 It's a great pleasure and a privilege for me this evening to be here with Fred Smith talking about his new book, The Dust of Orozgan. Fred's a fascinating character. He's a diplomat, he's a singer-songwriter, he's somebody who's got an extraordinary message for Australia. It's great that he's coming to talk with us and share with us with some songs as well later on. Talked him into doing that for us, thank you Fred. But here at the Strategic and Defence Study Centre, we're interested in strategic studies, we're interested in military affairs, Australia and the Asia Pacific and looking at defence issues broadly. And of course this book you'd think, well The Dust of Orozgan, it's very much a personal account, Fred's personal journey, but it is much more than that. I've only just finished reading it last night and I have to say it brought me to tears at a number of junctures and maybe I'm a bit of a sock, but I have to say it's a very moving account, very moving personal account of Fred's journey through Orozgan. And relating that to us, to Australians, everyday Australians who maybe haven't had that much to do or haven't followed all that closely, Fred really has brought to life this story, he's helped make it understandable. But he's done that not just for soldiers and veterans, he's done it for family and friends. But more than that, we've got a story here that actually says something meaningful about the use of armed forces in modern society or the application of armed forces of modern societies in primitive contexts, if you like, or certainly much less sophisticated technologically ones that we find ourselves in place below Afghanistan. So it's a really great privilege to have Fred with us tonight. Fred is known in many circles as a singer, songwriter, but this book really demonstrates that he's much more than that. This is a compelling read, but it brings together and it brings to life the songs that some of us now know quite well. He provides wonderful context for those songs, how they came about, what it is that made them so important for him to write. And so what we're going to have now is Fred's going to talk to us for 30 or 40 minutes or so about his experience, the journey behind the dust of Orozgan. And then we're going to open up to Q&A, we'll have a bit of back to and fro on it, and then we'll open up to the floor for your questions and your engagement with Fred on the issues that he grapples with so masterfully in this book. So Fred, thank you very much and over to you now. Thank you very much. It's kind of worth saying. How are you going? Can you hear me? Well, I can see across the room there are people who know all about Afghanistan and probably some people who don't know much about it at all. So I thought it'd start with a sort of basic level of Afghan history and to explain how we all came to be there in the first place. I mean, many of us would first have heard of Afghanistan during the Russian years of course, where they famously went in back in 1979, dominated for 10 years. They were resisted by the Mujahideen who are very often supported by the CIA quite successfully. And then they left and when they left, when the Russians left in 89, they left a power vacuum. And what you get in power vacuums is you get warlords and militias. And in those years between 89 and 96, which the Afghans refer to as the Civil War, the militias slugged it out with one another, led by their respective warlords, mostly along tribal lines, for control of the country. And the capital, Kabul in particular, which was hammered by rockets, with rockets coming into different enclosures. And in this sort of power vacuum that the Civil War used, the disruption, created an environment in which the Taliban were able to gain support. And so they swept in to the streets of Kabul in 1996 in the back of Toyota Hiluxes and took over the city. Many thought at the time that the Taliban were a fairly extreme interpretation of the Islamic faith, but they represented the possibility of law and order, so people generally supported them. And so the Taliban dominated about 90% of Afghanistan for the following five years. There was a pocket of resistance in the north held by a militia called the Northern Alliance, led by a charismatic warlord named Shah Ahmed Masood. Masood interestingly predicted that al-Qaeda would attack the western world from a base in Afghanistan. And on the 9th of September 2001, Masood accepted a request for an interview from two journalists who claimed to be from the Al Jazeera network that when they showed up they turned out to be from the Al-Qaeda network. The camera they carried was a bomb. Masood was killed and two days later, the event he had predicted, an attack on the western world took place in Manhattan and changed things forever. John Howard was in Washington at the time, he invoked the Anders alliance eight days later and we sent Australian special forces in to work alongside American and British special forces to drive the Taliban out. And in November 2001, talks were held in Germany to find a political solution. So where was Orosgan province in this? Well, Orosgan province is a fairly obscure province in southern Afghanistan. I've talked to Afghans who actually don't know where it is, including the interpreters who said, yes, I know where it is because it was the answer in my geography test. You can get a good mark by knowing where Orosgan was, but it's down there in the south, north of Kandahar and east of Helmand. So although it is quite obscure, it plays an important role in this story, in particular in the ascension of Hamid Karzai. Karzai was in Pakistan at the time and the west was essentially looking for a Pashtun tribal leader who could emerge to lead the country. The Pashtuns represent 42% of the population of Afghanistan, so they're a large ethnic group. It was natural that we would need a Pashtun leader. So Karzai rolled the dice. He got on a motorbike and rode to Orosgan province just to try and start something up on spec. He found some support amongst tribal leaders, but the Taliban there got on his case and chased him into the mountains of Dararwood. He was about to get captured when he got the satellite phone, pulled the CIA, they sent a helicopter, pulled him out, saved his life. He went back in a couple of weeks later, but this time he took some US special forces with him and they started training up Afghan leaders around Dararwood. But then they'd found out that the local people in Tarankat, the capital, Prince of Orosgan, had staged their own coup and got rid of the Taliban mayor. They saw the opportunity, they went down to Tarankat and took over the governor's compound. The Taliban headquarters in Kandahar heard about this and said this is not on. So they formed up a large convoy of about 80 trucks and set off up the road one afternoon to deal with this uprising in Tarankat. This is when the Taliban still dominated the south. They stopped at a village halfway because it was Ramadan, they needed to eat. They could have gone on and taken TK by dawn, but they decided to rest for the night figuring they had the numbers anyway. This gave the US special forces the opportunity to call in airstrikes and the following morning as the Taliban convoy went across the plains to the south of Tarankat, US air came in and hammered it. The fighter planes, bombers just destroyed the convoy and this turned the war because the Taliban realized that they could not mass in numbers. Word of this got back to Kandahar. Taliban in Kandahar fled to Pakistan. Karzai swept south, took Kandahar and went from there to become the president of Afghanistan. So it's an interesting story about the role of Eurasian in Afghan recent history. It's an interesting story about the power of airstrikes to prevent the Taliban from massing. It's an interesting story about how useful a handful of special forces can be in this situation. But it's also a story about the importance of momentum. Afghans are survivors. They want to know what's going to happen next and they want to be on the right side of history because the consequence of being on the wrong side of history, it can affect your life expectancy. So that's how Eurasian fits into this initial story. And you have an interesting situation now where the Taliban were A, on the nose because they'd stuffed up while they were leading the country, the droughts, poverty and crazy restrictions on people's liberty. They failed as a government, but also people realized that they were on the losing side of history. So the Taliban were the pariahs at this point. You're talking 2001, where Australia pulled out of special forces in 2002. And then you have this sort of period between 2002 and 2005 where there was a great deal of optimism on the one hand. But on the other hand, the Taliban managed to pull off a resurgence in this period. I guess the interesting thing to note is that the Bush administration's official line was, we don't do nation building. They just didn't want to do that. They just don't want to do counter-terrorism. But the problem is, if you don't do nation