Asia-Pacific, Headlines, Human Rights, Religion | Analysis

AUSTRALIA: Winning ‘Hearts and Minds’ in Afghanistan?

Analysis by Stephen de Tarczynski

MELBOURNE, Sep 8 2008 (IPS) - Responses by defence officials in the wake of a recent inquiry into claims that Australian soldiers mistreated detainees in Afghanistan undermine efforts to win the battle for hearts and minds in that war-ravaged country.

“Our people were patrolling far away from our main base in Tarin Kowt. It’s regrettable that there are some cultural sensitivities here, but we are at war in Afghanistan, and we are at war with people who will stop at nothing to reimpose a regime in which human rights don’t exist whatsoever,” said Australia’s minister for defence, Joel Fitzgibbon, in a response to the uproar that has ensued following the public release of the inquiry’s report.

The Australian Defence Force (ADF) conducted the inquiry into the treatment of Afghan nationals detained by Australian forces in April after allegations of mistreatment were made by Afghan National Army (ANA) members.

Australia is one of the 14 non-NATO contributors of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to Afghanistan.

This latest inquiry follows the report of an investigation in May which cleared Australian soldiers of the mistreatment of civilians in Nov. 2007.

Following a firefight to “clear” a compound in Oruzgan province on Apr.29 this year, four men – suspected Taliban fighters – were taken prisoner and “held in walled pens during the night and guarded by FE [force element] soldiers” at a forward operating base, according to the ADF’s inquiry officer, Colonel D.K. Connery.

The allegations included that Australians pushed one of the four detainees – who included a man of 70 years of age and another whose left leg had been amputated below the knee – against a wall “two or three times” and beat him with a stick.

ANA soldiers also alleged that “the detainees were stripped naked, beaten and mistreated.”

However, Connery stated that the inquiry – which was finalised in June but only released outside official corridors in late August – did not find “credible evidence to support any of the allegations of abuse of LN [local national] detainees.”

Instead, the inquiry officer suggested that the ANA soldiers “objected to ‘infidels’ handling Muslims and did not believe that an old man and a cripple could be Taliban.”

“A strong cultural sense of ‘appropriateness’ underpins the initial allegations,” wrote Connery. He also declared that the Afghans may have been further angered by the Australians holding the prisoners in pens “which had previously been used for dogs.”

This has outraged members of Australia’s Muslim community. Dogs are considered unclean in Islam.

Ikebal Patel, president of the Australian Association of Islamic Councils, has been vocal in slamming the use of dog pens as holding cells. Patel was “appalled” to learn of the use of such pens following the release of the inquiry’s report.

A spokesman for the Islamic High Council of Australia, Mohamed Mehio, also condemned the practise. He called it a “matter of human rights”, declaring that dog pens were not suitable either for Muslims or non-Muslims.

Such criticism has not been restricted to non-governmental groups. Afghanistan’s ambassador to Australia, Amanullah Jayhoon, has also expressed concern at the treatment of the detainees.

But Fitzgibbon continues to defend the actions of the Australian personnel, arguing that the treatment did not breach the Geneva Conventions.

The defence minister has even appeared to contradict the inquiry – in an apparent attempt to diffuse the situation – by claiming on Sept.3 that “the holding facilities were never used as dog kennels.”

This is despite an ADF spokesman having earlier endorsed the inquiry’s assertion that dogs had previously been housed in the pens.

But what Fitzgibbon and others – the Australian public has largely supported the soldiers’ actions, while the head of the ADF, Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, said in May that he believed that the claims of mistreatment were false – seem to be oblivious to is that Australia is a foreign force in Afghanistan.

Practices which may be acceptable here are not necessarily seen in the same light in the country where Australian personnel are essentially part of an occupying force. Any perception of mistreatment by local Afghans is self-confirming. It is mistreatment whether or not Australian and other foreign forces think otherwise.

The inquiry’s report also comes at a time of heightened tensions between the Afghan government and ISAF as the country experiences its bloodiest period since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. The Hamid Karzai regime has accused foreign forces of killing more than 500 civilians in Afghanistan this year.

In some of the latest instances, demonstrators in the Afghan capital, Kabul, blocked roads in late August as they protested the killing by foreign troops of a local family of four, including two children. Four other children were killed in an ISAF artillery attack in Paktika which also wounded seven civilians.

These incidents follow reports of large numbers of civilian deaths in an air raid in Herat. The Karzai government has said dozens of civilians were killed and the United Nations believes around 90, including 60 children, died. The United States, meanwhile, insists that five civilians were killed.

Clearly, ISAF is facing an uphill struggle if it hopes to win the “battle for the hearts and minds” of the Afghans.

It is positions such as the one taken by Fitzgibbon that also undermine any attempts at making headway in this battle. Cultural differences must be taken into account when undertaking the type of guerrilla-style warfare currently being played out in Afghanistan.

The minister’s response also indicates that lessons have not been learned from earlier cases, such as the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the burning of two Taliban corpses by United States troops in Afghanistan in 2005.

Without clear frontlines, success in winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the local populace will be a major determinant in ISAF’s overall ability to confirm the western-backed regime in Kabul as Afghanistan’s legitimate government.