A Bridge (Not Quite) Too Far – With Video

Posted on Sun 09/28/2008 by TonyfromOz

Afghan Jingle Truck. Image from Gerald Schultz. Click on image to open in a new window.

This image is from a story I read yesterday regarding the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. It’s funny how you read an important story, and all you pick up on is something not quite in the context of the article. I’ll explain about it later in the post.

When the term ‘War On Terror’ was first coined, the semantics of that title engender things in your mind that might actually translate a little differently.
That word ‘War’ is the main thing in contention here. People think of that as two sides slugging it out on a battlefield, almost on a continual basis. This title however is actually something more than that. The battlefield here is for people’s hearts and minds, the ability of those coming from a weaker background not to be oppressed by a stronger group of people who force their opinion on them with the backing of a military under their control. What the title here means is that we then go the aid of those weaker people, hopefully defeating that stronger backing, and hopefully putting in place a democracy where those weaker people might have even some semblance of a voice of representation.
That stronger force, be it backed by a secular military or under the control of a draconian religious backing don’t fight conventionally. In the main, their attacks are aimed at those weaker people inside their own Country, and that’s the insidious part of it all.
We can handle conventional battles like you might imagine them as. However, these people hit and run, and you never really get to see them in conventional set piece battles. They use weapons calculated to instil fear. On a regular battlefield, the soldier knows where the bad guy is. Here, you never know where the next ‘shooting match’ is going to be. In the main, the good guys just have to treat every occasion as a potential ‘shooting match’. Even though the good guys are far and away better equipped, that advantage is negated when trying to fight like this.

It’s a bit like a bank job. The criminals plan meticulously from the outset, mainly so they try and leave no clues. They plan forwards and then follow that plan. After the crime, the Police have to come into a blank paper and work backwards with no idea of the original plan. The criminals have nothing hamstringing them at all, because it’s a crime. They’ll do anything to achieve that plan. The Police however have to work backwards and then do all of that in accordance with all conventions, laws, and procedures, otherwise, even if they do catch the bad guy, it all gets thrown out the window. See how the law leans its favouritism towards the criminal.

The same applies here in this ‘War On Terror’.

Let’s go off to Afghanistan then. The vast populace outside of Afghanistan has absolutely no idea what is going on there, other than this esoteric ‘War On Terror’. There is action on numerous fronts, but just like the bank job, the good guys have no idea what is going to happen, and when it is going to happen. They act reactively, after the event, and then try to mop up. It’s tough work, and in the main, it gets reported that the good guys may have made a mistake, so we need to concentrate on that. What the bad guys do, they do with impunity. No one roots them out and investigates them. No! They just do whatever it is that they do, and then run away. Either that, or they blow something up from a position of hiding, using a concealed throwaway mobile phone as the detonating device, so that the good guys just get blown up, and they are long gone.

In Afghanistan, the good guys doing the hard yards are those from the US, Australia, and a couple of other small forces. The main action, the continuous hard work action, is in the Southern Provinces of the Country. In the North, NATO and other UN forces have it relatively easy. They can send word home that they are in Afghanistan, and people look upon that as one big battleground, so that’s the way it is seen. Also, the casualties are a lot less in the North than in those Southern Provinces, and that also plays well back home. If the ‘work’ in the North got really intense, then that would play poorly back home, but on the Political Front mainly, and there would be grumbling calls to pull the troops out. Meanwhile, in the South, the US and Australian troops are pulling down the real tough work. The American casualties are viewed by those Countries with forces in the North, as being okay, because it’s not our guys.

So, while the hard slog in the South continues, small stories might tend to get lost. Stories that don’t mention the good guys accidentally killing a few civilians in the crossfire, those ones guaranteed to sell newspapers.
The battle for the hearts and minds goes on. It’s not all shooting it out with the bad guys in set pieces. It involves more than that. It also involves reconstruction, and here I want you to read this a little more closely than just skipping over it.
Those bad guys are destroying their own Country, and we are the ones putting ‘Humpty’ back together again. Imagine that. They’re not actively engaging troops in set piece battles. They blow up their own Country’s infrastructure.

