Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade and International Security) Share this | Hansard source

In November 2002 the Howard government withdrew Australia’s troops from Afghanistan. Labor supported the move at the time because we had accepted in good faith the government’s public statements to the effect that the security situation in Afghanistan was under control. The government in November 2002 said that its decision to withdraw Australian troops was made because the job had been done. Clearly the job had not been done. This was a grave error of Australian national security policy. The government privately knows that; the government does not have the integrity to publicly recognise and acknowledge that. Today Afghanistan remains terrorism central, the home of al-Qaeda, the home of Osama bin Laden and the home of the Taliban, and these agents of insecurity are now increasing and consolidating their position. These organisations, most particularly al-Qaeda, also feed Jemaah Islamiah, the principal terrorist organisation operating in South-East Asia.

Two things have become clear about the government’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2002. The first is that the government kept very private, very secret, the diplomatic pleas from the government of Afghanistan for Australian troops to remain in the country due to the security situation at the time. The second is that the government’s decision to draw down Australian troops in Afghanistan was little more than a prepositioning exercise for the subsequent deployment of Australian troops to Iraq.

This decision-making process at the end of 2002 and early in 2003 was part and parcel of a pattern of mismanagement of this country’s national security priorities. Firstly with Afghanistan, the government abandoned ship before the job was done. They had been privately warned in diplomatic correspondence from the government of Afghanistan that the job had definitely not been done and they turned a deaf ear to it. Secondly, from about this time also, in 2003 the government began its active diplomatic efforts with the United Nations in New York to draw down our troop presence in East Timor. The result was that we again abandoned ship too early, before the job was done—and we all know the downstream consequences of that in terms of the fresh, expensive and large deployment to East Timor which has subsequently become necessary.

But why were these two flawed decisions taken? The decision to cut and run from Afghanistan at the end of 2002, combined with the decision to cut and run from East Timor from 2003-04 on, was made because the government was preparing for and subsequently active in deployments in Iraq—the third element of the mismanagement of this government’s national security priorities. So there was a wrong decision about Afghanistan, where terrorism was still alive and well—and the government had been formally warned of this by the government of Afghanistan at the time—and the political instability was continuing in East Timor. But, nonetheless, the government decided to cut and run from that, all in order to feed the future or continuing military requirements in Iraq. Iraq itself will probably be recorded in history as one of the single greatest failures of Australian foreign policy and national security policy since the war.

On top of this pattern of mismanagement of our key national security decisions, the Solomons also looms large. In 2002 the government of the Solomon Islands made a formal diplomatic request, through the medium of a visiting parliamentary delegation to the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, seeking modest levels of police assistance to restore law and order in that country. The foreign minister directly rejected that request for assistance and subsequently we had to engage in a large-scale military deployment to the Solomon Islands. We had failed to recognise the early warnings of an emerging security policy challenge and instead had left it very late, resulting in a very large deployment indeed to the Solomon Islands at huge cost to the Australian taxpayer. That is further evidence of this pattern of national security policy mismanagement.

I visited Kabul in 2004 with the member for Bruce to see for myself how far the country had gone in re-establishing itself in the post-Taliban period. What was interesting about that visit was that I was offered no assistance whatsoever by the foreign minister in facilitating that visit—none whatsoever. At the time, of course, we did not have an embassy in Kabul, although we did have an embassy in Islamabad, but not a skerrick of assistance was offered. In undertaking that visit to Afghanistan, I had to rely entirely upon the good offices of the Afghan foreign ministry. This was an emerging country, an emerging democracy, an emerging foreign policy and foreign ministry establishment and they had to provide all the resources for my visit. The Afghan foreign ministry had to meet me, they had to provide my ground transport, they had to provide my ground security, together with that for the member for Bruce, and everything we did in the several days we spent in that country was provided exclusively per medium of the assistance of the government of Afghanistan.

I have often reflected on why the Australian government was so reluctant at the time to provide any such form of assistance. I know our diplomats in the field perform a first-class function and they are often—in fact, almost always—ready to provide assistance to visiting members of parliament, particularly for the official opposition and the official opposition foreign policy spokesman; but it became clear to me after a period of time that the government was not keen at all for me to see what I was about to discover, which was how degraded the security situation in Afghanistan was becoming, most particularly in the southern parts of the country.

I had extensive meetings with a range of Afghan government officials. I met with the Afghan foreign minister. I had dinner at the foreign ministry with the foreign minister. I met and had discussions with the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, and a range of other Afghan government ministers responsible for domestic security and the opium eradication programs in that country. Bit by bit, piece by piece, together with discussions with the embassy of the United States in Kabul at the time, a picture began to emerge very clearly in my mind of the gross security challenges which were then presenting themselves to the government and people of Afghanistan, particularly with evidence of the re-emergence of the Taliban and the remergence of al-Qaeda related activity in the southern and south-eastern parts of the country.

I found a desperately poor country devastated by decades of civil war. In addition to the challenge of a swift move to democracy, the new government in Kabul confronted an out of control opium industry and, on that score alone, the United Nations estimate was that, as of 2004, the opium and heroin crop of Afghanistan lay at a market value of some $US2.3 billion per year. It was also estimated that Afghanistan’s opium crop was providing 85 per cent of Europe’s total opium supply. The Afghan government demonstrably was having difficulties dealing with opium production and controlling the overall domestic security situation.

