Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Labor supports this decision and Labor supports our troops. This will be the most dangerous Australian mission to date in the war on terror. The danger our troops face now cannot be overstated. We know they will perform their duties professionally and courageously. They always make us proud and this will be no exception. As they prepare to leave, our thoughts and best wishes are with them and with their families who watch as they go to fight for us. And they will remain in our thoughts and prayers until they are home safe again.

This should not be understated in any shape or form: this is a very dangerous task indeed. The situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and the area in which our troops are deployed is one of the most threatening areas. The troops that are there now, based around the SAS and other elements of special forces, are constantly engaged, and we have been blessed so far by the fact that in this particular phase of the operation we have lost no lives. This has not been the experience of other nations engaged and fighting alongside us.

I suspect that the augmentation in the size of this force, which is slightly bigger than that which was anticipated from previous government announcements, probably reflects the fact that the Minister for Defence and/or his advisers have made a calculation in relation to the types of dangers that would be involved for those doing civil reconstruction alongside their brothers and sisters more actively engaged in combat and have come to the conclusion that they will need a deal more protection than might originally have been assumed. That seems to me to be the case on the increased numbers.

It is a deployment which has bipartisan support and we would say to the government: ‘As you make your calculations of what is required for the troops in the field, if they require additional support from other elements of their military forces then they ought to get it.’ This is a very difficult task, and a dangerous task, on which they are engaged.

As I said, the deployment has bipartisan support, so therefore I was disappointed, but not surprised, that the Prime Minister used part of his statement to attack the Labor Party and attack the opposition. Unfortunately, as is now his wont, the Prime Minister did not tell the whole truth. Labor has long supported the deployment of Australian troops to Afghanistan, but, rather than stay until the job was done in Afghanistan, the government withdrew our troops during 2002. Labor supported this move at the time in good faith, based on the Howard government’s statements that the security situation in Afghanistan was under control. But what the Howard government did not say publicly then and what the Prime Minister did not say in his remarks to this House just a few moments ago was this: we now know that he withdrew our troops from Afghanistan in the face of private diplomatic protests from the government of that country. The Afghans pleaded with the Australian government in a letter dated November 2002 to continue Australian military assistance because, as they said, ‘Terrorism is still alive and well.’

Of course, we now know that this plea was ignored, and now we are going back to fight terrorism in Afghanistan again. John Howard should not have cut and run from Afghanistan at that time. It was the wrong decision, and I am glad that he has reversed it. It meant that Australian forces were absent during a critical period in the breakdown of security, stability and central control in Afghanistan. It was a time when al-Qaeda and the Taliban were able to hang on and regroup, and now they are once again able to attack. Labor saw this and, following my shadow minister Kevin Rudd’s visit to Afghanistan in April 2004, took the serious step of calling for an expansion of Australian troop involvement there, and some time later this occurred to the Howard government.

We cannot underestimate the consequence for Afghanistan of this nation and our allies taking their eye off the ball at that crucial period of time. We of course, in good faith, backed the decision by the government of the day because we are overwhelmingly of the view that the primary fight for Australia in the war on terror is in the region around us. There are many assisting us in Afghanistan. In this region, there are few to play the sorts of roles that we are capable of playing. This is why our focus must be in this area. We have not said that that should be exclusively the position but, nevertheless, we should move with very great reluctance away from that point.

The Leader of the Opposition then believed what the Prime Minister had to say to him, but the Prime Minister concealed from the Australian people the exact state of affairs there, and the consequence of the failure to keep an eye on the ball has been the comeback of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and a vastly more difficult situation for our troops to now handle on the ground. Serious errors were made. They were of course made for a reason. As we now know, the ground was being prepared for the redeployment of troops in the direction of Iraq, and not the least casualty of that massive error has been an appropriate, continuous engagement with the people who started this whole business by acquiescing in and launching that attack on the United States on 11 September 2001. So our troops are in the front line of taking on board the penalties which have accrued to those who would defend the interests of the Afghanistan government that have been a product of the mistaken policy in which this government has been closely engaged.

I have said before that, even though this area is outside of Australia’s immediate zone of interest, when it comes to dealing with terrorism we have supported that deployment, and we have done it for two reasons. The first is this: Australian troops are fighting in Afghanistan because we are signatories to the ANZUS alliance. We invoked the ANZUS alliance in the aftermath of September 11. No-one should ever forget that Australia entered the war on terror in Afghanistan under our ANZUS obligations. Our ally had been attacked. It was attacked within the meaning of the terms of the ANZUS treaty, and as a result of that we committed ourselves to action. It is in fact the only time the ANZUS treaty has been invoked, and our troops still operate in Afghanistan under that cover, because the forces that were removed after an appropriate ultimatum had been sent to them in the aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September are still the forces that we are fighting in Afghanistan.