building, then you're going to be playing whack-a-mole for the next century. Another part of this problem was that such government as existed was, according to the Council of many, commandeered by particular interests and warlords. And so police, the government were used by some of the warlords in certain areas to advance their professional interests, to prosecute and persecute antagonistic tribes. And of course this alienated people from what called itself the government. The warlords were a big feature of this. Perhaps many argue, people like Anand Gopal, Sarah Chayes, argue that the American Marines and special forces that remained in Afghanistan in small numbers contributed this in a way. Their approach was essentially to define and pursue the enemy. But in pursuing the enemy, they had to seek advice from the people they knew who were the warlords. And of course in identifying who the Taliban was, the warlords were identified their enemy. And apart from all that, there was a clear absence of any effort to reintegrate the Taliban. And so many Taliban found themselves, or former Taliban, who wanted to join the government, found themselves with no way back into the government because they were being chased by what was left, what was the government, they were being prosecuted by the warlords, and so they had no choice but to seek the protection and company of the Taliban. And so for all these reasons, the Taliban had made a resurgence. And this sort of highlights some of the limitations of airstrikes and of special forces. They're good at breaking stuff, but asking them to build stuff is a bit beyond their training. So that's the sort of general background to the situation in 2006, where the international community having got quite involved in Iraq, and with the US very heavily engaged in Iraq, the international community was called on to send in more troops to the various provinces of Afghanistan, of which there are 34. And so the international community agreed to do this. They saw the need to reinforce security in Afghanistan. The Taliban had researched, they were strong, particularly in the south, and in some provinces in the east. The south, of course, is Pashtun country, and that is where their natural constituency is. And so different nations took on different provinces as part of a sensible enough international division of labour. The Brits went to Helmand province in the southwest. The Canadians took on Kandahar. The Germans went on to Kunduz, for example. The Kiwis went to Bamian. And the Dutch agreed to take on a small province in the south called Uruzgan. So I wanted to offer an account of how we came to be in Uruzgan, because I don't think that's been examined very carefully. And I took the liberty of quoting someone who was the Secretary of Defence at the time, who said, by mid-2005, with the Taliban resurgent, ISAF coalition members had begun deploying forces and aid teams to key provinces. The UK, Germany, France, Denmark, Canada and New Zealand, among others, had joined the United States in the field, so the Netherlands and Australia began to consider what we should do as members of this coalition. It wasn't so much a matter of direct pressure from the United States or NATO, more a judgement that as members of a community with a continuing shared interest in Afghanistan, we needed to join the others to do more to help the challenge. The Dutch were prepared to accept leadership of a province that wanted a tier one partner to share the load. Australia was still in Iraq and with the ADF and civilian agencies now in Solomons as well, we didn't want to take on a province of our own, but we were prepared to join a tier one country. And so with the Brits and Americans encouraging the Union, the Afghan government pleased to have another base covered. The Netherlands and Australia found each other in wedlock in Urazge. So it's an interesting story about the historical accidents, the coalition and alliance considerations that saw us get into this small province in the south of Urazge. But once of course the military went in, we developed a political and economic, a political and emotional equity in Urazge province. So it's an interesting story about how the military, the equity, follows the military. And so we sat in 300 engineers focused on building schools, roads, hospitals, in support of a large Dutch contingent. And the Dutch were the predominant force on the base for the next four years. They were the lead province. They had 2,000 soldiers. They had a thing called the Provincial Reconstruction Team to do all the tribal work. And they took an approach that they called the 3D approach, defence, diplomacy and development. And they had a special PowerPoint briefing. If you were caught in the vicinity you would be sat down and subjected to this PowerPoint briefing on the 3D approach. They could be didactic, the Dutch, but on the other hand they had a good story themselves because they were four years ahead of the ISAF strategy which eventually reached this point by about 2009. Also on the base were Australian special forces. And during this period of four years the Australian involvement evolved from what I think called the Reconstruction Task Force focused on engineering tasks to the Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force focused on mentoring and rebuilding to the Mentoring Task Force with a focus on rebuilding the fourth Kandak of the Afghan National Army in order to be in a position to hand over to them the security problems. At the same time there were US special forces elements who had been there since 2002 in small numbers, probably about 200 of them, down at a forward operating base on the main base there called Ripley, but also out at the peripheral districts of Karlsruhe-de-Skan and Charchenay in small fire bases out there. So an interesting coalition mix there, but the Dutch were predominant. Now, so you can see with these different elements on the base there was always the possibility of people seeing things differently including on the very fundamental question of what to do about the main warlords in the province and on the very fundamental question about what to do with the tribes. Now the US special forces had been there as I said from 2002. In that year President Karzai had appointed a warlord by the name of Jean-Muhammad Kahn to be the governor of Urazgan. Jean-Muhammad Kahn was from the Popelzai tribe. Popelzai are dominant in Tarenkout and in the areas around it, but they only represent 10% of the population of Urazgan, the rest of which were Barakzai, Nurzai, Gilzai. But because Karzai was Popelzai and connected to JMK, JMK was appointed. And so the US special forces worked with JMK, Jean-Muhammad Kahn because he was the governor and because that was who they knew. Later they began to work with Mathula Kahn, who was sort of henchman for Jean-Muhammad Kahn and probably perpetrated a lot of atrocities in his name against the other tribes in that period between 2002 and 2005. But Mathula had a very good militia. They were disciplined, well paid, well fed. So they were useful partners for the US special forces in those three years. Now the Dutch arrived in 2006 and before they set to work they did an odd thing. They commissioned some research in order to work out what was going on. And a research company called TLO, the liaison officer, did some research in Nurzgan and the question of why some of the tribes beyond Terren Kahn were supporting the Taliban. And of course the answer was that they needed protection and feared the government of Jean-Muhammad Kahn. And so the Dutch developed what they called the tribal balance policy. They eschewed all contact with Jean-Muhammad Kahn and Mathula Kahn and they worked very closely with the other tribes, the Barakzai tribe, the Gyulzai tribe, the Nurzai out in the district of Nurzgan, actively supporting them. So what you essentially had was two conflicting tribal political strategies going on between the US and the Dutch. Paradoxically that was not a bad outcome because it enabled us to do a very Afghan thing which was to play both sides. 