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    Quarterly Essay 20 A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power
    Quarterly Essay 20 A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power
    Quarterly Essay 20 A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power
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    Quarterly Essay 20 A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power

    By John Birmingham

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    In A Time for War, John Birmingham ponders the Australian way of war. After East Timor and Bali, a combination of primal fear and primal ambition has transformed attitudes to our region, to security and to war as an instrument of politics. Australian defence policy has become more assertive and our armed forces are being radically restructured and hardened. Australia now has the capacity, and even the will, to act as a military power in its region.

    A Time for War begins with a gripping account of Operation Anaconda, the 2002 battle in Afghanistan to which Australian special forces made a crucial contribution. Birmingham also looks at our war dreaming: the sanctification of Anzac Day and the eclipse of the Vietnam Syndrome. Ranging from Sir John Monash to Peter Cosgrove, from Rudyard Kipling to The One Day of the Year, he finds that our armed forces can now do no wrong, and that politicians have taken note. The new militarism is not simply a response to September 11, he argues – it marks a deeper shift in the culture.

    “It being an RSL, we would stand each night at six o’clock for the prayer of remembrance. It was always a moving occasion, a strange suspended moment when the pokies and racing channel, the piped music and the drunken bullshitting all fell away ... Friends from overseas who witnessed the quiet ceremony never failed to be impressed. One, a poet from Czecho- slovakia, had always thought Australians to be a shallow, soulless, materi- alistic people, but she changed her mind after her first experience of the ode to the fallen among the half-empty schooners and chip packets.” —John Birmingham, A Time for War
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateDec 1, 2005
    ISBN9781921825194
    Quarterly Essay 20 A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power
    Author

    John Birmingham

    John Birmingham was born in Liverpool, United Kingdom, but grew up in Ipswich, Queensland, Australia. Between writing books he contributes to a wide range of newspapers and magazines on topics as diverse as biotechnology and national security. He lives at the beach with his wife, daughter, son, and two cats.

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      Book preview

      Quarterly Essay 20 A Time for War - John Birmingham

      Quarterly Essay

      Quarterly Essay is published four times a year by Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

      Publisher: Morry Schwartz

      ISBN 186 395 1342

      ISSN 1832-0953

      Subscriptions (4 issues): $49 a year within Australia incl. GST (Institutional subs. $59). Outside Australia $79. Payment may be made by Mastercard, Visa or Bankcard, or by cheque made out to Schwartz Publishing. Payment includes postage and handling.

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      Editor: Chris Feik

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      Printer: Griffin Press

      CONTENTS

      A TIME FOR WAR

      Australia as a Military Power

      John Birmingham

      CORRESPONDENCE

      David Kemp, Graham Richardson, David Corlett, Don Aitkin, Ian Marsh, Matthew Sharpe et al., Judith Brett

      Contributors

      A TIME

      FOR WAR

      Australia as a

      Military Power

      John Birmingham

      Once upon a time every schoolboy in the British Empire could tell you about the Afghan wars. Be they seated at a small wooden desk in Liverpool, Calgary, Dunedin or Toowoomba, they could take their Conway Stewart fountain pens and scratch out a couple of paragraphs on, say, the massacre of nearly seventeen thousand men, women and children during the British retreat from Kabul, through the Khyber Pass in January of 1842.

      Those fortunate enough to attend a better school could probably provide some context, pointing out that the passes of the eastern reaches of the Hindu Kush had run deeper with blood than water at many times in the previous three and a half thousand years. Invaders from central Asia and Europe had repeatedly swarmed down the mountains and into the fertile plains of the Indus River valley since Alexander the Great hacked and slashed his way through in 326 BC. Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, two of the great warrior-psychopaths of human history, brought their version of shock and awe to the defiles in 1224 and 1398. Muslim hordes under Mahmud of Ghaznawi poured through up to seventeen times between 1001 and 1030 AD.

      So many conquerors, invaders, brigands, savages, slavers, liberators and true believers of one kind or another have contended in blood in this place that it is a wonder the ground remains so barren. With so much life having been spilled over the centuries by Persians and Scythians, White Huns, Tartars, Mongols, Mughals, Soviets, British and Americans, it’s a minor mystery how the fallen cannot have nourished the earth with their passing. But barren it remains.

      The 800-kilometre-long mountain system was born of the tectonic clash between the Indian and Eurasian plates. The rocky granite of the jagged, broken-tooth landscape is largely igneous metamorphic in origin, a coldly scientific term for the hellish processes involved in generating enough heat and pressure to turn solid rock molten and lift it up into a summit twenty-five thousand feet high. Here and there on the northern slopes forests are sustained by snowmelt; wild goats and sheep and even small remnant populations of black and brown bear are to be found tucked away in the high crags. But for the most part the whole area presents to European eyes as desolate howling wasteland.

