URUZGAN WANTOKS
Leaving Kandahar on edge, the one-hour flight northwest to Uruzgan is uneventful but the scenery as we pass over desert and mountain on our way northwest into Uruzgan province is pretty epic. You can just imagine Alexander the Great and his motley army humping across this parched landscape two thousand years ago – and what a feat it was.
Since 2006, Tarin Kot in Uruzgan has been Australia’s main base of operations in Afghanistan, although Special Forces were deployed since late 2001 with the initial US invasion to drive the Taliban out of power. “TK” also turns out to be the birthplace and hometown of Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, who is still at large. Despite this, security here is much better than in Kandahar and the south and the Australians have worked hard to build schools, roads and local capacity among the Afghan National Army (ANA). But there remains constant danger and so far Australia’s casualty rate stands at 40 killed and more than 260 wounded, including the latest wounding last week in another “insider attack” by a rogue ANA soldier near Kabul.
Last week, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten flew into TK for the day to announce the end of Australia’s deployment.
‘Australia’s longest war is ending,’ PM Abbott said, ‘not with victory, not with defeat, but with, we hope, an Afghanistan better for our presence’.
At its peak there was 1550 Australian personnel in-country (at least 20,000 Australians have served since operations began), but over the past year or so it has dropped to around 700, with only 400 left in TK. By December, like many other allied nations in ISAF, the ADF will be mostly gone. They will no longer maintain the TK base, but a number of special forces, trainers and advisers will remain in bigger camps at Kandahar and Kabul. It reflects what is happening all over – ISAF forces are pulling back from FOBs and regional bases to fewer, larger bases just in key locations. It is into this vacuum that a contest is emerging between the ANA and Taliban.
Looking for Pacific island soldiers – particularly Melanesians – amongst the Australian Defence Force (ADF) ranks here was going to be the weak link I thought. Surrounded by Micronesians with Guam Battalion and Polynesians with US, French and NZ forces, I figured that Melanesians would be the ones thin on the ground for documentation as part of my Pacific island soldier project here. In fact, as the cheerful Aussie PAO Kris Gardiner says, ‘they’ve all come out of the woodwork, I didn’t realise how many were here,’ and are well represented. During my few days at the TK base I find 3 Papua New Guineans, a Solomon Islander, a Fijian, an Aboriginal Australian and a Maori from New Zealand. They ranged in job description from infantry soldier, to Q-store admin, drivers, carpenters and even the heart-stopping job of IED/bomb disposal.
IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) have been the curse of the Iraq and Afghan campaigns, and source of the most casualties. It is the worry on everyone’s minds wherever you travel, no matter how good the armour on your vehicle is. This is not to mention the increasing use of VBIEDs (vehicle born IEDs), where suicide bombers sidle up and then ram their car, packed with explosives, into moving convoys. This is what killed two Guam Battalion soldiers in May this year in Kabul, a loss keenly felt by the guys I’m embedded with in the tight-knit islander unit.
I spend one morning with Corporal Shane Gibbs, a Brisbane-raised lad whose parents both came from Papua New Guinea. With full beard and thick Aussie accent, “Gibbo” takes me through his Hurtlocker world. This is his second tour and he has lost mates along the way, but his professionalism and enthusiasm shine through. He shows me the Bushmaster vehicle he and his team operate from, loaded with various types of explosive for “controlled demolition” of the IEDs they find. He wheels out a robot vehicle they call a “scorpion” which has video and robot arm to remove explosives or deposit them safely by remote control.
‘The younger guys who are used to playing X-box and video games usually get the hang of operating it pretty quick, compared to the older guys,’ he laughs. Gibbo reckons he has personally dealt with up to 40 IEDs on his tours, but puts the success of their missions down to teamwork and holding their nerve.
Other islanders are involved in an ADF engineering unit that has arrived to help pack up the base. At a glance, the ADF is far more multicultural and gender-balanced these days and it is encouraging to see a real diversity of faces.
However, there is a perception that while the ADF has been successful in a local, tactical sense and is widely respected by other coalition forces, it has struggled to explain to the Australian public the broader strategy in place in Afghanistan. It has not been helped by a frankly unsophisticated approach to media in general, with a preference for only allowing lightning media visits for “dog and pony” shows, forcing many Australian photojournalists and correspondents (like myself) who regularly cover conflict, to embed with US and other forces to get any sense of what is going on in the Afghan campaign. This is no fault of the two excellent Aussie PAOs I dealt with in TK: Kris Gardiner and Chris Rickey, since the policy decisions are made in Canberra. I was also helped by my friend and diplomat Fred Smith, a one-man, hearts-and minds weapon whose music has helped give the Australian military presence in places like Bougainville, the Solomon Islands and Afghanistan a softer, more cultural, edge.
Whatever its faults, the US military is far more open and transparent to outside scrutiny than the ADF. Documentary films like Restrepo and Armadillo that offer a real insight into the war would be impossible to make with the ADF and the Australian public has largely been left in the dark. The irony is that this policy has undermined public confidence and support for what has been a strategically correct decision (at least initially) to deploy to Afghanistan, to remove the odious Taliban and Al Qaeda, compared to the folly of the Iraq war.
Many Afghans are thankful for the ISAF presence and anxious about the drawdown. Australia will maintain some presence in the years ahead but the heavy lifting will be done by ANA forces and increasing diplomatic activity by concerned regional powers like India, worried that military elements in Pakistan will continue backing the Taliban.
After TK I flew back to Kandahar to rejoin Guam Battalion and get ready for the next mission – a trip down to Helmand province to find more islanders, especially Fijians, at the large “pop-up cities” of Camp Leatherneck (US) and Camp Bastion (UK) as well as out on more vulnerable FOBs like Lashkar Gah. It is where I’ll feel first hand the edginess of a foot patrol outside the wire, in this war without end.