2009, enter Fred Smith. The international community realised we needed to send diplomats in in bigger numbers. Why? Well the broader strategy had shift to counter insurgency, a focus on protecting the population and winning the support of the population as against smoothing the enemy. It was realised that political solutions were essential without them, this would go on forever. And besides which diplomats provide an important source of advice to government. I remember reading a quote by the British High Ambassador at the time who said, in order to be successful military needs need to be unquenchonably optimistic and somewhat susceptible to group thinking. The point is if you're a military leader, commander or whatever, you can't have doubts. You can't send people in the battle if you have doubts about what you're doing. Diplomats need to come in to offer a second point of view on the situation to government. For example, Gallipoli, early reports that went back to the Prime Minister were, yeah we'll be right, just send more troops. That's what the military will generally say, because they have to believe in what they're doing. Government needs an alternative source of advice. So I went in with an ambivalent view about, well not ambivalent, I wasn't sure about the Afghanistan mission, I was open minded about it, let's just say. And when I got there, I took advantage of the depth of knowledge that the Dutch had developed. You know, they had a lot of soldiers there, but the Dutch had done a good job of cultivating their Afghan expatriate community back in Holland, of which there are many. And so they had a real depth of expertise, both amongst Afghans and amongst academics, one of whom was a Dutchman named Biller, who had come out of a Dutch museum. You know, he had sort of haircut Beatles circa 1964, and he got around in socks and sandals. He was known to the Dutch soldiers as Khaiten Woelendzokendraga, which means wearer of goat hair socks. But anyway, he knew a lot about Afghans, and I used to sit down and just absorb the knowledge. And he said, look, he kicked around in the Mujahideen in 1984, and he said, look, the population back then was 15 million, it's now 30 million. Competition for land and resources is extreme. Competition between these tribes. And of course they'd been through 30 years of war. And so we entered these situations thinking we're here to defeat insurgents or smoke terrorists, but of course, through the eyes of the locals, we are a source of power and resources in their struggles with one another. This means we need to be very aware of this. And this means probably three things. Firstly, that when we take in... Okay, there's no data in our scan, no one collects data and information, there's no one there with clipboard. All that you know about the province comes from what people tell you. You get perceptions. When you're talking to only one people or one group, you're going to get a skewed view. They will tell you what they want you to think in order, in the context of their dispute, with a guy in the next tribe. That means you need to filter, synthesize and triangulate information in order to get a broad picture of what's going on. Secondly, it means that every decision you make as an intervening force is political. It will increase one person's wealth, prosperity, power against another. You need to understand that. And accordingly, you need to make these decisions with political strategy in mind. So, that was the fundamental lesson for me from talking to the Dutch. Another aspect of the Dutch involvement was, for better and worse, an important and interesting thing about the Afghanistan. It was the influence of home domestic politics. And this is in part why the Dutch took this very development political view because the war was abhorrent to many Dutch. They didn't like the idea of going in a kinetic war. They wanted more to feel good. The Dutch liked to think of themselves as good people and they are. It also shaped their development projects. They called eye-catching deliverables big things that could be presented on the home front quite well. Meanwhile, they had a lot of back quiet projects going on in districts where a farmer would come in the middle of the night from the Mirabat Valley. They'd slip him a ground worth of cash. He'd go out and dig a well. All this stuff to build relations. So they did high-profile stuff and they did really low-profile community in relation to building stuff. Interesting approach. Of course, a part of the Dutch approach to the warlords was that they wanted to seem back home holier than the Pope, as one Dutchman put to me. The optics of dealing with warlords is not good on it. You need to deal with the warlords. They're part of the power structure, but they should all contact partly for the presentational purposes. And of course, the other thing about this was uncertainty about the Dutch mission. Dutch politics, as you may be aware, is very complicated. There are six main political parties. Their lower house looks like our upper house now, like the bar scene from Star Wars. Highly contested around the Dutch mission. Very controversial. You know, three of those parties supported the mission, three didn't, and come March 2010, they had a four-year tenure for their mission and it was about to expire in August 2010. It came down to the crunch point. By March 2010 they still hadn't decided what to do. This matters because military planning requires a great deal more foresight than that. They had 17 cabinet meetings in a row to try and resolve what to do about the Dutch mission there. They failed to reach a point of agreement and the cabinet and Dutch government disintegrated. Dutch government fell over the Eurasian mission. They couldn't resolve a decision about whether to go back in. They called an election and the Eurasian-Dutch-Eurasian mission ran out of its tenure. It expired effectively. And so the Dutch were to go home in August 2010. Okay, so we knew that the Dutch were going to leave and word of this got out into Eurasian province, which created a great deal of anxiety because many of those tribes that I mentioned before, the Neuzeig, Eurasia-Barek-Sai, had come to trust and rely on the Dutch and were fearful that if they left that they would be abandoned, to be my mother. And so in the face of this anxiety, I mean, two decisions had to be made. Australia had to decide what it was going to do. And what we had decided, we decided not to take over leadership of Eurasian province, we decided to leave that role to the Americans. But what we decided to do was take over the provincial reconstruction team, which was that aspect, that team within the military base that dealt with governors and the tribal leaders and did the development work. So an Australian diplomat by the name of Bernard Phillips was chosen to lead a U.S.-Australian PRT beginning August 2010. That comprised Ausaid officers, about five or six of them, five or six of us DFAT, and then a team of American soldiers in support and the Australian Managed Works team as well. So we were going to take over leadership of this province. Now, up until this point, Australia had just been focused on mentoring the Afghan Army. So we were in a sense, we had been up until that point, innocent of all this tribal considerations. We'd narrowed our focus to the Afghan National Army so we didn't have to make decisions about what to do with warlords and tribes. But with the Dutch about to leave, we had to make these decisions and we had to signal these decisions to the Afghan public because the Taliban were making propaganda about what would happen once the Dutch left. So at that point, this was March 2010, it was me on the ground for DFAT and we had to make a call on this. So I did a bit of research and spoke to a few people. I spoke to Jason Katz, who was an American aid worker there, had been there for some time. He put it in simple terms. He said, I guess you've got two choices. You could either keep the balance that the Dutch have left or you could let MK rule. Now, the MK rule option was not as dumb as it sounds. Matula Khan was developing as a leader. He sort of moved from henchmen to warlord to more statesmen like figure. He was running shurras in town, for example, where some barracks on Gilles' eye leaders would come and meet and resolve problems and answer cases. My American colleague, Russ, went to one of these coolest shurras and said, this is governance Afghan style. People go to MK for governors, not to the governor. So you're seeing really here an alternative source of what we call governance. I mean, he had a point in a country where formal government is weak and often corrupt and sometimes partisan. What constituted legitimate was in the eye of the beholden. Even people like the TLO felt that we could deal with Matula because he was, you know, more mature than, say, Jean-Mohamed Khan. In any case, all the money that he embezzled or otherwise had secured stayed in the province because it was a local guy. Anyway, I also conducted a series of meetings around the province with various leaders, including Mooladar, a kuchi leader who had no front teeth but a real genial disposition. He said to me, talk to people, organize shurras, have good relations with tribal leaders, bring development, protect people against other groups like the Taliban and the old government of JMK. If you support all tribes, we will support you. So this seemed sound to me. Clearly we needed a relationship with Matula, but we also needed a relationship with the other tribes. As I said, we needed to do a very Australian thing. We needed to be egalitarian and support all equally. But we also needed to do a very Afghan thing, which was to play both sides. So that's where it ended up and we fixed on a political strategy which was to firstly engage and contain Matula Khan. There's to say, we talked to him. We related to him. We engaged with him intensely, but we made it clear what we expected and wanted from him. Now, can I say that we had him as a puppet on the string? No, it might have been the other