Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Hinkler and the member for Kingston for raising the very important issue of post traumatic stress disorder. We have seen the ramifications of that for veterans in all wars—of course, in World War I they called it shell shock. There should be no shame in reaching out and admitting that you have a problem and seeking treatment, and we have to be much better this time round at offering that treatment.

This is an incredibly important debate for the parliament to have because it involves the welfare of Australians and the safeguarding of our national interest. It is an important debate for the parliament to discuss and think about the great challenge of our age, which is the dangerous combination of transnational terrorism and failed, lawless and chaotic states. I support our mission in Afghanistan and I support our ADF personnel, our federal police and our civilian aid agencies who are undertaking that mission. Having seen ADF personnel at work in the field in Afghanistan as part of the parliamentary exchange program and having met many of them in my electorate of Wakefield at RAAF Base Edinburgh, I have seen the professionalism, maturity and decency that they bring to a dangerous and hostile environment in Afghanistan.

Our thoughts in this debate are with the families of those who have made the greatest sacrifice, with the wounded and with all those who serve our nation. This conflict does serve as a reminder of the generations of Australian servicemen who have made many sacrifices big and small to protect our liberty and more often than not the liberties of people from many distant places around the globe. We must remember that those sacrifices do not stop with one generation; they echo down the generations and they define our nation as a beacon of liberty, justice, mateship and democracy.

The history of Afghanistan should weigh heavily on this debate because Afghanistan has been fought over the centuries in what was described in the 18th century as the great game. Prior to the first British-Afghan war, Mountstuart Elphinstone, the former Governor of Bombay, wrote to a friend:

If you send 27,000 men up the Bolan pass to Candahar (as we hear is intended), and can feed them, I have no doubt you will take Candahar and Caubul and set up Soojah; but for maintaining him in a poor, cold, strong and remote country, among a turbulent people like the Afghans, I own it seems to be to be hopeless.

The British found Afghanistan an easy place to invade and a very hard place to hold. I have one of the Rats of Tobruk in my electorate. When I went round to see him prior to Anzac Day he showed me his medals. One of those medals was from Dunkirk, which he had neglected to mention. When I asked him how he came to be in the British Army he said he had actually joined up in the thirties and spent some time on the Khyber Pass. He is 90-odd now and it just goes to show you that some things do not change.

The Soviet Union also discovered this reality about Afghanistan. Despite their brutality, unrestrained use of force and conventional military advantage, they could not bring peace, order or stable government to Afghanistan. In the process of the invasion the Soviet Union destroyed Afghanistan’s agricultural economic base—which was fairly sophisticated—fractured its tribal society, exacerbated ethnic and tribal tensions, killed over a million Afghans, internally displaced two million more and then forced a further 5.5 million to flee abroad. That legacy is especially confronting when you consider that from 1880 to 1973 Afghanistan was largely stable and peaceful, and ruled through a combination of strong local governance and benign royalty. In fact, it was even possible to travel through Afghanistan—as many people did in the 1960s, following the hippie trail—with relative degrees of security.

The sudden withdrawal of Soviet forces, while celebrated locally and internationally, opened the door for an even more brutal period of civil war amongst warlords, with foreign interference, the Taliban and ultimately with the nation becoming a client state of al-Qaeda. Advocates of the sudden withdrawal of UN sanctioned NATO forces should consider that historical lesson. Those who imagine that Afghanistan can somehow be made good through sudden withdrawal, foreign aid and wishful thinking must face up to the murderous chaos that would ensue if NATO forces withdrew suddenly.

It should not be our desire, and it is not our desire, to permanently occupy Afghanistan but we can only withdraw when a relative degree of peace and stable governance is achieved. The real question that should be debated is how to bring peace to Afghanistan. In my opinion there are four pillars on which that peace may be based. The first is that we must embark on well-researched and intelligence orientated intensive counterinsurgency operations. Insurgencies are in essence violent competition for the state and, to be overcome, they must be met with careful and selective use of military force, with civilian aid and with good governance. These operations are being undertaken now, and that includes the training of the Afghan National Army—a direct part of the Australian mission in Afghanistan.

The second thing we must do in Afghanistan is disaggregate the threats. There is a tendency in this debate to roll a whole lot of people up in a bundle and call them all our enemy. I think we need to disaggregate those threats and understand the bewilderingly complex nature of Afghan tribal society and the difference in the threats we face and have a different strategy for dealing with each of them. It seems to me there are three main threats in Afghanistan. The first threat is that the Pashtun tribes may turn against us and wage a permanent insurgency. If that occurs, all will be lost. These tribes must be understood, and we must take into account the complex nature of their society, be mindful of their interests, be respectful of the code of Pashtunwali, which has reigned there for centuries, and resist the impossible task of imposing Western values on their communities. In short, we must make these tribes our allies, not our enemies, because Afghanistan cannot be peaceful or stable if Pashtun society is disrespected or ignored. We must seek an honourable engagement built on respect in order to create the conditions for peace, and marginalise those who would truly damage our national interests and international order.

