Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thought the contribution from the member for Hotham was very apt, given his role as Leader of the Opposition at the time that Australia took a decision to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in November 2002. Before I go on to discuss that decision, I will briefly remind the chamber what we are talking about here in terms of an extra deployment.

We know that we already have a reconstruction task force in Afghanistan and that it will be working there for a period of two years. The government pointed out in the Prime Minister’s statement that it is aware of the risks faced by the ADF in Afghanistan and that it is committed to ensuring that the reconstruction task force is properly equipped to conduct its role. As a result, and after consideration, the government now tells us, through the Prime Minister, that it is proposing to increase the size of the reconstruction task force from 240 personnel to 270 personnel.

The Prime Minister argued in his statement that this would enhance the security, robustness and flexibility of the task force. The government has also decided—and this was again announced by the Prime Minister in his statement—that the deployment will include an infantry company group of about 120 personnel to provide enhanced force protection. We know that in the province in which the Australian troops are being deployed there is an extremely tenuous security situation and a very dangerous environment within which they are working. The government has undertaken to review the task force structure and to reconsider it in six months.

The additional deployment will bring the total reconstruction task force strength to around 400. It will be made up of a number of elements—command, security and protection, engineering, administrative support and tactical intelligence services. The force will be equipped with a number of Bushmaster infantry mobility vehicles and a number of Australian light armoured vehicles, or ASLAVs. The reconstruction task force will be drawn primarily from 1st Brigade in Darwin and will be under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Mick Ryan. It will have its own headquarters and will operate under the national command of Australia’s joint task force in the Middle East area of operations. ADF units and personnel deployed in Afghanistan remain under Australian national command. The reconstruction task force, as we know, will work closely with the Netherlands and other NATO partners. The Australian government, as the Prime Minister has pointed out, is pleased with the Dutch planning and preparations and is impressed with the process.

I now want to go to what I think is a very important question—that is, why we are in the position that we are in in Afghanistan, given the decision taken by the government in November 2002 for us to withdraw our troops, despite representations from the government in Afghanistan for additional support. It raises very serious questions about the integrity of the decisions which have been taken by the government and the reasons which were then given to the Australian public about that withdrawal.

I know that, as a member of the government, Mr Deputy Speaker Lindsay, you and your colleagues were very supportive of Australia’s decision to involve itself in Iraq. I am certain that the reason that we withdrew our troops from Afghanistan was because of the need for a deployment in Iraq at around that time. It is worth noting, as the member for Hotham and the Leader of the Opposition have pointed out, that when the US went into Afghanistan in 2001, it acted at the head of ‘one of the great global military coalitions of history’, as described by the Leader of the Opposition. The US acted with the support of all European allies and all its Cold War enemies—notably, as the Leader of the Opposition said, the Chinese and the Russians. It had the support of the overwhelming number of countries in the Middle East and, of course, it had bipartisan support here in Australia.

We should never forget, as the member for Hotham pointed out, that Australia entered the war on terror in Afghanistan as a result of 9-11 through the ANZUS treaty and our obligations to our great friend and ally the United States. That is not the case with our involvement in Iraq. I certainly remain committed to that fight and I know the Labor Party is. This party took a serious step in calling for an increase in the number of troops in our deployment to Afghanistan last year. Of course, we now know that the Prime Minister argues that we are being opportunistic by taking that decision. I think it recognises that this party, the Labor Party, is aware of the very important role that the Australian defence forces are playing in Afghanistan and is very concerned about the need to impose controls and eliminate the threat from al-Qaeda and, indeed, the remnant Taliban groups and others who are fighting in Afghanistan against the wishes of the international community.

We know that the focus of the world effort against terrorism after 9-11 was Afghanistan. We know that the campaign waged by the coalition forces under the leadership of the United States was in fact not successful in routing out al-Qaeda and either eliminating or taking its leader as a prisoner. It seems to me that we have now suffered the consequences of failed strategy, and tactics as well, in Afghanistan.

We know that around that time there were motions being put in the United States, and arguments going on within the Pentagon, the state department and indeed the Office of the President, as to whether or not the United States should engage in a war in Iraq. We know it was a very contentious decision which was ultimately taken by the Bush administration to invade Iraq, but it was with the full support of John Howard and the government in Australia. I am not sure, although I can hazard a guess, that either Prime Minister Howard or any of his ministers were engaged in the internal discussions within the United States between Wolfowitz and the other players—Vice President Cheney, the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs—about their decision ultimately to invade Iraq. We were not engaged in that discussion. If we had been engaged in that discussion, we should have, as the Leader of the Opposition has now said on a number of occasions, advised the government of the United States of the folly of that enterprise and warned them that what they were going to get themselves into would be a quagmire which would be very difficult to get out of.

