By Tom Andronas
In 2013 I visited Afghanistan with the Australian Defence Force.
I embedded with Australian forces together with then 3AW radio presenter Justin Smith to broadcast what we thought was going to be the last Anzac Day dawn service our troops would spend there.
We were wrong.
I have a few prevailing memories of the country, sensations that have stuck with me over the years.
First, the smell. The whole place smelled like smoke because the locals just burned everything. Wood, plastic, household rubbish – the lot.
Second, the bacon in the Tarin Kot camp mess (which I’ve since been told wasn’t real bacon at all). There was so much of it, and I ate more than my share. They say an army marches on its stomach, so the multinational force operating out of TK sure must’ve marched fast.
Third, the phrase, “that’s a bit war-ry”, a refrain used by the medics whose job it was to train us in battlefield first aid, in case things went wrong. It mostly referred to limbs being blown off by improvised explosive devices.
It was a nervous privilege to be taken on a patrol ‘outside the wire’, to inspect a 14km stretch of sealed road our troops had been building. We learned a bitumen road can be the difference between complete isolation and freedom of movement for villagers who live outside the town, due to the risk of IEDs being concealed in dirt roads by insurgents.
It was a surreal experience, piling into the back of the armoured Aussie Bushmasters and rolling out of TK. A digger nicknamed Chook was manning the 50-cal machine gun on the roof, and he invited me to pop my head and my camera out the neighbouring porthole.
What I saw was both confronting and entirely expected. I remember lots of brown dust, concrete walls, and countless pairs of eyes peering suspiciously at us. It was impossible to distinguish who our troops were there to liberate, and who might be the enemy.
At a point further down the road we got out of the Bushies to check a newly-built bridge. The sappers and their dogs had already done a sweep for IEDs, and we were each assigned two guardian angels, young men whose job it was to protect us. An uncomfortable obligation to put on a fresh-faced soldier barely out of his teens.
Lining the road on both sides as far as we could see were fields of opium poppies. And from here arose the feeling of inevitability that despite the decade already spent attempting to rescue Afghanistan from the Taliban and itself, that our troops were unlikely to succeed.
An Australian soldier stands guard, scanning a field of opium poppies for signs of danger. Photo: Tom Andronas
Further down the road we encountered an elderly Afghan farmer who we interviewed via a “terp”, a young Afghan interpreter - the type of person our ADF spent the last few weeks trying to evacuate.
The old man told us, “We feel safe, there’s no Taliban here”.
I’ve recently stumbled across a saying attributed to the Taliban: “you have the watches, but we have the time”.
When I first heard the saying my memory flashed back to that elderly farmer, and I wondered whether he really believed what he’d said, or whether he’d even said it at all and the terp just told us what we wanted to hear, or whether the old man was Taliban himself.
Watching what’s been happening in Afghanistan over the past few weeks has been heartbreaking.
My first thought was for the 41 Aussie families who must now come to terms with the fact that their sons died in that foreign land for little more than a few years of borrowed time.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Then spare a thought for the hundreds of diggers and their families whose lives were irreversibly impacted by catastrophic injuries in the line of duty. And those who took their own lives when the darkness became too much.
Watching the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Kabul in recent weeks, my heart broke for the Afghans who helped us out, with the reasonable expectation that we’d help them out (of Afghanistan). Our prime minister has now acknowledged it’s unlikely we’ll be able to get everyone out who deserves it, which leaves them at the mercy of the Taliban.
But mostly, my heart breaks for the generation of girls and women who have known at least some sense of freedom and hope over the past 20 years. As they are once again relegated to a life of servitude and subjugation by the Taliban, they will be left with no choice but to watch their dreams for the future fade into nothingness.
That’s truly heartbreaking. But it was almost inevitable, wasn’t it?
What remains to be seen is whether the Afghan people can galvanise around a new vision for their future and resist the oppression of the Taliban.
Early signs defy hope.
Because despite all the time, lives, money, and resources we’ve poured into Afghanistan over the past two decades, the Taliban have outlasted our resolve.
We have the watches, but they have the time.