Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/14/22 Ben Mckelvey on Australia’s Crimes and Struggles in Afghanistan

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

Scott interviews author and freelance journalist Ben Mckelvey about a book he recently published which explores the controversies and challenges of Australian special operations in Afghanistan. Scott and Mckelvey dig into the war crime allegations and subsequent defamation lawsuits that have defined this chapter of Australian SASR history. They also take a step back and reflect on how the realities on the ground made Coalition success in the war impossible.  Discussed on the show: Find Fix Finish by Ben Mckelvey Kill Bin Laden by Thomas Greer Bush at War by Bob Woodward Brereton Report “The Other Afghan Women” (The New Yorker) Funding the Enemy by Douglas A. Wissing Ben Mckelvey is a freelance writer and editor from Sydney. He has been embedded with the ADF in East Timor and Iraq, and has worked independently in Iran and Afghanistan. Follow him on Twitter @benmckelvey  This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, sorry, I don't mean to go all FDR on you or anything, but here's the new deal. All the interviews are now going up first at Scott Horton's show.substack.com. Of course, they'll all be going up at Scott Horton.org the next day, and the archives going back to 1999. We'll still be free for you there at Scott Horton.org, but I got to generate revenue, you know. All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism.

And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you. at scott horton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got ben mcelvey he is an australian journalist and author of many books the latest is find fix and finish from tampa to afghanistan welcome the show how you doing ben good Scott how are you very good very happy to have you on the show really an impressive book and I've read a lot of books about Afghanistan um thank you appreciate that so yeah and you know what

it's kind of over now and it's a bit of a relief wasn't sure how I felt about reading another book about Afghanistan now I'm so happy to be done with it but I was very happy to read this it's a very important book and I do hope that people will take a look at it all about Australia's special for in the Afghan war there. And, of course, regular listeners to this show are very familiar with at least some stories from Australia's war in Afghanistan.

And we'll be talking about Braden Chapman and his story here pretty soon. In fact, let's start with that. You know, I'm really proud of the fact that Dan McKnight, after reading my book, Vulsar, and decided he wanted to found Bring Our Troops Home.U.S. and his push to fend the guard legislation since then and all of that but my other real proud one from fools aaron is brayden chapman

the australian special forces officer who i forget if he was an officer now but anyway remember who read that book and decided that's it i'm blowing the whistle and telling the truth at least i think that's the way i remember him telling me the story he read that book and decided that he was going to do something about it now so um and he does make a small appearance in your book in testifying against, I'm not exactly sure who all in these civilian libel trials, I guess, over war crimes accused by he and others in the special forces there. So maybe we're going to start with that. Tell us what you know about the great Braden Chapman and fact, including where is he now

and how's he doing? Well, actually, I don't know much about Braden. He's not someone that I spoke to in the book. But he, as he said, he was a whistleblower here in Australia. So he was an electronic warfare operator. So he's a signaler, which was a pretty essential role in the Australian Special Forces operations, especially the kill capture operations, which are the things that are detailed in the book. So he's the guy that had the piece of equipment that had go out with the SAS teams and figure out using direction finding.

so usually mobile phones figure out where the target was and then they'd go and find the target whoever had that mobile phone the rules of engagement allowed that person to be killed without any attempt to capture so these were you know essentially targeted killings if the prosecuting force chose them to be targeted killings um and that was kind of at the heart of the problem with the the Australian Special Forces mission because there's a big case that's uh that's going on at the moment. So the case is closed. It is a defamation case with a guy called Ben Robert Smith who is he's probably the most notable Australian soldier. He was awarded the Victoria Cross. He became an executive at a television station. He's got great visibility. And then there are accusations

that he committed a number of murders. But the fuzzy line in that case is whether they were targeted killings or whether they were, you know, an extension of what they were doing. But Braden was a whistleblower for the ABC, which was our public broadcaster. And he alleged, and it was proven that at least some of those killings were murders. They were people who were aught to combat, so they couldn't be targeted. And, yeah, I think he probably just got to the point where he, morally, he couldn't reconcile with the things that had happened. So he just had to go forward.

And now how many criminal convictions do we have of special forces operators there? We have none. We have none. There's been a lot of conversation about it. There's been a lot of media around it, especially because Benro Smith is one of the people that in the media has been accused. We had a thing called the Office of the Special Investigator, which is, it's a federal entity that is looking at these allegations of murder because we had this thing called the Brereton report, which is an internal defense. report. And the Burton report alleged that there was, that there were 39 murders. And those murders are being investigated and some other murders. But that's sort of happening at the moment. So the

only thing that we have at the moment is this defamation case. All right. And then so in the defamation case, that's the media accused this guy, Ben Robert Smith. And he's, I guess, you know, supposedly the kind of most famous poster boy for the Australian military over there. Yeah. I don't know if there's an equivalent here, I'd say Petraeus, but he's a big loser general who everybody despises. But this is the guy who, say, if Patrick Tillman had not been killed in Afghanistan or something, this is a guy that stature, right? Everybody's favorite enlisted hero kind of guy. And then now he's being accused. I'm sorry, go ahead. You know, Jocco? Yeah, Jocko willing. Well, I didn't want to bring him up, but that's a good

example. It would be as though if Jaka Willing, who's now America's most famous retired Navy Seal, was accused of all these war crimes. It is. And, you know, the interesting thing about Ben-R-Smith is because he's been so visible, you know, the SAS have this thing called protected identity status in Australia. So their identities can't be revealed in the media. They generally don't reveal their own identity because they do this counterterrorism work in Australia as well, not just the gunfighting in Afghanistan. But because Ben had was awarded the Victoria Cross, you know, he went and met the Queen. He was very visible. Some other people have been awarded the Victoria Cross, but Ben, he sort of, he looks like a G.I. Joe, you know,

he's either six foot six or six foot seven. He's massive. He's very muscular. He's got very striking tattoos. And then not just that, he became an executive at a television station. So, you know, he has the highest visibility of anyone in the Australian military. He's retired now, and now he's going through this, you know, this series of allegations that he committed murders, the media is alleging that he committed murders. And then he's come back and sued them for defamation. And, you know, it's a unique case in Australian law because there's never been anything that's in this complex and this big before.

So just the legal costs, which will have to be covered. by whoever loses this case will be sort of perhaps $20 to $50 million. So it's not something that somebody would be able to do privately, but because he's got the backing of this television station, there's these two big media organizations bashing against each other, then it's going forward and it just went on forever and ever and ever. And, you know, endless casees, which are Kings Council lawyers, you know, super expensive. And it's been, that case has been very visible here in Australia as well.

And now it's been rested now and it's up to the jury to decide as a press time here? Or how's that? It's a judge case. Okay. So the judge is retired and he's going to give his interim ruling. We think maybe the end of this year, beginning of next year, but we don't really know because like I said, it's unprecedented Australian law. Now, you know, I don't want to get you and Harper Collins sued for defamation here, but you do a pretty thorough job of portraying. the testimony against this guy officially and unofficially in the stories about what happened

here is it fairly well substantiated that he had committed some murders here i think some of these at least one or two of these are the same ones that brayden talked about aren't they no so brayden was involved in brayden was part of another another squad um and yeah i mean i i i really couldn't say with bera smith's case uh you know for legal purposes but also just because you know having sat down and listened to all the testimony, you know, there was lots of guys who were accusing him of murder, but then there was lots of guys who were saying that they were there and it didn't happen as well. So I try to present both cases and, you know, you sort of got to let the court sort of figure things out. There was a lot of testimony that we weren't able

to see as the public because, you know, a lot of the satellite stuff, the drone imagery, the stuff that Braden does on the ground, that electronic warfare operation stuff, and, you know, hoovering up phone conversations and things like that, that's all sensitive information. So I actually have a sneaking suspicion that the case may till one way or another in closed court, which is something that we don't have access to.