way around, but he knew what we wanted to see and that at least was a start. And there's good reasons to think that he matured into a more inclusive and statesman-like figure. But of course, in parallel with that, we engaged intensively with the other tribes in the province. Development projects, conversation, some level of therapy, I think, we became a shrink in some ways. If they had a problem, they'd come and see us. And we even facilitated meetings between Matula and these other tribes to try and negotiate some better way forward. And at the same time, of course, we engaged and supported the provincial governor and his administration. You know, when we got there, there were five or six provincial government departments. By the time we left, there were 24. And the governor became a more robust figure and was empowered. Now, of course, the governor and Matula didn't really get along. Matula was, by nature, a monopolist. And the governor was an alternative sense of power. That's the way it is there. So by supporting the governor, we were essentially providing a ballast and support around the main warlord in the province. So that was where things were at by the time we formed our political strategy. Now, when the Dutch pulled out in August of 2010, one of the consequences was that, of course, the PRT grew, but the Dutch had done a very good job not only of engaging in the provincial capital of Terrenkaup, but also out in the districts of Derawet and Chorah. Afghanistan, a highly decentralized country, if you want to be effective in Afghanistan, it doesn't suffice to engage in the capitals. You need to get out into the districts. And the Dutch had mission teams doing political and development work in Derawet district and up in Chorah. And so we needed to replace this mission team capacity. And so I was sent up to Ford Operating Base, to realize in the Chorah Valley, 40 kilometers north of Terrenkaup in August of 2010 with a team of American shooters for protection to do that district engagement team. And I just wanted to offer some sort of perspectives from the districts because this is really the grassroots stuff. All that you might have heard about, the strategic political stuff, can be put in perspective by this very grassroots sort of experience that I had. And I suppose I just want to tell a story from my book which makes a point in all this. You know, as I said, I had a team of American shooters who worked within the PRT, but the Americans had also sent, it was mainly an Australian base, perhaps 80 Australians up at Ford Operating Base, me or wise, perhaps 200 Afghan soldiers were there. But then we sent up a team of Americans with me and a separate team of Americans with a police mentoring team to mentor the local police in Chorah District. One evening, the police mentoring team, Lieutenant, asked Willie, who was my lieutenant, for a loan of five of our PRT soldiers for patrol to Kala Kala the next day. I said to Willie, it was a US Army resource it was his call to make, and Willie gave him the green light. The guys were keen, they were probably sick of escorting me around and wanted to get some real action. I was working at the PRT office the following morning at 1100 hours when the sergeant, our civil affairs sergeant, Gary Burstein, highly excited. They just got into a tick contact and were buzzing with adrenaline. They'd been to a place called Kalia Rag to do some atmospheric testing. They said they had met a local national who told them things are fine here. Malam Sadiq and his guys keep things pretty quiet. But if you walk five minutes that way and cross the aqueduct, you'll get shot at. Soldiers being soldiers, they walked five minutes that way and crossed the aqueduct and got shot at. Gary came back and explained the whole hillside across the river lit up and muzzle flashes from 200 yards. Man was around zipping and fizzing around us. We had no cover so we ran beyond a hill and returned fire. Then we went back into a flanking maroon and got closer. Then we shot again so we fired back. Like, I mean we raked that whole garden and a hill would have gone far. Then we went after him but they ran away. I've never seen him so happy. What it says is that security in Urasgan is a function of meters. You cross an aqueduct and you're in trouble. So what we learned from this is that the key to security in the Jura district was three local leaders. Three guys. One of them Malam Sadiq, Akda Muhammad, Hamad Akhlaq Khan, Mack. We reduced the Afghans to acronyms too. And these guys had militias of 20, 30, 40 guys with AKs and they kept the area pretty secure. Eight kilometers south from the Baluchi Valley around Kopmashal, guys there used to get into contacts four out of five times they went out of the gate. But where we were we could walk through the village. Okay, so this is interesting. Security is a function of local leadership and that meant that the Taliban had a couple of tactics, one of which was to kill local leaders. In fact, the Taliban's senior leadership put out a proclamation in August that year saying it was okay for Taliban to kill local leaders. They'd been doing it already up to that point, but with mixed feelings. The second thing with the Taliban across was their use of IEDs. If it came down to a gunfight between us and them, we would win. And so they took to what they call asymmetric warfare. They took the bombs around to impede our freedom of movement, to impede the movement of our vehicles and our foot patrols and make life difficult for us. But of course the other aim of the IEDs was to target the press in Australia or in the United States to kill local lead, kill us in sufficient numbers to undermine the will of our political leaders to prosecute the fight. The Taliban have a saying, a small bomb in Kabul is worth two in the districts. Why? Because that's where foreign journalists are. IEDs are political as well as tactical. So what was our tactics while it's out at the Ford operating bases? Well firstly, our military tactics focused around really patrols with the Afghan National Army. And the focus of those patrols varied. It could be to assert control of a territory. It could be to seek out weapons caches. Intelligence led patrols to identify weapons caches and often they'd find heaps of stuff and grab it and destroy it. And that of course would undermine the Taliban's ability to fight. Also engagement patrols. And then I'd my own sort of trips outside the wider build relationships, start development projects and things like that. And so of course then the second thing was to develop the Afghan National Army. There were 200 soldiers on the base and the role was to develop them, their ability to patrol and fight. Now most of those Afghan National Army guys were Tajiks and Uzbeks and were not particularly comfortable in Southern Afghanistan. And not that keen to lay down their life for a bunch of pastimes. But you know, we had to do it. We had to do it to get them outside the wire. And in the end, you know, the colonel there was good. The intelligence officer was a great guy. We had a very strong relationship. And they were pretty effective in the end but in terms of the political agenda, you know, what we needed to do was support local leaders including the district chief, Mohammed Doher Khan. So that's the view from the forward operating basis. And I came back from the fobs in about September, October of 2010 and did another three months in the province then came back to Australia and stayed in Australia for a couple of years. Produced the Duster for the Afghan album. Toured it around the country. In that meantime, there were some very positive developments I think, you know, the PRT got to a critical mass, got a lot of development, government work going and some great projects. We finished the TK to Chora Road. Of all the things we did in Afghanistan, the Afghans love the roads the most. No one likes potholes. And of course the roads endure. We built a number of schools including the Malalai Girls' School in Tarankat which had 700 girls going to it. Afghans on the whole want to educate their daughters. So those were some of the achievements. The Mirrored Bad Valley, we secured that from pretty much Taliban country in 2009 to a point where we dominated it and were getting roads and schools out there. And I suppose those development projects were part of the incentive. We were trying to cultivate the support of local leaders. Our comparative advantage over the Taliban is that we could bring them things they wanted. Projects, schools, roads. Whereas the Taliban's main strength was laying in intimidation. And so the leaders of the Mirrored Bad Valley out to the east there encouraged us and invited us in. And over the four year period became very secure. Now there were a couple of setbacks in that period. A number of green on blue incidents which I want to go into but obviously devastating for Australian troops to be targeted by the people who were trying to mentor the Afghan National Army. It was only rogue elements but one or two can spoil the relationship and the perceptions back