An Australian soldier’s heroics under fire to save an Afghan interpreter put our ministers to shame
The Australian Special Air Service trooper Mark Donaldson was awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry after his vehicle convoy came under enemy fire in Afghanistan’s battle of Khaz Oruzgan in September 2008.
The citation for Donaldson’s VC outlines how the enemy attacked his convoy with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, pinning it down and causing many casualties. Donaldson deliberately distracted the enemy, drawing fire on himself so that the wounded could be saved and brought to the vehicles.
The convoy’s escape was slow and perilous. The vehicles were full of wounded; Donaldson and the uninjured had to run, exposed, beside them to escape fire.
“During the conduct of this vehicle manoeuvre to extract the convoy from the engagement area, a severely wounded coalition force interpreter was inadvertently left behind,” the citation reads. “Of his own volition and displaying complete disregard for his own safety ... Donaldson moved alone, on foot, across approximately 80 metres of exposed ground to recover the wounded interpreter.
“His movement, once identified by the enemy, drew intense and accurate machine gun fire from entrenched positions. Upon reaching the wounded coalition force interpreter ... Donaldson picked him up and carried him back to the relative safety of the vehicles then provided immediate first aid before returning to the fight.”
Donaldson moved quickly and decisively. It was, clearly, unthinkable for him to leave the wounded interpreter – to abandon him to a certain battlefield death.
Right now the federal government should take Donaldson as the exemplar when it comes to the treatment of locally engaged staff who worked with Australian military forces before they were ingloriously pulled out of Afghanistan in mid-June.
Instead, with the resurgent Taliban retaking Afghanistan and targeting those locally engaged staff, including interpreters, the federal government is dragging the chain – tying up the processing of the asylum claims of the locally engaged staff in unnecessary bureaucracy. While there is still a chance to save the hundreds of Afghans who trusted Australia and supported its military and aid enterprises, they should be immediately removed to another safe country for visa processing. The cost, danger and strategic difficulty of doing that in a country again falling to the Taliban should not be a consideration.
Ministers insist that security vetting for protection visas is happening as fast as possible in Afghanistan. Clearly it is not happening fast enough for those former interpreters and other staff facing death or who have already been killed for serving those the Taliban regard as the invading “in
fidel”. A major impediment in the visa processing is the permanent closure of the Australian embassy in Afghanistan in May – a move that also heavily compromises realistic chances of prosecuting Australian troops for alleged war crimes.
The last of the US forces will abandon Afghanistan in late August.
If it appears that Australia has cut and run, pre-emptively, diplomatically and militarily, before the American retreat ... that is because it has. The global optics – and the reality for those left behind – are appalling.
The former prime minister John Howard committed Australian troops to the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and, in so doing, to Australia’s longest war. He speaks of Australia’s “moral obligation” to the Afghan locally engaged staff. Notwithstanding the irony of being proselytised to about the morality of the tail-end of this century’s main Middle East wars by Howard (who diverted Australian military resources to the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the most spurious of pretexts, allowing terrorist cells and the Taliban to re-emerge in Afghanistan) he has a point about the interpreters.
The world, meanwhile, is watching how the US and its allies, not least Australia, meet their moral obligations on the back of their Afghanistan retreat.
Australia already had poor form in this space, having abandoned many locally engaged staff when it pulled out of South Vietnam in 1972.
“I’ve got Afghan guys who I worked closely with who I’m now writing references for,” says former police officer and war crimes investigator David Savage, who was severely injured and almost killed by a suicide bomber while working on an Australian aid project in Afghanistan in 2012.
“I’ve written directly to the [federal] ministers responsible and I literally just get stock standard replies, you know there is a process and if they fit our criteria they’ll be eligible for visas. If they wanted to bring them here with the urgency required to save them, they could. This is an avoidable tragedy.
“And it’s just strategically dumb in the long term as well. Who would risk their lives for Australia after this? Sure, nothing might happen for a while. But Australia is going to end up going into another country – whether it’s a peacekeeping mission, war or aid delivery. And which locals would put their hands up to say, ‘Yeah, we will trust the Australians’?”
As Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon, defence minister when Donaldson risked his life to retrieve that wounded Afghan interpreter, says: “Donaldson’s VC citation should be reproduced on the mousepad of every Minister who sits on the National Security Committee.
“I’ve no doubt the issue is not a simple one and there will be those with questionable claims. I have first-hand experience. But only two key questions need be asked and answered: did this person assist, and are they now at risk as a result of the help they provided?”