‘We lost our way’: ex-soldiers regret how Australia got bogged down in Afghanistan

When the government announced the final 80 Australian troops would be home from Afghanistan by September, bringing to a close Australia’s longest military engagement, John Bale was filled with “a mix of emotions”.

Bale, a former army officer who was deployed to Afghanistan twice in 2008 and 2010, says: “When I read the news … I was a lot more emotional than I had expected. We knew this was coming but it hit me.”

Now active in providing support to military veterans, Bale sees the withdrawal as a moment for Australia to reflect on “what we haven’t done as well as we could have, what we have done really well, and also to grieve what we’ve lost” – including the 41 Australian defence personnel who have died in Afghanistan since 2001.

“We have put a lot into this as a country and I still think there’s a lot more to do for those veterans and their families,” says Bale, the co-founder of Soldier On Australia and now head of the emergency responder support group Fortem Australia.

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Bale adds that Australia must focus on the needs of the people of Afghanistan after the withdrawal: “The war may be ending for us but it’s certainly not ending for the Afghan people … To be honest there are no victory parades.”

Australia’s announcement follows the decision by the US president, Joe Biden, to end what he described as “the forever war”. Declaring on Wednesday that Afghanistan “was never meant to be a multi-generational undertaking”, Biden said American troops would leave before the 20th anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. Allies including Australia quickly followed suit.

The withdrawal comes at a time when Australia is grappling with the results of a long-running inquiry into alleged war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan. The Brereton inquiry found “credible” evidence to implicate 25 current or former Australian defence force personnel in the alleged unlawful killing of 39 individuals and the cruel treatment of two others. The newly established office of the special investigator will consider the evidence ahead of potential prosecutions.

While describing those findings as “deeply concerning”, the minister for veterans’ affairs, Darren Chester, argues these individuals were among more than 39,000 Australians who have deployed to Afghanistan “and for the overwhelming majority their service was in keeping with the values we expect as a nation”.

The withdrawal announcement has also prompted fresh questions about whether Australia went into, and stayed in, Afghanistan without a proper strategy.

Bale is critical of “mission creep” during the engagement, saying what started as a mission to root out terrorism in the wake of the September 2001 attacks by al-Qaida had morphed into rebuilding and mentoring work. “If you’re going to shift your strategy you need to communicate that to the Australian people,” Bale says.

Asked on Thursday whether, on reflection, it had been worth it for Australia to have stayed in Afghanistan so long, Scott Morrison gave a generic response.

“Freedom is always worth it,” the prime minister said. “Australians have always believed that. That is why Australians who have served in our defence forces have always pulled on that uniform.”

‘Afghanistan is no freer today’

Heston Russell, a retired Australian special forces major who was deployed to Afghanistan four times, is blunt in responding to Morrison’s comments.

“The reality is Afghanistan is no freer today than it was when we first got there,” Russell says, arguing the engagement was “a failure at the strategic level”.

He says there was “fantastic planning” in the initial operations targeting al-Qaida. “And, you know, sort of once we achieved those tactical and operational outcomes, we then got bogged down in strategic participation and essentially inventing roles and thinking that we could actually sort of wage war against ideology,” Russell says.

“We sort of kept inventing strategy to maintain our position over there … We lost our way along the way and got caught up in international politics and strategy and coalitions and alliances.”

The costs to the people of Afghanistan have also been high. A monitoring project by the London-based group Action on Armed Violence has tallied 49,039 deaths and injuries from explosive violence in Afghanistan between the beginning of 2011 and the end of 2020, with about 58% of these being civilians. That group began monitoring such deaths in 2011, 10 years into the conflict.

Russell – who has previously been vocal in calling for Australians accused of war crimes in the Brereton inquiry to be afforded the presumption of innocence – says he worries the allegations have overshadowed what he sees as Australia’s “incredible success at the operational and tactical level”.

Russell says Australian governments – under a series of prime ministers – overused the special forces instead of conventional forces and “we’re realising now how much we actually sort of burnt out people”.

The Australian government should have been more open about what was happening on the ground, he says, and allowed the media to “properly document what we were doing”.

“A huge part of our national strategy failure is also the failure for us to take the Australian people along the journey of what was our longest deployment and what our men and women were doing over there,” he says.

The Australian engagement in Afghanistan has been relatively small since 2014 and there are currently only about 80 ADF personnel in the country. They are part of the Nato Resolute Support mission that trains, advises and helps the Afghan national defence and security forces. The Australian task group is headquartered at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai international airport.

Related: Damned either way, Biden opts out of Afghanistan as US tires of ‘forever wars’

Once the nearly 10,000 American and allied troops leave, the country’s future will be largely determined based on peace negotiations between the Taliban and Afghanistan’s government. There appears to be pessimism in Canberra about what that future could mean for the Afghan people.

The foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, says she hopes the peace negotiations “lead to a strong and resilient peace for the Afghan people” but there are challenges ahead.

“An important part of the work that we have done, for example, over all of these years, is to support the provision of education to many, many girls who would otherwise never have been in schools – to support the development of female teachers in their system, to familiarise the communities through village education committees, with education for girls and for boys,” Payne told the Seven Network on Friday. “They are the sorts of outcomes that I very much hope are enduring.”

Labor’s defence spokesperson and a former minister for home affairs, Brendan O’Connor, says he “saw first-hand the important role the Australian Defence Force played in building civilian capability” when he visited Tarin Kowt in 2010 to be briefed on the Australian federal police’s training of Afghan national police.

O’Connor says the Australian government needs to maintain focus on Afghanistan even after the withdrawal is complete, arguing this should include support for “international efforts to deliver peace, stability and development” in the country.

Russell, who founded Voice Of A Veteran last year to target the “mental health crisis in our veteran community”, is now focusing his efforts on campaigning for a royal commission into suicide among former ADF personnel.

He says he’s pleased that a non-binding motion calling for a royal commission passed both houses of parliament with cross-party support last month – but “it’s been pretty disheartening” Morrison hasn’t announced one yet.

Russell says he hopes the prime minister reflects democratic processes and acts on the call. “Do the right thing,” he says.

• In Australia, support and counselling for veterans and their families is available 24 hours a day from Open Arms on 1800 011 046 or www.openarms.gov.au and Safe Zone Support on 1800 142 072.