home more to the point. Again, Australian soldiers were the immediate target but the home audience is a big part of the Taliban's target. Secondly, my good friend Muhammad Dhan Duaoud Khan was assassinated at one point and linked to that probably was the assassination of the original warlord Jhan Muhammad Khan. In Kabul, incidentally. Both were shot in Kabul in attacks. Circumstances unclear. Taliban probably involved in J.M.K.'s assassination. J.M.K.'s nephew possibly involved in M.D.K.'s assassination. Complex pictures, hard to understand what actually happened. But regardless, the consequence of all this was that Matiullah Khan was appointed as chief of police. Why? Because Khazai in his tribal Khazai's habits of government came from the old Afghanistan where what you do is it's a patronage network so you have clients and patrons. And Khazai's model was to have a powerful patron working on his team in every province. That used to be Jhan Muhammad Khan. Jhan Muhammad Khan dies. He appoints Matiullah Khan. That was the natural thing to do. So Matiullah Khan became the chief of police which would have been the worst nightmare for the Dutch. And it was actually not something that we did not with the PRT were not particularly comfortable supportive of. We liked his predecessor much better. But the good news was that Matiullah turned out to be a good organizer of people for better or worse. His management strategies would not suit APS standards but were effective nonetheless. He understood punishment and reward. And he was quite an effective organizer of the Afghan National Police. And in those intervening years as Australian and American forces pushed out into the valleys of Urusgan province Matiullah and his guys set up a network of checkpoints along with the Afghan National Army through those valleys. Afghanistan people live in valleys that's the way it is. And those checkpoints were doing a reasonable job of providing security on the back of that security. We the PRT were able to do development work. And so there was a certain amount of progress in that time. And then I suppose it must have been late 2012 ISAF generally was beginning to withdraw from Afghanistan and in accordance with the ISAF schedule Australia had resolved we'd taken over leadership of the province in late 2012 from the Americans. We agreed to do that. So we decided late 2012 that we would withdraw from the province in October 2013. I realized that this would be my last opportunity to go over there. It was the kind of work I enjoyed but also back here in Australia I developed a role in telling the story about Urusgan to Australian people and was enjoying that. So I thought I'd go and see how the story ended. And so I got back there in May 2013 for the last six months of the Afghan of the Urusgan mission. I got involved in a range of work. One thing I was very focused on was the Tarrancout airfield. This was personal to me because they built you know the Americans wherever they go they pay things. For example when I arrived in Tarrancout it was all rocks on the ground but they built a whole bunch of footpaths in a project that we called OEF Operation Enduring Footpath. But they paved the Tarrancout air strip you see and this made for a good cricket pitch. But more importantly than that the defining thing about Urusgan province is its isolation. And we realized that if the airfield couldn't be sustained after we left then Urusgan would sink into isolation again and all that we'd achieved with the National Army and all that we'd achieved in development would fall apart. So it became priority to defend the air and make sure the air strip could be sustained and I got involved in work to do that particularly by engaging you know Ministry of Transport and Dawa Oil and Camero and a whole bunch of things need to be glued together and I did that working with a young fellow who'd come out to Australia as an Afghan refugee, Hazara and joined the Australian Air Force and was sent back there. So he understood airfields he could speak both languages and he glued this whole situation together in two months which highlights the value of cultivating our expatriate communities to do this kind of work. Something the Dutch did very well. It's a story I tell probably at too much length in the book. And then of course there were ceremonies to mark the final conclusion of the mission a cessation of ceremony attended by those gentlemen from Australia big deal but also a ceremony where we invited the parents of Australian soldiers cured in Afghanistan to come and commemorate what they'd lost and that was a very moving thing in November of that year. But the other thing I did when I was there was you know quite consciously at this stage wanted to be in a position of telling the story and I think that one thing that's really lacking here in Australia in a sense is the Afghan account of us and what did they think of us? I mean are we going to write our own report card or are we going to ask them? And so I got my interpreter to call a dozen or so Afghans around the province and got them to come down the front gate we met them there, brought them into PRT house the meeting room there, applied them with water and asked them a series of questions you know have we made a difference and I filmed these and here's some of that footage people were in huge trouble with the insurgents parts of their bodies were being cut off like their ears and noises people died while being tortured by the insurgents with sticks and stones now people can relax people can now feed their families through work and our children have a very good life therefore we have a very secure life before we have a very secure environment children saw the very bad times we had in the valley now they are more relaxed and do not have worries about the security when I came in at the end of 2001 to Uruzgan province there were only two health facilities one was in Terankut which was a very small facility with minimal resources and another was in Derawood there were limited services in Uruzgan and not everyone could reach them now there are 29 health facilities across the province that have good quality reasonable amount of resources in 385 health posts since Australians came to our land our province Afghanistan in Khas Uruzgan it is like we were sitting before in the darkness now we are sitting to the light more construction work has happened in our province our roads, ditches and even our agriculture produce has improved in its output people have seen the difference which have come about as result of the efforts by our friends and our coalition partners Australians they have lost many sons here and we are very sad for that because they are our guests and they were not supposed to die here now the Afghan national security forces have replaced Australia in the patrol bases people in the village feel very happy about this they understand that the international forces cannot stay here in Afghanistan forever I appreciate the work of international forces in Afghanistan who helped the people emerge from disaster to prosperity particularly here in Uruzgan where I appreciate the efforts of coalition here is a consequence of which we now have a better environment the blood that has been sacrificed by coalition forces here for the poor people of this province won't be forgotten so I mean those are sort of interesting and heartening perspectives there's a couple of others that I'd share with you Colonel Hanif who was the fierce and inscrutable chief prosecutor praised the aggression of Australian soldiers as a result of which there are fewer places in the province where insurgents could hide the reality is that the Afghans wanted aggression from us they wanted us to be very proactive in chasing the Taliban out of their lives Hanif said that Australians and Dutch had done well to promote balance between tribes although the Afghan government had not always been helpful in this Haji Ramatullah the Populzai tribal leader and former director of education offered some interesting big picture perspectives he listed the five main things the international community had achieved in Afghanistan highways and roads a viable education department the development of systematic and organized government after years of chaos a vast improvement in security and the establishment of basic elements of a modern economy a stable currency and mobile phone system and the introduction of the internet to Afghanistan all of these were big achievements after 40 years of war Ramatullah said ISAF's main mistakes were civilian casualty incidents airstrikes gone wrong and situations where innocent people had been attacked based on wrong information that political dynamic I mentioned earlier people understand these sort of mistakes a maiden war but this has been the main loss of support for ISAF amongst Afghans so that's sort of a bit of a report card on the broader mission and and what it was all about I bow guarded the market bit here which is sort of it was going to be a conversation but I got carried away on my computer this morning and I've inflicted