Lawyer and historian Rob Crosby, author of Keep Calm, We Are Coming. The book details four NZSAS missions in Afghanistan.
The first historian to chronicle the New Zealand Special Air Service’s (SAS) deployments in Afghanistan says such stories will provide the “tacit approval” from Kiwis for similar military operations in the future.
Ron Crosby’s recent book Keep Calm – We Are Coming recounts the heroic acts of the SAS in dealing with three terrorist attacks in Kabul between 2009 and 2012, and evacuating Kiwis fleeing the Taliban from Kabul Airport in 2021.
In a special Anzac weekend interview with Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night, the lawyer-turned-historian said the book helps fill a vacuum of stories from more recent military operations.
“I’ve been in a very privileged position of having an association with the SAS Trust and being able to interview members of the regiment as we’ve captured their memories,” Crosby said.
“The Operation Wātea responses, but also Operation Kōkako when they uplifted the 300-odd people that they did from that swirling mass of thousands of people at Kabul Airport who were desperate to escape from the Taliban – those were tales that, to my mind, demanded telling.
“And it was important, I felt, for the public to be aware of those.”
Among the stories told in Keep Calm – We Are Coming is the SAS’s role in training and equipping an Afghan special police force – the Crisis Response Unit (CRU) – to deal with Taliban terrorism in Kabul.
The city had strategic significance to the Taliban because it was where the Afghanistan Government was headquartered – and if they could demonstrate it was unable to protect Afghans from terrorist attacks, then they were achieving their purpose.
As a result, the SAS’s efforts to provide the CRU with the skills to protect themselves and civilians in these combat situations was crucial.
“The CRU were not that well-equipped and certainly weren’t that well-trained when the Kiwis started working with them,” he explained.
“When they were having to respond, as they did very soon, to what would be termed spectacular terrorist attacks aimed particularly at international civilians, then it was necessary for our blokes to be at the sharp point of the responses.”
Crosby acknowledged that far more books had been written about New Zealand’s contribution to the Allies’ efforts in World War II compared to more recent military operations like those in Afghanistan.
And he told Real Life that New Zealanders being aware of the stories from Afghanistan would provide the “social licence” to enable similar operations going forward.
“Social licence is really the tacit approval that any organisation that’s going to be successful, that is representing the public in any way, has to have and maintain,” Crosby said.
“To do that, you’ve really got to have people understanding and being aware of what you’re capable of and what contribution you can make. The NZ SAS regiment is one of our few strategic assets that we can offer in a coalition sense for the defence of our nation.
“The cost of defence is so horrendously high nowadays, and so technical – but [the SAS] is an elite unit which has the capabilities, skills, and now experience to offer, which is valued by coalition members.”
Worries that New Zealand’s military might be losing this social licence to play a part in major international conflicts because its contributions are undervalued were valid and concerning, Crosby told Cowan.
“We don’t live in a bubble, and that’s being demonstrated to us very much at the moment with what’s happening in the Middle East. These are events that are beyond our control,” said Crosby.
“As a small nation like New Zealand, unable to provide the expertise and complex technical defence that is necessary, the only way to provide that is to link in with like-minded nations in a coalition.
“Those like-minded nations may change over time; we’ve seen them change from Britain to the US ... we need to be able, as a nation, to be able to provide strategically valued contributions – and the SAS happens to be one of those major assets.”
Crosby told Real Life that the qualities so admired of New Zealand soldiers in conflicts gone by are “absolutely” still present among today’s military personnel.
“The ‘hearts and minds’ type of philosophy for whenever they’ve deployed has been very much utmost – and their ability in Afghanistan and with the CRU to meld in with them, to have mentors who were living in their barracks alongside them, demonstrated that very specifically.
“The tenets are the pursuit of excellence, the highest levels of discipline, obviously humility and humour – and all of those tenets go to making what I regard as very well rounded, very approachable and very capable operators.”
Keep Calm – We Are Coming is in bookstores now.
