Ben Roberts-Smith: the decorated Australian soldier accused of killing ‘helpless Afghans’

In the summer of 2012, Australian troops stormed into the central Afghan village of Darwan in search of a rogue soldier who had murdered three of their comrades.

The Afghan army sergeant had killed the Australian troops days earlier, and a “tip indicated that the assailant might be hiding in the village”, said The New York Times (NYT). He was not found during the raid, however.

But another man was shot dead. More than nine years later, “the moments just before the man’s death have become the subject of an intense legal dispute involving Australia’s most decorated living soldier”, the paper continued.

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Ben Roberts-Smith is an ex-member of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) who in 2011 received the Victoria Cross for Australia, the highest award in the country’s honours system. Now, he is suing three Australian newspapers over claims that he “broke the moral and legal rules of military engagement” by killing “helpless Afghans”, in a court case that is “rekindling hard questions about the costs” of his country’s 20-year mission” and “the conduct of its most highly trained soldiers”.

Hero or villain

Born into a military family, Roberts-Smith joined the Australian army at the age of 18, in 1996. Over the next 17 years, he rose to the rank of corporal and was granted two awards for gallantry during his multiple deployments to Afghanistan.

However, his activities during his time in Afghanistan have come under scrutiny following the publication in 2017 of a book, No Front Line: Australia's Special Forces at War in Afghanistan, by investigative journalist Chris Masters.

The veteran reporter told how Roberts-Smith was involved in the death “of an Afghan teen” during a patrol in the Taliban-infested Chora Pass in 2006. Two SAS troopers manning an observation post had spotted the youth “about 70 metres away” and judged him to be “unarmed”, The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) reported in the run-up to the book’s publication.

The “surrounding hills were used by civilians as well as the Taliban”, the paper continued. However, Roberts-Smith and another SAS member then shot dead the teenager, who was described in a later patrol report “as a spotter working for nearby insurgents”.

Further reports of killings allegedly involving Roberts-Smith surfaced in 2018, when an ABC investigation uncovered claims about the death of a handcuffed Afghan man during the Darwan raid.

According to one version of events, the man - a labourer named Ali Jan - was handcuffed before being “kicked off a cliff” by a soldier alleged to be Roberts-Smith with such force that “his teeth were knocked out” on impact with the ground, the NYT said. Witnesses claimed that the Afghan was then shot dead while Roberts-Smith watched.

In the version of events told by Roberts-Smith, “there was no cliff and no kick, and little evidence that the man was even called Ali Jan”, the paper continued. Instead, he has claimed that special forces “legitimately engaged and killed the man, who was a Taliban scout”.

Following the publication of the ABC investigation findings, the SMH reported that Roberts-Smith was “one of a small number of soldiers subject to investigation by a quasi-judicial inquiry looking into the actions of Australian special forces soldiers in Afghanistan”.

Roberts-Smith then launched defamation proceedings against the SMH and two other papers, The Age and The Canberra Times, over a series of articles that his lawyers say depicted him as someone who “committed war crimes, including several murders”, reported The Guardian.

He has repeatedly denied the allegations, which he described as “false”, “baseless” and “completely without any foundation in truth”. But after launching his defamation case in June, the Sydney-based trial has been hit by pandemic-related “delays and postponements” that his barristers claim mean the ex-special forces soldier “may not receive a fair trial”.

In August, as Covid cases surged in Sydney, the trial was postponed for a minimum of three months. Weeks later, a lawyer defending the newspapers told the Federal Court that the Australian Federal Police had information, including an eyewitness report, that allegedly implicated Roberts-Smith in Afghanistan war crimes.

Last week, his lawyers called for the defamation action to be moved to Adelaide or another city with fewer Covid cases and lighter lockdown restrictions, lest it become like “Waiting for Godot”.

However, “the court has heard it’s not as simple as just changing courtrooms”, reported The Australian. Sydney’s Federal Courts “were fitted with untold security measures to accommodate the secretive SAS witnesses”, who cannot give evidence via video link amid fears of a potential breach.

The case is currently due to resume in Sydney on 1 November, but with further delays expected, a judge is considering the application to move the trial.

Difficult questions

The defamation case brought by Roberts-Smith against the three publications has been called “Australia’s trial of the century”, said the NYT, with the former soldier “seeking the largest damages award in Australian history, most likely in the millions of dollars”.

The legal battle marks “the first time any inquiry into soldiers’ actions in Afghanistan has played out in open court”, the paper continued. Roberts-Smith has come to represent the “Anzac myth” - a belief that modern-day Australia was built by brave, young soldiers - in the eyes of his many defenders.

But this “virtuous portrayal” has “sometimes clashed with bizarre and lurid details that emerged during the trial”, including Roberts-Smith’s admission that he once hired “a private investigator to spy on a girlfriend at an abortion clinic” and that soldiers “used the prosthetic leg of an Afghan he had killed” as a “drinking vessel”.

In November 2020, the ADF released the Brereton Report, an investigation into war crimes allegedly committed by a small group of special forces soldiers during the war in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.

The inquiry found evidence of 39 murders of civilians and prisoners by or at the instruction of members of the Australian special forces that were subsequently covered up by ADF personnel. The author of the report, New South Wales Supreme Court judge Paul Brereton, described the events as “possibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history”.

Against this backdrop, the defamation case brought by Roberts-Smith has become “a tale of two soldiers”, wrote The Guardian Australia’s Ben Doherty. The court has heard that he is “either a decorated paragon of soldiering virtue who bravely risked his life for his country, or a brutal murderer who killed unarmed civilians”, Doherty continued.

On a wider scale, the case has also raised questions about the culture within the Australian military.

Did troops “faithfully - and lawfully - discharged an uncompromising but necessary violence” in Afghanistan? Or do its ranks include “rogue troopers who used their overwhelming battlefield advantages in weaponry and technology to callously kill the defenceless”?