death by powerpoint on you all I suppose we could have a look at the current situation then move to some questions yeah well I think it'd be good to just talk about a couple of the aspects one of the things that struck me about the book is you know you bring together the personal and the political you provide a context that helps make sense of what is otherwise a nonsensical conflict and you help provide context to not quite explain a way but help people understand how it is that those Australians died doing what they did in a risk gain and your songs very powerfully capture that and it struck me as I was reading the book dealing with the grief and it comes out when you talk about the dust of a risk gain and I was really touched with the way you dealt with the parents when they came to concerts if you were performing here in Australia when they met you in a risk gain when a couple of the parents one of the sappers dad came and saw you and you recognised the name so you deal with the grief there in a way that I think is very very important and you talk about it in the book in the end there about mates for mates and soldier on we most of us have been very much removed from that partly because of the fact that the media was kept away from the action it was very much a controlled war and then this gets back to the political dimension which you've talked about extensively as well but you talk about the Australian political strategic objectives being firstly the support of the alliance and secondly the fight against terrorism by strengthening the Afghan government against harbouring terrorists of course that's the that's the difficult one that's the one that generates all the casualties trying to do good generates extraordinary backlash from those who are being pushed back and you asked the question early on in the book on page 288 of the book sub Jenny Renato Benny Renato's mum asked you are we making a difference you you've portrayed an account that suggests we did make a difference we have made a difference but do you want to reflect two years later now what's your sense of the prognosis where are things heading you know it was getting more broader that's an important question how enduring was the difference we made and the short answer is that regression sense we didn't expect all that we've done to be resilient but I think we left it in better shape than we found it and some of those some of that resilience has remained in terms of I suppose in terms of Afghanistan broadly the situation is currently better than we thought it would be you know over the last three years 125 ISAF troops 1000 Afghans soldiers have pulled out that's a big change we're down to 10,000 American troops and a handful of ISAF troops the Taliban expected to overrun the situation that hasn't happened at all the Taliban currently holds more territory than it ever has but they're only covering 3-5% of the population there were more violent deaths in Afghanistan last year than they have been since 2000 we're talking about 3,000 a year or so according to UN figures which is not good but it's not as bad as a place like South Africa or Colombia that are at peace so the situation and security is undoubtedly bad but it has not fallen apart it's not Syria for example the politics they seem to be fighting in a court probably but they can't be moving forward but the key point is that the Taliban has about 30,000 soldiers in Afghanistan the Afghan National Army has now about 300,000 so what that means is the Taliban can effectively swarm and attack places but they can't hold places the Taliban won't win they won't lose either and so the likely prognosis is an ongoing insurgency with all the problems that causes the barrier that creates to any economic development but that I think that is better than what would happen if we pulled out which I think would be some entropy and collapse and possibly a disintegration and with that disintegration would become increased possibilities of al-Qaeda operations from there but also massive refugees flows which the world is already struggling with so for all these reasons I think we need to do what we're doing now which is bring the international involvement down to a sustainable level around 10,000 troops American troops sustainers and 270 Australians and we contribute to that and I think that we're sort of natural believers in progress but I think in Afghanistan we have to accept that if we can just hold the line for a while then we'll see what the next generation can do 75% of Afghans are under the age of 25 they want iPhones they don't want this tribal crap they want iPhones and jobs that's the hope for the future so you know 10,000 US troops well they've had 30,000 in the Korean Peninsula since 1950 10,000 not a big deal Obama wanted to pull troops out of Afghanistan for political reasons I think he's been persuaded that that's a bad idea and I think whatever administration, well if Trump comes in the mill beds are off but I think his success is if they're Democrats we'll sustain it at that level and signal that we're going to sustain it because that sends signals to the Taliban to the Afghan people that the Taliban won't win and that affects the calculus that affects the calculus we were talking of long before about the nature of the conflict there and the prospects we were talking about the fact that I was heartened by your account I've defended Australia's involvement in Afghanistan and been critical of our return to Iraq but my sense is that we've invested enormously in blood and treasure in Afghanistan we owe it to the people there and to our own who've come back to follow through and you make the point there that near the end you talk about stalemate is better than the alternative and I think that's an important point and for me it resonated as a valid point as we think about given that in the grand scheme of things in the world today things aren't what they were in 2001 our neck of the woods is much more problematic not just because of the rise of China but with climate change and a range of other socio-political and geo-strategic factors in our neck of the woods that makes that appropriate for us to think more and focus more on our neck of the woods but there still is probably a residual capacity to press on and continue in Afghanistan as you suggest but this is obviously a debatable point and I think at this point it's probably worth opening up to the audience and engaging them because I'm sure there are strong views one way or the other on this from people and what we might do is I will grab the microphone and I will see who has a question they'd like to ask and then take the microphone to them for a couple of questions because we do want to get a couple of songs in and we don't want to miss the opportunity to hear you hear you hear you perform for us so let's see if I can do that and you can see if there's anybody with a question out there I'll tell you what, I'll give you my mic that's not quite working so let's go just this gentleman here first and then the gentleman behind it's such a great talk so if you could hear from me I'm going to the Hazara ethnic group I came here on a humanitarian program the Americans, the Australians and the Dutch the British they're all concentrated on the bastion population in Kandahar, in Helmand, in Urskan they're all populated by bastions you built a school and the Taliban came and destroyed it and the Americans went again the British, the Australians and the Taliban came again and destroyed it at the end of the day the bastions have proven a session and faithful partner in Afghanistan and while you guys have totally overlooked my people, the Hazaras in Afghanistan we could have been a great partner because the Hazaras were very secular the schools despite receiving nothing from you guys schools have flourished more graduates more graduates from high school come out of high school in Hazaras in my area than any other places in the bastion area so my question is why did you not only Australia but the Americans in Britain overlooked Hazaras whereas Hazaras could have been a great partner in building democracy in building education and basically everything in Afghanistan that's a very good point as you might be aware Hazaras 10, 12% of the population 25% you might as well answer some questions you get a sense of the dynamics here that's a good problem when you go to Afghanistan you're totally cocooned by factions you're received by factions you're introduced by factions you live in a guest house that's built by factions so I don't lend you your perception of this absolutely there is ongoing tension but Hazaras are concentrated around the middle of Afghanistan in what they call the Hazaras and there is long-standing tension 120 years ago but it was displaced by Pashtuns when I say displaced that's a nice word for what happened driven towards the middle of Afghanistan and the relationship between Pashtuns and Hazaras is not good and part of the problem for the Pashtuns is that Hazaras keep toppling the schools every academic records from the end of every