The Sydney Al-Nakba rally and march — marking 64 years since the ruthless dispossession of Palestinians from their historic homeland — went off successfully on May 15 despite attempts by NSW police to have it moved, or cancelled.

Organisers say about 500 people took part in the march. The event was all the more poignant for the protesters since the NSW Supreme Court had the previous day dismissed the NSW Commissioner of Police’s attempt to derail it.

In her judgement, the Honorable Justice Adamson noted that Nakba day is a “product of history” and said: “Nakba Day ought to be regarded as a day which, like ANZAC Day, Christmas Day or Australia Day, is referable to a particular date which is not movable”.

Nakba, or “the Catastrophe”, is when Palestinians mark the Israeli takeover of their villages and towns in 1948.

In reality, the process of ethnically cleansing Palestinian inhabitants took several years. About 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled or fled. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed. The vast majority of Palestinian refugees, including those outside the 1949 armistice lines at the end of the war, and those internally displaced, were barred by the colonial settler state of Israel from returning. They are still denied the right of return.

Today, a younger generation of Palestinians and their supporters also use this date to highlight the many other human rights abuses against Palestinians — thereby fusing even more significance to this protest date.

Sydney Palestine solidarity activist and participant in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, Michael Coleman, described the police attempt to close down the march as “part of the broader attempt … to criminalise solidarity with the Palestinians”.

Patrick Langosch, a protest organiser who defended the action against the police in the Supreme Court, said: “I don’t believe concern for traffic was the real reason the police took us to court”. He added, “This time it backfired for the police and has only made our [solidarity] movement [for Palestine] stronger.”

Stop the War Coalition supported the al-Nakba protest.

On the weekend ofMay 19, NATO officials will gather in Chicago. Military action against Iran will be high on NATO’s agenda.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu calls Iran ‘an existential threat’ and both the Republican and Democratic leadership in the US is in favour of ‘tough action’.

Pressure for NATO intervention in Syria is also growing.

NATO is masquerading as a champion of democracy, while its members back dictators in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Military intervention will inflame the fighting. Its only aim will be to increase the Western powers’ grip on the region.

NATO will also discuss the occupation in Afghanistan.

Though the war is clearly lost, occupying forces are set to stay for at least two more years. Keeping NATO troops in place will lead to more atrocities and make a negotiated peace much more difficult.

The US and the UK are the lynchpins of the NATO coalition and responsible for more wars of agression around the world than any other power.

UNAC and Stop the War Coalition will therefore be holding major protests in the US and the UK to say no to a new war on Iran; to oppose the threat of intervention in Syria; and to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

Please join us and spread the word.

• More information on US protests…
• More information on UK protest…

Thousands of protesters are expected to descend on Chicago this weekend for Nato’s annual summit where Afghanistan will be top of the agenda.

It promises to be one of the most important anti-war demonstrations of our generation. I will be unable to travel to attend, but from here in Kabul I can tell you that the whole country will be watching Chicago this weekend.

The protesters remind us that the US government is not representative of the US people. It’s encouraging to see so many willing to take action and stand up against this unjust, disastrous war.

Recently Barack Obama travelled to Kabul to meet Afghanistan’s so-called president, Hamid Karzai. Both leaders used this meeting to pretend that they are ending this war when they are really trying to prolong it.

Obama knows that the American people are turning against the war, and both men also know that the Afghan people are against not only the war, but the continued occupation of their country.

Both claim that the war will end in 2014, while saying simultaneously that American troops will remain in some capacity until 2024. As 2024 nears they will probably say they mean to remain in Afghanistan until 2034.

The reality is that the US and its Nato allies plan to dominate Afghanistan and the larger region militarily for the next generation. Their reasoning is geostrategic: to control our energy and mineral resources, and maintain military superiority over China and other competitors.

No one can believe leaders like Obama who say they are working for peace even as they continue the bombings, night raids and drone attacks that kill civilians every week – sometimes every day – in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

This weekend’s protests will likely face repression. Police in Chicago have reportedly spent $1m on riot-control equipment ahead of the summit. But it’s vital that people take to the streets to raise their voices. Here in Afghanistan, peace and women’s rights activists risk their lives to hold protests against both the occupation and the fundamentalist warlords.

President Obama lived in Chicago for many years; it is practically his hometown. Mine is in Afghanistan’s remote Farah province, where I was elected as an MP in 2005, at the age of 26. Because I spoke out and denounced the occupation, the warlords and the Taliban, I faced threats and assassination attempts – and was kicked out of parliament in 2007.

Because I was banished, I was unable to stand in parliament and condemn a Nato bombing in May 2009 that killed about 150 people in Farah. Most of the victims of this massacre were women and children. I would like to ask Obama and his wife, Michelle, how they would feel if their own daughters were killed in this senseless and brutal manner?

Because this is the reality of the war in Afghanistan. This is the reality of what Nato does all around the world, and if Nato is allowed to stay and continue the war in Afghanistan, it will be emboldened to wage more wars against more people – in the Middle East, in Africa and beyond.

We have many problems in Afghanistan – fundamentalism, warlords, the Taliban – but we will have a better chance to solve them if we have our self-determination, our freedom, our independence. Nato’s bombs will never deliver democracy and justice to Afghanistan or any other country.

The voices of protest in the streets of Chicago will be seen and heard in Kabul, and in Farah, and eventually in every corner of Afghanistan. As we say here, the truth is like the sun: when it comes out, nothing can block it.

I’m sorry I cannot be in Chicago this weekend physically. But I, along with millions of other Afghans, will be there in heart and in spirit, standing in solidarity with the demand that Nato withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.

Source: UK Guardian May 16, 2012

Much has been made of the so-called budget cuts to the Department of Defence (or, more accurately, the Department of Foreign Military Interventions and Intimidation of Neighbouring Countries) this financial year.