Yeah, well, I'm not sure what they would do with a case like this in the United States. Have you had any war crimes convictions from Afghanistan? Yes. Oh, from Afghanistan. I do not believe so. There were a couple low-level ones from Iraq. There was Stephen Green, I believe, was his name who was the rapist who raped and murdered,

the 14-year-old girl and her family in Iraq was convicted. There was the special operations officer Gallagher was tried, but I think acquitted or got overturned on appeal or something I forgot exactly. He was actually operating very close to Australia. Australians in Mosul. Yeah, in fact, I got about 30 pages to the end of this thing. I was right at the part where you talk about how these guys went to Iraq War III there to fight ISIS as well. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the interesting thing about the case here in Australia, as distinct to the cases that have happened in the States, is that the things that are being alleged, you know, are undoubtedly murders, but they're so close to what our special forces were mandated to do anyway. And that's the thing that sort of lost a little bit in the Australian media is that the way that it's being characterized is that there's these bad apples that sort of went out and did something horrible. But it's like, no, no, no, the war was horrible. And then they were pretty close to what we were doing legally. Well, I mean, I think that's really right. And that's, I mean, the difference between in one story, you tell the guys throw grenades into a room where they can hear women and children scream.

in there and they go ahead and they're investigated and charged I think even but then the charges are dropped because how dare you second guess these guys and then really how different is that from laying a guy down on the ground and putting two in the back of his head it's the same difference yeah well I mean the interesting thing about that case is that you know there were people who said that the women and children could be heard there were people who said that they couldn't um they were actually charged this sort of went through the um the military criminal criminal criminal And eventually the thing was thrown out of court because there was a ruling that the Australian forces cannot give a duty of care to any Afghan in a, in a wartime situation, which was a very contentious ruling because it essentially says that, you know, short of murdering Afghans, any death of an Afghan in, you know, in an area where the Australian Special Forces, were operating is legal, you know, so things that are, things that would be considered

to be manslaughter previously could not be considered illegal in Afghanistan as by this ruling. Duty of care. And that was just made up. That was a new invention of this court. Essentially, almost like the Supreme Court has ruled in America over and over again, like after the Parkland shooting, that the police have no duty to protect you, even your child, if you're child is being massured and a cop is standing right there. He has no duty to intervene. In this case, it's even further. It sounds like they're saying they have no duty to not kill somebody if they are adjacent to a war zone somehow. Yeah. So the Parkland ruling, as I understand it, is that you have to be, you don't have to be proactive. Whereas this ruling is like even if

you are the one who is activating the violence, you don't. owe a duty of care, you know, as long as you are operating under your obligations of international humanitarian law, so you're not executing people, you know, it's just, it's just sort of bad luck that this war sort of came to your town. In other words, so anything short of, that would be how that opinion would be ready, anything short of putting somebody on their knees and just capping them in the back of the head would count as, hey, things happen. Yeah, so like, you know, within the defense judiciary,

system, you can be charged with, you know, a range of offenses. But then outside of that, then there's no legal framework for you to be charged, I would imagine. That's what that ruling says. Yeah. No controlling legal authority, as Al Gore would have said. Yes. I think that's true. All right. So let's rewind talk, go back to the beginning here. Well, not the very beginning because, you know, we all know about the initial invasion and Torabora. I guess, you know, we could mention that the Australians were there, but also were not allowed to go and help at Torabora, along with everybody else who was not allowed to go and help at Torabora.

That's true. An interesting footnote there. I also thought, actually, it was important that you wrote in here about how, yep, and then the Air Force bombed them for almost a week. Yeah, in other words, they didn't bomb them for the last eight days before they escaped. They called off the bombing long before December 17th when Osama bin Laden and Iman al-Zawari got away, right? Yeah, I mean, I think they were certainly trying to kill the al-Qaeda members. I just think that they didn't really have an understanding of what warfare was going to look like in Afghanistan.

You know, there were always limitations with an air campaign, that purely an air campaign, even though the technology migrated through the war and then through to, like, as you said, the war against ISIS. But, you know, the reason why Afghanistan became such a dirty war is because it's very difficult to have a distinction between who the enemy were and who the populace were. And if you're just bombing from the air, you know,

you don't have any bomb damage assessment. You don't have a great understanding of, of what the impact is, you know, of what you've actually done. So you have to have a ground force and then that just becomes a mess. Yeah, well, I read it more like they bombed for a little while and they knew that they were risking accidentally killing Osama bin Laden, but they had to put on some kind of show of pretending to try to get him for a minute. But then when the Green Berets and the Rangers and the Marines all asked to get involved

and seal the border, they were denied no matter how much the Delta Force and CIA begged for reinforcements there. So you think that the hand of Pakistan was in that decision-making? Well, I mean, at one point when the Taliban offered to negotiate extradition, Mushariff refused when he was offered to hand him over to the Pakistan, as I think that was probably at American behest. But it's clear that the American CIA in Pakistan had arranged deconfliction with the Pakistan. Army and the Frontier Corps to make sure that when the Delta Force invariably

chases al-Qaeda across the border we want to make sure we don't hit our own friends in the Delta Force here so we have all our deconfliction lines set up and everything and then what happened they treated the Pakistani border a border into a friendly country with a friendly cooperative military and treated it like it was hyperspace and like it was this impermeable membrane that once Osama bin Laden stepped foot on foot across that border that there was nothing the Delta Forest or Special Activities Division of the CIA

could possibly do to simply walk after him and shoot him. And they were forbidden from trying. And the CIA and the Delta Force, you quote Tom Greer there, but he wrote a whole book called Kilbin Laden about how they

begged over and over and over and over again for permission to do their job and they were denied. And we also know from Bush at War, by Bob Woodward, where he just publishes straight text from the notes taken during the National Security Council meetings, where they're very clear that they don't want this war to end too soon, and they're worried that if bin Laden is killed, somehow the Americans will get the idea that we won the war home by Christmas. That's what you get for messing with us.

But we want the American people to know this war is going to last through time and space. Maybe we should start bombing Baghdad right now so that they don't get the wrong idea that even if we do kill bin Laden, that we have somehow won the war. And then Bush, the president announces, well, as long as bin Laden is on the run, then I'm satisfied. In other words, the manhunt against him is canceled. We're going after the Taliban instead of al-Qaeda. Those were the orders of the treasonous commander-in-chief. And that was no accident. And when when Gary Bernson, the CIA officer on the scene, says we begged over and over and over for reinforcements and we just couldn't understand why we couldn't get them. And then the next

three paragraphs are all blacked out. That's because that's where George Bush is a traitor, allowing bin Laden to escape so he can serve deliberately escape so you can serve as an Emmanuel Goldstein boogeyman figure. How are they supposed to make your mom afraid that Saddam Hussein is going to give chemical weapons to Osama bin Laden if Osama bin Laden's already dead. They needed him out there to scare the American people and for that matter the Australian people into an aggressive war in Iraq. It was as deliberate as it could be. And you even have in the book, James Mattis is standing there with 4,000 Marines in Kandahar doing nothing. Why isn't he standing on the Pakistani border? Because Bush wouldn't let him.