      The sorrows of history and terrain have created a crazy maze of ethnic splinters and tribal groups, some of which can boast of blood feuds nurtured through many, many centuries. To these micro-states there have recently been added new bloodlines from all over the Dar al-Islam as jihadi flowed into Taliban and Al Qaeda training camps through the last years of the twentieth century.

      Civilisations have always ground against each other in this stark landscape. For glory, for treasure, for no good reason beyond the Great Khan’s belief that the greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him.

      The modern Afghan wars have been fought for purposes high and low. The first, disastrous British expedition, which ended in the slaughter of General Elphinstone’s force by Ghilzai warriors in the gorges between Kabul and Gandomak, touched off nearly a century of strategic rivalry with the Russian Empire for control of Afghanistan. The Soviet invasion of 1979 can even be seen as a continuation of this, as the Tsar’s successors manoeuvred to gain greater access to the choke-point at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Alternately it may have been a pre-emptive strike, to snuff out the possibility of an Islamist revolt such as occurred in Iran. Whatever the case, Leonid Brezhnev’s generals were no more successful than Queen Victoria’s had been, and the Red Army’s tenure left only ruins from which the Taliban emerged as the avatars of an older, apocalyptic vision of war as a holy calling.

      To this long trail of tears one more people sent their warriors. They were Australians, and in the first weeks of March 2002 they fought a battle in a valley known as the Shahikot.

      When a hundred SAS troops infiltrated the heights overlooking the Shahikot, they were the first ground forces this country had committed to major combat since the early 1970s, when the Royal Australian Regiment was fighting in Vietnam. The intervening years had seen great change, both in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and the society it was pledged to protect. The Australians who served in Vietnam from 1962 were a mix of volunteers and draftees. They did not enjoy the unqualified support of the citizens in whose name they fought, and many were vilified on their return.

      The fracturing of Australian society that accelerated throughout the 1960s was driven in part by increasingly vehement disagreement over the Vietnamese conflict. The intricate skein of blood and consequence spun out of that war is far too complex to untangle here, but a few strands stand out. A generation, or at least a significant part of it, was to some extent radicalised. Australian governments lost confidence in the use of military force as an instrument of policy. And in combination, these developments created a substantial body of mass and elite opinion that came to doubt and even deny the legitimacy of military force.

      No Commonwealth government, not even Gough Whitlam’s, seriously considered embracing pacifism or the tenets of unilateral disarmament. But a broad-based coalition within civil society did coalesce around a loose, ill-defined set of principles that might best be characterised as anti-war. The peace movement had no formal leadership or organisation, but it did have demographic weight, drawing hundreds of thousands of disparate individuals into public action, for instance during the Vietnam Moratorium marches, or a decade later in the anti-nuclear campaigns of the 1980s.

      The end of the war – an ignominious defeat for the industrialised democracies – saw the retreat of the military from the centre of public life in Australia. It had been damaged by the misadventure in South-East Asia. While Australian soldiers proved more than a match for the North Vietnamese regulars and Vietcong guerillas against whom they fought, at home the armed forces lost their standing as a universally respected institution. The nation’s military heritage – as important a part of the culture as trade unionism, liberal individualism, the bush, sport or more recently multiculturalism – was devalued in the eyes of a large minority of the population. Importantly, because so much of the most uncompromising and aggressive opposition to the war had originated on university campuses, a large cohort of future leaders was estranged from the military tradition that had, just one generation earlier, secured the very freedoms the protesters enjoyed while opposing the war.

      However, to paraphrase Dylan and Herodotus, times change. The Australians who fought in Afghanistan did so with near-universal support. Such voices as were heard in opposition to their deployment came mostly from the furthermost fringes of the left. Even the Greens did not oppose taking some sort of action against Bin Laden, although their support was muted and they would have preferred any Australian forces to be committed under UN control.

      There were of course no conscripts in Afghanistan. As one of its first acts the Whitlam government had abolished conscription, immediately depersonalising the politics of any future military commitments for the vast majority of the population with no immediate family connection to the armed forces. A polity with a defence force composed solely of volunteers will be always more accepting of casualties than one in which draftees are forced to put themselves in harm’s way. In a sense the SAS troops in Afghanistan were doubly volunteers, having sought entry to a branch of the army in which service is especially hazardous.

      Of course, there were other reasons for the lack of public outcry. The vast majority of the electorate saw Afghanistan as a just war. The country’s ruling clique, the Taliban, openly harboured those believed responsible for the atrocities of September 11. They had been given an opportunity to extradite Al Qaeda’s leadership and had refused to do so. Likewise there was no sympathy for the type of theocratic fascism practised by Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden. Unlike Ho Chi Minh they inspired only fear and loathing in the West. Had Jane Fonda ventured into their midst for a photo-op and a bit of grandstanding, there is every chance she would have been beaten, raped and executed on general principles, with the entire performance video-taped and released across the internet.

      A year after Afghanistan, the Australian Defence Force made a heavier commitment

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