A View from Canberra: Sticking to commitments | ADM September 2011

A Special Correspondent | Canberra

Perhaps the most onerous of duties confronting any ADF chief is standing at the lectern at media conferences to announce the latest death in Afghanistan.

General Hurley was less than a week into his job as CDF when he fronted up to the conference room in the R1 building at defence headquarters in Russell to announce the death of Sergeant Todd Langley, an unpleasant but not unfamiliar duty as he had filled in for former defence chief Angus Houston on a number of previous occasions.

Defence has now well refined this entire process. From the media viewpoint it usually kicks off with a phone call as defence public affairs rings around media organisations and selected defence journalists to announce there’s been an incident in Afghanistan and that the CDF and perhaps also the minister will hold a media conference at R1, usually one hour hence.

Such events invariably mean a combat fatality and that has allowed the media to report ahead of the press conference with a high degree of confidence that another digger has been killed in Afghanistan.

In your correspondent’s experience of attending a number of these media conferences, they are handled with a high degree of decorum. Details of the actual incidents are often sketchy, reflecting the haste to make an announcement and the fact that often operations are ongoing.

Invariably, the CDF is asked something along the lines of: Well, what about insurgent casualties from this incident? To which the reply is invariably along the lines of there were some insurgent casualties but we don’t have details.

Defence is adamant it doesn’t do body counts. That’s a reflection of this kinder gentler age, and bad experiences from the Vietnam War where the US used counts of enemy dead as a metric of progress, producing gross exaggerations and indiscriminate targeting of non-combatants.

Successive defence ministers have also stated that success in Afghanistan won’t be achieved by military means alone. Yet Defence clearly pays close attention to enemy dead and occasionally it lets slip some details. For example, in the Australian War Memorial Hall of Valour is a slightly grainy image of Lance Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith VC, cropped from a larger  photo whose main subject is a slain insurgent.

That was taken only hours after Roberts-Smith’s VC-winning action and intended for intelligence use. Defence has resolutely declined to release the complete image.

As often seems to be the case at this stage of the fighting season after a few casualties have been incurred, there was a brief debate about Australian strategy in Afghanistan, prompted by an article in The Australian by former Army chief Lieutenant General Peter Leahy.

He made some fair points about the need for greater engagement by Australian civilian aid agencies and for an eventual negotiated peace deal with the Taliban to end the conflict. And he made the overall point that Australian strategy in Afghanistan was confused, producing the fairly obvious response from the government that stuff had changed in the two years since General Leahy left the army.

But his views reflect those of others of senior military background such as former Major General Jim Molan who strongly argued that Australia needed many more troops to ensure the job was done properly.

Currently there are around 1,550 Australian troops in Afghanistan, a figure the government, echoed by Defence, says is sufficient for the task in hand.

Well is it? There is certainly a view expressed quietly by some close allies that Australia, for all its bluster about pulling its weight could be doing a whole lot more. But your correspondent noted a small passage in a recent book on the UK experience in Helmand Province.

That book, Dead Men Risen by Toby Harnden, tells the story of the 1st Bn Welsh Guards in Helmand province in 2009 in vivid, graphic and highly personal terms. This tour was controversial, producing headlines and parliamentary debate about the adequacy of support provided to the soldiers.

Harnden’s book was equally controversial, with the UK Ministry of Defence giving its approval then buying up and pulping the entire initial print run on grounds that it breached national security. Harnden says that was really because of political embarrassment and stood firm, agreeing to just a few minor deletions.

The Welsh Guards tour of Helmand stands out as among the casualties was their Commanding Officer, LTCOL Rupert Thorneloe, killed by an IED strike.

The Welsh Guards landed in a hornets nest, traveling over roads riddled with IEDs in vehicles offering far less protection than Australia’s Bushmasters. Few helicopters were available

The battalion was lamentably under-equipped and overstretched for what was expected of them. That was down to the UK government seeking to do Afghanistan on the cheap and on the British military’s commendable but misguided over-confidence about what it could achieve.

And here’s where Australia rates a mention.

Harnden quotes Thorneloe’s successor LTCOL Charles Antelme who said promising less but delivering more was the way to do business.

“In a way that’s what the Australians do brilliantly. They’ve got all the influence in the world and they just say ‘well we’re not going to give you a lot but what we do we’ll give you 100 per cent’,” he said.

So on that basis, maybe we are doing it the right way.

But back to Taliban casualties. Harnden tells the story of the small team of Welsh Guards snipers who between them accounted for 131 Taliban – almost three-quarters of all confirmed kills.

In one area in particular, insurgents had been launching attacks from within rock throwing distance of a British outpost. After the snipers did their thing, no Taliban would come closer than two kilometers.  

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