And in the book, we do detail the attempted surrender of Mueller-O-Mar and Mueller-O-Mahar's secretary when... Oh, yeah, please tell that story. Now that I've talked for five minutes, you please tell that because it's such an important story for people to understand. No, I'm intrigued to your perspective as well, Scott. It's in my book, too, but go ahead. Yeah. One of the things that I tried to do in the book is Australia primarily operated in a province called Oruzgan, which is a place where, where a lot of the leading Taliban originated.

And when Hamid Khazai secreted back into the country after the initial invasion in October 2001, he went in with a team of Green Berets. And his idea was that if they took Tarancat, which was the provincial capital in Uruzgan, which is a pretty small place, and Uruzgan is a pretty small province as well. But he figured that if they managed to take Uruzgan,

then the sort of the, there'd be a sort of House of Cards effect where the Taliban would feel like ideologically they're defeated so that they could sort of force to surrender it straight away in 2001, 2002 in that period. And they managed to do that. They sent in an ODA, which I think was only about 20 guys with a couple of CIA guys attached. And there was a large Taliban force that came to Terran Kot to try and to try and kill Kaza and to try and knock off these Americans that were trying to create a southern front.

Using air power, they killed most of these Taliban, which were primarily Pakistani Taliban. And then they sort of worked their way, winded their way down to the border in Kandahar. And as they were doing that, a Taliban force came to them. And they were, one of them was Mueller Bereda, who is one of the leaders in Afghanistan now. And he was then, he was then Mueller-O-Mah's sort of personal secretary. And they attempted to surrender. So they essentially said all that we want is to basically live our rural lives, you know, in a manner that we see as dignity. You know, we were sort of happy to lay down our arms and disband the Taliban.

But it was refused, you know, and I spoke to David Kilcullen, who is a famous Australian strategist who worked with Petraeus, actually. And he called that the original sin. He said that that was Afghanistan's original sin. You know, there was an opportunity. It was the first opportunity. It wasn't the last opportunity to end the war, but there was a choice not to. And I think that probably Rumsfeld personally was agitating for the war to continue at that stage. Yeah.

It's just amazing the quote that the United States is not apt to negotiate surrenders right now. Well, what does that mean? Surrender is not good enough? Now, and the whole thing is, hey, unconditional surrender, fine. But then we got that, but then no, we're not even going to accept your surrender. just going to hunt and kill all of you? Yeah, I mean, and the thing about that is the, even after that, you know, from a strategic perspective, it was reasonable to assume that the Taliban could be destroyed and they were

destroyed, but once you start agitating the populace, once you start, you know, installing these criminal governors, which they did in, in Oursgan, then the populace just kind of get, they get shut off. And then, you know, like the Taliban, they were to a certain extent, a sort of decentralized force. they were more of an idea and people like, look, we hate the Americans, you know, but we hate the Taliban, but we kind of hate the Americans more because of these people that they've installed and our lives are actually getting worse, which we'd been told constantly that our lives were going to get better. And one of the quotes that I really thought was, was sort of fascinating

in the book, was there was a guy who was working for the Human Rights Commission, Afghan guy that lives in Australia now. And he came in and set up this thing called the Afghan Independent Commission for human rights in Terrancott. And, you know, the American idea of the war in Afghanistan was that they were bringing human rights to the Afghans. You know, this is the thing that we're doing, you know, telling Afghans constantly, we're bringing you human rights, we're bringing you human rights.

And then this guy brings, this Afghan guy brings this American-backed human rights commission to Terancat. They set up a town, set up a little office. And everyone turns up and they're like, oh, great, finally, human rights are here. Can you, you know, can you go and get the Americans who've committed human rights atrocities here? Can we prosecute them? Same with the Australians, the Dutch, you know, the Taliban, you know, the governor, all this sort of stuff. They sort of like explain what had happened with these human rights transgressions. And this poor guy is like, you know,

what do you think human rights is? We can't do this. There has to be some sort of, some sort of activation. There has to be some sort of big stick, you know. And so then they just get dragged back into the real politic of Afghanistan again, where it's, you know, whoever's got the arms, whoever's got the, you know, the most henchmen sort of runs things. And then that's when people became particularly disillusioned because they realized that, you know, there was a disconnect between the things that they were being told about human rights and, you know, what the Americans and Australians and the Dutch could do and what was actually happening on the ground. Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Tennessee

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Well, that's where the Australian base was. And that was the place where we had a sort of legal mandate. But then, you know, the Australian special forces ended up fighting all across southern Afghanistan, which is where most of the insurgency was happening in the south and the east. So in Kenan, they did a lot of, in Helmand. They did a lot of anti-drug missions. There was a force called the Second Commando Regiment, which is an Australian fighting force. And they did a lot of work with the DEA over in Helmand, and then the SAS were in Kandahar doing targeting missions, which was, you know, sort of capture kill, hunting missions. That's interesting the story you tell about how they teamed up with the DEA because they needed helicopters and the DEA

needed some violent authority. So they just came up with this ad hoc thing, but then it's not altogether clear the way you write it been, but it sounds like you're saying that they're just flying around killing farmers in their fields in the name of, well, I mean, Poppy Wars. You know, they they were they were fighting against the people who were shooting at them but the people who were shooting at them were probably quite often people who have just been told by a drug lord to protect the crop you know so that that was that was part of the problem is that you know as you know the opium poppy is the is the sort of the number one cash crop in afghanistan and a lot of the a lot of the internal tensions in Afghanistan are over water capture and over, you know,

access to markets and things like that. And so if you wanted to win the war, you actually had to mediate all of these local disputes between these tribes. But then we managed to sort of overlay over the top of that, this eradication program where some of the drug producers were being targeted because they were unfriendly with the governors who were, you know, who'd been installed and who a lot of them were crooks and, you know, Karzai's, uh, Karzai's brother-in-law, actually, and, and people like that. Um, so then we sort of create this, this violence. And the, the Australian mandate was that we could only attack these drug producing areas if they were to lessen the insurgency. So that's why they were called counter-nexus

operations, because the idea was that the insurgency was being fueled by this drug trade. And if we destroyed this drug trade, then the insurgency, it's a little lessens. But it was, you know, like everything else, it was done haphazardly, you know, the management of how that was actually going to lead into less money for the insurgency was sort of amateurish at best. And it just ended up being just a lot of people getting killed and some drugs being destroyed, but no less output across the border and into like Europe and the US and Australia and drug markets. Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny because that's sort of just another way of saying that if the heroin fields are owned by our guys, we don't do anything. We only go after the heroin that's being raised, you know, by the other guy. And even then, you put them out of business, you're just putting a bunch of guys with no other job to do but fighting the insurgency now,

before they were farming poppies. Now they joined the insurgency. So you're screwed either way, trying that. But it's really eliminating the competition for our local friendly warlords, right? That definitely happened. And one of the things that happened as well is when we started attacking, you know, sort of enemy poppy fields, then people defaulted on their landlines. When they defaulted on their landlines, they had to sell their daughters. And a lot of these guys who didn't want to do that migrated over to Pakistan. And that, these are these were some of the super hardcore Taliban guys who, it happened to them in the early stages of the war. They went over to Pakistan madrasas. And then they, you know, they activated their own sort of local militia and they came back and they, they, they, they, they became some of the, some of the sort of significant anti-coolition militia fighters in Afghanistan. What a horror show. And now you say in the book that overall, the, at least officially, the Australian Special Forces claim about 11,000 kills. Is that right? Well, yeah, I mean, it's not something that's sort of publicly spoken about, but that number came from a guy that I was talking to who's a regimental sergeant major in private, and he said, this was our internal number.

