Fatal errors at an Afghan base
CONFUSED rules made Diggers sitting ducks.
THE first spray of bullets came out of the darkness.
Stripped to their shorts, T-shirts and thongs in the stifling 40C heat — some playing cards and, others the board game Risk — the platoon of Australian Diggers had no chance.
They were stunned, and their roving sentry was on the wrong side of the line of fire. Another burst of rounds from the M-16 followed quickly, and then another.
In a matter of seconds one day late in August 2012, the routine mission of the 24-member mentoring team, Call Sign India21, to the remote Afghan National Army patrol base Wahab in Afghanistan’s Oruzgan province had become one of the deadliest in Australia’s decade-long campaign in the war-torn country.
As soldiers scrambled for cover, with two firing at their Afghan allies in guard towers overlooking the Diggers’ makeshift camp, Private Robert Poate, 23, and Sapper James Martin, 21, lay dead.
Lance Corporal Stjepan “Rick” Milosevic, 40, held on for a few minutes, but soon died as two other Diggers — one with a non-life-threatening gunshot wound and another hit by shrapnel — were dragged to safety by medics.
But the attack didn’t come from enemy fighters who had breached the wall of the small Australian-constructed base in Dorafshan Valley, a Taliban stronghold. The killer came from inside the wire.
Afghan teenager Hekmatullah, just 19 and recently promoted to the rank of zabet (sergeant), was behind the latest in a bloody spate of insider shootings by local soldiers on their coalition allies.
Since the post-September 11 invasion of Afghanistan, the “green on blue’’ attacks had increasingly come to define the conflict just as the Vietcong’s tunnels and guerilla tactics had shaped the Vietnam War.
And in 2012, as coalition forces ramped-up their mentoring of the Afghan army, in the hope of withdrawing from the country, the attacks became more regular.
After just two insider attacks in 2008, by the time the platoon had deployed from the coalition base at Sorkh Bed on August 28, 2012, there had been 44 shootings by rogue Afghan soldiers, killing 39 allied troops, just that year.
Despite the carnage, platoon commander Dominic Lopez — from Brisbane’s Gallipoli Barracks — believed there was a “low risk’’ that an Afghan soldier would turn on the platoon.
He had little reason to think otherwise.
Amazingly, Lopez’s superior officers had not ordered military intelligence to assess the risk of an insider threat at the base of 60 Afghan soldiers — until after the Diggers had deployed.
Two hours before the fatal shootings at 9.45pm on August 29, intelligence finished its assessment — warning of a “high risk’’ of an insider attack within the base.
But it was never sent to the Diggers.
Lopez later explained that there was a tightrope to walk when arriving at a base and trying to build a rapport with the soldiers that his platoon was to mentor.
Without a specific warning of a threat, the last thing he wanted to do was kick out the Afghans from their quarters to ensure a separate area for his platoon.
Instead, Lopez and the Afghan army commander agreed that the Diggers would camp at the northwest end of the base — the opposite end to the Afghans.
The Diggers set up a makeshift administration area under a couple of tarpaulins adjacent to their three protected mobility vehicles (Bushmasters) and eight-tonne trailer, where they were relaxing — sitting on their stretchers and using ration boxes as tables — when the shooting happened.
Afghans had open and easy access to the Australians.
There was no reason to be concerned, no sign of trouble.
The morning after their arrival, the Australians partnered a patrol with the Afghans, successfully disabling an improvised explosive device planted just outside the base.
After their return mid-afternoon, the Diggers went about administration duties and their daily routine with some of the platoon, lifting weights with the Afghans.
Among those pumping iron with the Diggers was Hekmatullah.
Despite Australian soldiers later describing the goodwill between the two groups — with the Afghans laughing and later watching them play cards and board games — Hekmatullah was quietly seething.
Recently denied leave, the young soldier — who it was later discovered was the son of a Taliban fighter — had just seen a video being circulated of US troops burning the Koran.
As night fell, he also joined the Diggers playing the games before going to get his M-16 for what should have been a stint on sentry duty.
It was then that he pounced, walking unchallenged between two of the Bushmasters and firing 25 to 30 rounds in three bursts before going over the wall and escaping into the darkness.
It took another six months before he was captured in Pakistan.
Last year, he was sentenced to death in Kabul and is now involved in an appeal.