When I came back to Australia it became plain to me that the decision we had taken to cut and run from Afghanistan at the end of 2002, as of March-April 2004, when I visited the country, made absolutely no national security policy sense at all. In fact, a number of Western military officials with whom I spoke—and I shall not name anyone individually for fear of compromising their position and the political relationships between those governments and this country—were privately critical of the Australian government’s decision to abandon ship. It was in many respects a poorly kept secret that Australia had, for reasons relating to Iraq, decided to exit the country and leave Afghanistan at a time of dire and acute need.

When I returned to Australia, the member for Bruce and I moved a motion on 29 March 2004, under private members’ business in the House, which, firstly, recognised the continued central importance of Afghanistan as critical to the war against terrorism; secondly, recognised that al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated terrorist organisations continued to pose a security threat to the government of Afghanistan; thirdly, recognised that removing the threat required both the political transformation and economic reconstruction of Afghanistan with the full support of the international community; and, fourthly, recognised that Australia must play a significant and substantive role, both bilaterally and multilaterally, in underpinning a long-term, secure future for the people of Afghanistan.

That motion, moved by me and the member for Bruce, was put before the House nearly 2½ years ago. The response we got from the government at the time was one of absolutely deafening silence, because the government at that stage was beginning to work out that it was inextricably bogged down in the emerging quagmire which was Iraq.

Of course, other countries had acted in a different way. New Zealand, for example, maintained a military presence in Afghanistan, with around 100 officers in a provincial reconstruction team, and they were at that stage also planning to deploy some 50 special forces officers to assist the US military in combat operations. The defence minister now admits that, while Australia had its priorities trained on Iraq, Afghanistan over the past several years had remained a hot bed of terrorist activity. It is very interesting to read what the defence minister has now had to say. Last week he stated:

Australians, and too many Australian families, have been touched, if not scarred, in this decade by two Bali bombings and by the bombing of our embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia. And we have seen other evidence of terrorist activity in our region.

There are a number of links between those who planned and committed these heinous crimes and Afghanistan.

The minister went on to say:

Samudra, who was sentenced to death for plotting the Bali bombing, testified during his trial that he had fought in Afghanistan in the 1990s, alongside Osama bin Laden. He also testified that it was his duty as a true Muslim to wage jihad against the West. The International Crisis Group in our region is headed by Sidney Jones ...

They have also prepared a document on this. The minister continued:

A 2003 document to the International Crisis Group on Jemaah Islamiah in South-East Asia documented the relationship between those who trained in Afghanistan and terrorist activity in our own region. Zulkarnaen, for example, who trained in Afghanistan in 1985, was a senior military commander of JI. Muklas, who was sentenced to death for the Bali bombings, trained there in 1986. Hambali, who is JI’s chief strategist and primary link between JI and al-Qaeda, was trained there in 1987.

Further, the minister said:

It is extremely important for us as Australians to appreciate, particularly when five per cent of the Australian population is overseas at any one time, that the defence and security of our country, our people, our interests and our values is not just about our borders, nor indeed our region. It is about ensuring that we make a contribution, along with others, to demonstrate what the Australian newspaper describes as ‘moral musculature’ in taking up the struggle against global terrorism. There is no greater source of it than Afghanistan.

My question is: where was the moral musculature in 2003; where was the moral musculature in 2004; where was the moral musculature in 2005? The bottom line is this: the security situation throughout that time was deteriorating. As at my visit there in 2004, Afghan government officials were absolutely clear-cut about the re-emerging terrorist threat right across the southern and southern-eastern parts of that country. The government chose to turn a blind eye to it; they chose to turn a deaf ear to it because it was a politically uncomfortable message and because they had buried themselves in this other theatre called Iraq. That is a regrettable manifestation of the mismanagement of national security policy in this country.

The nation needs to pause right at this moment, when we are about to dispatch fresh troops to Afghanistan, and reflect on how this came about. This was a wrong decision in terms of national security priorities to withdraw our troops when we did. Everyone knows that and acknowledges that privately, but this government still to this day—three years or more since the withdrawal—does not have the moral fortitude to publicly recognise the simple, logical fact that this decision was wrong.

Of course, the reason for the distraction was Iraq, and we know what has happened there. We were to go to Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction which did not exist. We were to go to Iraq in order to reduce the terrorist threat. In fact, we have increased the terrorist threat as a result. As a consequence of the invasion of Iraq, in the several years which have elapsed since the March 2003 invasion the UN now documents there have been some 50,000 deaths in Iraq, running at the rate of about 1,000 per month. We have Iraq now on the verge of, if not in the middle of, a civil war between Sunni and Shiah and we have the rolling Iraq war contributing to the global energy crisis, or oil price crisis, and therefore the global price of oil. And this was supposed to be the reason we exited from Afghanistan. Iraq will go down as one of the greatest foreign policy disasters perpetrated by any Australian government.

Turning to the current deployment, I would simply say this in conclusion: the troops going on this deployment have our full bipartisan support. They are brave, professional men and women in uniform doing their bit for their country. We support them wholeheartedly. But they have been redeployed to Afghanistan after three years of policy failure on the part of the Howard government. They are going to a highly dangerous, insecure environment. I am gravely concerned about their security, gravely concerned about casualties emerging, and the government, because of the mismanagement of the decision-making process on Afghanistan, has a double responsibility to ensure their physical security. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Ms Owens) adjourned.

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