Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to add some comments, and it is perhaps appropriate that I follow Senator Cameron, whose contribution I think was a valuable one. We are having this debate today whereas in my view it should have been had nine years ago when this country first committed troops to Afghanistan. We are here to clean up the consequences of the former government’s reckless and indefinite commitment to an unwinnable war of doubtful motivation in Afghanistan. This reminds us—and this is what I will mainly confine my remarks to today—of the need for the parliament, as the body in which the will of the people is invested, to decide upon the deployment of the nation’s defence forces.

Our involvement in the war in Afghanistan stands alongside the previous government’s support for the ill-conceived and disastrously executed occupation of Iraq as evidence of the need for a democratic process to be used when undertaking the grave decision to go to war. Senators will no doubt be aware that I currently have legislation in this place—and it is shortly to be introduced into the House of Representatives—that would do just such a thing: require a vote in both houses of parliament before the Australian defence forces were committed to war or warlike situations or hostile environments. That bill was submitted to a committee. The Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade neglected to even hold a hearing because, I was informed, the major parties believed nothing new would be brought to the debate. So the Australian Greens held a hearing. We brought in a very high degree of expertise—a former Defence Secretary, former military personnel who have been involved in deployments, people who have been involved at very senior levels in our diplomatic corps, representatives of the peace movement and a very broadly representative group of people who think about these matters a lot.

The most serious flaw then in the committee’s majority report was the assumption that, having all dimensions of security and diplomatic intelligence at its disposal, the executive arm of government alone should be entrusted with sending Australians into war. If even the comprehensive debacle of the invasion of Iraq is insufficient to shake this unfounded faith then it is very difficult to imagine what it would take to do so. I want to draw the very clear distinction at this point for MPs who have spoken in this place and on the other side of the building that the right to send Australians troops into harm’s way rests properly with the executive and presumably with the military being in control of all the facts. First of all, the occupation of Iraq completely contradicts this notion. It is hard to imagine a situation in which that notion could be more thoroughly proven wrong.

The committee’s report and the arguments we have heard imply that a parliamentary debate would involve the disclosure of classified military and strategic information, which would tie our hands behind their backs. If there is one thing I can leave senators with out of this debate it is that that completely misses the point. The decision to deploy is not a military decision; it is a political one. Once we are there our forces on the ground are obviously invested with the need to make tactical and strategic decisions day to day and they do not need parliament looking over their shoulder at that point. But the decision to deploy in the first place is not a military one; it is a political decision. Our bill rests on that premise.

In 2003 the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, told the nation that we were at war. The decision had already been made by, we understand, no more than about 17 people. There was no debate, there was no discussion and there was no binding vote. The War Powers Bill to amend the Defence Act and put this power into the hands of parliament has been in this House since long before the previous government committed us to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was first introduced into parliament in 1975 by Australian Democrats Senator Colin Mason. That is how long we have had a bill before this parliament—it has effectively been languishing but it has been brought forward at different times—that would remove that power exclusively from the hands of the executive.

I can understand why a defence minister would stand up and say, ‘We believe that that power should reside with the executive,’ or why any minister of the Crown or the Prime Minister should want that power to remain with the executive. That is how power is. But it really defies belief that we could have senators in here who would stand up, whether they are pro- or antiwar or whatever their views are on this deployment, and say that they do not believe that that power should reside in this chamber. We legislate over the construction of a car park, but we do not believe that it is within the wit of the Australian legislature to make these decisions. I reject that idea completely. We believe that this power should rest in the hands of the parliament.

We welcome the recent debate in the House and acknowledge that it would not have occurred without the agreement between Senator Bob Brown and the Prime Minister that, in part, allowed this government to form government in the first place. Probably, if that had not occurred, we still would not be having this debate. But let us hear from the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. The Prime Minister said last week:

I believe this debate is an important one for our people and our parliament.

                        …                   …                   …

Our highest duty is to make wise decisions about war.

So it would appear that the Prime Minister believes it is the duty of parliament to make the decisions about war—either that or we are left with the conclusion that the debate is to be had but that it is to be empty and that the views of Australia’s democratically elected representatives will not be allowed to prevail. The Leader of the Opposition said:

It is right that the parliament should now debate our commitment, first, because something as grave as a serious military campaign should be justified to the parliament …

Of course, he is quite right: something as grave as a military campaign should be justified to the parliament. So I hope that now the Leader of the Opposition would agree that this justification ideally would take place before we commit our forces to an invasion rather than nine years after the fact.

The danger of concentrating the power to send Australian forces to war in too few hands was vividly illustrated by the war in Iraq. Falsified and distorted intelligence was presented as the justification for the invasion of Iraq, and it was not subject to scrutiny from parliament. The majority of Australians opposed that war. Hundreds of thousands of them took to the streets, including me and many of my colleagues, to demonstrate our strong opposition to the war. We were joined by millions of others around the world. They were summarily ignored by the Prime Minister. Would they have been ignored—would we have been ignored—by the parliament? I have seen former Prime Minister John Howard back in the public debate over the last couple of days over the launch of his book, with absolutely no intention to learn a thing—not a word of contrition and not a thought that perhaps this war, which cost at least in the low hundreds of thousands of lives and was based on lies, might have been a mistake. The determination to learn nothing is breathtaking.