And I just couldn't believe it because what we've been told publicly is that, you know, the Australians were in a limited amount of fighting, but not a significant amount. We had 41 combat deaths and I was like, surely there can't be 11,000 Afghan deaths. But, you know, that number was published in a book that was approved by Special Operations Command. And then there's a special forces major who's become a politician here. And, you know, he cited that number of times. So I believe that that is the number. And now, so this is what I was trying to think of before when we were talking about the civil suits and the criminal investigations is there was this IG report that you cite.

I'm going back over my notes now. And he claimed to have identified 39 murders, outright murders by 25 different soldiers. Is that right? Yes, that's right. Yeah. It's called the Breripan report. So we've had this sort of, you know, drip, drip, drip. of information since 2014, 2015, that there may have been some murders in Afghanistan.

And then the whole thing eventually, you know, the noise became so loud that they had to do this big internal report. And then it was published in 2020. It was called the Burrartan Report, alleging that there were 39 murders. But then in that report, which is pretty detailed, and it's public if anyone wants to go and have a look at it. Just Google the Burritan report. It says that there's no command responsibility for any of these murders, which the book tries to detail that, you know, perhaps commanders and politicians didn't know exactly that there were murders going on, but it was it was reasonable for them to go and do more investigating, to have an understanding what was actually happening in Afghanistan. There was a lot of, you know, there was a lot of sort of don't ask, don't tell, plausible deniability, just not wanting to know what was happening in Afghanistan. and that was one of the significant problems in Australia. All right.

Now, tell us about Jan Mohammed and his son. His nephew. Oh, his nephew. Yeah. So, John Muhammad is like, I mean, he's dead now, but he was like an old school power broker in Afghanistan. You know, there was a period where he was anti-Taliban before 2001. There was a time when he was Taliban, 2001.

You know, it's a very poor. thing in Uruzgan as to whether you're part of the Taliban or not, you know, because it's basically where the prevailing political winds are blowing. And so he's someone that has always managed to have this power or had always had managed to have this power within southern Urzgan, whether in southern Afghanistan in Uruzgan. And he was a guy that he knew Hamid Karzai's father. And Karzai's father was always like, you have to listen to John Muhammad, because that's how Afghanistan actually works in the rural areas. So when Kazaa came and was installed as the president of the country, he made John

Muhammad the governor of Urasgan. And straight away, he just, John Muhammad just saw it as this blank check opportunity for him. You know, he wasn't a particularly talented politician in post-2001, but he was someone who was pretty good at enriching himself and using then, especially the American special forces, to sort of hunt and kill his enemies, his tribal enemies in Erisgan. And, you know, he enriched himself as much as he possibly could until 2005 when ISAF reorganized and the Dutch came in. The Dutch were running things in Erisgan with the Australians.

And he said, the Dutch said, look, we can't work with John Muhammad. You know, this place is going to be, there'll be an insurgency for 100 years if people like John Muhammad are running this place. So he ended up getting booted and he went to Kabul and he was eventually knocked off by the Taliban. But his nephew sort of assumed power. He wasn't handed power, but he was a much more talented politician than Joe Muhammad.

So he became the head of this police force, this transport police force, who were protecting this thing called Root Bear, which goes from Tarancott to Takeda, to Kandahar City. And, you know, he was setting up tolls, and he was making sure that every time the Americans bought construction materials through, that they'd have to pay him a certain amount of money. otherwise those construction convoys could be attacked, possibly by Matiola. This guy is called Matiola. Matiola's a man.

So he was, he was a, he ended up being the power broker in Eurisgam, but he was a much more talented politician. And he had a greater understanding of the sort of the post-2001 politics of working with the Australians and the Americans. And there's an estimate in the book that he may have ended up earning about $100 million dollars from the Americans and the Australians are paying these protection fees and, you know, whatever it is. And you put that money into, you know, that money was spread around Uruguayn to sort of ingratiate the populace, but then also to build up his own

militia. And he was, he was a real problem in Afghanistan, in Urusgan, because he was, he was an entrenched local power broker who sort of did some of the right things, but with someone like Matiola in power, you could never have this. sort of political equanimity that you required for peace. So you couldn't get rid of him. But then he sort of had to have him as well. And then eventually, you know, he was killed when the whole thing fell apart. And, you know, Oregon is what it is now.

It's a very sort of tribally fractious place where the Taliban, you know, have some influence. And I'm sure there's a lot of fighting going on. And I'm sure there will be a lot of fighting for a long time to come. You know, it's funny if you just ask the average Australia, or American to put their shoe on the other foot for one second. Hey, what if the Afghans invaded and took over our country and then put a bunch of child rapists and murderers

and charges our police chiefs and mayors and governors? Why, we would probably shoot at them and plant landmines in their way until they left, wouldn't we? Yeah, I mean, that was a sentiment that I got a lot from the Australian Special Forces that I was working with. They were like, you know, they have, a real hatred for the insurgents, especially the Taliban, you know, like the thing about the Taliban is the Taliban were awful, but to win the war, we had to present a face of government

that was better than the idea that the Taliban was presenting. And the Taliban were awful, but at least they were local, you know, so the locals could kind of understand why the Taliban were doing the things that they were doing, but they didn't understand why we were doing the the things that we were doing. So we had this blanket of secrecy, and we'd be doing these J-Pel rates. I mean, my book's about J-Pel, about the Kill Capture Program. You know, so they'd come in and they would have had this signals intelligence. They'd have this, you know, they'd been listening to somebody's phone and they know that this guy was a bomb maker and he's bringing bombs in, but the local populace don't know that. So in the middle of the night, you know, some guys

blow in some, you know, Australian SAS or Dev Gru or whoever it is. You know, they shoot him, they shoot some other people, they take off, and for the populace, they just don't understand why that's happened, you know, so they were just like, well, these people are the worst. This is terrible. Plus, we've got, like you said, you know, these governors that are child rapists and these drug runners and stuff like that. So they'd be like, well, why don't we just side with the insurgency, you know? And public information was a real problem in Afghanistan, I think, and, and what we were doing, you know, we weren't telling the populace here in Australia because it was politically expedient, not to tell people, but then we weren't telling people in Afghanistan what we're doing either.

So that's why there ended up being so much public sentiment for the insurgency. Well, you know, I think in both of our books, we cite Anon Gopal for a lot of his great work there. And, you know, incredible work. Yeah, and of course, no good man among the living is this great book. And he wrote a bunch of great articles for tomdispatch.com. And he wrote one that I believe came out right after the war ended about down in Helman province and how, I guess, you know, the major theme of the article was that there was this horrible, hated criminal murderer, rapist, torturer, killer, drug dealer, bad guy,

who the Taliban had liberated the Helman province from. And when the Americans came, the first thing they did was put this guy back in power. Yeah. It'd be like, you know, you broke Henry Lee Lucas out of prison and put him in charge of Texas. Like, wait, this guy's a serious. killer. We all hate him. What are you doing? I mean, that was the problem. The problem wasn't, state building wasn't the thing that the Americans were doing. And then that's not what the Australians were doing because the Australians were just trying to slavishly do whatever the Americans

were doing. But the Americans ostensibly just had this counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan. And so even though, you know, like the place you're talking about, which I think is the capital of Helmand or just outside of the capital, you know, so that they think that they're running this counterterrorism operation. So they're like, okay, well, we need counterterrorism partners. And it's like, okay, well, these brutal guys who are going to chase the Taliban and try and kill them, they're the people that we want to be with. And everything else that they do, you know, it's just an externality.

