“We’re Done” — How SAS Forces Walked Away From America in Afghanistan
“We’re Done” — How SAS Forces Walked Away From America in Afghanistan
Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Summer 2010. Inside a hot, dusty tactical operations center somewhere in southern Afghanistan, a senior Australian SAS commander did something that almost never happens inside a coalition war room. He refused. Not loudly, not with a fist on the table, but with a tone so flat, so cold, so utterly final that the American officer on the other side of the table had no response. two words.
That was all he said. We’re done. What happened in that room and in the years of frustration and blood and strategic failure that led up to it is a story that has never been told in full, not on mainstream television, not in any official government press release. But according to military historians, former operators, and records later examined as part of Australia’s landmark 2020 Afghanistan inquiry, known to the world as the Breitin Report, it is absolutely real.
The tension was real. The breaking point was real. And the consequences, they would shake the entire coalition. to understand why some of the world’s most elite soldiers, men who had bled for this mission, who had buried their brothers in foreign soil, who had dedicated years of their lives to a war they were told they could win.
To understand why they finally said enough, you have to go back to the very beginning, back to the morning when the world changed. September 11th, 2001. The smoke had barely cleared over New York when Australia’s government made a decision that would define the next two decades of the nation’s military history.
Prime Minister John Howard, standing in Washington when the towers fell, invoked article fee of the Anzis Treaty, the collective defense clause. For the first time in its history, Australia was marching to war not out of obligation, not out of geography, but out of loyalty. Within weeks, foreign squadron of the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, the Sasser, was wheels up and headed to the most dangerous country on Earth.
The Sasser, one of the most capable Special Operations Forces on the planet. born from the British SAS model tested in Vietnam, forged across decades of classified operations that most Australians will never know happened. These were not ordinary soldiers. These were men who had passed selection rates below 20%.
Men trained to operate for weeks deep inside enemy territory, invisible, silent, and deadly. and they were going to Afghanistan alongside their British cousins, the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, the original. The template, the regiment that every SAS unit on Earth traces its lineage back to Australia and Britain were sending the very best they had.
The Americans were glad to have them at first, because here is the thing that the official mission briefings never quite explained. The thing that veterans, historians, and military analysts have been quietly arguing about for years. The Australian and British SAS did not go to Afghanistan to fight the same war the Americans were fighting.
They came from a different tradition, a different doctrine. A doctrine built on patience, on intelligence, on moving through the human terrain like water, invisible, precise, leaving almost no trace. The Americans, by contrast, arrived with the full weight of the most powerful military machine in human history. helicopter gunships, armored columns, drone networks, kill lists, a warfighting culture built around overwhelming force, speed, and kinetic energy.
These were two completely different philosophies of war. And for a while, for the first few years, the differences could be papered over. There were enemies to fight. There was momentum. There was the shared language of the Five Eyes Alliance and the comforting fiction that everyone was on the same page. But they were not on the same page.
And somewhere in the hills of Arus Gun Province, in the heat and the dust and the blood of a war that never seemed to end, the page finally tore. If you’re watching this channel for the first time, for stories like this, stories the official histories leave out, consider subscribing to Australia’s Secret Wars. There’s a lot more where this came from, because what happened next, what the Australian and British SAS commanders began to see happening on the ground around them would lead to one of the most significant and most quietly
suppressed breakdowns in coalition alliance history. To understand how two of the world’s most respected special forces units ended up in silent, seething conflict with their most powerful ally, you need to understand what the war in Afghanistan was actually supposed to be. According to the official doctrine, the counterinsurgency playbook that military theorists had spent years developing winning in Afghanistan required one thing above all else.
not firepower, not drone strikes, not helicopter raids at midnight. It required the trust of the Afghan people. The strategy was called clear, hold, build. Coalition forces would clear the Taliban from a district. They would hold it and then crucially they would build it.
Schools, wells, roads, a functioning local government. The idea was to make the presence of coalition forces feel like a benefit, not an occupation, to drain the insurgency of the popular support it needed to survive. It was in theory a sound strategy. The Australian and British s understood this instinctively. Their doctrine developed over decades in Malaysia, Oman, the Faulklands, and Northern Ireland was built around the same core idea.
move quietly, work with local partners, build relationships, be a ghost in the field but a human being in the village. And for the first years of the Afghanistan deployment, that is broadly what they tried to do. But something began to change around 2005 and by 2010 it had changed almost completely. The war had ground on.