Afghanistan now provides us with an equally stark and tragic example. The original decision by the previous government to go into Afghanistan, to the extent it was justified, was justified principally as retaliation for the attacks on United States soil on 11 September 2001. The attacks were carried out primarily by Saudi and Egyptian nationals. They were planned and coordinated mostly in Germany and the United States. According to reports by al-Jazeera and other media agencies, the Taliban at the time offered to turn al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden over to the United States if they were provided with evidence of his involvement in the attacks. The United States authorities declined that opportunity, preferring instead to invade Afghanistan as the first recourse and not the last.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair also spoke of the monstrous nature of the Taliban, particularly in regard to its treatment of women, and the need to put an end to the regime. After more than nine years of occupation, the Taliban remain very powerful in large sections of Afghanistan. Rival factions including the Northern Alliance have also been just as brutal and antidemocratic, and the Western-backed Karzai government has a poor record on civil rights and particularly on women’s rights.

Afghanistan today, as it was, is riven by warring factions. The Taliban, war lords, drug barons and the Karzai government fight a daily and very bloody battle for power. To further illustrate the tragedy of Afghanistan, that government is notorious for corruption. The US commander in Afghanistan, General Petraeus, has described the Karzai administration as a ‘criminal syndicate’, and the last two Afghan elections were rife with allegations of electoral fraud. So who exactly are we supporting here? The ongoing presence of foreign armed forces in Afghanistan acts as a provocation for recruitment to the Taliban and other insurgent forces—which is why President Karzai is now also known by the more realistic title ‘the Mayor of Kabul’. With Karzai’s vote-rigging and the notoriety of his brother as a drug lord gangster, it is little wonder that his government is under siege while we train his army. Only a legitimate Afghan government which draws legitimacy from the mandate of the people could successfully put an end to the fighting in Afghanistan.

The defeat of the Taliban has been presented as virtually synonymous with the defeat of al-Qaeda. Today, of course, much of al-Qaeda’s organised capacity has been displaced to Pakistan. Senior United States officials confirm that al-Qaeda is now barely present in Afghanistan, estimating that there are perhaps fewer than 100 al-Qaeda operatives remaining in Afghanistan. The campaign against the Taliban is an entirely different proposition and continues to be extremely arduous. Whatever we think of the Taliban, no-one has yet convincingly argued—not in this debate as far as I am aware—that they represent a threat to Australia, to Australian interests or indeed to the United States.

Let us consider the question of rebuilding Afghanistan, of which we have heard quite a bit over the last week or so of this debate. Let us reconsider our priorities. It is estimated that one littoral combat ship costs $613 million. According to World Bank figures, that sum would be enough to educate 6.8 million children in Afghanistan for nine years—or we could buy one warship. Which investment would do more to strengthen Afghanistan and Afghan civil society? The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom have estimated that $287 billion dollars has been spent on the war in Afghanistan. Senator Cameron provided us with some of the forward estimates, and they are breathtaking. This translates to a $300,000 cash payment to everyone in Afghanistan for the price of the deployment and the war—or, incidentally, a cheque for $13,400 for every Australian. One billion dollars, which is less than 0.35 per cent of the money spent on the war in Afghanistan, could pay for 2½ billion meals for hungry people; 31½ million child immunisations against the six main childhood diseases of diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, polio, tetanus and tuberculosis; more than 700,000 family homes; more than 270,000 schools furnished with desks, chairs and tables; or 53 million children supplied with schoolbooks for a whole year. This is for $1 billion, around a third of one per cent of the money that we have spent bombing that country.

So what exactly are the occupation forces investing in? What are we doing to assist the Afghan people in rebuilding Afghan civil society in a way that we can endure? I have never quite understood how it is that, in a country with the history of Afghanistan, where we are simply training the army and the police forces while neglecting this entirely corrupt government that we appear to be propping up, we think that when we finally withdraw anything will happen other than that the security forces, who have been extremely well trained, will simply devolve to the situation that prevailed before we arrived. That is the critical thing to remember. Somehow conflating the training of a strong military with the creation of a viable democracy is breathtakingly naive.

Supporters of the continuing occupation argue that the withdrawal of foreign armed forces will see the country devoured by the Taliban. But what exactly is it that has been achieved in nine years of violent military occupation: an Afghan army that cannot or will not fight, an Afghan police that cannot or will not uphold the law and a parliamentary system that has not had the support of the majority of the Afghan people? Exactly what kind of nation-building exercise has taken almost a decade to produce a state that would allegedly collapse without the presence of vast foreign armed forces to prop up its unpopular and corrupt government?

In recent months, we have seen the contents of the Wikileaks website publication of an archive of more than 91,000 United States military internal logs of the war in Afghanistan, covering the period between January 2004 and December 2009. It was confirmed that there is frequent and barely acknowledged civilian loss of life in Afghanistan—people killed by badly trained and often panicking United States soldiers, people seeking revenge with the use of smart bombs and drones and people killed by accident and through negligence. Civilians—among them women and children—are significantly represented in the figures of the dead and injured. A very large number are killed by US military computer operators in Nevada flying drones who never have to witness directly the consequences of their work.

