancient country but the Toyota Hilux, cellular phones and the internet connect it with the 21st century.
The first Australian contingent in 2001 was 1 Squadron Special Air Service Regiment who arrived via Perth, Diego Garcia and Kuwait three months after 9/11 to find the Taliban rule had collapsed. While the Americans controlled the air, the Australians were “ground truthers” getting to know the lay of the land. Their role was to long-range patrols to “disrupt and degrade” remaining Taliban and Al Qaeda elements but there was an immediate sense the enemy was not routed but merely regrouping.
The Allies bombed the Tora Bora Caves into submission but Osama Bin Laden escaped into Pakistan and so did many of his and the Taliban’s fighters. Australia’s first casualty was a corporal who stood on a land mine in January 2002 blowing off his foot though he survived the blast. Australia’s first battle death since Vietnam soon followed – Sgt Andy Russell killed when his Land Rover also hit a mine.
While the focus moved toward nation building with peacekeepers arriving from 18 countries, the Australians moved to Bagram in the North-east to help remove the large remaining stronghold. Here a force of Arab, Uzbek, Chechen and Taliban fighters offered the stiffest resistance yet before being pushed by superior firepower and survivors again slipped away to Pakistan.
Attention was moving to Iraq and Australia already stretched with peacekeeping missions in Timor Leste and the Solomons the end of the 2002 Afghan mission seemed like a natural end. In 2003 SASR was assigned to Iraq while major combat operations ended in Afghanistan and a stream of refugees returned. NATO took over the military role in Kabul but could not establish a force further than 60km from the capital.
Meanwhile Taliban leaders like Mullah Omar were regrouping in Pakistan and a training facility in Quetta prepared new soldiers for the war against the infidel. Inside Afghanistan the main tactic was intimidation against cooperation with the new government. It was effective enough to send all NGOs out of Kandahar by end 2003. The Taliban also began a bombing campaign in Kabul targeting foreign military. NATO estimated they needed 80,000 troops to secure the south but due to Iraq they only had a fraction of that number.
Violence escalated in 2005 with 19 US Navy Seals killed in an ambush in Kunar province. America pressurised Australia to return and agreed to support the Dutch contingent in Tarin Kowt, capital of the dangerous Uruzgan province in the south. Their mission was to transition “the war off terror to nation building” but new president Hamid Karzai told Denense Minister Robert Hill Uruzgan was challenging.
Special Forces arrived ahead of the 2005 parliamentary elections, which the Taliban was determined to intimidate into failure. The Australians were to conduct long-range patrols as a show of force. While the election passed without incident but the patrols were subject to ambush. 2 Squadron was involved in a six-hour battle in the Khod Valley and they returned to base to find Minister Hill there who realised the nation-building project was “not far advanced”.
The political rhetoric was to characterise the mission as counter-terrorism though no Al Qaeda fighters had been encountered since 2002. The enemy was more nebulous, sometimes called Taliban, sometimes the Mujahideen and others anti-coalition militants.
On patrol the biggest danger was Improvised Explosive Devices which could be placed in culverts under the road and detonated from a distance. In towns suicide bombers and “green on blue” attacks were also dangers. The Special Forces based was named Camp Russell in honour of the soldier who died in 2002 and there they had to mostly sit out the bitterly cold winter. The danger was increasing with the UN and NGOs departing in 2006 and only two of Uruzgan’s six districts considered safe.
Contact became more frequent. Australia suffered two deaths in quick succession, Pvt Luke Worsley to a rocket-propelled grenade and Sgt Darren through a round in the stomach. One American officer considered the cost of the war. “Considering the (Australian Javelin shoulder-fired weapon) each cost up to $100,000, I used to think we could go down there instead and buy every fighting age male”.
In 2006 the Coalition launched Operation Mountain Thrust, the biggest set-piece since 2001. The third rotation of Australian Special Forces landed in Tarin Kowt and were almost immediately in the fight in the nearby Chora Valley menaced by Taliban forces. In three months they cleared the valley only to be withdrawn and the area was quickly overrun again. This pattern would be repeated over again. Despite its firepower, the Australians were not a holding force so it was easy for the Taliban to take over the battle space aided by the local Ghilzai population who either supported the insurgency by choice or by intimidation.
A new rotation in 2007 was also sent to help the Dutch patrol the Chora Valley and ran into heavy Taliban firepower including mortars, rockets, heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. IEDs made using palm oil containers, fertiliser and battery packs were increasingly used to trip vehicles whose movements were tracked on the bush telegraph. Battles lasted days on end, though very little of this was reported in media.
Although over 60,000 international troops were in Afghanistan in 2007, they all responded to their own leaders meaning there was no coherent plan across all campaigns. Or as Masters put it, the same war was being fought again and again. That year the second Australian soldier died. Trooper David Pearce killed when an IED took out his light armoured vehicle. A third, Matt Locke when a patrol was ambushed in a field.
The death toll rose rapidly in the years that followed as the Taliban confidence – and firepower – increased. Back at home the prime minister of the day and the opposition leader would solemnly attend the funerals as the bipartisan support for involvement continued. The battles that caused the deaths remains mostly outside the public eye.
Afghans were dying in greater numbers still. As one analyst put it “we can kill 20,000 and there are 300,000 in the madrassas in Pakistan being prepared”. The foreigners were increasingly seen as the occupiers rather than allies. In 2009 the new Obama administration called for a “stronger, smarter” strategy in Afghanistan. There was a troop surge and a counter insurgency strategy of “clear, hold and build” but it was undermined by Obama’s parallel announcement of a drawdown in 2011. The Taliban were elated, they could simply wait the enemy out. It was expressed in their saying “they have the watches, we have the time”.
The war dragged on into the 2010s with little or no change in the overall dynamic. The Australians pulled out of Uruzgan in 2013 leaving the field to the Taliban. When surge didn’t work it was followed by drawdown and when that didn’t work either there was another surge. No wonder Trump’s election promise in 2016 to pull America out of the middle east (including Afghanistan) was so electorally popular at home. The war was bewildering.
America is now negotiating directly with the Taliban in an effort to extricate itself from the conflict. American magazine Foreign Policy says after 18 years of war, thousands of lives lost, and hundreds of billions of dollars squandered, the United States has accomplished precisely nothing.
It says the Kabul government is irredeemably corrupt, the Taliban had sanctuary and support in Pakistan and the claim that it was necessary to deny al Qaeda a “safe haven” was increasingly dubious, especially once Osama bin Laden was dead and that terrorist group had spread to many other countries.
“Trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern, Western-style democracy was an act of extraordinary hubris, and all the more so when U.S. leaders told themselves they could do it quickly,” Foreign Policy said.
If the US does finally withdraw so most likely will the 300 ADF personnel deployed there. It is sad news especially for Afghan women who face a return to second class citizens under a renewed Taliban government. But maybe it will give a country tortured by 40 years of war a chance to live and breathe.
Woolly Days 