Scott Morrison is shamelessly audacious to claim Australian service personnel died for “a great cause” in this country’s foremost 21st century moral-military failure – Afghanistan.
As Afghanistan reverts to a real-life Gilead with the Taliban victory (thanks to America cutting and running and its allies, not least Australia, pre-emptively, cowardly, scurrying out unannounced, on its coattails) Morrison, in a round of broken-record media calls, evoked all the Anzac military myth this country has ever used to justify involvement in too many pointless imperial wars.
In the past 24 hours he’s referred to the “sacrifice” of the 41 Australian personnel killed in Afghanistan, just so that it might be surrendered to the Taliban. Sure, soldiers know they might die when they deploy – but the idea that they willingly cash-in or secularly offer-up – sacrifice – their lives is both absurd and as obsolete as the cavalry charge.
He reckoned “freedom’s always worth it, fighting for it, whatever the outcome”.
Whose freedom? We must wonder. All of those Afghans, now deserted, who helped Australia fight this ultimately pointless fight? The women and girls now abandoned to unthinkably violent, hateful and oppressive misogyny? Anyone who ever questioned or challenged the Taliban in the past 20 years because (more fool them) they took America, Australia and others at their word that “we will not abandon Afghanistan”?
Or is it just the “freedom” to retreat when the domestic real politik gets a little too sticky to maintain support for our longest war, or when US-Australia alliance management (which, let’s just face it, is what got Canberra tied up in this intractable, tragic mess in the first place) becomes all too helter-skelter?
But the prime ministerial line and the contorted sentiment behind it, that is Olympic for its tone-deaf, insensitive audacity, was this one, spoken to the ABC’s Lisa Millar on Monday morning: “No Australian who has ever fallen in our uniform has ever died in vain – ever.”
Ever since Billy Hughes started to weave ecclesiastic language around the “sacrifice” and “spirit” and supposed Australian exceptionalism of the Anzacs killed in the human meat-grinder of the world war one battlefields, prime ministers have referred to “the fallen” to cloak the unpalatable truth that soldiers are shot, burned alive, eviscerated and die screaming for their parents in mud and dust.
It’s time, don’t you think, we told the truth about “the fallen” of our wars, justifiable or otherwise, and stopped hiding behind their memory?
They are: the D.E.A.D..
And now to that prime ministerial proposition about them, which bears repeating: “No Australian who has ever fallen in our uniform has ever died in vain – ever.”
Countless parents, siblings, partners and children of Australia’s dead in all wars – and the dead, themselves, could they speak – might be better qualified to parse on that one.
I’m thinking of the 8,709 Australians killed in the utterly pointless invasion of, defeat on and retreat from Gallipoli. Or the 1,917 Australian soldiers slaughtered in a single day at Fromelles in 1916.
My only darling son; Another life lost hearts broken for what[?]
I wonder: would the mother who had these words inscribed on the gravestone of her son, buried on the European western front, agree he’d not died in vain?
Morrison’s hyperbole is not only offensive to some of the families of the Australians who died in Afghanistan, it’s historically naïve – up there with his assertion that there was “no slavery” in Australia.
Morrison has been trotting out this hoary “freedom is worth it” line vis-a-vis quitting Afghanistan for some time.
Last month I asked Hugh Poate, whose 23-year-old army private son Robert was killed by a rogue member of the Afghan army in 2012, what he thought.
He said, “It was bullshit. What he [Morrison] should have been referring to was the freedom of this country. And our country was not threatened. Again, this is just some way of trying to justify the loss of 41 lives in Afghanistan, the ruining of 261 [through serious injury] and some 500 who’ve since taken their own lives ... these are lies. This is political spin.”
Losing and retreating without announcement and after countless hollow political promises to the contrary over two decades, is one thing.
Abandoning the locally-engaged interpreters, fixers, aid workers and thousands of others who believed Australia’s empty assurances, compounds the immorality of Australia’s retreat from Afghanistan.
Assurances from Morrison and his senior ministers that Australia is now doing all it can – but you know, it’s difficult now the place has fallen – to help rescue those who it now bureaucratically deems worthy of salvation, is feckless, insincere PR.
Australia has known since early 2020 (when announced by former US president Donald Trump) of America’s plans to retreat. And the draw-down in American troops over recent years foreshadowed the inevitability of this full retreat now under way.
Australia should have been working assiduously for years on saving the Afghans who helped us. Maintaining a diplomatic presence in Kabul, instead of scuppering out without announcement in May, would have saved some of those now abandoned to death sentences.
This is a human and moral catastrophe of the highest order. Australia must take its share of responsibility rather than hide behind hyperbole and myth.
We all, meanwhile, should ignore the endless self-justification of the politicians who’ve let Afghanistan down and who vacuously claim, unauthorised, on behalf of the dead and their families, that it was somehow all worth it.
In the words of that eternally grieving father – bullshit.
Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
