In 2020, the Inspector General of the Australian Defence Force published its long-awaited findings on the behaviour of the nation’s special forces in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. It became widely known as the Brereton Report, after Major General Paul Brereton, the investigation’s lead.
Its findings were simple: Australian special forces had committed murder in Afghanistan. Thirty-nine cases were identified. The report found evidence of collusion to cover the atrocities up. Troops carried ‘throw down weapons’ to plant on their victims, to claim they were actually insurgents and the slaying was within the terms of engagement. New recruits were ‘blooded,’ ordered by their officer to kill prisoners to get their first kill. The report identified 25 individuals responsible, and stated that no-one above the rank of sergeant was involved or had knowledge of these atrocities.
So far, only one man has even been charged with murder, and is still awaiting trial. The Office of The Special Investigator, set up by the Australian Government, has noted the difficulty in reliably investigating the incidents, especially with the Taliban in power.
It is likely that only political obsessives in Australia, let alone around the world, will have even heard of the very serious findings of the report. It is unlikely that the culture of the Australian forces evolved on its own.
The British government, for its part, sprang into action and passed The Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021, which created a
‘presumption that it is to be exceptional for a prosecutor to determine that a Service person or veteran should be prosecuted for alleged offences on operations outside the UK […] These measures do not apply to allegations of sexual offences, torture, crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes’.
(Although the law as originally drafted would have included them – tinyurl.com/spgbBRE3).
The BBC has been picking up stories of abuses by British forces. The 2022 Panorama programme, ‘SAS Death Squads Exposed: A British War Crime?’ observed that: ‘British special forces killed hundreds of people on night raids in Afghanistan’, and asked, ‘but were some of the shootings executions?’ More recently, the episode ‘Special Forces: I Saw War Crimes’ (May 2025) relayed stories from service personnel:
‘Killing of detainees “became routine”, the veteran said. “They’d search someone, handcuff them, then shoot them”, before cutting off the plastic handcuffs used to restrain people and “planting a pistol” by the body, he said’.
And:
‘The testimony, as well as new video evidence obtained by the BBC from SAS operations in Iraq in 2006, also supports previous reporting by Panorama that SAS squadrons kept count of their kills to compete with one another.’
The story sounds almost exactly the same as the Australian one.
The BBC has, inevitably, received pushback for this reporting from the usual ‘support the troops’ types, usually of the ‘so what, war is hell’ variety, or ‘who are we to judge the actions of soldiers under pressure’. But the main response has been crickets. There has been no full bore coverage or outrage on the front pages of the national press. The stories have been simply left to sink down into the archives to be quietly forgotten.
This is the propaganda tool of ‘worthy versus unworthy victims’: the crimes of the British state will receive less attention than the crimes of official enemies. A genuinely democratic press interested in holding authorities to account for the citizenry would operate on the opposite principle.
This is hardly new. In her book Legacy of violence Caroline Elkins explores what she calls ‘legalized lawlessness’ which involves ‘legalizing, bureaucratizing and legitimating of exceptional state-directed violence when ordinary laws proved insufficient for maintaining order and control.’
One example she gives is of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in India in 1919. The event saw Brigadier General Dyer order his troops to open fire on a crowd, killing around 400 and wounding around three times as many. Despite the outrage around the world, Dyer stood by his actions, as producing a salutary terror to prevent an uprising.
His only punishment was dismissal (though the press and well-wishers raised a substantial sum of money for him). In a debate in the House of Commons on the incident, Winston Churchill depicted it as ‘a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation’, that is, as an exceptional one-off, out of character with the spirit of the British army.
The House of Commons passed a resolution of censure of Dyer, but the House of Lords passed a motion condemning the lower house’s resolution. In that debate, Elkins quotes one noble peer, Viscount Finlay stating:
‘One of the mainstays of our Empire has been the feeling that every officer, whose duty it was to take action in times of difficulty, might rely, so long as he acted honestly and in the discharge of his duty, upon his superiors standing by him’.
Looking at Elkins’ narrative, this is a recurring theme: violent excesses by imperial forces are met with official investigation and sanction, only for the perpetrator to be let off after a vociferous public campaign. The most recent example of this being Sergeant Blackman, who was convicted of murder in Afghanistan.
After a strenuous campaign, the charge was downgraded to manslaughter, and he was released after serving four years in prison. Appeal judges accepted he had a stress-related mental illness leading to diminished responsibility.
The British state has opened a public enquiry under Justice Haddon-Cave. This will likely be a full and conscientious enquiry that will shed some light on the operations of the British forces in Afghanistan. The most likely outcome will be that junior heads will roll (gently), and the report will join others on the shelf, forgotten except by historians
The interests served by the British state create a need for killers, and it is unsurprising when they cross the line. What is harder to understand is the minds of people who will determinedly keep violence and slaughter available as a policy option.
Pik Smeet
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