This also comes as international forces prepare to withdraw after two decades in Afghanistan.
"Warrior culture"
The investigations follow the release in November of a military inquiry report, which found "credible information" of potential "war crimes" committed by Australian troops, alleging they unlawfully killed 39 Afghan prisoners and civilians between 2005 and 2016.
Prepared by Australian Defence Force Inspector-General Paul Brereton after a four-year inquiry, the report describes a "warrior culture" embraced by some of the force. It alleges patrol commanders required junior soldiers to shoot a prisoner to achieve a first kill, and that troops planted weapons on slain Afghan civilians. It recommends criminal investigations into 23 incidents involving 19 individuals.
After the Australian Report, more and more Calls Grow For More Investigations Of Abuses In Afghanistan by all invading forces led by the US Aggressor.
"These findings allege the most serious breaches of military conduct and professional values," Australian Defence Force Chief Gen. Angus Campbell said in a public apology while presenting the report.
This has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the Australian military is made up of people who do not respect any international law or even their own military law.
Queen of Hearts
Australians are descendents from the criminals on death rolls released by the British Queen to steal other people's land after murdering them by the millions using their guns. They were commanded by a crook of crooks called Captain Cook. But was actually meant as Captain Crook.
ReplyDeleteThe Morrison government is provoking China to please America - Paul Keating (Former prime minister of Australia)
ReplyDeleteThe Coalition government is ignoring Australia’s interests by pushing us towards a confrontation with Beijing, mainly to be seen in Washington as America’s fawning acolyte.
The Morrison government is wantonly leading Australia into a strategic dead end by its needless provocations against China. China is not the old Soviet Union. It is not attacking or forcibly incorporating countries into a grand union, nor is it exporting some kind of universal ideology. And it does not threaten nuclear Armageddon on a daily basis, as the Soviet Union did. Save for its front porch, the South China Sea, it broadly keeps to itself.
Its great problem is that it is now a state as large as the United States, and with the potential of being much larger – an unforgivable sin for American triumphalists. And that sin has radiated over those Australians with a fawning, obsequious attitude to the United States. How dare China shirtfront American economic pre-eminence!
This is what all this warmongering is about – China’s presence and scale. China’s rise is simply not in the American playbook – its very existence and at this scale is an affront to America’s notion of itself as the exceptional state, the proselytiser of divine providence.
Australia is a continent sharing a border with no other state. It has no territorial disputes with China – indeed, China is 12 flying hours away from the Australian coast. Yet the Morrison government, both through its foreign policy incompetence and fawning compulsion to please America, effectively has us in a cold war with China.
It is true that China, like all big states, has become ruder as it has got bigger. Under Xi Jinping and in its new foreign policy adolescence – its grand coming out – it expects other states to afford it deference and jump to its tune. But big states are invariably rude; it is the role of foreign policy to navigate the dangers without pulling the roof in – without military conflict. For big-state rudeness, we need look no further than Iraq and Vietnam.
But we now have an ambassador to the United States, Arthur Sinodinos, usurping the role of the foreign minister by making declaratory statements to claim that China’s coercion in the Pacific is now a bigger threat than September 11 terrorism and that ANZUS will hasten military and economic tie-ups to counter Beijing. Sinodinos has even invented a Chinese challenge to “the way we run our domestic economy”. Would any sane person suggest the various Chinese trade bans are a cause for war – or anything like a cause for war? But Sinodinos does.
Defence Minister Peter Dutton says Australia needs to be in a position to defend its waters in the north and south – implying, without any basis whatsoever, that China may be a military aggressor. that’s a posture China has never shown any sign of.
The Morrison government is needlessly and irresponsibly pushing Australia towards a headlong confrontation with China – and doing it, in the main, to be seen in Washington as America’s fawning acolyte. The whole notion of Australia’s right to an independent foreign policy – a right to be itself and act in its own interests – is being suborned by a government determined to subordinate its interests to those of another country.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the conservatives put all their strategic faith in Britain. Now, dull as ever, and with the same fear of abandonment, they are placing their faith in the United States – having no faith in Australia’s ability to make its way in Asia as a proud, resourceful and intelligent state in its own right.