But it is an illusion. The near $1 billion being “cut” from the 2012-2013 budget is being bumped to another year.

Most of the savings come from deferring the government’s planned purchase of the world’s most deadly and most expensive warplanes from the US, including the Orwellian-sounding “Strike Fighter”.

It had to be deferred because these killing machines won’t be ready for delivery on the scheduled date. When Australia buys them, they will be more expensive than previously advertised.

These “savings” aside, the military expenditure in this budget includes:

• $2.2 million in 2011‑12 to “enhance detainee management in Afghanistan”.
• $9.5 million in 2012‑13 for “Operation Resolute” military refugee boats and to protect the big mining corporations’ offshore resources.
• $1.3 billion over four years for the net additional cost of continuing Australia’s military intervention in Afghanistan and the wider Middle East. 

This doesn’t sound very much like a cut – and especially when you consider that each soldier in Afghanistan costs $1 million per year.

Time to end the waste of money and lives.

Troops home now and no support for foreign interventions.

Click here to see the budget’s Defence Expense measures.

Click here to see the budget’s Defence Capital (i.e. investment expenditure) measures.

Since WikiLeaks raised the ire of the US government in 2010 through the publication of leaked diplomatic cables, PM Gillard’s conduct towards Australian founder, Julian Assange, has been reprehensible.

Gillard is yet to apologise for her inflammatory claims that Assange had acted illegally, despite the AFP’s subsequent findings that he had broken no laws. Her remarks were made at a time when she should have been defending Assange from the US politicians calling for his assassination, and stand in stark contrast to her recent statement that now-ex House of Representatives Speaker, Peter Slipper, and ex-ALP MP, Craig Thomson, should be “entitled to a presumption of innocence”.

The Gillard government’s conduct in this affair continues to highlight the need for the openness and accountability which WikiLeaks exists to promote.

When evidence of the existence of a sealed US grand jury indictment against Assange emerged in February this year, the government denied any knowledge of it.  They continue to block the publication of documents relating to the potential extradition of Assange to the US, reportedly at the behest of the US government.

And we still don’t know, despite the Gillard government’s assurances that they would find out, why Assange’s former lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, was stopped at Heathrow Airport and told she was on an “inhibited” travel list.

Meanwhile, Ms Gillard’s government has been quietly passing legislation which will potentially make it easier for the them to extradite Assange to the US, should he ever return to Australia, and legislation which facilitates the US-led attacks against WikiLeaks.

This abrogation of our rights in deference to the US government is unacceptable. With the verdict in Assange’s final appeal against extradition to Sweden expected any day we need to remind PM Gillard that she’s answerable to us, the Australian people, not the US government.

We have organised a protest at the Sydney Convention Centre when Prime Minister Gillard speaks in Sydney on Tuesday May 15 to demand she acts immediately to stop attempts to extradite him there.

Where: Sydney Convention Centre, Darling Harbour
When: 1 pm, Tuesday 15 May

Organised by the Support Wikileaks and Assange Coalition. Contact Linda on 0401 511 588 for more information.

President Obama’s secret trip to Afghanistan, shrouded in secrecy for security reasons, culminated in a midnight meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the signing of a ‘strategic partnership agreement’, the full details of which have not been made available to either the American or Afghan public.

 US President Barack Obama arrived in Afghanistan late Tuesday on a surprise visit and signed a ‘strategic partnership agreement’ with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in a midnight ceremony. (AFP) “If ever there was an image to convey the limits of the UK-US success in Afghanistan, it was the way that Barack Obama, the Commander-in-Chief of the liberating, Taliban-scattering forces was forced to skulk into Kabul last night under the cover of darkness,” writes the Telegraph‘s Peter Foster. “After landing at Bagram Airbase just after 10pm local time, there was a low-level, cover-of-darkness helicopter insertion to the Presidential Palace where the ten-page deal (which contains no specifics on funding or troop levels) was signed around midnight.”

The agreement, broadly understood, codifies the ongoing conditions under which the US government agrees to operate in Afghanistan and will guide policies on the management of military bases, authority over detainees, the execution of night raids and other security operations, and will set conditions for troop levels and residual US forces that will remain in Afghanistan even after a ‘withdrawal’ commences in 2014.  The agreement also deals with ongoing financial support for the Afghan government and military into the future.

Though Obama spoke optimistically of ‘light of a new day’ in Afghanistan and many media reports heralded the agreement as a ‘signal to the end of war’, other analysts arrived at different conclusions.

“Interestingly,” writes Jason Ditz at Anti-war.com, “with the ink now drying on the document and the US officially committed to the occupation of Afghanistan for another decade, officials are continuing to tout 2014 as the “end” of the war. This speaks to how the 2024 date, though openly discussed by the Karzai government in Afghanistan and privately acknowledged as part of the secret pact, has not been publicly presented to the American public. When they will officially spring it on us remains unclear.”

“While the world may accept that the US and Afghan governments have some ‘state’ or ‘noble’ considerations for not revealing the contents of the US/Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement, how about the democratic consideration of involving Afghans in their own future?,” asked Kathy Kelly, a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, who is currently on a peace walk from Madison, Wisconsin to Chicago, where she will arrive in time for the upcoming NATO Summit.

“The SPA is likely to prolong fighting in the region,” Kelly added, “because the Taliban and neighboring countries have clearly stated that they won’t accept US foreign troop presence. Also, many Afghans wonder if the US and NATO want to protect construction of the TAPI [Trans-Afghanistan] pipeline, which the 2010 NATO summit approved of and the New Silk Road which Hilary Clinton has promised the US will construct.”President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai sign a strategic partnership agreement at the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday. (Charles Dharapak/AP)

US veteran Sgt. Jacob George, who served in Afghanistan but now speaks out against the war, argued the agreement speaks to the futility of US military efforts in Afghanistan that began with the US invasion in 2001. “The agreement actually allows for sustaining a ‘post-conflict’ force of 20,000 to 30,000 troops for a continued training of indigenous forces. They are pretending this is something new, but it’s not. That’s what I was doing in 2001 — and 2002, 2003 and 2004. This is just disastrous, for ten years, with the greatest military the world has ever seen, we’ve been unable to defeat people with RPGs. And a year after Bin Laden was killed, we’re still planning to keep tens of thousands of troops there.”

