Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Before I prepared my remarks this morning for this debate on Afghanistan, I had cause to give a phone call to Warrant Officer Class 2 Brian McGrath—or Brian, as I generally refer to him—a good mate of mine who resides in the suburb of Dapto in my electorate. He is quite an extraordinary character. He did the reverse of what many do. He joined as a Reservist at the age of 30 and then enlisted as a full-time member of the Australian Army some years thereafter. I want to thank him for his service. He did his tour of duty. He's a sapper, and it was his job to train those who were arriving in Kabul in explosives and the risks of explosives. I have no doubt that the work he was doing kept many Australian men and women alive. So, I thank Brian.

And I'll start by thanking the 26,000 other Australians who served their country by serving in the ADF in Afghanistan over the past 20 years. I also want to honour the ultimate sacrifice made by the 41 Australians in uniform who sacrificed their lives on our behalf in Afghanistan. We cannot begin to contemplate the grief that their families share and that is revisited on occasions such as this. It's going to be a very tough couple of weeks for the families of those Australians. But we do in some small way share the loss that their families, friends and comrades feel today.

Afghanistan was our longest-running war and in many ways our costliest. We measure that cost not just by the lives of the 41 Australians lost on the front line of the conflict. There are also those soldiers who survived their tour but lost the battle at home, and there are those who continue to live with post-traumatic stress disorder. I'd like to pay tribute to organisations like Open Arms and Soldier On and encourage any of our ex-service men and women to reach out to them. They're doing a great job—a much-needed job. But the fact is that we're not doing enough to support our veterans on their return home. As a nation we were too slow to recognise the burden they carried on their return and were too slow to respond. But in counting the cost of our involvement in Afghanistan we cannot look only here at home. Civilian deaths are estimated to be at least 50,000 people, including may women and children. There are also about 70,000 Afghan National Army members and local police who lost their lives during the 20 years of conflict. In a country of 39 million people, 120,000 dead is a huge number. As many here in Australia wonder whether the cost was worth it, now that the Taliban are back in power, I'd like to think that the families of those 120,000 people in Afghanistan are asking the very same question.

Tragically, we're not yet in a position to judge the final cost of this war and our involvement in it. The chaotic and deadly scenes we've seen in Kabul over recent days will add to the toll. I'd like to pause at this point to honour the excellent work that has been done by our ADF forces and diplomats, the men and women, as they work under unimaginable pressure to bring as many people out of Afghanistan as possible. They've been hamstrung by a government that was not on top of the situation early enough, but their work is important and dangerous and we support them. The long-term cost is going to be very hard to judge. There's little reason, on the evidence, to trust the Taliban when they say that they have changed, but we live in hope. The days of Afghan women in parliament and Afghan girls attending high school seem to have tragically come to an end.

Reasons will be raised about the West's commitments to the people of Afghanistan in the face of our withdrawal after such a swift return of those we sought to oust. While the invasion of Afghanistan was absolutely justified by the 9/11 attacks, America and her allies must confront questions about the misery that was to come for two decades that followed. Objectives became opaque and resources were spread too thin. Once the initial operation to remove the Taliban had succeeded, we saw the limits of our efforts in a foreign state building. Australia was dragged into the quagmire and so was the Afghan population. Two decades of significant advances in human rights and basic infrastructure were achieved. This is not nothing. I saw this for myself when I visited Kabul in 2018. The advancement in education and basic human rights for women was significant and heartening to see. But the Taliban have shown patience can trump military might, and those advances are now all but lost. Much of our presence in Afghanistan was justified by the need to deny safe haven for international terrorist groups. Any success that we may have claimed on that front has now been reversed as well.

The Taliban's stunning victory will inspire jihadists around the globe. Islamic State and al-Qaeda both have presence in Afghanistan from which to rebuild. Nothing can make this right, but we can make it worse. If we fail to keep our word to the brave Afghans who drove our men and women around, interpreted for them, worked in our embassy or otherwise helped, our mistakes will be compounded. We must bring them out of Kabul and to safety. This is now a matter of national security. It is also a matter of national honour.

There's more that we can do. Around 4½ thousand Afghans already live in Australia on temporary protection visas, many from ethnic minorities that would face certain death at the hands of the Taliban. Their families still reside in Afghanistan. We must demonstrate to them and to the world that we will never force them back to Afghanistan. We must give them immediate and permanent protection. This is now the only good thing that can come from the fall of Kabul and the 20 long years of much sacrifice of Australian lives and effort since our first involvement in this long bloody war. I thank the House.

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