Such is this story.
The thrust of it is this. Australian reconstruction forces, Army Engineers and their own backing forces had to go out and fix a couple of bridges along Afghanistan’s Highway One, the main road to the South from Kabul. What they had to do was to drive with all their equipment and backing protective forces a distance of 400 Kilometres out, and then back again. That 400Km is 250 miles. They had to take all the equipment with them, replace the bombed out bridges and then come back home to their base. Along the way, they also fought a pitched battle against Taliban forces. All this was accomplished in 11 days.
I’ll bet you wish your local Authority could do this at home. Not just repair the bridge but replace it with a new one.
The thing here is this. Those bridges were not blown up by the good guys. Those Taliban fighters blew up those bridges in their own Country, on their own major Highway South. The Australian Engineering force and the US forces don’t use that highway. It’s for the trucks inside Afghanistan to get supplies and stuff to those Southern towns and cities. The good guys rarely venture that far South, so this operation had to be planned to the last minute detail. The Australian Army Reconstruction Force was the only unit capable of doing this with any form of protection, from their own Australian Forces stationed there.
So the War there in Afghanistan is not just shooting it out with the bad guys. When the Australian forces arrived there in the first place, the town where they were staying had the power generator blown up by the Taliban, so the first thing they had to do was to restore electrical power to that town where they are stationed. Again, such is the nature of this ‘War On Terror’.

Now, the story itself, and the task I’m setting you.
The story is from an Australian journalist, Ian McPhederan, and he took a camera crew with him for this footage. This short video goes for just over two minutes, so it’s not a long stretch to watch.

This is the story in the Sun Herald from Melbourne Australia.
Where you see the word ‘Diggers’ in the headline, that is the name we here in Australia give to our soldiers, in much the same way the US soldiers are referred to as GI’s. This term ‘Diggers’ relates back to the First World War, when part of every Australian soldier’s kit was a trenching tool, a small spade, and the first thing they did after arriving on site was to dig holes so that they wouldn’t be seen sticking up on the skyline. It’s a badge of honour in Australia to actually be a ‘Digger’. It’s a term of affectionate respect.

Before you watch this video, there are couple of instructions, so that you get the correct one. If you press ‘Play’ here, it will scroll through the introduction from Ian McPhederan, and then open up at the Menu. To get straight to the correct video, just press one of the two ‘Main Menu’ tabs there at the right, top or bottom. When the next screen opens, you will see a map of Afghanistan on the right and 8 small images in the left half of that screen. The video I want you to watch is the top right one with the title ‘The Bridge Builders’. Click on the image and the video will start to play.

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More about “Aussie Diggers In Afghanistan“, posted with vodpod

Now, the little thing that intrigued me and it refers back to the image at the top of the post.
I read the article, and watched the video, and then came back to the story. In that text there was one thing that intrigued me, and I might suppose some of you also. In all that talk of military operations, and bridge building, there was mention at the top of ‘jingle trucks’, so I had to chase that up with a search engine. I found stories of them, mostly from blogs coming back to the US from military personnel there who have commentary blogs. Some of them had images, and one explained just what they are. The Afghan truck drivers like to decorate their trucks, along the same sort of lines as they do in Thailand with the Jeepneys. The trucks are very intricately painted all over, and the jingle part of their name comes from the wind chimes things they have dangling from the front of the trucks. If you look closely in the short video, you’ll see another rolling across the screen. It’s not just the dump truck you see in this image, but right up to large semi trailers as well. This was the best image I could find, and is credited to a Hawaiian photographer, Gerald Schultz.

Funny isn’t it. You hear a story about bridge building, both figuratively, and actually, and the thing that stands out most is a question about a painted truck.

Remember, these soldiers are not there on a political whim on our part to make a point. They are there in our name, helping the people in Afghanistan who have no voice, out of fear of those who seek to oppress them by destroying their own Country from under them.