The Prime Minister’s announcement last week came with an important caveat. The government will be more open about the activities of our secretive elite special force unit, “so long as there is no material danger to soldiers”. We have yet to see where and how this line will be drawn.
No sane New Zealander wishes to see the safety of our troops compromised by a policy of openness that delivers strategically useful information to the enemies they are confronting. Equally, every sane New Zealanders know that military involvement in this messy war exposes our nation to risk, given the global reach of the terrorists harboured by the Taliban in Afghanistan. There is a delicate balance to be struck between what we want to know and what we need to know.
Until now, our view of the Afghanistan conflict has been obscured by the obsessive level of secrecy that the New Zealand Defence Force has imposed over its counter-insurgency operations. The say nothing policy has done nothing to build public understanding or trust in what our military is doing in our name in what promises to be the longest foreign war in our history.
Time and time again, we have heard about significant events at second hand, via foreign media, instead of direct from our own government, our defence chiefs, or our own under-resourced New Zealand media. Occasionally, by wielding the cold chisel of the Official Information Act, some information of genuine concern has been very slowly extracted from our officials and ministers – particularly in regard to the treatment of the detainees or prisoners taken by the NZSAS in 2002. [Check out my previous columns, here].
Hopefully, last week’s announcement signals some real change.
For the first time, we have official confirmation that the NZSAS is authorised to conduct missions in support of the International Security Assistance Force [ISAF] headquarters, including reconnaissance, combat operations and military assistance, and training and liaison to Afghanistan’s Ministry of Interior special operations unit. These are facts that merit closer analysis.
Under ISAF standard operating procedures, the NZSAS is required to deliver any detainee [suspect] or prisoner taken during its operation to Afghan national security forces for detention. What happens next is currently raising a real ruckus in Canada.
Last December, Richard Colvin, a career diplomat with Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs [DFAIT], delivered damning testimony about reports he filed during his tour of duty in Afghanistan about the treatment of Canadian detainees transferred to the custody of the Afghan National Directorate of Security [NDS].
“In our annual human rights report at the end of 2006, we informed them about systemic problems of torture in Afghan jails. By March 2007, we were orally warning Ottawa that the NDS tortures people and if we don’t want our detainees tortured, we shouldn’t hand them to the NDS… It was only in October 2007 that DFAIT’s senior leadership finally sent a dedicated monitor to Kandahar. Within weeks, he found incontrovertible evidence of continued torture. An Afghan in NDS’ custody told him that he had been tortured, showed him the marks on his body, was also able to point to the instrument of torture which had been left under a chair in the corner of the room by his interrogator.”
Today, Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is under sustained fire for rejecting Colvin’s testimony and stone-walling an inquiry into the treatment of Canadian captives in Afghan custody.
Last week, Canada’s chief of defence staff, General Walt Natynczyk, added fuel to that fire by ordering a formal investigation into how a critical report on the beating of an Afghan prisoner remained buried at National Defence headquarters.
The new United States commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has also expressed his concern about the detention facilities in Afghanistan. His initial assessment of US forces, filed last August, says:
“Detention operations, while critical to the success of counter-insurgency operations, also have the potential to become a strategic liability for the US and ISAF. With the drawdown in Iraq and the closing of Guatanamo Bay, the focus on US detention operations with turn to the US Bagram Internment facility. Because of the classification level of the BTIF and the lack of public transparency, the Afghan people see US detention operations as secretive and lacking in due process.”
McChrystal reserves his best shot for the Afghan detention facilities:
“Currently, Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgents represent more than 2,500 of the 14,500 inmates in the increasingly overcrowded Afghan corrections system. These detainees are currently radicalizing non-insurgent inmates and worsening an already over-crowded prison system… As a result, hundreds are held without charge or without a defined way ahead. This allows the enemy to radicalize them far beyond their pre-capture orientation. This problem can no longer be ignored.”
So, what will the New Zealand government and the NZDF do with any NZSAS captives?
In September last year, New Zealand’s chief of defence, Lieutenant General Jerry Mateparae, declined to provide me with a copy of the standard operating procedures to be observed by the NZSAS for the detention and processing of its captives.
Citing section 6[a] and 6[b](i) of the Official Information Act, he refused to do so because “the government has recently announced a further NZSAS deployment to Afghanistan”. Very strange, since we now know the NZSAS will be complying with ISAF standard operating procedures, and he provided me with information detailing those procedures in 2008, when the NZSAS was not in Afghanistan.
The Office of the Ombudsman has initiated an investigation into the general’s latest decision. The outcome will provide a real measure of the new policy of openness.