Inquiry into Afghanistan essential
When the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) went on the defensive over allegations raised by journalists Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson in their 2017 book Hit & Run, claims that the two journalists had the location of a SAS raid wrong were central.
The book alleged that a 2010 SAS raid on two Afghan villages left six civilians dead, including a young child, and injured 15 others. The NZDF has always denied this, claiming that insurgents were targeted and reports of civilian casualties were ‘‘unfounded’’.
Disagreement over the location of the raid was so important to the NZDF’s version of events that it was described as the ‘‘central premise’’ of Hit & Run in a 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 at home might have assumed that if Hager and Stephenson could not even get the location right, surely the rest of their story collapses.
A year later, the NZDF has quietly conceded that Hager and Stephenson were not so inaccurate after all. In official information released this month after the Ombudsman intervened, the NZDF has confirmed that photographs of a village published in Hit & Run were indeed the location of the 2010 raid as the authors claimed, although the NZDF 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 possibly committed war crimes in Afghanistan. It seemed to work and politicians relied on Keating’s account.
When former Prime Minister Bill English ruled out an inquiry in 2017, he said that ‘‘allegations of war crimes now seem to apply to some other place, not the place where the New Zealand operation was carried out’’. He perpetuated the idea that the authors were mistaken.
The new release of NZDF information also partially clarified what was meant by ‘‘unfounded’’ civilian casualties. The NZDF now says that the word ‘‘unfounded’’ was ‘‘intended to address the suggestion that the NZDF was responsible for civilian casualties’’. There ‘‘may have been civilian casualties caused by a malfunction on a coalition helicopter in the same operation’’, the NZDF said.
In other words, any civilian casualties were accidental rather than deliberate, but can not be ruled out. And in what might seem to the layperson like hairsplitting, the NZDF also confirmed that ‘‘explosive entry’’ was used to enter a building, but it was not ‘‘blown up’’ as Hager and Stephenson claimed.
A year ago, as Leader of the Opposition, Andrew Little called for an independent inquiry into the events. An inquiry is said to be under active 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.