You know, like that's not what we're doing. It's, you know, it sucks for the people over there, but that's, that's what we want to do. And that's one of the things that I was thinking about when I was writing the book is, is essentially what we did is there was going to be a small amount of violence and certain places post-9-11, during 9-11, the counterterrorism mission was to stop violent acts happening in places the US, Australia and Europe. And so what we did is we externalised this violence, but then we sort of maximised it.

So, you know, hundreds of thousands of people died in Iraq and Afghanistan to make sure that hundreds weren't going to die in places like Sydney, New York, London, places like that. But I think that they actually, you know, that there's been more terrorist attacks in Europe in sort of 2015, 16, 17, 18, than there were the sort of 10 or 20 years leading up to that. So even that didn't work. Even that sort of minimisation of violence here and maximisation of violence over there didn't work either. So, you know, the strategy was a problem throughout the war and partnering with these, you know, these awful warlords was, was, was. was something that was definitely counterproductive. Yeah.

Well, and you know, if you take all the domestic terror attacks in America and you subtract out all of the kind of hoax is perpetrated by the FBI, but you just look at the actual ones. There are some actual ones. And we just, you know, the San Bernardino, I guess, was the very worst to them. But there was the Fort Hood massacre. There was the guy that blew up, I think, trash cans along a racetrack path on some sidewalks in New York and New Jersey.

There was the guy from Denver who wanted to blow up the subways in New York. And I was going to say the cartoon contest, but no, that was an FBI frame-up job. But anyway, you know, that's pretty bad, too. Now, luckily, we haven't had a September 11th type of a thing. But that goes to show, though, that, you know, all of these guys were young, new recruits. You know, Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter, and the guy that did those New York attacks, the New Jersey, New York sidewalk attacks I talked about. These are young guys,

Americans, radicalized by not even Bush's wars, but by Obama's wars in this later part of the terror wars before they went and did their, and in fact, I should have said Mantine was worse than San Bernardino. I forgot Orlando for a moment there.

But anyway, so we've had some real ones too. And of course, as you're referring to, the horrible massacres in France, all are a direct result of backing and then bombing the jihad in the war in Syria and Iraq War III and all of that. So, you know, yeah, you're certainly right that if the goal was preventing terrorism, well, we sure got a lot of Afghans blown up and a lot of Americans and Europeans too.

And, in fact, you know, by the way, talk about that for a minute, if you would, about how the Taliban actually did really resort to terrorism against civilians and against any collaborators with the Americans in some of the most heinous fashion in order to enforce their way. And you talk about, I think, especially in 2011, that we have, you know, America, you know, kills bin Laden

and executes a bunch of raids all across Afghanistan, and the Taliban respond by just cutting throats all over the place in a way that the Americans are essentially just dumbfounded and can't do a thing about. I mean, that that was, the reason why they did it wasn't because it was a reaction to bin Laden, you know, I don't think they actually cared that much whether bin Laden died or not. I agree with that. Yeah, I didn't mean to make too much of a causation there. Go ahead. No, but I think what was happening was, you know, there was, there was that famous Obama speech in 2009 about the surge and then the retraction of American forces in Afghanistan. There's a story in the book with David Kilcullen, who was meeting with a couple of Taliban agents.

in Kabul, in 2009, when that speech was given. And they're sitting in this restaurant and they're chatting and, you know, Obama gives this speech and these two Taliban say to Kilcullen, they start laughing and they say, are you trying to lose this war? He's like, what do you mean? And said, well, you know, you've said that there's going to be this surge, but then eventually it says that the Americans are coming. And I think at the time they were planning on leaving in July 2011.

And this Taliban agent said to David Kilcullen, you know, it's great. You guys are going to be here until July. But what are you going to do in August? You know, the Taliban are going to be out there talking to the populace. They'd be like, just remember that we're coming back into power. So when bin Laden was killed, I think the Taliban had an understanding that the war was sort of winding down, that this was the Americans having an opportunity to say that they won the war regardless of that they've won the war or not. At least they'd achieved one of their goals.

and so they could have killed people like that was when Matiola Khan was killed that was when I think the mayor of Kandahar was killed you know there was there was all of these sort of you know puppet figures I think they probably and Wally Karzai too right and yeah Wally Karzai exactly and I think these people may have been able to be gotten previously but the Taliban's like well it doesn't really make sense for us to do it then

because there was also a faction of the Taliban that wanted the war to continue because they were being paid. You know, they were these large construction projects and they'd been outsourced to private companies. And these private companies want the contracts, but then they want to make sure they actually don't get paid until the work's been completed. So they would actually approach the Taliban and say,

you know, we like to do this work. You know, we're getting paid this amount of money. We'll give you this amount of money to make sure that the work can be done and then you can destroy whatever the project is afterwards. And that happened quite a lot. So there was a, you know, a faction of the Taliban that's like, we want this war to continue as long as possible. But then in 2011, Bin Laden's killed

the Taliban like, well, okay, this thing's winding down. We should probably start knocking off these power brokers so we can assume power relatively easily when the time comes, when the sort of money runs out. And that's the period that you're talking about. Yeah. By the way, there's a book by a guy named Douglas Wissing called Funding the Enemy. That's all about that. It's a whole book just on that subject. I have a sort of mini chapter in my book about it. He's got a whole book. about the billions paid directly to the Taliban by way of these reconstruction projects. And some of it also protection money too, where, you know, for safe passage for goods

and services and gasoline to the boys out on their bases that then they're going to fight them with, but they're getting paid and they figure it's worth it. I mean, that's the problem about localized incentive structures. You know, if you have this sort of like overarching strategy and then everybody has an understanding of the way that that works and relates to this overarching strategy, then you're not going to have these localized incentive structures. But like you said, you know, if you're a, if you're a battalion commander and you're like, well, we just want to make sure that we get our food come through, our petrol, you know, to make sure that we can keep going, you know, if we have to

pay the Taliban, then my KPIs are sort of knocked off and how it relates to the overall strategy, you know, maybe that's a little bit iffy. But, you know, the overall strategy just changed so quickly and so often and, you know, sometimes it was muddled anyway that everyone's just like, well, I'm just going to do the thing that I have to do to sort of fulfill my obligations. And that was the problem with the Australian Special Forces. You know, they wanted to get these J-Pel jackpots as many as they could, you know, whether it related to peace or not, then, you know, it didn't really matter because I think a lot of people knew that we weren't going to win the war anyway from about 2009.

Right. Yeah, I should have known earlier than that. But so, and by the way, you know, it's important to bring up here that David Kilcullen, he and his crew were the ones who said that we could win the war by July of 2011. So he doesn't get to blame this on Obama for making that deadline. Obama said to

Petraeus, now you're telling me, you'll have the Afghan army trained up and ready to stand in our space by July of 2011, huh? 18 months, is that right? And David Petraeus says, yes, sir, sir, and clicks his heels.

In the name of David Kilcullen and in the name of Fat Neck Fred Kagan and in the name of all of the, you know, General Jack Keen and all of the people who made their millions of dollars promoting that surge and pushing that surge

and David Kilcullen was one of the ringleaders of not any counterinsurgency strategy. He was the ring leader of a PR campaign to expand that war and it was his promise to Obama by way of Petraeus. We've got this thing licked. We'll have the Taliban on

their knees eaten out of our hands by July of 2011. And Obama said, fine, then I accept that deadline then. July of 2011, it is. So I declared jihad on Kill Cullen for trying to blame Obama for his massive error in urging the tripling of that war and the killing of hundreds of thousands of extra people to no good end whatsoever when he knew good and well that Afghanistan is not Malaya and the U.S. is not the British and this is not going to work the way that he claimed. I bet that guy lives in a gigantic mansion by the ocean right now, doesn't he? Have you been to his house? I haven't been to his house.

