AARON PATRICK: Why secret ADF report into Afghanistan war must be released

Every working day during the Afghanistan war, the commanders of the Australian Defence Force held a meeting where they were presented with a list of the dead and injured, friendly, enemy and civilian.

Over the 12 years of combat operations the daily toll rose and rose. Those numbers told a story, which the military leaders chose not to hear: losing the war, the Army was turning Afghanistan into killing fields.

Experienced-but-low ranking special forces soldiers had decided to wage a war against the insurgency their own way. The officer class stepped aside and let them. The consequences were devastating for Afghans, the Special Air Service and the Army.

Yesterday, the Chief of the Defence Force, Admiral Mark Hammond, could have helped Australians understand how Australia’s longest war descended into a decade of war crimes recriminations.

Instead, he declared that one of the most important reports on the war, the inspector-general’s inquiry into commanders’ culpability for war crimes, would remain secret.

The decision contradicts one of the most important principles of military leadership: learn from your mistakes.

A 22-page summary of the document was published online Tuesday in a way designed to minimise attention. The full version, which was commissioned in 2020 and apparently finished in 2022, remains so classified that almost no one in the ADF has read it, including generals, admirals and air marshals.

Australia never conducted a public inquiry into how the war was lost, why some soldiers may have gone rogue, and whether allowing the Special Air Service Regiment to turn itself into a quasi-assassination squad was a good idea.

The command-accountability report, whose authors remain anonymous, is the closest document the military has to a what-went-wrong analysis. Making the report public would allow the next generation of military leaders to learn from mistakes made in Tarin Kowt, Kandahar and Kabul.

The summary published this week shows there is a lot to learn. It suggests the Defence Force leadership looked away as the killing escalated from 2010 in Southern Afghanistan.

There was an obvious tell something was amiss: enemy wounded weren’t rising in step with what the military designated EKIAs. One person who saw the data said it would been even obvious to a civilian that something had shifted in the conduct of the war.

The SAS captains and majors couldn’t explain why. They had allowed themselves to be separated from combat by the sergeants and corporals who ran the four-to-six man teams who pursued Taliban leaders they were free to kill if they couldn’t be captured.

The inspiration came from their military brethren in the US, where Delta Force and the Navy SEALs worked with the CIA and other intelligence agencies to locate enemy safehouses, bomb factories and arms caches.

The SAS’s facilitators, the summary suggests, included military lawyers, intelligence analysts and the lieutenant colonels who commanded what was known as the Special Operations Task Group at Camp Russell in Uruzgan province.

On Thursday, when Senator David Shoebridge accused officers of “disguising unlawful murder”, Admiral Hammond said: “I agree with your response to the allegations. That behaviour is not in concert with our values; our professional standards.”

Pressed by Senator Shoebridge whether anyone had been fired for failures of command, he indicated he did not know.

All militaries guard their secrets. But the report into command responsibility is likely being kept secured on the fifth floor of Canberra’s Russell Offices, where Admiral Hammond and his staff work. Not to protect national security, but to shield culpable individuals.

The summary did not include any names. There was a single, mild criticism of “CA”, the designation for the Chief of the Army, although it was unclear which occupant of the job it referred to.

Such reticence to embarrass the officer club is unlikely to extend to the full report given the integrity of the two men who wrote it, a retired senior military officer and a retired senior public servant.

Admiral Hammond could order all names and identifying information redacted and otherwise publish the report in full. The findings deserve to be debated from the sergeants’ mess at the SAS barracks to the lecture theatres of the Defence Force Academy.

No doubt the Defence Force’s embarrassment at its failures being exposed would be intense and brief. The cost would be trivial compared to the benefit of avoiding destroying a regiment’s reputation in the next war.

Admiral Hammond must know that sometimes you have to upset an institution to protect it. This is an opportunity for bravery, like those men Australia sent to fight, and sometimes die, on a battlefield a long way away.