The Taliban had not been defeated. They had adapted. The build phase of clearhold build was being consistently underfunded and underresourced. And in the face of an enemy that refused to die, the American military machine began to pivot toward a different kind of warfare. What defense analysts and former operators would later call high value targeting.
kill lists, nightly raids, a relentless, systematic effort to decapitate Taliban leadership by finding commanders and eliminating them one by one, compound by compound, night after night. The tempo was extraordinary. In some periods, American and coalition special forces were conducting dozens of raids per week across Afghanistan.
The pace was unprecedented in modern warfare, and the Australian and British SAS were expected to plug directly into this machine. What the American commanders didn’t fully appreciate, what the briefings in Washington and Tampa never quite captured, was that the SAS model does not scale well to industrial tempo operations.
The Australian Sasser, according to military historians, deployed on average one squadron at a time, roughly 60 to 100 operators rotating through Arusen province. These were small teams, precision instruments. They were not designed to maintain a nightly operations tempo that resembled a factory production line.
And the British SAS, operating out of Kandahar and elsewhere, had its own mounting concerns. concerns about the quality of the intelligence driving the targeting lists, about the number of civilian casualties being generated, about whether any of it was actually working. A former senior British special forces operator would later describe the feeling among operators on the ground as watching someone use a sledgehammer to perform brain surgery.
Every time we hit a target, one account later recalled, “Three more fighters appeared at the funeral.” The intelligence picture was deteriorating, too. Australian SAS soldiers were trained to develop deep, long-term intelligence relationships with local Afghans to build a picture of the human terrain over months, sometimes years.
But the American system increasingly demanded immediate results. Hit the target now. Move to the next one. The nuance was being ground away. And something else was happening. Something darker. Something that the Australian SAS commanders at the most senior levels were beginning to notice and were deeply uncomfortable about.
There was a culture spreading through the special forces community. Not just the Americans, not just any one unit, but a culture that was seeping through the poorest membranes between Allied forces, moving from unit to unit like an infection. A culture that told operators that the normal rules did not apply to them, that they were beyond accountability, that in this war, in this landscape, anything was permissible.
What the Australian and British SAS commanders saw, and what they would later try to stop, though not quickly enough, was the slow moral collapse of a coalition that had been at war for too long with too little success and too little oversight. and the Australian sergeant on the ground, the one who had watched all of this unfold over multiple rotations, who had seen the mission drift from protecting the Afghan population to hunting targets from the air.
He was not the only one asking the question that was quietly spreading through the ranks. What exactly are we still doing here? Kusen province, late 2010. The night air sits at 40° C even after dark. The dust is fine as talcum powder and gets into everything. Your lungs, your weapon, your eyes. The mountains in every direction are black against a purple sky so full of stars it seems almost unreal.
Beautiful in a way that soldiers learn not to look at because it makes the violence harder to process. An Australian special operations task group is wheels up from their forward operating base. Blackhawks night vision four combat load. They are heading to a compound in a valley south of Terran count. A compound that has appeared on a targeting list provided by an American intelligence cell.
According to the intelligence package, the compound contains a mid-level Taliban commander with links to eyed networks that have killed coalition soldiers. But the Australian patrol commander, a man with multiple Afghan deployments behind him, a man who has spent more time on the ground in Arusen than almost any other special forces soldier in the coalition, is not certain.
He has seen this before. The intelligence package is thin. The source is single stream, meaning it comes from one informant, uncorroborated. The compound is in a village with a population of several hundred civilians. There are compounds nearby where children sleep. He flags his concerns through the command chain.
The mission proceeds. What happens next is documented not in any official press release, but in the testimony gathered by investigators years later in unit journals, in the quiet, corrosive conversations that veterans carry with them long after the war is over. The compound is hit. The target is not there. But others are in the chaos of a night raid.
the terrifying, disorienting, violent chaos that attends every direct action mission. No matter how perfectly planned, decisions are made in fractions of seconds. And not all of them are right. Afterward, when the dust settles and the helicopters lift back into the black sky, the Australian commander stands in that compound and looks at what is left.
And what is left is not a victory. It is a scene that will require explanation. He is handed a radio. The American commander at the Joint Operations Center wants a report. The Australian commander gives it honestly without embellishment, without the language that has become standard in some quarters.
The careful framing that transforms ambiguous situations into clear tactical successes on paper. The American commander is not satisfied with the report. He wants it rewritten. The Australian commander refuses. This was not an isolated incident. It was a pattern. It was the same conversation happening at different times in different forms in different compounds and operation centers and debriefs across the coalition.
The British S were having their own version of it. Former British operators, speaking years later to journalists and investigators, described a systematic pressure to conform to reporting standards that obscured the reality on the ground. And what was the reality on the ground? According to the Institute for the Study of War, as reported in the aftermath of the conflict, the high-value targeting campaign that had consumed enormous coalition resources and cost enormous lives had almost no durable strategic effect. For every
Taliban commander killed, the movement adapted, replaced him, and continued. The Taliban’s fighting strength, estimated at 7,000 in 2002, had grown to over 25,000 by 2016. Every metric of genuine strategic progress was moving in the wrong direction. The Australians knew it. The British knew it.
