Calls grow for NZ public inquiry into war
‘Iwill be with you whatever,’’ wrote British prime minister Tony Blair in a gushing letter to thenUnited States president George W Bush in July 2002.
At the same time, he was telling the British public and Parliament that no decision to go to war against Iraq had been made.
Private warmongering between Bush and Blair didn’t come as a surprise to a British public who were heavily opposed to the Iraq invasion. But the intimate penpalship between two of the most powerful men in the world was only declassified in the course of a public inquiry into the Iraq War, known as the Chilcott Inquiry, 14 years after the fact.
Now renewed interest in New Zealand’s involvement in the Afghanistan war after the release of Stuff Circuit‘s The Valley series has led to calls for a public inquiry. Little was known about New Zealand’s ‘‘hearts and minds’’ mission in the Bamyan province of Afghanistan, until the deaths of 10 Kiwi soldiers between 2010 and 2012.
Since New Zealand withdrew in 2013, we learnt about allegations New Zealand special forces killed civilians, including a three-yearold girl, that troops were secretly taking biometric data without the knowledge of the Defence Minister, and that a mission creep occurred which transformed the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) into something closer to a counter-insurgency unit.
Helen Thomasen, the mother of Rory Malone, who was killed in action in the Battle of Baghak in August 2012, feels she has been misled about what was really happening in Afghanistan.
‘‘I wanted to know the ins and outs, the truth, you know?,’’ she said. ‘‘Don’t cover it up - I wanted to know how my boy got killed.’’
Green Party leader James Shaw said the fact that former soldiers had come forward to dispute the official findings of battles where New Zealand soldiers were killed meant there was ‘‘far more here than we are being told’’.
‘‘Some of the information raised in Stuff Circuit‘s investigation raises real concerns about whether that accurately reflects how the NZDF operated.
‘‘On that basis we support a public inquiry into New Zealand’s role in Afghanistan, to help the public better understand what really happened and to ensure that mistakes made in that conflict are not repeated.’’
Marianne Elliott, a former UN human rights lawyer who now runs ActionStation, says there was a ‘‘fundamental incompatibility’’ between the PRT and the military operations Kiwi soldiers were undertaking simultaneously.
‘‘A bridge or a school built by foreign military forces who are also actively involved in fighting an insurgency becomes a target for that insurgency. This is a concern that we - the civilian humanitarian community in Afghanistan - raised consistently at the time.’’
Elliott says conducting security patrols and raids on villages suspected of housing insurgents is incompatible with building schools and repairing orphanages. ‘‘But even if we put aside for now the fundamental problems with the PRT model, the public in New Zealand had a right to know what our troops were actually doing in our name in Afghanistan.’’
DIRTY LAUNDRY
Calls for public inquiries are almost always rejected by the government of the day: too hard, too expensive, and potentially career ending for ministers and commanders. ‘‘You’re doing your dirty laundry in public and no-one wants to do that,’’ says Professor Theo Farrell, author of a new book Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan, 2001-2014.
Farrell, a professor at the University of Wollongong, says inquiries should only be called in exceptional circumstances, where recurring mistakes have been made, leading to serious consequences. Call them too often, and it could lead to military commanders deliberately withholding information, knowing that it would one day be publicly released.
‘‘One has to be cautious here because if the military goes into a conflict expecting that an inquiry will be at the end of it, they’re going to be very careful about not to write down any incriminating evidence. You learn less because people start to cover their tracks.’’
Farrell says armies are rarely properly prepared when they head into conflict, but over time they adjust and learn. But the fact that serious issues with the command of the deployment arose on the CRIB 20 deployment, nearly a decade after New Zealand first went in to Afghanistan, show a need for proper scrutiny.
Farrell argues in his new book that the Western coalition should have left Afghanistan in 2002 after the Taliban was defeated and that nation-building efforts were doomed to fail.
Plus, the New Zealand Defence Force hardly has a good record of taking ‘‘lessons learnt’’ on board. The findings of two key internal reports on Afghanistan were never released. The first looked at New Zealand’s overall deployment, and reportedly found evidence of a lack of cohesive strategy, that each sixmonth deployment behaved like ‘‘independent operations’’, and put up with substandard boots and rifles. Similarly, an investigation into the Battle of Baghak by Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Whakahoehoe conducted in parallel to the official court of inquiry has never been publicly released.
Former National government defence ministers Jonathan Coleman and Gerry Brownlee have repeatedly refused to speak about the deployment. Current minister Mark Mitchell also refused to front.
GOING PUBLIC
Fifty-eight countries sent troops to Afghanistan. Only two, Denmark and Norway, have held public inquiries.
The Danes established a commission of inquiry into their Afghanistan conflict in 2012 after significant political unease over accusations war crimes had been committed.
A team of independent experts were put in charge of wading through and declassifying sensitive material. But the inquiry became mired in infighting, was shut down three years later when a new centre-right government came to power. It was then rebooted with a much narrower remit, and the two academics still working on the inquiry are expected to release their findings next year.
In 2014, Norway appointed a commission of inquiry to ‘‘evaluate and draw lessons from Norway’s civilian and military involvement in Afghanistan during the period 2001–2014’’.
Norway’s experience was similar to New Zealand’s: 10 fatalities and many more seriously injured, but they spent $2 billion, nearly 10 times as much as the Kiwis, and contributed another $2b in aid.
The commission was led by a former foreign and defence minister, and most commissioners were independent researchers. The report, released in August 2016, found that only the domestic political objective of proving itself to be a trustworthy United States and Nato ally was fully achieved.
Far less successful were their ‘‘Afghan’’ goals – to prevent Afghanistan from lapsing back into being a haven of international terrorism.
‘‘On the whole, Norway has not made a great difference,’’ the report stated.
In 2014, Australia held a Parliamentary inquiry into Afghanistan which recommended a ‘‘comprehensive review of Australia’s civil–military–police mission’’ should be carried out.
Two years later they released a ‘‘whole-of-Government lessons report’’ which highlighted 17 lessons to enhance future overseas missions.
Britain’s House of Commons Defence Committee held a similar inquiry calling for an ‘‘independent, whole-ofgovernment ‘lessons learnt’ study’’. Since then, the Ministry of Defence has begun investigating hundreds of cases of alleged abuse committed by armed forces there.
THERE AND BACK AGAIN
This week, the drums of war were beating again. Prime Minister Bill English revealed he will send three more New Zealand troops to Afghanistan, adding to the 10 troops stationed at Afghan National Army Officer Academy in Kabul.
Further requests for combat forces are likely after US President Donald Trump was reluctantly drawn into sending more troops to the country, 16 years after war began. This time, there will be no provincial reconstruction. The US is ‘‘not nation-building again, we are killing terrorists’’, Trump said.
But without a comprehensive review of our time in Afghanistan, how confident can we be that our politicians will make informed decisions about future deployments, especially when most Kiwis are still in the dark about what we were doing there in the first place?
Otago University international relations professor Robert Patman says New Zealand needs a ‘‘more rigorous system of accountability than that which currently exists’’.
‘‘If we cannot satisfactorily answer some of the questions raised by New Zealand’s experience in Afghanistan after 9/11, I am not sure we can be confident that we have drawn all the appropriate lessons from the deployment.’’
"The public in New Zealand had a right to know what our troops were actually doing in our name in Afghanistan." Marianne Elliott, former UN human rights lawyer