Andrey Avetisyan, Russian ambassador to Kabul, speaking to the Telegraph newspaper ahead of the agreement, revealed concern for the long-term impacts of a sustained US military presence. “Afghanistan needs many other things apart from the permanent military presence of some countries. It needs economic help and it needs peace. Military bases are not a tool for peace.”

“Does anyone think our staying until 2024 is going to bring peace and stability to Afghanistan?” ask Kevin Martin and Michael Eisenscher in an op-ed today on Common Dreams. “We’ve already been there for eleven years – the longest war in our country’s history.  What do we really have to show for it?  We’ve spent almost $523 billion.  Almost 2000 Americans have been killed and another 15,300 wounded.  1000 NATO troops have lost their lives.” Eisenscher is National Coordinator of U.S. Labor Against the War and Martin is the executive director of Peace Action.Dec. 19, 2001 — Marine Lt. Ronald Reed of Virginia waits inside his fighting position on the perimeter of the bombed-out airport in Kandahar. More than eleven years later, an end to the disaster that is the US war in Afghanistan is nowhere in sight. (Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times)

They continue: “Staying through 2024 will be a hard sell to the majority of Americans. According to last week’s Pew Research public opinion poll, only about a third of those polled think U.S. troops should stay in Afghanistan ‘until the situation there is stabilized’ (whatever that means). About two-thirds of Obama supporters, and almost as many swing voters (who make up nearly a quarter of the electorate), want a swift withdrawal of U.S. troops, while Mitt Romney supporters are split just about evenly.”

Today also marks the one year anniversary of the US killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Martin and Eisensche conclude: “It’s not clear what the year since the killing of Bin Laden has done to improve U.S. or Afghan security. It’s even less clear what staying for another dozen years will do for either country. The time to bring U.S. forces home is now, not 2014, and certainly not 2024.”

And Robert Naiman, Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, asks in his analysis at Common Dreams, ‘What Did We Get for 381 US Dead Since the Death of bin Laden?‘ and writes:

In his speech, President Obama said, “As we move forward, some people will ask why we need a firm timeline.” I’m delighted that President Obama supports the principle of a firm timeline. But it’s far from obvious that we actually have a “firm timeline,” and if we do, exactly what it is. Certainly there is no timeline for when all U.S. troops will be withdrawn. President Obama did seem to imply that we can be sure that there will be no U.S. troops involved in “combat” in Afghanistan after December 31, 2014. But they may be involved in “counterterrorism,” which presumably is combat, and “training,” and if you ask the military what “training” is, they will say it includes embedding with Afghanistan troops who are engaged in combat. So “training” is also combat. And therefore it is far from obvious that we actually have a “firm timeline” for anything. [...]

In his speech, President Obama said: “we are pursuing a negotiated peace. In coordination with the Afghan government, my Administration has been in direct discussions with the Taliban. We have made it clear that they can be a part of this future if they break with al Qaeda, renounce violence, and abide by Afghan laws. “

Isn’t this essentially the same policy that Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was proposing in October 2006 when he said that the Afghan Taliban couldn’t be defeated militarily and that the U.S. should bring “people who call themselves Taliban” into the Afghan government? Why have we waited almost six years to adopt this policy? Are we really going to get a much better deal now than we could have had six years ago? If so, will the difference be sufficient to justify the additional sacrifice of the last six years?

If we stopped the killing now, how sure are we that the political deal that would result would be much worse for us than the deal that will result if we keep killing? Shouldn’t someone have to answer that? What if we tried having an offensive cease-fire for 30 days, just as an experiment, to see if it facilitated peace talks? What exactly would be the downside of giving that experiment a try?

Source: Common Dreams, May 2, 2012

Anzac Day celebrates forgetting.

Its revival, the transformation of a ceremony nearly extinct in the 1980s into today’s turbocharged festival, coincides with the excision from national consciousness of the most important aspects of the Great War.

In their book What’s wrong with Anzac?, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds document the funding that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs pours into resources promoting Anzac Day. Yet despite such educational campaigns, how many Australians can answer the simple question: what was the war about?

Conservatives, and most liberals, tell us that Anzac Day stands above politics. That’s true, in a fashion. But the event’s not apolitical so much as anti-political.

Where Carl von Clausewitz defined war as the continuation of politics by other means, Anzac celebrates the battlefield as a realm entirely removed from political life. The Great War spurred an unprecedented degree of social polarisation in Australia, and yet the obsessive retelling of the Gallipoli landing never corresponds to any equivalent interest in, say, the populace’s remarkable rejection of conscription in two ballots in 1916 and 1917. The Bush/Blair/Howard War on Terror rendered that period more relevant than ever, since obvious parallels can be drawn between the hysterical patriotism of the ‘Freedom Fries’ days and the jingoism during which most Australian cities renamed their streets (if you live in Victoria Street, there’s a pretty good chance it was once called Wilhelm Road), while the state-sanctioned suspicion of Arabs and Muslims after 9/11 corresponds to the widespread persecution of Irish and Catholics in the wake of the Easter Uprising, and the unparalleled freedom granted to security agencies echoes Billy Hughes’ promulgation of the open-ended War Precautions Act.

Yet Anzac Day functions not to celebrate but to prevent that kind of history. It lauds bravery yet allows no room for what Bismarck called ‘civil courage’, a trait that many non-combatants showed in abundance when, against all the newspapers, politicians and mainstream political parties, they opposed the slaughter in Europe.