school year show Hazaras at the top of the roster and that sort of behaviour is not welcome in any culture but the basic question is an important one ISAF invested heavily in the south in the Pashtun areas where the problems were particularly Helmand province for example there were 10-20,000 Marines went into Helmand province for a period there and had a hell of a hard time I'm not sure we tended to go where the and of course the Taliban is seen as a kind of extension of Pashtun nationalism their constituency is amongst the Pashtuns and they are seen as an expression of that Pashtun nationalism and so they get no support in the other areas I think there was a tendency for ISAF to concentrate both concentrate the military and receive the enemy to be so for example and I remember when we were going into Helmand in that big way what sprung to mind for me was the statement by a Pink Floyd manager Peter Jenner who once said his strategy on touring Pink Floyd was go where the love is the love was not in Helmand the love would have been in the middle of the country so in a sense our approach was to attack the enemy rather than support strengths so you have a very good point perhaps we would have been better to have tried to support positive things rather than address the enemy who we perceived to be in that Pashtun area and I guess that's my answer you could be right I'm quoting from your songs a minister for education can't read or write and the minister for women runs a knock shop in the night I'm just wondering if that was still the case later on no we replaced that education minister good to hear that's part of what we did this is one of the interesting things about how we worked as between that was Dutch reporting and it could have been circular reporting there's a thing in the intelligence world called circular reporting where someone says something over dinner it might have been the case but one of the things we did there was identify malign people within provincial government and then through our embassies and the Dutch embassies and Kabul lobby to have them replaced and we did that with that particular education minister and got a much more productive one and the ministers varied some of them were great some were less so well there was one, two steps forward one back this is the thing about a country like Afghanistan it's very personality based here we have ministries and the ministries have depth and procedure and all that thing but in Afghanistan it comes down to personalities it's very much like Melanesia, big man culture and a lot depends on the talent and disposition of the individuals you get in those positions and there's a rotating the health minister in Rosgand was fantastic when you saw him roads and rehabilitation Hashim fantastic got things done others problematic and we had to work around them and keep their fingers off our Mr President, why don't you introduce yourself please to the Sorrelson director of research services at A&U you made an interesting comment that one bomb in Kabul is worth two in the provinces and I just wonder what your reflections on the Australian press and their recording and reporting of Afghanistan during the period you were there was I think it was mixed we have we have Nick Stewart here for example good to see you who wrote an article recently on our relationship with Matula I disagreed with him on some points but I agreed with him on others you had a whole spectrum of reporters from some who could be quite antagonistic and identify problems to some who like Hugh Rimenton who could be quite sympathetic and respected confidences and I thought told a pretty fair story I think that the Australian defence forces were pretty good at getting embeds in a whole lot of them did that from Hugh to Chris Masters to Ian McFedron and there might have been half a dozen reporters who came, went out to the forward operating basis, stayed and reported and said whatever they wanted as long as it didn't transgress operational security so I think we did that quite actively we gave them an ability to say whatever they wanted but having said that having toured this show and this album around Australia what Australians tell me is that they never really understood the thing they feel as though it hadn't been adequately explained to them I think that's got a bit to do with the media cycles most of what breaks the news is 30 seconds of footage every time there's a ramp ceremony from which Australians think it's just horrible that what are we doing what's the point, this is going nowhere I don't think the current media cycle lends itself to a more sophisticated presentation and in part that's what I hope this book will do to give people a more three dimensional sense of what it's like it was a tricky opaque environment but we got a bit done there were some tough times a lot of grief but we had a bit of fun too I wanted to show that human side to it and I wanted to show the human side to the Afghans because they're fascinating and interesting people Australian politicians in particular and I suspect it's pretty broad are very good at having photo opportunities for opening something like a toilet block but they're very poor at making sure that there's always a toilet paper there how do we make sure that all the things that were done blood, sweat and tears in some cases that the schools are safe and resourced for the kids to go to that the health clinics are safe places to go to and people get help there otherwise the resources really weren't worth putting there in the first place we have to keep it up in the future I think that's a great point and this is why it's important to have DFAT as it was a time working in these places because we had our engineers there and they would build things and they're good at stuff they build things to a higher standard than most Afghans are accustomed to most of the stuff we build we do it like the roads but there were projects that other countries did which definitely became white elephants schools that were unused aid clinics unused it happens and one of the things is the military tends to work on an 8 month cycle they go in for 8 months and they leave whereas development agencies are accustomed to the long cycle work of sustaining these things but of course sustaining these things through a system through government and that kind of system is the work of generations now we understand all this and this is one of the interesting things about our development in Rosgand we got in there and we did it for 4 years AusAid was there for 4 years and that's a really short horizon for development actors so one of the lessons we learnt from this is that when our soldiers go in our diplomats and aid workers should go in and you're right there was tension between the short term and the long term and we recognised it was a problem and we do what it could but it's long cycle work of generations we want to hear from you a couple of songs from Preto last question my name is Ayaz I'm particularly interested in your talks because I'm coming from a place very close to Rosgand that you have been to that is it's related to Ghazni province but it is very close in daily communication with Oresgand coming from Malistone the complexities that you mentioned it's very understandable for us working with local commanders it's very difficult and you have done with a great job the question is that for some of these local commanders that you already mentioned for example Mateo Lohan it's believed that he got his power his influence his money from foreigners from the contracts that he had with the NATO he was supplying the services he was supplying security for NATO convoys and he got the money for that and later he became a problem at the local level so don't you think that dealing with the local influential people from international community from ISAF it is also a part of problem that is creating a state problem there they are feeding and they are sourcing the local influential that they are very sometimes they are playing negatively there no that's absolutely an important perspective I guess there's probably four things I'd say the first is that in that power vacuum that was Afghanistan in 2002 Taliban one government falls you're never going to get the other one out in that power vacuum you will always get warlords emerging the second thing I'd say is you're absolutely right there's probably an extent to which our involvement there in that money made the situation worse the clever warlords figured out how to tap into us and make money from us I said before that the golden rule is we are a source of power resources in their disputes with one another now Matula played that game very well he when he set up his home he built it right on the outskirts of our base he had a monopoly he had a Kandak that was in charge of road security and he basically worked that like the M5 tollway you know if you wanted to use his road to resupply you had to give him money and so he became very wealthy as a result so obviously thirdly and that's a problem because all Matula's friends would be happy with that