Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to provide my contribution to this national debate in this parliament on the war in Afghanistan. Speakers before me in this debate in both the House and here in the Senate have comprehensively convinced and outlined the rationale for Australia’s ongoing presence in that country. Our military contribution comprises around 1,500 Australian Defence Force personnel who are deployed in Afghanistan with the majority, over 1,200 of those, being based in Oruzgan province.

Our substantial military, civilian and development assistance focuses on training and mentoring the Afghan National Army 4th Brigade in Oruzgan province to assume responsibility for the province’s security. We are building the capacity of the Afghan National Police to assist with civil policing functions in Oruzgan and helping to improve the Afghan government’s capacity to deliver core services and generate income-earning opportunities for its people, and of course operations to disrupt insurgents’ operations and supply routes utilising the Special Operations Task Force. In Afghanistan we work in partnership with the United States, New Zealand, Singapore and Slovakia as the International Security Assistance Force combined team in Oruzgan, which commenced on 1 August this year.

Tonight I want to put a very personal face on the statistics and the facts of our involvement in Afghanistan. The majority of our personnel currently in Afghanistan derived from 1st Brigade at Robertson Barracks, in my home town of Darwin. I am very proud this evening to provide this contribution in front of Lieutenant William Cumming, from the Royal Australian Navy, who is here with me this week in Parliament House on his parliamentary defence program.

One of the major elements of the Combined Team Oruzgan is the second mentoring task force. The mission of the MRTF-2 is to provide operational mentor and liaison teams. These teams live with and train, mentor and support their Afghan National Army 4th Brigade colleagues. There are more than 750 Australian Army personnel from 5RAR 1st Brigade at Robertson Barracks involved in MRTF-2, which is based around an infantry battle group from the 5th Battalion—as I said, RAR, the Royal Australian Regiment.

I just want to take a moment to pay tribute to those men and women, and I hope that if they get to read my contribution online, whether they are in Afghanistan or still back at Robertson Barracks, I can say hello, and a fond hello, to some of the many personnel I would have met in March 2009 while I was in East Timor as part of Operation Astute, as part of the parliamentary defence program. I understand, from my meeting with Brigadier Gus McLachlan last Friday, that most of the people I would have met in East Timor in March 2009 as part of 5RAR have now been deployed to Afghanistan. So I have a very personal knowledge of the kind of personnel who are working in Afghanistan on behalf of this country—certainly under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Darren Huxley.

The people I met in East Timor were people who were professional soldiers, who were trained to be exquisite in their knowledge of the field in what they do, who were capable experts and who would do this country extremely proud no matter what country they were deployed to or in what circumstances. These people have come back from East Timor and have spent months training in all sorts of situations, in all kinds of routines, in all kinds of drills, learning the language and learning the culture so that they can contribute in a professional way to what is happening in Afghanistan. That is what they want to do, that is what they live to do, that is the chosen career they have voluntarily opted for as being part of the Army, and from what I saw in East Timor, they do it exceptionally well.

5RAR is a regiment of 1 Brigade; it is the home of the Australian Army’s 1 Brigade in Darwin at Robertson Barracks—or ‘Robo’ Barracks as we locals call it. It is in the electorate of Solomon. The Darwin-based troops are involved in other critical elements of the Combined Team Oruzgan. There are provincial reconstruction teams which provide a trade training school, work section and security element, which contribute to the enhancement of security of other government agencies working in Oruzgan. Seventy Australian Army personnel from 1 Brigade are deployed in the provincial reconstruction team. The brigade also provides 15 personnel to the force engineer construction team, whose role is to provide force level engineer support to deployed ADF elements operating in the Oruzgan province. Eighty personnel from 1 Brigade are involved in the Force Communications Unit of the Combined Team Oruzgan and a further 21 from 1 Brigade personnel are involved in the artillery training scheme at Kabul, which provides training, mentoring and training activity development to the Afghan National Army artillery branch and school of artillery, and 1 Brigade also provides approximately 20 personnel at the Combined Team Oruzgan headquarters. The CTU headquarters is a brigade-sized tactical command post headquarters tasked with command and control of multinational elements operating in the Oruzgan province.

CTU has the ability to use a wide variety of military capabilities to prevent regression of the current security situation in Oruzgan, and to support the development of the Afghan National Army 4th Brigade. Capabilities include fire support engineers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, psychological operations, information operations, electronic warfare, signal support, administration and logistical support. CTU is currently commanded by Colonel Jim Creighton of the United States Army, and his deputy commander is Australian Army Colonel Dennis Malone

What I want to do tonight is paint a picture of the contribution that our people at Robertson Barracks have provided: 985 defence personnel from Robo Barracks are currently in Afghanistan, and as I understand it 750 of those are from 5RAR. Clearly 1 Brigade, the Darwin-based brigade, has a central role in Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan. But what I also want to do is place on record tonight the very special relationship that the Darwin community has with the ADF. The Army, Navy and Air Force all have bases in Darwin, and the military there are well integrated into the local community and well respected and appreciated.