The operators on the ground, the men doing the fighting, had known it for years. But the machine kept running. There is a concept in military doctrine called mission creep. It describes the gradual, almost imperceptible shift in a military operation away from its original purpose toward something, something that no one explicitly ordered, but that happens anyway, driven by momentum and pressure and the peculiar logic of prolonged war.
By 2010 and into 2011, the Australian and British SAS were deep inside a mission creep so severe it had essentially consumed the original mission entirely. They had come to Afghanistan to deny al-Qaeda a base, to disrupt terrorist networks, to contribute to the stability of a government that would never again harbor the people who planned the attacks of September 11th.
They had ended up in a nightly kill cycle that, by the most charitable analysis, was making the situation worse. And then came the moment that crystallized everything. Not a single dramatic confrontation, not one defining incident, but a slow, sickening dawning across multiple command levels, multiple national contingents, multiple rotations of a truth that the war planners in Washington had refused to accept.
The war could not be won. Not like this. Not anymore. and some of the men being asked to fight it were no longer sure it should be. In November 2020, the Australian government released a document that shook the country to its foundation. The Inspector General of the Australian Defense Force Afghanistan inquiry report, four years in the making, thousands of pages, and a conclusion so stark, so damning, so utterly devastating to the reputation of one of Australia’s most storied military institutions that the defense minister
could barely read the summary aloud. According to the Breitton report, named after Major General Paul Breitin, the inquiry’s presiding judge, there was credible evidence that Australian special forces soldiers had committed 39 unlawful murders of Afghan civilians and prisoners between 2005 and 2016. 25 Australian soldiers were identified as either perpetrators or accessories.
The inquiry found that these killings had been systematically covered up by the soldiers themselves, by their superiors, and in some cases by the reporting structures that were supposed to provide accountability. The findings were specific, and they were brutal. soldiers had carried out a practice known as blooding, requiring junior operators to murder prisoners in cold blood as a right of passage, a way of binding them to the patrol, ensuring their silence and their loyalty through shared guilt. There were throwdowns,
weapons and radios seized from legitimate enemy combatants and carried for use as planted evidence to be placed on the bodies of civilians killed in raids so that after action reports could classify them as enemy fighters. There were throat slittings, bodies dumped in rivers, reports written in sanitized language that transformed massacres into tactical successes.
And perhaps most damningly of all, there was evidence that senior commanders had over time created an environment in which all of this was not only possible, but in certain units normalized. The consequences were immediate and severe. Two squadron of the Sasser Special Air Service Regiment was disbanded, formally dissolved.
An entire squadron of Australia’s most elite soldiers struck from the order of battle as a direct result of the findings. It was a moment without precedent in modern Australian military history. A new government body, the office of the special investigator, was established to pursue criminal prosecutions against individual soldiers.
The process would drag on for years through courts and appeals and the slow grind of legal accountability. Medals were reviewed. Decorations that had been awarded for operations now under criminal investigation sat in uncertainty. Some of the most celebrated moments in recent Australian military history became the subject of war crimes allegations. The world was watching.
And what about the British sauce? Their reckoning came separately. But it came in the United Kingdom. A separate inquiry. The Iraq historic allegations team had already been deeply controversial began examining British SAS conduct in Afghanistan with specific focus on a pattern of what investigators described as unlawful killings during night raids in Helman Province.
Former British operators speaking anonymously described an environment almost identical to what the Britan report had found in the Australian units. The same pressure, the same culture, the same erosion of the rules. One senior British military figure speaking to investigative journalists described a deliberate policy within certain SAS units to kill fighting age males encountered during raids regardless of their confirmed combatant status.
The British inquiry, still ongoing at the time of this script, has heard testimony suggesting the chain of command not only failed to prevent these killings, but may have actively worked to suppress the evidence. And here is the deeper truth, the one that neither the American military establishment nor the Australian government nor the British Ministry of Defense has been willing to say directly, but which the evidence points toward unmistakably.