As I said, our errors have permitted those forces to make a comeback and expand their influence in the region. When the United States acted in 2001, it built up and led one of the great global military coalitions of history. I think there are still some 30 countries engaged in supporting the Afghanistan government now, and I think at different points of time in different ways up to 60 countries have assisted in that process. The US then acted with the support of all its European allies and, I might say, all its Cold War enemies—notably the Chinese and the Russians. It had the support of an overwhelming number of countries in the Middle East, and we were part of the international force that removed the regime in Afghanistan. But the job was not done; it was not properly completed. It has to be said that that marvellous coalition and that empathy that the United States enjoyed around the globe—the sense of horror of the excesses of fundamentalist terror that was so pristine at the time that we engaged in Afghanistan—has become infinitely more complicated since then and our position in the West a great deal more undermined, in no small measure as a result of our own errors and poor understanding of the things that we are dealing with in this region.

The second reason why we need to be in Afghanistan is this: Afghanistan is al-Qaeda central, it is Taliban central and it is terror central. The threat in Afghanistan comes from remnant Taliban and al-Qaeda forces, many of them based across the border in Pakistan. I do say this: if we do not win this war over the next couple of years, we will lose in Afghanistan and we will certainly find ourselves in Afghanistan placed in a position not dissimilar from that in which we now find ourselves in Iraq. The tactics, the strategies, the propaganda—all those things which have been clearly developed by those of our enemies as experienced in their operations in Iraq are now gradually being transited to Taliban and al-Qaeda operations in Afghanistan. Not only did we take our eye off the ball in Afghanistan but the mistaken involvement in Iraq has educated tactically, and enhanced enormously in terms of self-confidence, those who were our initial enemies in Afghanistan.

We have got to be realistic about these things and understand them. We correctly ask young Australians to place their lives on the line. There is an obligation on the politicians who send young men and women into battle to have a clear-eyed view of what it is that they are dealing with and to make sound judgments as to what the priorities should be. It is not simply enough to gloss over these things and to dismiss, with the glib phrase here and there, objection—or to simply state, as though there were some sort of obvious truth behind it, that these things are simplistically settled.

Thirdly we should be there for the reasons outlined by the Prime Minister in the remarks that he made in relation to the economic conditions inside Afghanistan. That poor country has bled for decades. For years it has not been given an opportunity to develop a coherent polity. The bitternesses and differences that exist between different ethnic groups and the different religious orientations have meant that stable central government has been virtually impossible to achieve. It has also been at one point in time one of the Cold War’s cockpits in which the United States, by proxy, struggled with the Soviet Union directly in the affairs of the politics and military activities within that nation. It has never been given a chance.

There are in current aspects of Afghanistani politics some little lights of hope. What the Prime Minister referred to in relation to the involvement of women in the democratic electoral processes in Afghanistan is one of those lights of hope. That they are able to conduct democratic elections at all is one of those little lights of hope in Afghanistan. But a look at the social statistics of Afghanistan—be they in the area of education or be they in the area of normal support for health, power or a decent industrial base—shows they are just not there at all. And the conflict continues and makes it harder to put all that infrastructure in place.

The conflict is also complicated because, at the time when we first engaged, we took on board allies because at that point in time we were unwilling to commit a substantial number of troops—and when I say ‘we’ I mean all those forces engaged, not just Australian ones. Because we did that, we set up and signed deals with other forces in Afghanistan who were not necessarily devoted to the idea of a central democracy emerging in that country—and indeed had a vested interest in some of that drug trade which has become so ubiquitous again in Afghanistan and so deeply undermining of the prospects of economic development, and so deeply undermining of the prospects of a proper and decent outcome to the political circumstances which we are now trying to see created by the actions of our armed forces.

The Afghanistani government and the Afghan people are indirect victims of that error, as I said earlier on, about our engagements in Iraq. We are in a quagmire in Iraq, dragged deeper and deeper into civil and sectarian conflict. That is not just the Labor Party’s view; that is the view now, increasingly, of the American military. Iraq has diminished and distracted the United States. It has sucked the oxygen out of US foreign policy all over the world. The war in Iraq has made Iran stronger, reduced the US capability to deal with Iran and Syria, boosted the status of the arch-criminal Osama bin Laden and made the fight against international terrorist networks far more complex. Far from the heroics of the democracy domino theory—that there would be a democratic revolution across the Middle East—Iraq is now a nation engulfed by violence, not embraced by democracy. So we made serious errors there, and in doing what we are now trying to do in Afghanistan we are trying to correct one of the consequences of those. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Dr Nelson) adjourned.

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