Capitalist: It Was Asking for Big Trouble

The founder of the British SAS was a Scots aristocrat called David Stirling. After WWII he found peacetime a bit boring – after having personally killed 43 Germans with his bare hands – and so he engaged in various mercenary activities in Africa and the Middle East. One of those mercenary engagements was the war in Yemen in the early 1960s. To cut a long story short, Stirling and his people had the war won but the handwringers in Whitehall in London didn’t like the idea of a private army fighting wars in a sensitive area and told Stirling to pull out, abandon the fighting and return home (or else).

Ron Smith: Afghanistan and the SAS

It was entirely predictable that news of the death on active service in Afghanistan of L/Cpl Leon Smith of the NZ SAS detachment would be greeted by an almost unanimous media chorus of questions about bringing the troops home. It was predictable because that was what had happened on the previous occasion (the death of Cpl Grant in late August), and, with variations, on occasions before that.

Almost as sadly predictable was the response of New Zealand politicians, with the exception of those who are actually politically responsible for the deployment at the present time. All the rest, including those who had been politically responsible at earlier times, and who ought to have known better (for example, Phil Goff) dutifully answered in the affirmative, ‘Yes, the SAS detachment should be brought home’. So what are we to make of this?

Ron Smith: Watching the Media

My 25 April blog on SAS involvement in taking prisoners in Afghanistan, who might subsequently be subjected to ill-treatment, suggested that the New Zealand policy of not officially taking prisoners at all was untenable, but that the purposes of the Jon Stephenson Metro article complaining about it, went beyond mere concern for human rights. It was, I argued, part of a continuing campaign by left-wing, anti-American interests, to force the withdrawal of New Zealand troops from the Afghan campaign. Comments by the parties (NZDF and Stephenson and his supporters) over the last week have done nothing to address either of these issues.

Of particular interest to me over the last two weeks has been the performance of National Radio’s Mediawatch. In the first treatment of Stephenson’s story (on 1May), we were treated to a gushing interview, with no probing of the evidence on which it relied and no critical questions, such as why, when his ostensible concern is human rights, he did not ask Colonel M* of the Crisis Response Unit about the treatment of captives in his charge.

Ron Smith: Afghanistan: prisoners and torture

I last wrote on this topic in August of last year (‘What to do with the prisoners?’, 25 August, 2010) when, as now, the matter of prisoner-taking by our SAS forces in Afghanistan was raised as a political and moral issue. The matter has now resurfaced through a long article by Jon Stephenson in the latest (May 2011) edition of Metro magazine. Again, accusations of impropriety are made against our SAS forces, and our political and military leadership, in relation to prisoners taken in counterinsurgency operations, in which our forces were involved, and who were subsequently handed over to US custody, or to the custody of various Afghan Government agencies. It should be noted that there is no suggestion that prisoners have been ill-treated by New Zealand soldiers. The focus of concern is rather on what happened to them after they have been handed over and this because of our legal (and moral) obligations under various international treaties and conventions.