Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Hansard source

Last year, together with my colleagues the member for Curtin and Senator Johnston, I had the great privilege of visiting our troops in Kandahar and in Oruzgan province at Tarin Kowt. Brief official visits are only ever going to be at best a superficial introduction to the challenges facing our troops, but the visit did leave several indelible impressions. We were struck by the enthusiasm, commitment and professionalism of all our troops. There was no mistaking that they believed they were engaged in an important, just and historic mission and that it was manifestly in both the interests of the Afghan people and of Australia that they were there.

The challenges they faced were very apparent. The terrain we saw in southern Afghanistan was a vast mountainous desert: steep, rocky ranges with thin slivers of irrigated cultivation and settlement running along the rivers on the valley floors. This topography makes travel from one settlement to another extremely difficult—unlike in Iraq, which is mostly flat and has many good highways. It also means that there is often only one route in and out of a settlement, typically the road up and down the valley. That brings me to the other sinister challenge of the improvised explosive device or IED, which has claimed the lives of so many of our diggers and their allies. This is the weapon of choice of the Taliban and its sophistication is improving all the time. We saw many examples of IEDs, with some fashioned out of unexploded munitions from this and previous wars; others made with readily obtained chemicals, including fertilisers. The ingenuity of the bomb maker is very evident in Afghanistan and the technology of the IED has improved as rapidly as our techniques for identifying and disarming them.

Our special forces who conduct carefully targeted operations against Taliban leaders and strong points endeavour to avoid the IEDs by travelling across country or using helicopters and avoiding the roads and settlements until they reach their target. They are not always successful in that endeavour. However, in a counterinsurgency war such as this the most important role for our forces is to train and mentor the Afghan security forces so they can win the confidence of their own people. At the same time, our forces must themselves win the confidence of the people of Oruzgan province and to do that they must work with them. This is the role of the training and mentoring task force. Working with and in the community they are especially vulnerable to IEDs, especially when they are on foot outside one of our Australian designed mine resistant vehicles, the Bushmaster.

Together with all members I record my admiration, once again, and my thanks to our forces in Afghanistan for their courageous service. In particular, we give thanks to those 21 Australian soldiers who lost their lives in that country; wearing our uniform and under our flag. Others have been gravely wounded. Their families know that this nation, this parliament, will never forget that service and that sacrifice.

The question we are debating is whether we should continue to remain a part of the United States-led coalition in Afghanistan. Should we bring the troops home? It is right that the parliament is debating this issue. The bipartisan support for our commitment in Afghanistan has had the consequence that the case for remaining has not been made often enough nor has it been tested in debate. Democracies from the time of Pericles have been debating the conduct of wars, for thousands of years, and this war and this parliament should be no exception.

The debate began with two fine speeches from the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. The Prime Minister made a profound point when she said that our troops offer their lives for us. They embrace wartime sacrifice as their highest duty. In return we owe them our wisdom. Our highest duty is to make wise decisions about war. I agree. Our troops need to know that they are fighting there not because we believed it was the right thing in 2001 or 2004 but that it is the right strategy today and tomorrow. The Leader of the Opposition made an equally profound point when he said that those who advocated our withdrawing from Afghanistan could not do so without at the same time advocating that the United States and its other allies do the same.

We should not be naive about the war in Afghanistan. We did not invade because we wanted to liberate the Afghan people from the tyranny of the Taliban; we invaded because the United States had been attacked by al-Qaeda, whose leadership had planned that deadly assault from bases in Afghanistan. The Taliban regime was urged to surrender the al-Qaeda leadership. It refused to do so and consequently the United States and its allies invaded. The initial assault was successful in the sense that the Taliban regime was overthrown and the al-Qaeda strongholds destroyed. However, Osama bin Laden evaded capture and al-Qaeda quickly regrouped in Pakistan.

Colin Powell had cautioned President Bush about the consequences of invading Iraq by referring to the warning that the Pottery Barn offers its butter-fingered customers: you break it, you own it. And so it is that if a great power invades a country and overthrows its government then it inherits the responsibility of establishing a new and better government for its people. The truth is that, after the invasion, the war in Afghanistan was neglected as the United States focused more and more resources on the conflict in Iraq. As Michael O’Hanlon noted recently in Foreign Policy, by the end of last year it was clear that the Taliban had nearly as many fighters in the field as they had before 9-11 and considerably more than they had in 2005. The Taliban was winning the war.

President Obama was left with little choice but to embark on, as his predecessor had done in Iraq, a thorough counterinsurgency strategy involving a near trebling of US forces, which was designed not simply to kill and capture Taliban fighters but to provide a secure environment for the Afghan people, for long enough to enable the Afghan government to develop the capacity to provide both ongoing security and adequately efficient and honest government. The most difficult task we and our allies have in Afghanistan, therefore, is that of nation building. Every tactical success, every victory on the battlefield, every Taliban leader killed or captured will be of little enduring value if there is not a strong Afghan government to take responsibility for their own country and the safety of its citizens.