The breakdown of the coalition the moment the Australian and British SAS commanders quietly professionally finally said, “We are done,” was not simply about tactics. It was about what the war had done to the men fighting it. What happens when elite soldiers trained to the highest standard of discipline and ethics are placed inside a machine that demands results without accountability for years with no realistic end in sight? What happens when the rules that separate a warrior from a criminal are slowly, systematically worn away? The
Breitin Report answered that question, and the answer was a terrible one. The war had not just been lost in the mountains of Yurusan. It had been lost inside the men sent to fight it. On June 18th, 2021, the last Australian Defense Force personnel departed Afghanistan. No ceremony, no speeches broadcast to the nation.
a small quiet departure from a country where 41 Australians had given their lives, where hundreds more had been physically and psychologically wounded and where, according to the Breitin Report, 39 Afghan civilians had been unlawfully killed by the very soldiers sent to protect them. Two weeks later, the last British forces followed.
By August 2021, the Taliban had retaken Cabo. The government coalition forces had spent 20 years and hundreds of billions of dollars supporting collapsed in 11 days. The war was over and the reckoning, the real one, the one about what all of this had meant, had only just begun. There is a specific kind of silence that settles over veterans of lost wars. You can see it in their eyes.
It is not grief exactly though grief is part of it. It is not anger though anger is part of it too. It is something more like the stunned disorienting feeling of a man who has spent 20 years building something brick by careful brick in heat and blood and sacrifice and then watched it fall overnight.
Former Australian special forces soldiers speaking in the years since their withdrawal have described their departure from Afghanistan in precisely those terms. We knew, one veteran told investigators in the aftermath of the Breitin report. We all knew, not everything, not everyone. But we knew the mission had stopped making sense. We just couldn’t say it.
What is the lesson of all this? What can we take from 20 years of commitment, sacrifice, moral failure, and strategic defeat? The first lesson is about the danger of endless war. The Australian and British SAS went to Afghanistan as precision instruments, surgical, intelligent, humane by the standards of modern warfare.
They came from traditions that understood the complexity of irregular conflict, that knew you could not bomb your way to a political solution. that knew the support of the population was the decisive terrain. But sustained warfare without clear objectives, without political will, without accountability, does things to even the finest soldiers that no training program fully prepares them for.
It wears away the edges. It creates pressure that distorts judgment. It builds cultures slowly, imperceptibly that would be unrecognizable to the men those soldiers were before the war. The Britan report is not just a list of crimes. It is a warning about what prolonged conflict without adequate oversight and moral leadership can do to institutions we trust with enormous power.
The second lesson is about the limits of alliance. Australia and Britain entered Afghanistan in 2001 out of deep genuine loyalty to the United States. The relationship between these nations, the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance, the shared democratic values, the historical bonds forged across two world wars and Korea and Vietnam is one of the most enduring in modern international relations.
But loyalty is not the same as agreement. and the quiet, professional, ultimately irresolvable disagreement between the Australian and British SAS commanders and their American counterparts about how this war should be fought was not a failure of the alliance. It was in some ways the alliance functioning as it should.
Nations with their own military traditions, their own ethical frameworks, their own assessments of strategy, maintaining the integrity of their own judgment even inside a shared mission. The tragedy is that the breakdown came too late and at too high a cost to change the outcome. The third lesson and perhaps the most important is about leadership.
Leadership in war is not about rank. It is not about the number of stars on your collar or the flags behind your podium. Leadership in war is about the moral courage to tell the truth when telling the truth is dangerous. to refuse an order that crosses a line, to stand in a room full of people who want you to sign off on something you know is wrong and to say clearly, simply without flinching, “No, the Australian and British SAS commanders who raised concerns about the direction of the war, who flagged the problems with targeting
intelligence, who pushed back against the culture of impunity, they were exercising exactly that kind of leadership.” And in many cases they were ignored, sidelined or simply overrun by the momentum of a war machine too large and too invested to change course. That is the tragedy of Afghanistan in miniature.
Not a single catastrophic failure, but a thousand small moments where the right thing to do was known and not done until the weight of all those moments became too great to carry. The men of the Australian Sasser and the British Saws who served in Afghanistan were most of them exactly what their nations needed them to be. Brave, professional, skilled beyond measure.
They served in the hardest conditions at the highest personal cost in a war that their political leaders sent them to fight and then struggled to define. History will judge that war harshly. The reports, the inquiries, the testimony of survivors and veterans and Afghan civilians, all of it is now on record. It is documented.
It is real. And it demands to be remembered not as propaganda, not as celebration, but as honest reckoning. Afghanistan was a war that began with enormous moral clarity, a response to one of the most horrific acts of terrorism in human history. And it ended with two of the world’s finest special forces units quietly, professionally, finally concluding that the mission they had been handed was no longer one they could execute with honor. We are done.
Two words that carry the weight of 20 years. If this story moved you, if you want to hear more of the untold history of Australia’s warriors, their courage, their failures, and the classified missions your government never announced, then make sure you subscribe to Australia’s Secret Wars. Hit the notification bell because the next story we’re telling, it goes even deeper.
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