I'm not sure where he lives actually. I think he lives in Colorado. On top of a gigantic mountain. I'm sure he's a pile of money. But in his defense, he's not. I think what Kilcullen had in mind was that I think he had a recognition that the only way that the war could end is a sort of a political mediation. So I think the complete eradication of the Taliban was completely unfeasible, even over generations. And so I think given the prevailing political wins, they were like, okay, well, this war can't go on for generations and generations.

So what we have to do is we have to kind of let the Taliban ascend to a certain extent in Afghanistan. Maybe they won't be called the Taliban anymore, but we have to have this sort of political mediation. So I think the idea of the surge was to put themselves in a political position where they could bring the Taliban in, but the Taliban wouldn't be in complete armed control. And then we could have this sort of mediated government, which would have been so much better, and what we ended up in 2020, 2021. So I think they were trying to get to this sort of tribal balance strategy where the Taliban were bought into the government,

but then the existing government could work with the Taliban, which is something that was entirely possible. But then, you know, the counterterrorism project just, it was, it overshadowed all of these, all these aspirations in 2011. I think that was the idea anyway. Give me just a minute here. At the Libertarian Institute, we published books, real good ones. So far we've got Will Griggs's No Quarter, Sheldon Richmond's coming to Palestine,

and what social animals owe to each other, and four of mine. Fool's Aaron, enough already, the great Ron Paul, and my brand new one, hotter than the sun, time to abolish nuclear weapons. And I'm happy to announce that we've just published our managing editor Keith Knight's first one, the Voluntarius Handbook, an excellent collection. of essays by the world's greatest libertarian thinkers and writers, including me. Check them all out at libertarian institute.org slash books. And for a limited time, signed copies of enough already and hotter than the sun are available

at Scott Horton.org slash books. Hey guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a assault or anything else you buy from amazon.com by way of the link in the right hand margin on the front page at scott horton.org so keep that in mind and don't worry about the mess your wife will clean it up well so in other words the surge would have worked for pacifying the taliban

if only they hadn't been going after them at night still it's entirely possible yeah it's entirely possible but then that that sort of like unmanaged strategy thing you know like the surge had to be in the service of this larger counterinsurgency strategy, which had to end in tribal balance. But I think there was a lot of people who were prosecuting the war who were like, well, you know, we're warfighters. We don't have any interest in, you know, being friends with the enemy and letting them take over in a way that's palatable for us. Yeah. Well, in the end, they gave them their whole country back anyway. Yeah, exactly.

Which they could have done all along. And look, I mean, that was the whole thing, though, was you can't have infantry standing around a street corner being officer-friendly traffic cop if there's still bad guys around everywhere. So that's why you have to have the night rays. And that was the whole excuse for flooding the infantry in there is once we have a bunch of guys on the ground, then we'll finally have the intelligence

to know who to get with our night raids and our drone strikes. Whereas right now we don't even know who we're getting. And that was the thing that now total lunatic and then war criminal, Colonel Michael Flynn, had written in his giant PDF file there that was ghost written for him about what's wrong with American intelligence gathering in Afghanistan. We don't have enough guys on the ground.

But the whole point of flooding the place with the guys so that we know who to Knight Raid and who to kill. So it all went together. And if it's, you know, totally contradictory and self-defeating, then I think that says it all right there, you know. Yeah, exactly. And I would imagine that Kilcullen and Flynn would have had, would have been at odds and, you potentially even had had arguments about this as to what the purpose of the surge was.

And, you know, as you would know, the cigar submission that Michael Flynn ended up offering was very damning of night raids and targeting, saying that, you know, I don't know how that ended up actually relating to our overall strategy. So, you know, Flynn, I think, he's definitely proven as a proven to be a very compromised figure. Yeah. Yeah, on one hand, I was really happy that the Washington Post confirmed everything I said in my book a year and a half after I wrote it. But on the other hand, I would have really liked to have had access to all that stuff while I was writing it too. But then again, it would have taken me a year longer to finish. So who knows. But anyways, I did thank, oh, Craig, what's his name from the post? Craig Whitlock.

said, hey, thanks for confirming everything I wrote in Fools Air in a year and a half ago, but he didn't respond. Listen, so let's talk about this group of, especially because there are a lot of veterans who listen to this show course, and I bet they'll be interested to hear all about this group of special forces. I mean, it's up to you to make the comparison to the Green Berets or the Rangers or Delta or however you would, which group they're most comparable to, or at least at the start of this, because part of the story is.

these guys go essentially from like force recon type group to essentially just what more like a Navy SEAL or Delta Force team doing night raids and is a whole kind of change of their culture and change of their mission and change of their specialty and everything from the start of the war all the way through here right I mean that's that's one of the reasons why a lot of these guys spoke chose to speak to me was because they thought that the the capability, the SAS capability in Australia's special forces capability, ended up being denuded and degraded over the war in Afghanistan because they were a specialised force.

And then towards the end of the war, they were just doing, they were doing these sort of endless direct actions. They weren't even doing night raids at that time. They were just day raids because there was a ruling that they weren't allowed to do this stuff at night. So they were basically doing what were searching cordon missions, which any infantry unit, any decent infantry unit would be able to do that. But previously, they had been like a, you know, force reconforce where surveillance and

reconnaissance had been the thing that the Australian SAS were best at. And part of the reason that they were so good at that and been trained for that was because we had this strategic posture in Australia. And the idea was that we had the defense of Australia was what the ADF, the Australian defense force was all about. So, you know, if there was going to be an invading force, they were probably going to come through the north of the country, we've got massive amounts of desert until you get to the southern cities. So the idea was that the Australian SAS would go into the north of the country,

spend a lot of time sort of looking at enemy forces, you know, perhaps doing some sabotage operations and things like that, and waiting for the Americans to come and liberate us. But, you know, that wasn't something that the SAS necessarily wanted to do was because, you know, that's not a particularly kinetic thing to do, and it's unlikely that they would ever actually end up doing that. So they assumed this counterterrorism role, which ended up being called the Tactical Assault Group, taking on some close-quarter battle skills and cereals, and then that ended up becoming their sort of, you know, their raison d'etre to a certain extent during the war on

terror wars. So, you know, they did end up becoming a little bit more like, you know, the Seals or Delta or someone like that. But perhaps, you know, for a lot of the operations that they did, they, it was a sort of dumbed down version of that because they, they, one of the problems that the guys sort of told me about was that they should be a force that is ready for a peer-to-peer conflict. But the combat in Afghanistan was clearly not peer-to-peer and the skills was sort of disappearing. The SAS now, it's, they've gone through a massive amount of upheaval,

but my understanding is that they're doing a lot more sort of grey roll stuff. They're doing a lot of intelligence gathering. They're working a lot with ASIS, which is the Australian Signals Intelligence, Australian Secret Intelligence Service, which is comparable to the CIA. And that's probably what they're doing now. But I can imagine that the regiment's gone through a reset through Afghanistan because so many guys, so many skills disappeared, so many guys left. And there was so much PTSD after the war in Afghanistan.

