Inquiry into Afghanistan essential

When the New Zealand Defence Force went on the defensive over allegations raised by journalists Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson in their 2017 book Hit and Run, claims that the two journalists had the location of a SAS raid wrong were central.

The book alleged a 2010 SAS raid on two villages in Afghanistan left six Afghan civilians dead, including a young child, and injured 15 others. The Defence Force has always denied the allegations, claiming that insurgents were targeted and that reports of civilian casualties were ‘‘unfounded’’.

Disagreement over the location of the raid was so important to the Defence Force’s version of events it was described as the ‘‘central premise’’ of Hit and Run, ina media release attributed to Lieutenant General Tim Keating in 2017. Keating said there were ‘‘major inaccuracies’’ in the book, with ‘‘the main one’’ being the location and names of villages. Readers might have assumed that if Hager and Stephenson could not get the location right, surely the rest of their story collapses.

A year later, the Defence Force has quietly conceded that Hager and Stephenson were not so inaccurate after all. In official information released without fanfare this month after the Ombudsman intervened, the Defence Force has confirmed photographs of a village published in Hit and Run were indeed the location of the 2010 raid as the authors claimed, although the Defence Force continued to quibble about much smaller points, such as the distance between two buildings.

Hager claimed that Keating had used the disagreement over the location as a diversion to confuse a public who might otherwise have been shocked by claims that our SAS had committed war crimes in Afghanistan. The confusion seemed to work and politicians relied on Keating’s account.

The new release of Defence Force information also partially clarified what was meant by ‘‘unfounded’’ civilian casualties. The Defence Force now says that the word ‘‘unfounded’’ was ‘‘intended to address the suggestion that the Defence Force was responsible for civilian casualties’’. There ‘‘may have been civilian casualties caused by a malfunction on a coalition helicopter in the same operation’’, the Defence Force said. In other words, civilian casualties were accidental rather than deliberate, but cannot be ruled out. And in what might seem like hairsplitting, the Defence Force also confirmed that ‘‘explosive entry’’ was used to enter a building, but it was not ‘‘blown up’’ as Hager and Stephenson claimed.

An inquiry is said to be under consideration by Attorney General David Parker, who is expected to announce a decision soon. This week’s revelations about the location and a greater acknowledgement of possible civilian casualties will have made that inquiry essential.