By Lindsay J Guerin 

I was asked why I wanted to serve in Afghanistan and if after that experience was I still in favour of the operation and its goals. As we commemorate Afghanistan Veteran’s Day on Sunday 11 October, these are my thoughts.

As we mark 25 years of Australian service in Afghanistan on Sunday October 11, these are my thoughts. 

I did not seek to serve in Afghanistan as an escape from routine or as a means to relive old deployments.  I sought it as a duty of continuity, within the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the wider coalition effort. 

My desire to serve was rooted in a belief in the importance of coalition work to help build a future that could offer fairness to all Afghans, and a belief that defeating the Taliban was not simply a military objective but an attempt to stop a particular kind of violence from dictating the terms of everyday life. 

This is why Afghanistan became personal for me. It was not only a theatre of operations. It was a contest over the future of a society, and the coalition’s intention- at least as it was consistently explained in senior briefings - was to persist in building an Afghanistan that could be fair for all Afghans. That intention mattered to me, because fairness was not treated as an optional ideal. It was treated as an objective that had to be pursued simultaneously with the pursuit of security, including the defeat of the Taliban’s capacity to impose terrorism through intimidation and violence.

If I had learned anything in years of planning and command involvement, it was that strategy is not a poster or a slogan. 

Strategy is made of decisions, priorities and tradeoffs, made under time pressure and uncertainty, with incomplete information, and with consequences that land on people who may never know the names of those who planned the effort. 

In Afghanistan, those consequences were visible every day. One of the defining experiences shaping my perspective was attending daily briefings at the senior level, chaired by a four-star US general as Commander ISAF.

The most important lesson I took from that routine was the discipline of confronting facts. Even when optimism was warranted, it had to be earned, and even when progress was difficult, it had to be measured properly. 

This mattered because Afghanistan’s operational environment was always changing. Terrain, alliances, local power structures, and the shifting capacity of adversaries meant that the coalition’s planning assumptions had to be continually refreshed. What once worked could become insufficient. What seemed stable could erode quickly. A headquarters environment in a major command—whether one is focused on air operations, intelligence integration, joint planning, or liaison—must therefore operate with humility: the understanding that the mission is never “done” and is never “solved” permanently.

The coalition’s mission in Afghanistan was often described publicly with a simple phrase: countering terrorism while supporting stability and governance. In briefings, it became more detailed and more difficult, because stability and governance do not emerge from security operations alone, nor can security operations succeed permanently without legitimacy and local cooperation.

The mission’s challenge was that the Taliban’s presence was not merely a military issue. Their intent was directed toward undermining change and maintaining control through fear. In that context, coalition actions had to carry both deterrence and support functions. They had to aim not only to neutralise immediate threats, but to reduce conditions that allowed recruitment and intimidation to flourish.

There are moments in operational experience that remain sharply etched, not because they are dramatic in a Hollywood sense but because they are profoundly human and profoundly disorienting. 

For me, the hardest part was witnessing the Taliban drive into Kabul in 2021.

I remember the feeling of watching that movement unfold— Taliban soldiers sitting in the back of utes with no opposition visible. The contrast between what had been promised and the rapidity of the perceived collapse was brutal. It was not simply a tactical event. It was a symbol of how quickly a long and complex effort can unravel when the conditions for stability degrade beyond a certain threshold. I had tears in my eyes when this happened.

The hardest part was not only the loss of control. It was seeing how quickly the adversary could translate momentum into political reality.

Any personal account of Afghanistan must confront the reality of outcomes and the human costs, and it must avoid the trap of cynical detachment that treats failure as proof that service had no value. 

Service in Afghanistan may not have achieved the final political outcome we hoped for, but it still provided moments of protection, opportunities and improvements that mattered to individuals and communities during the period of coalition engagement. 

The pain did not eliminate purpose. It clarified it. 

Lindsay J Guerin is President of the Inverloch RSL Sub Branch.