The second of these threats is the Taliban, whose ranks range from thieves and thugs to religious zealots, and that group must be isolated and marginalised and forced into peaceful conduct through counterinsurgency campaigns. Force is necessary to provide unrelenting pressure on our part on the Taliban.

The third enemy, the final threat, is of course the most dangerous and the real reason we are in Afghanistan—al-Qaeda and groups like them who subscribe to Takfiri transnational terrorism and who have declared war on all civilised societies and all the world’s major religions, Islam included. I use the term ‘Takfiri’ deliberately, and for the benefit of the House I will provide a definition of the term. David Kilcullen, who is a counterinsurgency expert, uses his description because he thinks it is much more accurate than terms like ‘Islamic extremist’. In his book Counter Insurgency he describes the term as follows:

The doctrine of Takfiri disobeys the Qur’anic injunction against compulsion in religion and instead holds that Muslims whose beliefs differ from the Takfiri are infidels who must be killed. Takfirism is a heresy within Islam; it was outlawed in the 2005 Amman Message, an initiative of King Abdullah II of Jordan, which brought together more than 500 ulemas, Islamic scholars and Muslim political leaders from the organisation of the Islamic Conference of the Arab League in an unprecedented consensus agreement, a ‘unanimous’ agreement by Muslims everywhere as represented by their acknowledged most senior religious and political leaders. Al-Qaeda is Takfiri and its members are universally so described by other Muslims who they routinely terrorise.

Dr Kilcullen continues in his book:

I prefer it to the terms ‘jihad’, ‘jihadist’, ‘jihadi’ or ‘mujahadeen’ … which cede to the enemy the sacred status that they crave …

It should be understood that these Takfiri transnational terrorist groups threaten the Muslim world as well as our own. We must resist the notion that there is a clash of civilisations or religions and expose al-Qaeda for what they are—murderous heretics. We must isolate al-Qaeda from the Muslim world in order to destroy it, and we must seek allies in the Muslim world in order to do this. There is a great deal of overlap in the threats. Nothing is simple in Afghanistan, but we must disaggregate the threats as far as possible and have a different strategy to deal with each of them. Peace and stability can only occur if we understand the nature of the threat we face and concentrate on the true nature of our ultimate enemy—al-Qaeda and groups like them.

The third pillar to bringing peace and stability in Afghanistan is that there should be some movement away from the highly centralised government there. As I said before, previous periods of stability were characterised by highly decentralised governments. I believe that only by devolving democratic power back to the provinces and the valleys can we avoid civil war and eliminate national kleptocracy. A devolution of power is essential to bringing peace to Afghanistan.

The fourth and final pillar to seeking a stable and peaceful Afghanistan is to end the great game which has been played by a range of foreign powers who have sought to fight proxy wars with each other within Afghanistan’s borders. We must seek broad international and regional agreements that end the overt and covert support for warlords and extremists—and, basically, a different era in the great game must begin. We must foster regional security in exchange for an end to the money, aid and resources that have fuelled the civil war and the insurgency in Afghanistan. Safe havens can only be eliminated through diplomacy, and we should give no quarter to those who spread violence, terror and disorder around the world, because no state, religion or community is safe from that violence, terror and disorder. It seems to me that diplomacy is an essential tool for ensuring peace and stability.

Afghanistan once was peaceful and it can be stable and peaceful again. In the end, only Afghans can decide this, but they need our assistance and the world’s assistance. There are plenty of nations that have overcome barbarism and civil war, but in Afghanistan this can only occur with the help of the rest of the world and the goodwill of its neighbours. It is natural to have doubts, ask questions and seek knowledge, but we must not fool ourselves about the nature of the threat of al-Qaeda. It is as evil and unrelenting as any tyranny; it is as ambitious as any tyranny. Like fascism and communism before it, Takfiri terrorism is a political ideology of absolutes that cannot be reasoned with. We should remember the words of Sir Winston Churchill in 1938:

Before we cast away this hope, this cause and this plan, which I do not at all disguise has an element of risk, let those who wish to reject it ponder well and earnestly upon what will happen to us if, when all else has been thrown to the wolves, we are left to face our fate alone.

Our mission in Afghanistan is a reluctant duty—a duty we commit to knowing the terrible sacrifices that will be made in our national interests, in the interests of international stability and security and to protect the liberties, however small, of others.

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