Afghanistan: it happened once before ...

Australia took its cue from American positions, and conformity with America was the primary political test of a policy. The role of junior ally permitted the luxury of embracing alliance policies without the need to evaluate independently their costs and prospects … Throughout, the Australian media were more a dependant than an independent variable in the political process …. The news media failed in their most basic political role - as an agent of disclosure. Rather than an independent input into the political process, their news columns overwhelmingly reflected the stance of the government. The news media failed also in their other main political role - as a forum for diverse commentary and analysis. Dissenting views on Vietnam, even where based on considerable expertise, were more often than not either ignored or denigrated … Rodney Tiffen in Vietnam Remembered.

Little has changed with respect to the war in Afghanistan. It is a guerrilla war with all of the attendant frustrations for conventional forces. The famous maxim that came out of the Vietnam War, “We had to bomb that village in order to save it,” seems now equally to apply to the war in Afghanistan.

For US Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, to claim that Taliban hand grenades rather than US bombing was responsible for the recent death of 147 women and children is to head down an old and discredited path. Why would the Taliban murder their support base unless it had been lost to them?

The secrecy with which the ADF has cloaked itself in recent years is undermining the essential relationship between a democracy and a volunteer defence force. Suspicion is growing that this secrecy has little to do with the needs of the so called war on terror, but rather to do with hiding systemic problems, of morale, maintenance and training within the ADF.

Incredibly the Chief of the Defence Force (CDF), Air Chief Marshall, Angus Houston, claims to have known nothing of an alleged SAS bungle resulting in death and injuries to civilians near Tarin Kowt in July 2006 at the time of Senate hearings in February 2007. That is an incredible, and quite frankly unbelievable, six-month gap in the flow of important information within the Department of Defence.

The Minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, has asked the CDF to investigate the incident. The CDF can’t do that, he is part of the problem. As much as the facts relating to the incident need to be investigated, so does what, on the face of it, appears to be a cover up involving the CDF and other senior uniformed and civilian officers of the ADF.