Again, in these endless discussions about the young men of that time, how often does anyone point out that Australians saw one of the very first anti-war protests anywhere in the world, when the Industrial Workers of the World called a rally on the Domain the weekend the conflict broke out? Everything that the IWW predicted about the war came to pass, just as everything that the official jingoes said proved entirely wrong. But amidst all the Anzac headshaking about the horrors of Gallipoli, there’s no room to mention those who tried to stop the killing taking place.

The anti-politics of Anzac Day not only diminishes the experiences of the millions of Australians who did not fight, it renders entirely monochromatic the experiences of the soldiers themselves. We can tell, for instance, the story of the Christmas truce of 1914 but only because a certain version of the story supports Anzac’s presentation of war as a time out of time, an experience in a realm where normal rules did not apply. The perversity of men shaking hands and wishing each other luck before obediently ducking back into the trenches to commence hostilities supports Anzac’s general depiction of combat as a social anomaly, a mysterious business entirely disconnected from what Archbishop Mannix called ‘a sordid trade war’.

That’s why there’s much less emphasis on the context of those unofficial armistices, which were, initially, made possible because so many ordinary Germans had been working in Britain and felt no particular animosity to the men in the opposite trenches, and which were systematically broken up by authorities terrified that if the soldiers fraternised it would be impossible to make them fight. Indeed, even if you only focus on combat (rather than the widespread mutinies that later took place), it’s possible to tell the story of the Great War in terms of measures by officers to force their men to kill. In his fascinating book Trench Warfare, Tony Ashworth documents the regularity in which ordinary soldiers on both sides adopted what he calls the ‘live and let live’ policy, allowing unofficial truces punctuated by ritualistic exchanges of gunfire at certain times and certain places, exchanges specifically designed not to kill anyone and thus avoid retribution. In Ashworth’s argument, the official tactics adopted by commanders were attempts to break down these proto-political refusals, to force the men into contact each other and thus ensure that they would fight.

In other words, even in the most extreme circumstances, the Great War was a social conflict, shaped by internal contradictions. That’s why, if the origins of the war are now never discussed, there’s an equally determined silence about how the slaughter ended, with revolution in Russia and Germany, and near insurrections in many other countries.

At the same time, one of the curious consequences of the anti-politics of Anzac is that the celebrations embrace the literature of disenchantment that emerged from the war, albeit with a distinctive twist. The war is now told, not in the bloodless narratives of contemporary Empire propagandists, but as a compendium of tropes taken from Sassoon and Owen and Remarque and Barbusse. Every schoolkid knows about shell shock and bodies hanging on barbed wire and rats feasting on corpses and the rest of it, yet these details, which in the original texts contrasted what had been promised with what war delivered, are now used to bolster the presentation of combat as an experience entirely divorced from normal social relations.

As William James noted, the ‘possibility of violent death [is] the soul of all romance’, which is why showing war’s horrors does not, in itself, foster antiwar sentiment, since ‘the horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis’.

It’s a central part of Anzac’s anti-politics: the hellishness of war separates it from ordinary life, transforming Clausewitz’s ‘politics by other means’ into a transcendental experience at which civilians can only marvel. Whereas for the writers of the twenties and the thirties, the Great War disappointed by representing, in concentrated form, the violent banality of industrial society, today the very bloodiness of the conflict is used to highlight the contrast with our own day-to-day life. The narrative therefore shifts from social critique (why did we allow these atrocities to happen?) to a veneration of sacrifice, the nature of which is largely irrelevant.

The Gallipoli pilgrimage provides the obvious example. The attendees at the dawn service do not ask themselves why Australians died invading a country thousands of miles away. No, that particular issue’s rendered inherently irrelevant, since the backpackers go there not to think about history but to marvel at the height of the cliffs and the sharpness of the rocks, and to feel an awe at people their own age experiencing horrors that they couldn’t imagine. The question arising from the pilgrimage is thus not ‘why did it happen?’ (a query that leads not only into history but into politics) but rather ‘what did it feel like?’, an aestheticisation of the past that’s explicitly anti-political.

Or, rather, it’s anti-political, in one sense. In another, it’s entirely compatible with the trend toward militarisation in the wake of 9/11, not simply because it fits entirely with the new consensus that there’s something inherently underhand in debating the politics of war (recall how long the Afghan conflict had been running before Parliament convened a formal discussion) but because the question ‘what did it feel like?’ always implies a follow-up: ‘I wonder what it would be like.’

Senator Scott Ludlam’s fascinating diary from his visit to Afghanistan illustrates how this plays out in recruits. Speaking of the soldiers he meets, he writes:

All the same, there’s an eagerness to prove themselves. The further forward you get, the happier crew are to be there and the less interested in being pulled back into safety. Having spent years training, most of them really, really want to be in theatre.

“This is a great battle lab for us.”

[…]

“I’d do this whether you paid me or not.”

If its horrors make war a transcendental experience, the contrast with the banality of late capitalist life make combat a perpetual source of fascination, in precisely the way James describes.

What are the consequences of this recognition of Anzac as an anti-politics?

Most obviously, it implies a certain futility about debating its meaning, even through posts like this.

Because Anzac’s not an argument so much as an aesthetic event, it’s largely impervious to critique. Everyone knows the newspaper formula: you devote most of your space to praising the diggers and republishing various twenty-first century versions of the ‘old lie’ – and then you give half a column to someone to ponder what it all means. The ritualistic debates about the nature of Anzac are, to a large extent, part of Anzac, a means for keeping the commemoration in the centre of Australian life.

Which is not to suggest that critiques should not be mounted, nor that it’s not important to foster genuine historical debate about the Great War, but simply to suggest that the terrain will not shift substantially without the re-emergence of anti-war movement that offers a different way of thinking about conflicts.