I want to take time in my contribution to also pay my gratitude and my thanks to the 450 families in Darwin who are the wives and the spouses, the sisters, dads and brothers even, relatives and friends of those people who are deployed in Afghanistan. A lot of effort goes into supporting those families as they cope for eight months while the person they cherish dearly is deployed to Afghanistan. But that is part of the role, that is part of the team, that is part of the commitment, and I think in this debate we have to remember that our people in Afghanistan want to be there because that is their career. That is what they have trained to do, that is what they choose to do in their life—that is, to represent this country and to fight for democracy and freedom. And not only should we support them; we should be there with them ensuring that they do the best job they can do because we equip them well, we support them well, but we also support the families they have left behind.

The deep personal commitment of Army personnel at all levels to being in Afghanistan is obvious. From my own discussions and meetings, everyone who goes to Afghanistan sees it as the culmination of the reasons they joined the Army in the first place: the useful application of their skills and training. As Brigadier McLachlan reminded me last week, joining the Army in this country is voluntary; people choose to enlist with the full knowledge of potential involvement in conflicts such as Afghanistan. And we have seen from the description of the teams and areas to which 1 Brigade troops are deployed, a large focus of the Army’s presence is about training, mentoring, protecting and developing the local capacity.

There is no doubt that the majority of us taking part in this debate have no empirical sense of the country and the people we are talking about. Afghanistan is largely a media construct for most of us, known only through news accounts of war and terrorism. I would warrant that most of us envisage dusty, barren deserts and harsh, inaccessible mountains. Most of us would have no sense at all of the history or the culture of Afghanistan, but our troops do. The vast majority of us will have no opportunity to visit Afghanistan, but a sense of the social history and daily life of Afghans can be gleaned from reading. Khaled Hosseini’s book A Thousand Splendid Suns is set in Afghanistan, largely in Kabul. Though a novel, it conveys in a very real way what life was like for Afghans and the way it changed under the Taliban. It gives one a sense of normal lives in Kabul, both before and during the harsh reign of the Taliban. Kabul was not the rocket ravaged ruin that we see on our screens. Hosseini describes Kabul as follows:

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

This was a good place. It is the pre-Taliban Afghanistan that we are seeking to restore—while, I might add, relying on our so very professional and well-trained troops to do so.

The Taliban took control of Afghanistan on 27 September 1996. Initially seen as heroes and freedom fighters who managed to overthrow the Soviet regime, their own regime quite rapidly became repressive and abusive, particularly of women. Women in Afghanistan had received the right to vote in the 1920s and were making a strong push for equality by the 1960s. Women made up 15 per cent of the Afghan legislature. In the 1990s, 70 per cent of school teachers, 50 per cent of government workers and university students and 40 per cent of doctors in Kabul were women. This is not the Afghanistan with which we were confronted nine years ago. As we know, the Taliban banished women from the workforce, forbade them an education and, indeed, did not allow them to be out alone on the streets and would beat them for not wearing the full burqa. Free speech was suppressed.

Our presence in Afghanistan is not only about protecting Australians from terrorism. We are doing something fundamentally important in Afghanistan: we are getting the country back to being a place where women and children are protected and where equal rights are restored. We have an ongoing commitment to that social rebuilding. There are already positive signs. As many of my colleagues in the lower house have said during their contributions to the debate in that place, we are creating a situation where the ordinary Afghan citizen can be confident that the International Security Assistance Force and the Afghan National Security Forces are making headway. More than two million girls are now enrolled in schools. In the words of Khaled Hosseini: ‘A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated.’

For me, this is the big reason why we are in Afghanistan and why we should stay. This goes to the core of what we are fighting for. We cannot and should not—and must not—walk away from that. It would be remiss, however, not to mention the huge sacrifices made by Australians in the pursuit of these operations. Twenty-one ADF members have been killed in action—one, of course, from the Northern Territory, whose home base was Katherine. It is the ultimate sacrifice, with each death devastating families and each death sadly felt in the ADF, alongside the community’s expression of sorrow and support. The father of Nathan Bewes, the 17th Australian soldier to be killed in the conflict in Afghanistan, said with humanity and dignity that his son had contributed to getting Afghanistan back to being a place where women and children are protected. This is a sentiment echoed by many who leave for Afghanistan and by many left behind on their departure. They are proud to be getting Afghanistan back to being a safe place, while making this world a safe place as well.

We have a responsibility to finish what we started in Afghanistan and to continue not only to be part of the alliance with the US, as sanctioned by the United Nations, but also to be part of a global alliance, grow that country and support its people. We have an equal responsibility to support those on the ground who are working for the security and development of Afghanistan, in the name of this country, Australia, and for our own national and personal security.