So they sort of had to reset the regiment. Yeah, well, that's a whole other part of it. In fact, I'll get back to that in a minute because I do want to ask you about that. But first, can we just talk about this J-Pell list? Because as you say, that really is the center of the book. And I think this is really important is the diffusion of responsibility here, where these guys essentially are getting a list of, and I love how everybody, of course, it's the military.

So everybody that they're targeting to kill is codename koala bear and code name, you know, pile of sand in your hand or whatever. So, but nobody's a human anymore, right? Everything is completely, like, jargonized, you could say like, what, like in a technocratic type of way. The computer screen says, we're going to kill, you know, I'm sorry the word is escaping me. Target, yeah, Target, pineapple, and then they just go and they kill the guy. But like, they don't know who the hell they're killing at all. And you talk about how they say, geez, lately it seems like, I don't know who we're killing out there, whereas maybe before they had a little bit more reason to believe that the people they were killing

had actually done anything. And again, we're talking about essentially civilian men with guns in their own country defending themselves. That's what makes them guilty enough to be killed anyway. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I talk about in the book is the incentive structure that developed within the Australian Kill Capture Program. So, you know, absent of a strategy that actually looked like it was going to work and we were going to win the war, you know, you want to have within Special Operations Command and any other sort of force element, you want to have these goals that you're sort of achieving, especially when you're in a war that goes on over 20 rotations. So the Australian Special Forces had 20 rotations in Afghanistan. And so one of the things that you can sort of look at and use as North Star and say, well, we did this last year and we want to do it better this year is the number of people

who had knocked off on the J-PEL list. So one of the ways you can do it is you can find more guys that were on the J-Pel list previously. Or another way you can do it is have more guys on the J-Pel. And so there were SAS officers who sort of suggested that they came into country. and they were like, oh, you know, the quality of JPL targets are not what they were previously. You know, previously it was like these really dangerous bomb makers who were bringing equipment through Kandahar and, you know, setting off these giant BBIs and killing people in the towns and the cities. And, you know, there's an example in the book of one of the JPL guys, an officer says,

well, this guy has four farmers under him. You know, it costs millions of dollars to launch a JPL, you know, And there's all these man hours and there's the, you know, these approvals. And, you know, we're exposing ourselves as Australian soldiers to potential, you know, death or injury to knock off a guy who's got, who's got four, you know, who's like the influential guy in your street. I was like, you know, this officer just sort of couldn't believe that we were doing that anymore. So, I mean, I think military strategist will tell you something like a JPL is probably useful if it's built into a larger military strategy.

But if it just ends up being the only thing that you're doing, and that's sort of the idea that if there we kill enough influential people, then we'll end up winning the war, then that's definitely a compromised idea. Right. And, I mean, wasn't that the famous cliche even out of Vietnam, that body counts were this giant illusion, right? That they weren't a mark of progress at all.

In fact, you could say all you're doing is making a matter and matter. And McChrystal himself called it Insurgent Math. You kill two, you get 20 more. No, that's right. But you, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's one of the issues we can count counterinsurgency. And then there's definitely an issue with a counterinsurgency in which the strategy is lost because the military is built around, uh, goal orientation, you know, and if you don't have, if you have a nebulous goal orientation, you know, so say for instance, the temperature of the populace and, you know, how accepting they are

of the government that you're installing, you know, the military is not going to accept that necessarily as a goal. But, you know, people killed on the kill capture, people captured in the kill capture. You know, that, that is a goal that is quantifiable and makes more sense within a military context. And, you know, Gareth Porter won the Martha Gellhorn Award back during the surge. I forgot which year now, because he showed, based on the military's own numbers, on, you know, from the ratio of all the people that they captured and sent off to Bogram, who then were released within two weeks because signifying that they had nothing on them

whatsoever ultimately well that would be the same ratio for the people that they were killing on those night raids too that these were people whose cell phone had been contacted by somebody's cell phone one time and now they're dead and so is anybody at their house or their next door neighbor who looks out the window to see what's going on that was I mean

there's a thing in the book called the there's an exploration into a thing called the rule of law cell which was, it was a project that was initiated by the Australian Special Forces because there was lots of Australian soldiers that believed in the mission or wanted to believe in the mission. And they sort of believed in capturing over-killing and then putting these guys through the Afghan justice system and then, you know, potentially them spending some time in jail

for, you know, trying to set off a bomb in their little town, you know. So there were a lot of altruistic guys who sort of went into the thing and believed that it could be done. But as you said, the Afghan justice system either, like a lot of those guys that went to Bagram and then were recycled back into the population, they were guilty. It was just that there was an evidentiary standard that wasn't met, or there was corruption along the way, which happened a lot.

You know, there was a lot of guys that were captured in these kill-captured missions, and then they'd go to the judiciary, there'd be a certain amount of money paid, and they'd be recycled back into the battlefield. So then that became an issue, an incentive. issue in the program as well because you're incentivized to kill rather than capture. Because if you capture and then recycle the guy back in the battlefield, not only you're seeing him again and thinking that whatever you're doing is not making any effect, you're

also not getting that as a jackpot, which was the metric of success within the Australian Special Forces, because if that guy isn't convicted for a long period of time, then he doesn't count as a jackpot. So then that incentive structure comes in, you know, and there's, there were endless guys that I spoke to who wanted to do the right thing, but the incentive structure was against them. Yeah. Well, you can see how it works. Now, how much longer can I keep you here? I got some more. Yeah, yeah. Come at it. Well, okay, so one thing is what you brought up there about the mental health of these guys. You have a quote from a guy saying, oh, none of us have PTSD here because we're not allowed to. Well, that's Ben Robert Smith, the guy who's at the center of that

defamation case. So, and now you say that really was the thing. where maybe in the regular army, some guys could get some treatment, but among these special forces guys, the risk of being sent home or somehow demoted or taken out of the crew was high enough and severe enough that they would all just essentially keep that stuff a secret.

So then, and I think you even say that the officers knew that that meant a greater percentage of these guys are going to end up killing themselves and having, or, you know, having much harder lives than if they were taken care of. And so that seems to be like, you know, a real important part of the book here about how true that was for these special forces guys there.

It's even more systemic than that. One of the guys that I spoke to in the book was the, he was the regimental psychologist for the SAS. So, you know, he was sort of, you know, the chief medical officer to a certain extent for the mental health of this regiment. And when they started deploying into Afghanistan, There's a health command, which I'm sure there is in the Australian military and the American military as well, which basically is in charge of the medical management of these forces.

So Australian Joint Health Command had had these rulings that they recognized that PTSD was a significant issue. And so they had to screen for guys with PTSD. And if it looked like you were going to present symptoms with PTSD, then you were going to be taken out of your unit. and that it was going to be managed and make sure that what they wanted to have actually was levels of PTSD that were that were near zero. And so this psychologist was spending time with the commanding officers, the special operations commands and saying, well, we can't do this, you know, because PTSD is going to be a byproduct of what we do.

And fighting the war is the thing that we want to do, you know, like managing our guys is one of the things that we do, but our North Star is fighting the war. So what do we do? Well, you can get waivers and you can get these sort of command rulings within these units if you're in a time of war. So you can just sort of basically sign off on, you can have a veto over these joint health command rulings. So that's essentially what they did. So not only they have low levels of PTSD within Special Operations Command and the SAS, they had zero PTSD for a period of time. So these guys were coming back to Afghanistan.

they weren't reporting any of the PTSD through to Joint Health Command. Everybody's happy because Joint Health Command's not having to deal with it. You know, the ADF brass, they don't have a PTSD issue. But all the pressure ends up being on these soldiers who keep redeploying and are not getting treatment. And there was a soldier who I spent some time with in a book previously. And in his case is sort of mentioned in this book where he was hospitalized twice for PTSD. the command knew it, but they kept giving him waivers and then he ended up taking his own life when he came back after his second deployment after his stintin hospital.