If you look back at the shifting attitudes to Anzac, that’s the real correlation. Alan Seymour’s One Day of the Year, usually cited as evidence of post-war disenchantment, obviously emerged from the anti-Vietnam movement, just as the near collapse of the celebrations in the 1980s stemmed from the rise of the anti-nuclear movement.

Contrary to conservative revisionism, peace activism has never involved an indifference to the plight of soldiers themselves. We’re often told that anti-war activists spat at conscripts returning from Vietnam. What we don’t hear is that huge numbers of the soldiers themselves supported the movement, both once they returned and, sometimes, while they were actually in theatre. In terms of the memory of the Great War, many of the most interesting studies of what was done to the troops have come from writers influenced by the peace movement, precisely because they’re more likely to eschew the top-down approach of reactionary historians.

Some 35 million people died in the First World War. It is an extraordinary statistic. In the face of such overwhelming suffering, such tremendous devastation, the only decent commemoration entails ensuring that nothing comparable ever happens again.

From Overland.

“You do not honor the dead through mindless flag waving, rewriting history or promoting new wars,” said Hamish Chitts, East Timor veteran and spokesperson for Stand Fast – a group of veterans and former military personnel who oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“ANZAC Day has become a nationalist circus with little real reflection on why governments sent soldiers, sailors and airmen to their deaths. All we get is glib cliches and a perverse ‘cult of sacrifice’ where we’re told that it doesn’t matter why you are sent to war, whether your government lied to you or not, the greatest thing an ordinary Australian can do is die in a war.

“A classic example can be seen on the streets of Brisbane. The RSL have put up banners and ads on buses saying, “420,127 Queenslanders have courageously fought for our freedom since 1915.” This is absolutely ridiculous and an outright lie! How did the insane slaughter of World War 1 gain freedom? The overwhelming majority of those poor souls that ended up fighting in those trenches that did come back knew it was a war only benefiting the rich and something that should never happen again.

“Which war gained women the right to vote? Which war gained the 8-hour work day? Which war gave people the right to hold public demonstrations? There isn’t one, our freedom has always been fought and won by the people, civilians, standing up to their own government!

‘The myth that if Australian troops fight they are automatically fighting for our freedom needs to be busted because it lets warmongering politicians off the hook when they slaughter our youth!

“The quagmire of Afghanistan and the soldiers it has and will kill on the battlefield and from suicide could have been saved if we had learnt from the past. As Australia accelerates its retreat from that disaster the criminal politicians responsible for this need to be brought to account.

According to the Department of Veteran Affairs at least 78 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have taken their own lives and hundreds have been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

“Stand Fast does not oppose remembering our comrades-in-arms that have died in war. But, if you are serious about honoring their memory, learn about the real reasons they were sent to war, pledge to stop this from happening again and join the call for an immediate withdrawal of Australian troops from Afghanistan,” concluded Chitts.

From Stand Fast

Pictured above is Alex Campbell, the last Anzac and surviving participant of the Gallipoli campaign who enlisted at 16 and later became outspoken against war.

PM Julia Gillard’s April 17 statement on Afghanistan revealed the government is under pressure to get Australian troops out.

The announcement that Australia is partially withdrawing troops – bringing it belatedly into line with the US – is welcome.

It reflects the growing political pressure on the government: 64% want the troops out, no longer believing the rhetoric about Afghanistan being the “good” war.

But while commentators suggest that her announcement was an “exit” plan, in fact the PM made clear that Defence Force special forces, among others, will remain in Afghanistan after 2014 as part of Australia’s war alliance with the US.

Gillard’s statement tries to argue that the war and occupation have delivered benefits to the people of Afghanistan  – such as education. But the comparison is easy if it’s with the days of the Taliban. What’s missing is a comparison to the period before the Taliban, as former MP and educationalist Malalai Joya, pointed out in her recent visit to Sydney.

Under the 10 year occupation, women’s rights have been badly eroded. While there is some more access to education in Kabul, Joya said, this is not the case throught the country. Forced marriage, underage marriage, and domestic violence are widespread and too widely accepted. More than half of all girls still don’t go to school. Every two hours an Afghan woman dies of pregnancy-related causes.

In addition, the Karzai government’s deal-making with reactionary war lords has led to reactionary laws such as one on marital rape and the jailing of women who flee violent partners.

There are likely to be other reasons for the Australian government’s change of tack: Gillard’s statement touches on the huge mineral resources in Afghanistan.

Gillard makes its plain she backs what is euphamistically referred to as “political reconcilation” in Afghanistan. This is the deal-making between the reactionary war lords and the puppet government of Hamid Karzai – a process that democrats, including Joya, reject.

The loss of morale and discipline of the occupying forces is another reason the pro-war camp is getting nervous.

Last month US forces undertook a cold-blooded revenge attack on 19 civilians – mostly women and children – in Kandahar. US forces have burned the Koran, urinated on corpses and on April 17 the Los Angeles Times published photos of US solidiers holding up body parts of dead Afghans.

The growing number of “blue on green” killings – Afghan trainees killing their Western trainers – reveals that the occupiers’ strategy – their current “goal” – is also deeply flawed.

The Australian government will have to be pressured to face up to the truth and do what is best for the people of Afghanistan.

All the troops must be pulled out and the billions currently being spent on militarism should instead become war reparations – to grass roots Afghan-led organisations – to begin the huge task of reconstructing their country.

This should be the focus of any new agreement Australia signs with Afghanistan.

This is a lightly edited diary of the Parliamentary Defence Exchange 3-13 April 2012 to Al Minhad, Tarin Kot, FOB Mirwais and Kandahar Air Field. Thanks in particular due to Captain Simon Petie, whose patience and generosity in looking after four special needs individuals made this trip so valuable.

Day 1 – Al Minhad Airbase, UAE

It’s about 8:30pm local time, on a bunkbed with the sound of an air conditioner and the roar of cargo planes for company.

