Andrew Hastie on the SAS scandal

Ex-SAS soldier and current Liberal MP Andrew Hastie has penned an extraordinary column on the war crimes scandal enveloping Australia’s special forces. 

Federal Liberal MP and former SAS soldier Andrew Hastie.

Ex-SAS soldier and current Liberal MP Andrew Hastie has penned an extraordinary column on the war crimes scandal enveloping Australia’s special forces. 

Hastie, writing in today's Australian, gives a rare insight into what happened and why: 

First, we have forgotten basic truths about human nature that previous generations of Australians better understood. We live in a bent world. We all carry man’s smudge: people do bad things. Christians call it sin in a fallen world. Enlightenment thinkers like Immanuel Kant called it the “crooked timber” of humanity. Whatever name we give our condition, we should always guard against the reality of people doing bad things when they are left unaccountable.

Second, we ignored the true ­nature of war and sanitised it. We pretended it was no different to any other form of unilateral government policy. But the reality is that war is inherently violent, escalatory and degrading. It is a modern conceit to pretend that war can be managed with a set of safe technocratic hands. The brutal reality is no plan ever survives the first shot. People lose their way and ­become hard of heart, especially after multiple deployments.

The Australian Defence Force was very effective at sanitising our longest war with its legions of public affairs officers. The United Kingdom and the United States took a liberal approach, allowing reporters to see their soldiers at war. However, we stage-managed Australia’s contribution to the ­Afghanistan war through a carefully crafted information operation. This approach stifled public interest reporting. Perhaps with greater access for the Australian media, some of the events alleged by the Brereton Report might never have happened.

Third, parliamentary scrutiny of Defence is broken and needs fixing. 

Hastie writes about his own experience, the necessity of the 'warrior culture' and the moral courage of those "who blew the whistle and repudiated the dark toxic personalities that have shamed the SASR in Afghanistan".

Read the full piece here.