So, you know, it's reasonable to assume that these guys knew that this PTSD iceberg was going to come hit the regiment, but they just wanted to, you know, to keep the party going. They had to keep the party going because that's what the Americans wanted. Yeah, well, yeah, there's an important incentive right there. And I think you say in here that essentially the guys in there had such problems that if they were honest about it, it would have shut down the whole unit or the whole brigade or whichever size thing. It would have ended the special forces mission there. I mean, it would have ended the mission. It wouldn't have ended the regiment. There obviously would have been enough guys that would have been okay. But just they had, it's such a small part of the Australian military, or it was such a small part of the Australian military, that there were only so many guys that were that were sort of beret qualified to go into Afghanistan. And so they had to keep giving these waivers to make sure that they could get this quorum of guys so they could go over and keep these rotations going.

Yeah. All right. Now, so you really have a lot of these stories in here. And I know that information is limited. And in a lot of places you're quoting other people's testimony and not taking a judgment on exactly what happened in some of these. But I wish you would tell the story about the story. or the stories of some of these farmers who've been killed,

some of these women and children and babies blown up, and the events at Whiskey 108 with the rookie and all these things. I think people need to kind of hear about what it is we're talking about. You know, kind of imagine maybe not in your town, but on the outskirts of your town, something like this going on, a foreign power. Well, I never even mind that. Just what's the truth about what happened in Afghanistan, you know?

Yeah, well, I mean, Whiskey 108 is probably going to be the place where that that defamation case is going to be decided. So it was, I think it was 2009 or 2010, it was the Australian regular infantry were fighting with some local insurgents in a place called Derafshan. And Derafshan was a place that was, it was really important for the Australian mission because it was a place that was only about 10 or 15 kilometers, which is, you know, sort of eight miles away from the center of where the base was and where the town was.

Terancat is the capital of Orozcan. But then sort of eight miles north, there's this area that's a sort of insurgent area, not necessarily because it would be called a Taliban hotspot, but because it's a place where there's been long enmity between Jan Muhammad and Matiulakhan, who are the wallards that we decided to partner with, and the tribes over there in the direction. Ravshan area, and this is over water capture that, you know, these tribes, the Popolzai and the Nozai and the tribes that were up in Derafshan, you know, they were fighting over water

capture and agriculture for generations, you know, so then, you know, we have this sort of Taliban versus Australia and America war and it becomes overlaid to this sort of long tribal war that's been going on. So there's a fight going on in Derafshan between the Australian regular infantry who are trying to do reconstruction in that area. They're really trying, there's a real effort to try and bring them into the fold and give them reconstruction projects and things like that. So there's a fight going on and, you know, there's a Navy SEAL who drops a bomb on a building there in one of the areas in Derafshan. And then the SAS are sent in to go and sort of like clean things up and they go in there.

And there may or may not have been murders depending on where you fall on this definitely. information case. So the allegation is that not only were there murders of these guys that came out of a tunnel where there was acation weapons, it's not contested that there was this tunnel. You know, there was a tunnel, there was a casual weapons, that was sort of drawn out. And then the allegation was that the Australian SAS had, you know, sort of, I guess, a sort of soft policy within, this is the allegation. It's not, it's not proven, that they had to blood the rookies. So the rookies had to start with a kill. If they hadn't got a kill in combat, then they'd take a prisoner and then execute them. This is the allegation. And so at the center of this defamation cases, there's a lot

of Australian SAS soldiers who basically said, I saw this, saw one of these executions, you know, they all have little snippets of information. They all actually have different testimonials. as well as to what happened. But then there's all this testimony in the other side saying, well, it didn't happen. And the reason why they have fabricated this testimony is because they're jealous about Ben Robert Smith getting the Victoria Cross.

So that's at the center. This is the allegation that's got the greatest amount of testimony on either side of this allegation. So watch this base and we'll see how it rules. Yeah. The blooding. That's what they call it, right? Yeah, yeah.

The initiation, sort of the hazing for the new guy. You got to kill an innocent guy. I talked about this with, with Braden. And then I'm sorry, I forget the name of this other journalists that I interviewed about this stuff. So they're Australian journalists who talked about that as well. That's mock, we'll see? I'm sorry. I got what Biden's got.

Yeah. I've done 6,000 of these. That's my excuse. I really have. So everybody, leave me alone. All right. Well, the interesting thing about those killings at Whiskey 1018, though, is that they're not innocence. You know, they were guys who were definitely involved in the insurgency.

You know, whether you believe that you have a right to protect your home or not, you know, and that makes you innocent, you know, so be it. But these guys were the guys that were pulled out of this tunnel. And so they probably could have been elevated to the JPL given time and intelligence. So that is the sort of murky gray area. the Australian Special Forces operations is like, you know, these killings have be characterized as these murders, and they definitely are if these allegations have proven that they're murders, you know, it's undoubted that they're murders. But they're not a million miles away from what we were what we were doing legally as well.

You know, the legal aspect of it and the moral and ethical aspect of it are at odds. And that's one of the things that I wanted to sort of to put through in the book. Yeah. All right. Now, if he could, at the end here, let's talk about Australia's ignominious defeat and retreat from Afghanistan before America's green on blue attacks all the way out the door, huh? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that was how you would sort of characterize the end of the Australian war, you know, all of these allegations of murder, sorry, most of these allegations of murder

happened in 2012 or 2013, which is when the Australians were leaving. And that's when Braden was operating and was in that mission that you spoke about. And then that was sort of at the end of the war, you know, so to a certain extent, Orozgan had been bought to heal in a very sort of a very violent way. but then the Taliban were prosecuting these green or blue attacks or they were promoting these green or blue attacks or these green and blue attacks were just organically happening. And it was, you know, it was a little bit different to the IED attacks, the suicide bombing attacks and things like that because they couldn't really be predicted.

And so from a strategic perspective, it was very difficult to understand to figure out. what to do with these green and blue attacks. And another one of the allegations in this defamation case is that the Australian SAS went to try and find one of the guys who'd been involved in one of these green or blue attacks and murdered a number of Australian soldiers. They didn't find him, but then there was allegations of murder in the place where they had, they know that this guy had been. So one of the aspects of this defamation case is the allegation that perhaps the

SAS were very angry about this green-on-blue attack that had happened, that they'd sheltered this guy and that perhaps there were murders afterwards. So that's one of the things that'll be borne out with this ruling. All right. Well, listen, thanks very much, Ben. I won't keep you any longer, but I really enjoyed your book and I really appreciate your time on the show. I hope people will take a look at this thing. Find, fix, and finish by Ben Mckelvey. Thanks again. Scott, it was awesome to talk to. It's always great to talk someone who really knows their shit and also loves their skateboarding. So hopefully we'll see you down here in Bondi sometime soon. Man, wouldn't that be nice? Yeah. You know what? I've been saving out those miles.

Hey, Tim. We're coming into summer. Hey, old Australian friend, Tim, you listening? Let's see if maybe we've worked something out. Yeah. Well, send me a message if you come down. I'll take you out for a beer. Okay, great, man. Have it going, Ben. Really appreciate you. This, Gordon. Thank you. Thank you. all right you guys again the book is find fix finish by ben mckelvey the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scothorton dot org and libertarian institute dot org