Stand out memories of the day: Dubai from the air. Freeway lanes inscribed in straight lines across the desert, geometries of colonies and highrise, blocks and spires marching out of empty sandlots, and the impossible needle of the Burj Khalifa, distinct from the structures around it.

Two trestle tables under shadecloth, three decades worth of murder weapons laid out in neat rows.  This is the first proper briefing at Al Minhad – all of it dragged back from Afghanistan. Cluster bombs, plastic buckets full of fertilizer, mortar rounds, Soviet shell casings fashioned into charges full of ball bearings.

Three taut-faced soldiers deliver a clipped overview of the tools of the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) trade: everything from plastic bottle fuses to pressure pads made out of old truck tyres. These, against attack helicopters, drones and armoured vehicles guided by satellite; the 21^st century fights the 19^th and somehow it’s still a contest.

In the background, gaunt silhouettes of Dubai stacked in the grey air, and training jets blasting into the sky in series.

We’re taught how to apply a tourniquet – to ourselves – in the event of something bad happening. We meet Major General Smith, who runs the whole Middle East Area of Operations (MEAO), and his deputies. A blizzard of acronyms, all delivered with crisp certainty, some whole sentences delivered in capital letters.

An Army Captain is our guide here, cheerful, thoughtful and entirely professional – just doing a job of course, but it’s much more than that it seems. How would you ever go back to a normal life if you made this business your occupation?

First briefings in which the handover is progressing pretty well and the Afghan National Army, at least, will be ready for handover and command by 2014. And the political strata, civil society? Blank. Not really their job.

Tomorrow, very early, lighting out for Tarin Kot. Have been fitted out for body armour and a Kevlar helmet, not something I thought I’d ever have to wear.

On the road outside the ‘welfare hut’ tonight, piles of duffel bags and knots of people in khaki waiting for rollcall for tomorrow’s trip into Tarin Kot and Kandahar. The air has cooled off and if there’s tension here it’s subliminal, like the background thunder of the cargo planes. 24 hours ago I’d never heard of Al Minhad, now I suspect it will be lodged permanently in the odd assortment of places a long way from home that I seem to be finding myself in.

Day 2 – Tarin Kot, Afghanistan.

10pm, in a cramped little bunk room in the transit chalets.

Early start today – three hours in a C130 over hazy white mountains, like being inside a mechanical rhinoceros in the company of dour riflemen. There’s barely room for people in this noisy swaying bucket, which tilts over on its wingtip on final approach and there’s a flash of green through the porthole – irrigated fields along the Tirin River.

Down the ramp into brilliant sunlight and two blackhawks have followed us in, hanging there with tangible menace with a wall of mountains framing them.

This is a small city now – coffee shop, souvenirs, unknown species of earthmovers, cranes, bulked out trucks and personnel carriers, and the sound of aircraft everywhere.

It’s a day of demonstrations and fairly intense briefings. The war goes well we’re told. I wonder whether the peace is nonetheless going to be pretty nasty.

I’ve spent the last 12 months researching drones, or more correctly Unpiloted Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and here they are, on their own little runway off to one side – small surveillance platforms controlled by two guys in a shipping container. In the last decade, somehow toy remote control planes got very, very serious.

Somewhere in the maze of prefab, shipping containers, blast walls and barbed wire, a reintroduction to the ‘things that will kill you’ workshop – antique weapons and home made bombs, and the teams that deal with them. “There is no peaceful way to die here,” during one frank briefing – we’ve brought a new kind of violence to a violent place.

Suddenly kitted out in a blast suit and told to disarm a pretend bomb – this thing must weigh 20 kg and has an air conditioned helmet – then off you go to lay a couple of slabs of explosive next to two antique mortars. Now try and imagine it’s 20 degrees hotter, and if you screw it up you might not even realise it before you’re blown apart.

We pass the Afghan army compound on our way back to our quarters, and it looks like a bombed out slum. WTF is really going on here?

Day 3 – Tarin Kot

All day on base today. I just took a walk around the block to try and clear my head. This place is achingly strange at night – away from the lights and people, a dusty wilderness of sheds and shipping containers, roaring generators and alien vehicles.

It’s a disconcerting mashup of prefab and handmade, and in the dead of night I could almost hear the silence of the valley behind the generators and helicopters lifting away.

Strangest and most arresting moment so far. Our little contingent on the hill doing weapons practice, blasting away at a near hillside with a steyr rifle and old pistol, and less than 60 seconds after we finish, the hillside is swarming with raggedy Afghan kids on motorbikes, charging up to the razor wire. It’s the brass shell casings they want, for melting down in town. We’re busy emu-picking the ground and putting them in bags, but these kids have been watching off to one side, and as soon as we’re done they’re on us…

Right then, close enough for ‘salaam’ and a wave, I feel like I might as well be from a different planet. Who are these kids, for whom inhabiting a firing range and collecting spent rounds is the best way to pay for the fuel in the bikes? It opened up an unimaginable gulf – me in my travelling cocoon, snapping an uncomprehending set of photos; them heading home to… what?

Today is fragmentary – the morning with Cathy, the formidable base commander, touring us through her edgy domain, a township fortress of 6500 people, its power station, poo ponds, firefighters and engineers. An air traffic control tower looking along the runway, helicopters in their fortified slots. The afternoon in a careful and detailed briefing with military commanders on exactly how they see the situation in Uruzgan.

Behind everything, this wide, wild stone valley. There will be landscapes like this on Mars.

Today I’ve driven a six-wheeled monster, felt the ugly kick of a steyr and watched the bullet impact on the hillside, and gaped at attack helicopters pulling away to god knows where.

Our last session, with the commanding officer of the SOTG, special operations task group, who very calmly removed any lingering innocence we might have had as to the point of this place: he has more than a hundred special forces soldiers in the field tonight. They’ve been in Helmand killing fields and are making their way back to their extraction point. The briefing is careful and technical; later we see on IR feeds from surveillance drones the villages in their area as a cursor on a map lights up their position.