With lessons hard learned in Iraq, the United States government has developed a thorough counterinsurgency doctrine. Authored by General Petraeus, the manual notes:

At its heart—

counterinsurgency—

is a struggle for the population’s support. The protection, welfare and support of the people are vital to success.

David Galula said:

Essential though it is, the military action is secondary to the political one, its primary purpose being to afford the political power enough freedom to work safely with the population.

As a consequence, the manual notes:

Military efforts are necessary and important to counterinsurgency efforts, but they are only effective when integrated into a comprehensive strategy employing all instruments of national power. A successful—

counterinsurgency—

operation meets the contested population’s needs to the extent needed to win popular support while protecting the population from the insurgents.

Once the insurgents lose the support of the people, they cannot survive. In this context it is important to bear in mind the fluid identity of the insurgents. As David Kilcullen reminds us, they are not a standing army. Their ranks are swelled by resentment towards the Afghan government and indeed towards foreign armies, especially if their activities cause loss and damage to the local population. These are Kilcullen’s accidental guerrillas. Equally, as an effective counterinsurgency strategy restores order and a competent national government resumes control, many of those insurgents stop fighting. Over the course of this year there have been many tactical successes. Taliban leaders are being killed or captured, their administration has been challenged in provinces where they have been in barely challenged control for many years.

However, at the strategic level, there are two very significant problems. First and most importantly, the Afghan government has simply failed to develop the capacity to deliver adequate security and efficient government in many, if not most, areas of the country. In a counterinsurgency strategy, the host government should be the solution not the cause of the problems exploited by the insurgents. The notorious, systemic corruption of the Karzai government, however, is more often than not perceived as the problem. The Taliban has sought to respond by offering an alternative government—harsh and violent to be sure; often perceived as the lesser of two evils. Improving the calibre, competence and honesty of the Karzai government or its successor is probably our most important and difficult task in Afghanistan.

Second, our allies’ long-term commitment is somewhat questionable. The Netherlands forces have been withdrawn from Oruzgan, and other nations, including the Canadians, Poles and Italians, have set dates to withdraw, although on Friday I note Prime Minister Harper announced a more prolonged timetable for withdrawal. President Obama’s surge, announced in late 2009, was accompanied by a commitment to start withdrawing forces by mid 2011.

The Taliban believe they will win the war not because they think they can defeat us on the battlefield but because they believe that public opinion in America and its allies will not permit their forces to remain in such large numbers for long enough to enable the Karzai government to acquire the capacity to administer their nation themselves. Withdrawing from Afghanistan now would, quite simply, deliver the country back into the hands of the Taliban. It would constitute a humiliating defeat for the West and a glorious triumph for the Islamist jihad. Those that advocate withdrawal cannot credibly dispute that this would be the consequence, but they argue that we are better off cutting our losses rather than postponing an inevitable defeat.

The truth, however, is that the new population-centred, counterinsurgency strategy has only just begun. We are fighting a new war which began in earnest late last year. Already we are seeing real progress in building up the Afghan security forces. Michael O’Hanlon noted:

The quality of training is up too largely—

in the Afghan security forces—

because teacher to student ratios have more than doubled. … In the Afghan army, the better of the main security institutions, 20,000 recruits are in training at all times, and the force is on pace to reach its interim goal of 134,000 soldiers by this fall. … The rate at which new recruits are joining the force is now twice the rate at which soldiers are leaving.

In terms of civil society, I might note that the Afghan parliament has a higher percentage of women MPs than our own. So there are some positive signs.

While the Afghan engagement has been a long one, in reality, we are fighting, as I said, a new war which commenced from the end of last year when President Obama took the advice of General Petraeus and General McChrystal to undertake a surge along the lines of the one that had been successful in Iraq. A successful end to the war is not going to look like victory in a conventional war. Truth be told, conventional wars have been few and far between. Wars of counterinsurgency are the norm nowadays. Just as the military effort is secondary to the political effort in counterinsurgency strategy, so is the end game in this exercise, essentially, a political one.

Already there are negotiations with some elements of the Taliban which are being facilitated by the United States. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, observed in response to criticism of this approach:

You don’t make peace with your friends.

A satisfactory outcome to the war would be one in which a stable government was able to provide security and reasonably honest administration across the country in which democratic institutions, however inadequate by our standards, nonetheless, allowed Afghani men and women to live in peace and security. Most importantly from our point of view such an outcome would see a government which would not ever again permit al-Qaeda to base itself in Afghanistan and wage war against us from there.

This goal will certainly be very difficult to achieve but, if we and our allies were to pull out now, it would have absolutely no prospect of achievement. Our mission is not to stay in Afghanistan forever; our mission is not to leave Afghanistan; our mission is to leave Afghanistan in peace and security. And before we can leave on those terms we must give the new strategy the chance to succeed.

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