'It is true that China, like all big states, has become ruder as it has got bigger. Under Xi Jinping and in its new foreign policy adolescence – its grand coming out – it expects other states to afford it deference and jump to its tune.'
ReplyDeleteThese two sentences from the above article by Paul Keating are also false.
China has been rude only to those that are rude and crude. All the countries that are friendly to China, without provoking China, and not behaving like asshole USA, Australia, Canada, UK, India and Japan, have no problems with China and find China a very friendly and helpful trading partner. Of course there are also some minor irritants that think too big for themselves and wanting to pick a fight with China would also be treated that way, mainly American lackeys and cronies.
China in its own quiet way has been showing to the world how an exemplary big power should behave with smaller countries, ie non interference in other country's domestic affairs, treating every country big or small as equals, mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and developing win win relationship.
ReplyDeleteNo threats of war, no sanctions, no gangster behaviour, no support for domestic violence and opposition, no weaponising of trades or other instruments for power and oppression, no support for terrorist organisations.
The age of American privilege is over
ReplyDeleteSuccessful statecraft aligns interests with circumstance. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a generation of statesmen grasping this essential truth presided over a radical reorientation of basic U.S policy. The result was a half-century of American global primacy.
Now, however, the era of American primacy has ended. The imperative of the present moment is to adjust U.S. policy to rapidly changing circumstances. In the two decades since 9/11, members of the foreign policy establishment have sought to finesse or avoid this issue. The failure of America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan suggests that this is no longer possible.
Writing in 1948, George Kennan, director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, made an essential point. “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population,” he wrote. “Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.”
With this purpose in mind, Kennan’s associates, chief among them George Marshall, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal and Paul Nitze — White males all — undertook a series of initiatives aimed at perpetuating this position of disparity. Their approach centered on devising mechanisms to project American power globally.
Among their best-known initiatives were the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO. Hardly less important was the National Security Act of 1947, which, among other things, created the CIA; NSC-68, a secret document that in 1950 committed the United States to the pursuit of permanent military superiority; and the fashioning of Strategic Air Command into an instrument of genocidal nuclear attack.
On balance, throughout the decades-long Cold War, Americans enjoyed a way of life that made the United States the envy of the world — free, democratic and prosperous. So at least most Americans themselves firmly believed.
By this time, the correlation between U.S. policy and Kennan’s position of disparity had long since begun to unravel. In 2000, the United States accounted for 32.6 percent of the world’s wealth. A mere two decades later, America’s share of global wealth had shrunk to less than 30 percent. Simultaneously, within the United States itself, the gap between the rich and the non-rich was increasing by leaps and bounds, contributing to profound domestic unrest.
“Free, democratic and prosperous” no longer suffices to describe contemporary America, even in the eyes of many Americans. The postwar formula for sustaining a position of global privilege is no longer working. Indeed, it has become irrelevant at best or counterproductive at worst.
Ever the realist, George Kennan would have unhesitatingly acknowledged that fact. For that reason, he would certainly have supported President Biden’s decision to end the war in Afghanistan.
But as a strategist, Kennan would have gone further, recognizing that the most pressing threats to American security and well-being are no longer “out there” in Central Asia or in other distant theaters but “back here.” Those threats include disease, climate chaos, environmental deterioration, porous borders, the erosion of personal privacy and, perhaps most insidiously, the unraveling of domestic comity.
The paradigm of power projection, with its emphasis on military intervention abroad, no longer provides a relevant response to these threats.
The genius of Kennan and his contemporaries was to recognize the imperative of fundamentally changing America’s approach to the world. The lesson of Afghanistan, confirmed by the astonishing display of incompetence that has accompanied the U.S. withdrawal, is that it’s past time for the present generation to do the same.
The American war in Afghanistan ends in bitter humiliation. But it should also serve as a wake-up call. The age of American privilege is gone for good.
- WP Sep 02 2021