We know that there are extrajudicial killings being carried out by US and Australian special forces. While this is a violation of international human rights law, there are absolutely no accountability mechanisms. Are the victims of these killings combatants? Who is determining the legality, let alone the morality, of these acts? We know also from the release of these documents that the Taliban have begun using surface-to-air missiles. Their predecessors were given these by the United States in the 1980s, principally to fight the Soviet invaders. Today, the most logical source of these weapons is the Pakistan armed forces—our erstwhile allies—who receive $1.6 billion in military aid from the United States.

This is so symptomatic of the flawed logic that underlies this perpetual war. The Karzai government is in talks with ostensibly moderate Taliban elements and other insurgent groups, with the hope of reaching some kind of peace agreement. Much of the insurgent element in Afghanistan is implacably opposed to foreign-occupying soldiers remaining on Afghanistan soil. The entire history of Afghanistan, from before Alexander the Great to the fall of the Soviet Union, demonstrates that this should come as absolutely no surprise to us.

Those in this parliament who insist that we must keep soldiers in Afghanistan while denying themselves the right to even vote on the issue because of the importance of this country’s strategic relationship with the United States need to consider President Obama’s statement, quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book: ‘I am not doing 10 years. I am not spending a trillion dollars.’ The Prime Minister says she will do 10 years and she will write an open and blank cheque to this occupation. Is it worth asking whether Australian forces will remain in Afghanistan once the United States has departed? The case for continuing the occupation of Afghanistan was never compelling and now it has fallen apart completely. It was never justified to parliament.

So I come back again to the fact that our open and democratic system includes an ongoing forum for discussion where leaders must provide reasoning and at least minimal accountability for their decisions—and that is, of course, this building, the Australian parliament. The decision to send Australian men and women into harm’s way should not, and never, happen behind closed doors. This is not a question of military tactics or military intelligence. These are political decisions, and each and every member of this parliament should be required to stand up and give an account of themselves before they send Australian men and women into harm’s way. It is a call that should be made in the open by elected members and by the public that they are meant to represent so that we can be held accountable for the life-and-death decisions that are then made on the ground.

The war powers bill which puts this power into the hands of parliament is not by any means a radical proposition. In the UK, the very source of our own Westminster tradition, Foreign Secretary William Hague of the Conservative Party has been a strong advocate of similar legislation. The debate in the UK around the transfer of the prerogative power to declare war, ratify treaties and approve judges from the executive to the parliament is well advanced, having now also drawn support from former Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Our ally the United States, for centuries, has held a similar provision that subjects the decision to go to war to a broader forum. Section 8 of the United States Constitution says, ‘Congress shall have the power to declare war.’

We must bring Australia into line with other democracies like Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey, where troop deployment is set down in constitutional or legislative provisions. What is it about the Australian legislature which leads us to believe that we do not have the maturity and that these decisions should be left to the executive? It is shameful for a member or a senator to stand up in this place and say they do not believe they have the will or the wit to commit these decisions by their own vote. Arguments against using our democratic structures on the grave issue of troop deployment include that it would be impractical, restrictive or inefficient. These arguments ignore the fact that parliaments make complex decisions—rapidly when necessary—and that the bill has been carefully drafted for circumstances where recourse to parliament may not be possible. Autocracies or dictatorships may well use decision-making processes that are more rapid and efficient, but surely no-one in this parliament would argue that those forms of government are acceptable or, indeed, legitimate.

One of the government’s ministers has described the war in Afghanistan as ‘unwinnable’. We have heard the highly conditioned comments by a surprising number—to me—of members of parliament on both sides of the house about the grave misgivings that surround this war. The Leader of the Opposition said, ‘Something as grave as a serious military campaign should be justified to the parliament.’ Yes, they are both correct; their statements are inextricably connected. Parliament is answerable to the people and only parliament should make decisions like these. Never again should the executive be able to unilaterally commit this country to an unwinnable war.

I will pay my respects at this point to former Australian Democrats senators—most recently, Senator Andrew Bartlett, who had carriage of this bill. It was the first piece of legislation that I picked up when I started my term in the middle of 2008. I cannot think of a more important matter for this parliament to discuss. This is not a fringe idea. It is mainstream in many of the countries that we would consider our peers around the world. But, indeed, in Australia the debate is more mature than perhaps the debate so far in parliament would suggest. Lieutenant General Peter Francis Leahy, former chief of the Australian Army, supports the war powers prerogative being devolved to parliament rather than to the executive. Brigadier Adrian D’Hage—a platoon commander in Vietnam, who was awarded the Military Cross and who commanded an infantry battalion and has been Director of Joint Operations and head of Defence Public Relations—supports this bill, as does Paul Barratt, a former Secretary of the Department of Defence. It is about time that we had a more mature debate in this parliament, particularly while we have Australian troops in the field. They should be brought home without delay.