20 or so Afghans are dead. The Australians are on the ground alone in the badlands of Helmand, on foreign ground about as far from home as it’s possible to get. But they also have access to predators, F16s, Apache helicopters, fixed wing gunships and aeromedical evacuation.

The kids they fight inhabit a different century entirely – no-one from their side tracks their movements on widescreen TVs and calls in air support or medevacs them home.

Maybe they wondered about Australia, where it was, why they were being hunted by people from so far away. Probably not. Who knows. They’re dead now, and my fact finding tour won’t uncover their names, who they were or what war they thought they were fighting.

It’s 20 to 11. Maybe I won’t hear the return of the blackhawks carrying the Australians back, from inside my blast-proof lodgings – although just as I write this something is passing overhead. What a crazy, lonely place this is. Tomorrow, all being well, I’ll be a passenger on one of those helos.

Day 4 – Tarin Kot -> Kandahar

This is odd: I miss my shipping container bunk in TK. Where we are now is described cheerfully by locals as a shithole – KAF, Kandahar Air Field.

25,000 people running the world’s busiest single strip airport. It’s a confusing dusty metropolis of storehouses, hangar complexes and yards, ubiquitous shipping containers and all possible species of vehicle.

The people here are mainly supporting helicopter and drone flights in and out of Kandahar, and logisticians running gear to TK. Whereas that camp has a certain baroque charm, KAF has yet to show its appealing side.

Today we were flown up the Chora Valley to a small Forward Operating Base (FOB Mirwais) about 20 minutes in a Blackhawk to the north-east of TK.

This is really a unique landscape – mud quadrangles and mosques with their backs to the lunar mountains, fronting neat geometries of brilliant green fields with the stony riverbed running like a vein down the centreline.

Here, I am an alien species, looking down on them past the barrel of a machine gun from a thumping great helicopter, at courtyards and cooking areas inhabited by people I can barely guess at.

Pausing at the FOB (the only moment of hostility so far – “Which one’s the Green? You can wait outside the base,”) in structures dimly familiar from deep childhood memories. Mud architecture and people on the street just the other side of the razor wire – I momentarily lost the sense of being a creature from a different century.

Then it was back. Guy from central Queensland describes picking up the remnants of a suicide bomber, assembling them on a plastic bag and realising it is a 12 or 13 year old kid. This isn’t really a war. This is something else.

The guys running the base are solid, resourceful, funny and hospitable (with one exception and we have them camped halfway up the valley on the threshold of terrible violence, training up the Afghan National Army to take over when we leave.

The helos are back, shooting us across to FOB Hadrian with this goggle-eyed Western Australian anti-war campaigner pressing his nose against the window.

Razorblade mountains, helicopter pilots with their beetle helmets and cyberspace feeds, children in bomb vests, shredded for the guy from Queensland to piece together.

Full moon tonight. I can’t see the mountains from here because the air is full of shit and fine, powdered dust, but I bet the mountains in the Chora Valley are as sharp as knives in the cold light.

Here is somewhere liminal, perched between mundane horror and violent hope, the worst nightmares of different centuries colliding with satellite imagery and homemade pipes full of ball bearings.

We’ll see what tomorrow serves up. I’m thinking that if KAF disappeared off the map and everyone was instantly teleported home, never to return, the world would be a measurably better place.

Day 5 – Kandahar

I guess the place is starting to make an evil kind of sense.

The Australian contingent here is smaller and more focused, a tighter cog in a larger machine. And what a machine.

Today we went from the storeman and movements people, keeping meticulous track of a whirlwind of gear, to the Heron unit flying drones all over southern Afghanistan.

Two teenagers in a shipping container fly the vehicle, entirely immersed in its extended nervous system. Next door, intelligence officers call what they see, helping the ‘pilots’ steer the cameras and relaying their interpretation to the field.

While we’re there, they’re soaking up the ‘pattern of life’ in two compounds 6km west of TK – suspected weapons caches with a convoy of Australian soldiers on the way toward them.

From up here, all of the tiny black figures moving between the orchards and the courtyards look suspicious. Look like targets. The dusty terrain below is an abstracted field of pixels and possible threats – not a cultivated river valley, but a clinical battlespace. The Afghans below are ‘LNs’ – Local Nationals – and some of them may die when the convoy arrives. In the meantime, they smudge their way around slow pans at various resolutions, awaiting deletion or passing over, their unthinking fate transmitted to these kids intently watching them from the safety of big Samsung monitors.

Their unit commander is affable and very competent, and the Israeli-built drone in the hangar is streamlined and clean. It can hang in the air for 20 hours. Anything it sees can be incinerated in very short order by any number of capabilities called in by the people we’ve met over the last few days.

To lighten the mood I’ve been photographing graffiti – some of it very good – stencilled mainly on the concrete blast walls. Zero Six, whoever you are, you’ve provided the only humanising touches to a thoroughly dehumanising place.

We spend the afternoon at the boardwalk – a piece of pure Americana transplanted into the sands south of Kandahar city. Fried Chicken, steaks at TGI Friday, stalls and shops, a football pitch, and tides of troops and contractors ambling along with their mates and their weapons. A small piece of the Midwest grafted uneasily into a war zone; as we arrive, to complete the weird, a predator drone is lifting away behind the rooftops.

Kandahar is fucking weird. The sightlines are long and dusty, the roads clogged with traffic, and the air grey with diesel fumes and the thunder of air movements.

Last night in Afghanistan. Just spent a great hour playing cards with Simon, Alex, Steven and Alex – they’ve been good company. But my god. What is to become of all this?

Drawdown? Transition? People just laugh at that. KAF is here to stay, until something major forces a change.

The dust has got into everything, including perhaps my sense of clarity. It’s time to go.