I take some pride in the fact that I was one of those people who opposed our involvement in Iraq and voted against it here in this parliament. I put out a newsletter to my constituents but principally to ADF members in the Northern Territory. The purpose of that was to explain my concerns about the war in Iraq. Those concerns have now been amplified a hundredfold because of the decisions which have ultimately been taken by the United States, followed by Australia.

A couple of years ago I had the privilege of visiting Australian troops at Al-Matana in Iraq, going to the Green Zone and visiting the headquarters of the United States. I have to say that, despite my concerns about the policy decisions taken by the United States government to enter Iraq in the first instance, I have nothing but praise for the work which is being done by Australian troops there at this time and previously. But the fact is that they should not be there.

We are now in the ridiculous situation where we have known for some time—as I am sure you have, Deputy Speaker Lindsay, because of where you live—of the demands which are being placed on the defence forces and what that has meant in manning levels. We are now in a situation where we have to announce that we are going to increase the size of the army up to 30,000 by some 1,500 troops because of the demands being placed on the Army by government decisions such as the one to involve ourselves in Iraq.

Many of us said at the time that what we were talking about, and what the Leader of the Opposition spoke about in his address last week, is the need to address the central concerns of fighting terrorism. What we have done is engage ourselves in a war in Iraq which is leading to increased threats of terrorism, not because of what is happening directly in Iraq but because of what it is doing in promoting the engagement of others outside of Iraq, in other places including Afghanistan and, I might say, South-East Asia, that ultimately, one could argue, resulted in the bombings in Bali.

It seems to me that we have an obligation in this country to make sure, front and centre, that we accept the obligations of the international community. But that does not mean we should tug our forelock every time Uncle Sam jumps, and that is what we did in the case of Iraq. Instead of doing what we did with the support of the international community in Afghanistan, and instead of continuing our focus on that obligation, we took our eyes off the prize, took our eyes off the ball and withdrew our troops after a decision made in November 2002. Things may well be different in Afghanistan now had the commitment the Australian government had shown to putting troops in in the first place been retained and if we had pressured the United States government not to enter the folly of Iraq but to maintain the focus on Afghanistan, rooting out those terrorist elements working with al-Qaeda and others involved in the region.

Notwithstanding that, though, I do want to make sure that people fully comprehend the Labor Party position here, that not only are we concerned about the decisions which have been taken by the government but we are concerned that they have put our troops in harm’s way and, at least in the case of Iraq, in an injudicious way by taking a decision which was in error. But in the case of Afghanistan we know the importance of the fight. The reason we need to be in Afghanistan, as the Leader of the Opposition pointed out, is that Afghanistan is al-Qaeda central, it is Taliban central and it is terrorist central. That is why we need to be involved in Afghanistan.

What we need to do is understand that the obligation which our troops are undertaking on our behalf is a very serious one and a very dangerous one. We have an obligation in this place, as we have had previously, to support our troops regardless of the government’s decisions. But in this particular instance not only do we support the troops but we support the decision taken by the government—although we say, as the member for Hotham has pointed out, that it was a decision taken only after the Labor Party had called for an increase in our troop deployments to the region.

In the case of our troops in Afghanistan, they too have our support. Of course, as I have continued to say and I will continue to say, I do not agree with the decision to deploy them there, but I do agree that we have to support them whilst they are there. That is what we need to do. We must ensure that they are provided every capacity to return home to this country safely, and they should be withdrawn from there sooner rather than later. In the context of Afghanistan, we have to keep our eyes firmly on the task and we have to understand that the responsibility we are placing upon Australian Defence Force personnel is that they have been given a very, very dangerous task and we should be very concerned that their security is at great risk. Nevertheless, the task needs to be achieved, the task must be done and we should commit ourselves to ensuring that they have our total support in that task.

We should also be concerned to ensure, as we have done for the troops in Iraq and other places where they are deployed, that their families at home understand that we support them as well, that we will not leave them in a position of want or need and that if, God forbid, something untoward happens to any of their family members whilst they are deployed, the family members will be properly looked after and their needs properly addressed. We have not always seen that from this government. We need to ensure that that happens. We need to ensure that those troops, when they leave this country serving our interests overseas, understand that their families, regardless of their positions and regardless of what happens to them, will be properly catered for, properly looked after and shown appropriate respect.

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