but his enemies would not in a competitive zero come culture one person gets rich another doesn't the other becomes your enemy you only need two or three four percent of the population to have a decent insurgency we needed to do that better and we need to think about these things in future but in the end you know this all happened Matula rose to power before Australia became a player on the base we were bit players the situation we inherited in 2010 by that point the horse had bolted we had to deal with him as he was and at that point you know we could have fought against him the Brits tried to do that in Helmand and got their asses kicked we had to work with him and in the end he was seen as quite constructive including people from from by people from the Gilsire tribe who found him useful we could we Australia but as a general principle the international community needed to be far more astute about the way that warlords work and operate your point is a good one now it's been fantastic hearing what you've got to say for it but we know you've got other talents and people come here I think with an expectation that they might get a ballot or two let's go with one it's nearly dinner time I think and we've got drinks and nibblies and signings outside afterwards as well so something that will get us ready for that but I'll hand it over to you now I was going to talk about warlord management and these sorts of questions but I suppose I'll offer a final reflection on final reflection on coalition missions these missions that we get involved in these stabilisation missions and we will need to do them in the future because the problems that ruin these countries become ours we will never do them unilaterally because when you go into another country unilaterally it starts to look like an invasion and there are lots of advantages to working in these coalitions of course you get more resources, different perspectives but it's not without its complexities as I've sort of highlighted today I mean we worked there very closely with the Dutch for four or five years and generally speaking we got on very well with the Dutch but there were cultural problems that caused issues for the diggers one was the fierce proclivity of the Dutchman for wearing lycra you couldn't stop them and the other of course was a Dutch cultural practice known as swaffling I'd never heard of swaffling before I went over there but I showed up and one of the diggers came up to me and said hey Fred you've got to do something about those bloody duchies they keep swaffling in the dixies and I said no worries I'll get right onto it well you didn't know what it meant so I asked one of my counterparts a Dutch diplomat called Alex Boestewijk I said Alex what's this swaffling business he said oh it's a Dutch cultural practice I said really what does it mean he said oh it just means to swing your penis backwards and forwards and bump it up against something I said is this popular in Holland he said more so amongst the men and the women I said how did it become so popular he said it became very popular through YouTube you see two Dutch tourists film on another swaffling the Taj Mahal footage of this went onto YouTube went viral and started a whole craze of Dutch tourists passing around the world swaffling national monuments the Sphinx and the Eiffel Tower and the Washington Monument I said Alex how do you know about this he said well I was working in the High Commission in Delhi and my ambassador he was called in to explain to the Indian Foreign Ministry the swaffling business and my friend Alex had to write the talking points it's the kind of work we do at diplomatic posts but anyway we had a more immediate problem on the base and so far as the Dutch soldiers were swaffling in the Dixies now the Dixies were the blue plastic portals that proliferated around the base this is the Dunny this is sacred space this is where your Australian soldier writes his best poetry so you know the future of Australian war poetry was at stake I had to do something about it and I wrote the following song called Nip Swaffling Up the Dixie sing along I've heard that when the Taliban hold power in Kabul they messed up people's lives with lots of silly rules women were illegal and so is flying kites and God defend the kind of men who like to dress in tights I wouldn't want to be like the Taliban and tell you what to do and fighting here for freedom after all just like you I respect your lowlands culture and I love you very much but there is one important thing I say to all you Dutch Nip Swaffling Up the Dixie it's against the law Nip Swaffling Up the Dixie we're trying to fight a war and if you're swaffling in that Dixie like a Dixie Swaffling man how the hell are we supposed to defeat the Taliban so Nip Swaffling Up the Dixie Nip Swaffling Up the Dixie there isn't enough room if I hear that you've been swaffling in that Dixie I'll tell Brigadier Vanoom and he'll have you caught marshaled and sent back to the Hague where they'll put your dick on a table and whack it with a spade so Nip Swaffling Up the Dixie Nip Nip Nip Nip Swaffling Up the Dixie it really isn't fair there are people who need to use that Dixie and you could swaffle anywhere you could swaffle in Paris you could swaffle in Rome you could swaffle in the Taj Mahal or wait till you get home you could swaffle in the shower block with shampoo or soapy you could swaffle with the RSMO with the fucking Pope Nip Swaffling Up the Dixie did you hear me are you deaf if I find that you've been swaffling in that Dixie I will call in the SF Task Force 55 and the boys from 66 go swaffling at night with black paint on their dicks and if they will find you swaffling in that Dixie my friend they'll hard knock on the Dixie door in which case I would recommend that you immediately bend over place your chest upon your thigh stick your head between your knees I will nip Swaffling Up the Dixie I mean there were very different cultures there I remember working on the bass we had two barbers on the bass we had an Australian one who worked in the laundry there and we called him two because you sit down the chair and his only English was one or two and you'd say one or two so you know and then there was of course the Dutch Barber you could do anything you wanted really nice coffee was like mine but there was a price to pay for this which is to say the diggers didn't call him dick on arm for nothing just to say his sense of personal space was different from what Australian songs were he used to nip Swaffling Up the Dixie listen well to this there are lots of people here on Camp Holland that you could swaffle with you could swaffle with the Slovaks down at the Slovak gate you could swaffle with the Aussies but be sure to call him mate you could swaffle with the cook you could swaffle with two you could swaffle with dick on arm if he doesn't swaffle you nip nip nip swaffling up the Dixie it really is quite gross once a week they clean those Dixies with a great big vacuum hose and if you're swaffling in that Dixie on a lazy Saturday you may find yourself fellatioed in the most unpleasant way it'll suck until there is nothing left what's the BDA that's the battle damage assessment gonna say about your cause of death that you died swaffling up the Dixie nip nip sing along now nip nip nip swaffling up the Dixie nip anyway for the Dutch as I said they withdrew from this game and that was a source of great sorrow to Dutch soldiers this is an interesting thing they felt their political masters had let them down in a sense and they've lost 26 men there and it's quite a lot and I mean one question was we do develop these emotional political equities I mean I did an economics degree here at the ANU the economists down there down the road would call that a sunk cost but the political equities is real yeah you one of them sorry the Dutch were very sorry to be leaving them and in case it was a very tough summer that summer bloody hot and a thousand Americans were coming in TV screens going and a thousand Dutchmen came in to pull out the other two thousand Dutchmen and the lines of the mess along the Dixies were chocker but then to make things worse for the Dutch they lost the World Cup soccer final this was 2010 of course they got into the final and the Dutch take soccer a bit seriously so they weren't in a good state by July and so I decided to put in a concert to cheer them up and I wrote this last verse just to thank the Dutch for their contribution to the province I should say I'll be playing more of these songs coming by a book if you want a book it's 30 bucks if you want a book and a CD it's 50 bucks anyway so this is the song the verse I wrote for them well Dutch friends I've heard you're leading I know you've made this plan because swuffling's become illegal here in Uruzgana but when you're back in Holland you can swaffle what you like you can swaffle in a windmill you can swaffle in a dyke you can swaffle in a hash pipe in Leiden or Helene but you can't swaffle the World Cup because the fucking things in Spain you can swaffle the World Cup next day