On Thursday 19 November Australia faced a reckoning with its recent past in Afghanistan.* Australian political culture approaches our armed forces with a great degree of deference and respect. Three of our last four Governors General have been, for example, senior military leaders. The Australian Defence Force support operations in respect of the January 2020 bushfires and the COVID19 pandemic have drawn widespread and deserved praise. There has, however, been significant and growing disquiet regarding reports of war crimes committed in Afghanistan by our special forces. On 19 November General Angus Campbell, Chief of the Australian Defence Force, released the summary of the final report of a long-running inquiry into those accusations. (Press conference transcript here; redacted report here.) That report had been commissioned by the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force, an independent office outside the military chain of command.
The press conference was a very sober affair. Much of the report will remain redacted pending criminal proceedings. The key finding being that the report identifies 23 incidents involving 39 killings by 25 Australian personnel which appear to be cases of clearly unlawful killings which will be referred for prosecution. Critically, the report apparently finds none of job seekers database these killings occurred in heat of battle, none occurred “in circumstances in which the intent of the perpetrator was unclear, confused or mistaken”, and all persons involved understood the relevant law of armed conflict and the rules of engagement. General Campbell acknowledged that this has damaged “our moral authority as military force” but emphasised “many thousands of Australians … served in Afghanistan and did the right thing, professionally and with honour; including many of our Special Forces personnel”.
Nonetheless, the redacted report includes the grim summary that, in respect of one chapter:
“what is described in this Chapter is possibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history, and the commanders at troop, squadron and task group level bear moral command responsibility for what happened under their command, regardless of personal fault.”
The details of that episode(s) remain redacted pending prosecutions. A concern for some time has been that any prosecutions may involve pinning all blame on a limited number of frontline Special Air Service Regiment ‘operators’ without any accountability for commanding officers who either knew or should have known what was happening. Will this be what comes to pass? In the Q&A at the end of the Press Conference General Campbell noted that the SAS second squadron will be permanently stricken from the Army Order of Battle. This means that squadron will be disbanded and its number never used again, leaving a permanent institutional reminder. The move could be seen to imply that all or most wrongdoing was confined to that unit, but apparently that is not the case. However, the report apparently finds (in the words of General Campbell):