The cold-blooded attack exposed the delicate balancing act inherent in Australia’s mentoring mission to Afghanistan, which began in 2010.
Two years later, the dangers and failings of the mission that ended in tragedy are being raked over in a rare coronial inquiry in Brisbane, secured by the families of three Diggers who questioned the integrity of the Defence investigation.
As barrister Matthew Hutchings mused in the second week of hearings, the Australians’ mentoring job was “a tension between holding hands with the ANA and keeping them at arm’s length”.
And as the Australian Defence Force prepares to send 200 commandos to the Middle East to “build the capacity” of the Iraqi security forces in the fight against Islamic State, learning from the Wahab attack is now more important than ever.
The families of the dead men agree. Poate’s parents, Hugh and Janny, Milosevic’s wife, Kelly Walton, and Martin’s mother, Suzanne Thomas, fought doggedly for the independent inquest to ensure their boys did not die for nothing.
The four, bound by grief, have sat through each of the inquest’s nine days to make sure of it.
They were unconvinced by the official Defence investigation, which pointed the finger at the trio’s low-ranking platoon leaders, Lopez and Sergeant Adam Burke, who are still traumatised after watching their men die.
The internal inquiry into the shooting, run by Colonel Don Cousins, cleared Defence, ruling out systemic or intelligence failures. The top brass were blameless.
Until now, Cousins’s findings have been untouchable. His role as the internal military investigator, or inquiry officer, carries the immunity of a High Court judge.
While coroner John Lock will find Hekmatullah is to blame for the horrific triple murder, those assisting the coroner have uncovered evidence of a series of failures that Cousins did not.
The mistakes, missteps and oversights left the Diggers’ platoon fatally vulnerable and gave Hekmatullah a prime opportunity to strike on that sweltering August night.
It is now clear that Lopez was ordered into Wahab blind.
Not only did he did not receive the risk assessment of an insider attack, Wahab was a mystery to him. He had been given only three fuzzy black-and-white aerial photos of the base and could not clearly see Wahab’s tricky layout: perched on the side of a steep hill, with plateaus at the top and bottom for accommodation.
And before deployment, there was no suggestion that it would be impossible to keep his troops separate from the Afghans.
The inquest has uncovered the startling fact that other Australian mentors had visited Wahab at least three times, most recently in May 2012.
Australian engineers even built the base.
But when intelligence officer Corporal Samuel Mathieson searched the Defence databases for Wahab, he came up with nothing more than the photographs given to Lopez.
And it wasn’t just Mathieson’s report that Lopez did not receive — his superiors also failed to deliver at least three other documents, warnings or other orders about the heightened insider threat.
Specifically, he never received a key change to the standing orders dictating that so-called “guardian angels” should now be used in “buddy teams” rather than as lone sentries.
(The inquest revealed widespread confusion about the role and definition of the guardian angel.
To some it was a roving sentry and to others a kind of close-protection bodyguard. In both cases, the task was to protect Australian troops from insider attack.)
Without the intelligence and the warnings, Lopez relied on his intuition, training, experience and existing orders when he arrived at Wahab.
The platoon set up camp, surrounded by their vehicles and with the lone sentry, and both Lopez and Burke allowed their men to ditch their 38kg in body armour and helmets in the heat.
It was a decision for which they were later criticised.
The only disciplinary action taken by Defence in the wake of the incident was against Lopez and Burke for allowing their guardian angel to wear a T-shirt and shorts under his body armour while on patrol.
The 10 Defence witnesses called to testify at the inquest were largely reluctant to admit personal or system failures.
But there is evidence the Wahab attack has already been a game changer.
That base was abandoned by Australian troops, written off as too dangerous, too impractical. The Australians and their coalition allies transformed their approach to mentoring across the whole of Afghanistan, placing the security of their troops above all other objectives.
Back home, Defence overhauled its pre-deployment training for the insider attack threat and mentors in Afghanistan are now accompanied by specialist guardian angels at all times.
Dissecting the chaos of that night on the Afghanistan battlefield in the calm of a coroner’s court more than two years later may be perceived as unfair.
And imposing civilian principles, such as risk management and workplace health and safety, on war could be dismissed by some as unrealistic.
But, in memory of the three fallen Diggers and for the sake of the Australian troops about to depart for the Middle East, Defence must prove it has learned all it can from the tragedy.
