An Australian Defence Department (ADD) report provides a rare account of the shameful operations being performed by its military as part of the US-led occupation of Afghanistan. From James Cogan.

The ADD report presents the findings of an inquiry into a September 17 Australian operation that resulted in the mistaken killing of Rozi Khan, the pro-occupation governor of Chora district in Uruzgan province and a long-time colleague of Afghan president Hamid Karzai. The intended target was an alleged member of the Islamist Taliban movement. A squad was sent out to storm into the man's house in the dead of night and execute him in cold blood.

The possibility for things to go wrong is inherent in such operations in civilian areas, and on September 17, they went terribly wrong. Just days before the hit on "Musket" was ordered, the Taliban had issued threats against residents of a village, which lay on the route being taking by the Australians. Rozi Khan had encouraged the villagers to resist any attack and promised to come to their aid with his armed followers.

As the Australian troops moved close to the village, locals spotted them and assumed they were Taliban intruders. Within minutes, dozens of villagers were firing on the Australians from the east, west and north. Rozi Khan and his men, alerted by the gunfire, began moving toward the fighting, as did local Afghan police.

Troops in an Australian back-up unit, engaged Khan's group and, the inquiry found, most likely inflicted fatal wounds on the district governor. After realising their mistake, the Australian troops aborted their "Musket" mission-at the cost of two dead and five wounded Afghans.

The September 17 mission was no isolated incident. It was part of a broader and ongoing operation codenamed "Peeler" that tasks the Australian special forces with "disrupting [i.e., killing or capturing] Taliban leadership or improvised explosive device facilitators".

Other missions result in massacres. On November 23, 2007, Private Luke Worsley of 4RAR was killed during an assault on a residence in Chenartu village in Uruzgan. Because of the Australian fatality, details of the incident were made public. The target was Taliban leader Mullah Baz Mohammed, who was expected to be at the house that night.

Australian troops crept up under the cover of darkness, blew the outer doors off the housing compound and rushed in. They left the Daad family-three men, two women and one female child-dead on the floor. A neighbour, Faiz Mohammed, told Time magazine: "There was blood everywhere." Worsley was shot as he entered the house. Mullah Baz Mohammed was not there.

ABC's "Lateline" commented that the Defence Department report "prompts questions about the legality and the ethics of targeted killings, even in the dusty and chaotic battleground of Afghanistan".

Australia's involvement in the war was the result of the most cynical calculations. By sending troops to fight in Afghanistan and then Iraq, the former Howard government hoped to cement Washington's backing for a series of military operations that would secure Australian strategic and economic interests in the South Pacific, as well as a free trade agreement with the United States. The Rudd Labor government is continuing the same policy.

There is a stark difference-both politically and morally-between the activities of citizens resisting the invasion of their country and those of the invading army. Afghans are fighting for the right to determine their own future free from foreign domination. The Australian military in Afghanistan is an instrument of imperialist aggression. It is conducting a campaign of terror throughout Uruzgan province to force the population to accept a US puppet government.

The Labor government repeatedly tries to ennoble the Afghan war with flowery descriptions of Australian soldiers as "heroes" who are "putting their lives on the line for the rest us". The truth is they are killing and maiming people, including entirely innocent civilians, of an oppressed country for a thoroughly reactionary, neo-colonial cause.

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