Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Defence. Minister, would you please provide for the House an update on Australian casualties in Afghanistan and the results of your most recent efforts to secure better progress in the international mission?

Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Braddon for his question and his ongoing interest in the welfare of the men and women of the Australian Defence Force. Indeed, he is interested in strategic policy issues more generally. At 5 pm this afternoon an RAAF C17 will touch down at Richmond air base. On board will be Lieutenant Michael Fussell, the fatally wounded special forces soldier who the House paid tribute to on Monday.

Lieutenant Fussell gave his life fighting to make Australia, and indeed the world, a safer place in which to live. It now falls on us in this place not only to honour and thank him and, indeed, to honour and thank the six who fell before him in Afghanistan but also to ensure that they did not give their lives in vain. That means doing all we can to ensure that the United States, NATO and the UN have a formula to succeed in Afghanistan with coherent, well-resourced and coordinated civil, political and military plans aimed at successfully denying terrorists a safe haven and a breeding ground in Central Asia.

The House will be aware that over the course of the past 12 months the Prime Minister, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and I have been engaging with the US, NATO, the UN and all the partner nations pushing for more troops and more strategies. Over the course of the past two weeks I continued to pursue those objectives by visiting Canada, the US, Spain, Portugal and the UK. In Canada, defence ministers from the eight nation-states operating in Regional Command South spent a full day discussing Afghanistan, the challenges there and indeed the challenges in the immediate region.

I also had bilateral discussions with Secretary Gates and my counterparts from the UK, the Netherlands and Canada. In London, Minister Smith and I attended the second AUKMIN meeting—that is, the meeting between the defence ministers and the foreign ministers from our respective countries, Australia and the United Kingdom. We had good discussions with both Secretary Hutton and Secretary Miliband.

While I had other reasons to be in Spain and Portugal, I also took the opportunity to discuss Afghanistan with the defence and foreign ministers from those two countries. In all of these discussions, nothing gave me cause to believe that Afghanistan will be anything but a dangerous and challenging place for some years to come. It is very easy to be pessimistic about Afghanistan, but the reality is that the 38 partner nations there have no choice but to push on. Allowing Afghanistan to again descend into a place in which terrorists can resource and plan their acts around the globe is simply not an acceptable option.

There is good reason to believe that in working together the international community can achieve relative peace, stability and security both in Afghanistan and in the immediate region. On that point my meetings over the course of the past two weeks were encouraging. For example, Secretary Gates reaffirmed the determination of the United States to significantly enhance its troop numbers, well above the numbers President-elect Obama was talking about during the election campaign. They are now talking about up to five brigade combat teams or, to put it another way, 30,000 additional troops.

Secretary Gates also confirmed the determination to push on with the idea of establishing a trust fund from which money will flow into further capacity building in both the Afghan national army and the Afghan national police. That greater capacity is of course crucial to Afghanistan being able to hold the gains we make. Indeed, Secretary Gates is now talking about more personnel beyond the 80,000 aspiration determined at Bucharest in April of this year. He is now talking some 130,000 Afghan national army personnel.

Pakistan was very much a topic of conversation. There is no doubt that the partner nations and indeed the global community now fully understand that success will not come in Afghanistan unless we tackle the substantial challenges we have in Pakistan. No conversation I have these days is without significant reference to those challenges across the border. There was also a consensus amongst the people I spoke with that we do need to do more collectively. We agreed to do so to ensure that the UN special representative in Afghanistan is fully resourced so that he is in a position to do the work which has been asked of him, particularly with respect to better coordinating the military and civil effort in Afghanistan. In addition, I also sense the mood may be changing amongst European NATO nation partners. I really do sense that people are reconsidering their positions and we might see some further commitments from some of those European based NATO partners.

The government will continue to engage and to push for the further action that we need to substantially progress our campaign in Afghanistan. Success in Afghanistan is important to global security, it is important to the Afghani people and it is important to our troops, who are making real sacrifices on the ground. Securing success in Afghanistan will be the best way that we can thank Andrew Russell, David ‘Poppy’ Pearce, Luke Worsley, Jason Marks, Matty Locke, Sean McCarthy and now Michael Fussell. It is the best way to thank them for what they have done for their country.