Day 6 – Kandahar – AMAB (AKA Camp Cupcake)

The air at KAF today is a fine grained blend of hydrocarbons, dust and fecal matter. You can smell it – shit rising from the ponds on the edge of camp, diesel fumes, powdery dust.

We visit the rotary wing group and learn about flying Chinooks in and out of situations – a visit out to the hangar, but the choppers are in the field.

It’s our last few hours in Afghanistan. By now the weather is closing in – a foul curtain of brown haze sweeping toward this benighted place. We wait an hour – every imaginable kind of aircraft flying in and out of the smog.

It’s actually raining shit – a few drops wrench from the tortured air, and somehow it just adds to the immense dusty sadness of the place. Occupied Kandahar.

We wait, in the company of blackhawks hanging like malignant wasps, monstrous cargo planes and a tiny passenger plane carrying a senior US military official. On the flight line, a ceaseless procession of spyplanes, jet fighters, passenger aircraft;  further back again, the dusty forms of Chinooks and Russian heavy lift helos.

This is all in the service of the people of Afghanistan, is it? Really?

Our Hercules arrives and parks in front of us – visibility is now appalling, but at no time does the pace of activity cease. We struggle back into the air, strapped in and dazed, aftertaste of shitful Kandahar air coating the back of the throat.

Half an hour in Tarin Kot, the air relatively clean and fresh.

Imagine: the valley in rain – great columns of grey stalking the south west, mountains zig zag shapes against a soft sky – when the thunder hits the base moments after the flash of lightning, it’s like the final word on this hideous ‘war’.

Then we’re away again – flying into turbulence with the messy but disciplined chaos of TK falling behind, no doubt to reappear in dreams.

Most of the way through the flight we’re invited up to the front.

Two cheerful pilots are bringing us back to AMAB, the sun dead ahead, and sheets of soft cloud fleeing away below. Beautiful. Sit in the jumpseat and watch as this grey behemoth makes its way back to Al Minhad, Dubai’s alien profile rising through a horizon of smog, the airfield taking shape up ahead and the pilots’ coded banter.

It’s a spellbinding way to leave the country: in the cockpit of a C130 Hercules, with the imprint of six big days just starting to settle.

Day 7 – AMAB

Last full day here and a quiet one. Debrief in the morning with our group and a quick hello to Minister Stephen Smith, to whom the ADF have taken a dislike over his handling of the skype scandal – although a couple admitted quietly that the extra transparency demanded by the Minister may have been good for Defence.

A quick look around AMAB – this quiet and orderly cube farm is dismissed as ‘camp cupcake’ by those further forward, but it’s an essential staging point for Australia’s interventions across the MEAO.  We meet the comms people, fire crews and force support unit running base. By now our team is probably feeling a bit jaded and powerpointed out.

The afternoon is long and quiet – the guys with blue passports are going to Dubai – having not been asked to bring it I’m stuck behind the wire and strangely ok with that.

Sleep through the heat and then there’s time to think about the future of this war and the relationship between Parliament and the military.

If this was about Al Qaeda then it’s been over for years. There are no AQ in Uruzgan and only a handful left in Afghanistan it seems. So we’re done? Unless we only do occupations after horrific attacks, we now need to invade Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and probably a few others.

One thing is pretty clear. The ADF will do what they’re asked – this is a focussed, professional, task-driven organisation and the people at the sharpest end of it spent their lives training to be sent into harm’s way. They are completely, unambiguously aware of the risk – they’ve all attended ramp ceremonies where their mates’ casket is repatriated to family back into Australia.

All the same, there’s an eagerness to prove themselves. The further forward you get, the happier crew are to be there and the less interested in being pulled back into safety. Having spent years training, most of them really, really want to be in theatre.

“This is a great battle lab for us.”

“Al Qaeda has been removed from the battlespace.”

“This is mostly about the US alliance.”

“I’d do this whether you paid me or not.”

At what point does the ethic of service combine with institutional inertia to simply keep us there no matter how far sideways the mission creeps?

This is indeed a great battle lab for us, the United States and the parasitic encrustation of contractors, mercenaries, middlemen and arms suppliers who have turned Kandahar Air Field into a city larger than Kalgoorlie.

Was it also a battle lab for the twelve year old who blew himself apart in the Chora Valley?

“What’s the definition of an insurgent?”
“Someone who takes a shot at us.”

Leaving, by this erudite definition, will end the insurgency. Will that tip Afghanistan back into a misogynistic, feudal hell hole? No-one here seems to know.

If we leave in 2014? What about 2020? 2030? When exactly, will this stable and compliant Afghan liberal democracy be properly baked? They. Don’t. Know.

The military don’t get to decide whether they stay or go. They get a signal from the executive, which right now is taking nearly all its cues from the United States. Nearly.

The decisions then, the real ones, are taken by people who never get shot at. Who never smell the blood and shit. Us – the politicians who, if we’re lucky, get to spend a week there under heavy protection so we can go home and say we saw it, we get it, we support the troops.

Funny word this. Support. Classy sleight of hand there, as if supporting the people in the line of fire was ever the question. Having met them, eaten with them, shared bunkrooms with them, ‘supporting’ them is so remarkably the wrong question to ask.

What kind of supporter would leave them in there indefinitely, another dozen or two to die between now and 2014, training an army to serve a democracy and a civil society that is nowhere in evidence?

That’s the calculated blind spot in this remarkable trip – the only Afghans I spoke to were serving coffee and selling gemstones, the only ones I saw were running up the firing range toward the razor wire. We’ve been in a perfect cocoon.

“If we did a poll of the people I suspect the coalition would be asked to leave”.

But of course no-one has done a poll.

All this in Uruzgan, an area three times the size of the ACT, with most of the blood spilled in Helmand and parts east. I think we’ve been played. All of us.

Scott Ludlam April 18, 2012