The emotional parades welcoming troops home from the end of 'Operation Slipper' in Afghanistan leave us contemplating the horrific effects of war on veterans and their families.
It is absolutely right, indeed imperative, that we grieve with them and count the costs – the deaths, the injuries (both physical and psychological) and the effects of fighting on both the troops and the families who must live with the consequences of the war. At the rising and at the going down of the sun, we should remember them.
In doing so, however, we should beware the danger of selective empathy. If we identify with the sufferings of some – but not others – the point of empathy is lost and our viewpoint becomes partial and incomplete.
This is, unfortunately, the very goal of much spin and propaganda. We rightly hold public parades to honour those who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq and to remember the dead and their families but ignore the plight of those who fled our enemies – on whose behalf our troops were supposedly there. Many of the children in detention whose plight was highlighted in the report of the Human Rights Commission, The Forgotten Children, were doubly victimised – once at the hands of our enemies the Taliban and again when they fled to us for safety.
It should also be remembered that war has its victims on both sides. Whatever we think of the Taliban and their ethics, they suffer and bleed as we do. Afghan mothers will miss their sons and Afghan lovers be torn apart by lives tragically cut short in just the same way as American and Australian ones.
Our enemies are not the only ones to have killed and wounded civilians. In 2013, Adnan Rasheed, a senior member of the Taliban in Pakistan, wrote an open letter to Malala Yousufzai, the brave young campaigner for women’s education in Afghanistan and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, seeking to exculpate his organisation for the attempt on her life. It is anti-Semitic, rambling and self-serving and does not make edifying reading. Nevertheless, one passage in particular should jolt the conscience:
I ask you and be honest in reply, if you were shot but [by] Americans in a drone attack, would world have ever heard updates on your medical status? Would you be called ‘daughter of the nation?... would the world media be constantly reporting on you? Would you were called to UN?