Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

At the outset I pay tribute to the thousands of men and women of the Australian defence forces who have served in Afghanistan. I pay special tribute to the 21 Australian soldiers who have lost their lives in the service of our nation in Afghanistan and acknowledge the unimaginable grief and burden borne by their loved ones. And to the almost 160 soldiers who have been injured there, they are not forgotten and they deserve every continuing support from us. We should also acknowledge all the dead and injured in Afghanistan, the troops of our allies and the many citizens of Afghanistan.

I start my contribution to this debate by talking about the need for debate itself. There are lots of reasons that have been given over the years for our involvement in this conflict. We were there to track down terrorists, specifically Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, although it seems that bin Laden is in all likelihood now in north-west Pakistan. We are also there to overthrow the Taliban who, in the words of former US President George W Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, gave comfort to terrorists. We are there to support the spread of democracy.

It is this last point that I want to talk about first in the context of this debate. If we are fighting for democracy, should we not have more faith in democracy and specifically parliamentary democracy here in Australia? Australia has been fighting this war in Afghanistan for more than nine years. That is longer than World War I, that is longer than World War II, that is longer than our involvement in Vietnam; yet it has taken nine years for this war to be debated in the Australian parliament—although I do wish to acknowledge the four comprehensive and considered ministerial statements Senator John Faulkner made on Afghanistan during his time as Minister for Defence.

I appreciate the conflict has received bipartisan support from the major parties, but bipartisan support is not the same as unanimous support, as I believe the Australian Greens, the lower house Independents, including Andrew Wilkie, and other fine people like Liberal MP Mal Washer would attest to. Surely, if we believe in what our soldiers are fighting for, we should also believe in the necessity for a proper debate in Australia’s parliament about military engagement before anyone goes to war.

Last week Prime Minister Gillard said that our troops could be in Afghanistan for another 10 years, possibly longer. That is just not acceptable. The time for debating whether or not we should have got involved in Afghanistan is passed. The fact is we are there. As a nation we made a commitment and now we have the moral responsibility to sort out this mess. What do we want to accomplish? What are our goals? What are our responsibilities? As a nation we should have our own aims, our own defined outcomes, and not rely on other countries to set those benchmarks for us.

Former Chief of the Defence Force General Peter Gration was right when he said Australian troops in Afghanistan need an exit strategy based on clear and measurable objectives. And if we do not set deadlines for our goals then we may never achieve them. The shorter the time period the more effort we will put into meeting those deadlines and the less time we will waste—and the fewer lives will be at stake. There is no reason why we cannot begin to draw up an exit strategy now that sees a considered, staged withdrawal of our troops with a final date within the next 24 months. This is an achievable deadline. Deadlines are a strange thing. They involve politicians making decisions. Australians must demand a deadline that this government and this parliament are responsible for. Ten years is not a deadline.

There is no doubt that we need to manage our troop withdrawal carefully. If we do not, we are in danger of leaving behind a dangerously unstable situation and risking what gains we have made already. In this context, we should take the following three guiding principles into account: firstly, we have to decide how we can play our part in taking steps towards achieving social and economic security in Oruzgan province; secondly, we need to determine what aid we can provide in the future and the mechanisms by which that aid is delivered; and, thirdly, we have to take into account our relationship and treaty obligations with the US and how we work with them to maintain and consolidate the efforts of our troops to date as well as our international obligations.

Currently, the main task for Australian troops is training the 4th Brigade of the Afghan National Army to keep the peace and protect themselves and their fellow citizens. The Afghan National Army needs to have the capability to manage Oruzgan province before Australia can withdraw from that area. The Afghan soldiers are willing but people I have spoken to who have served in Afghanistan say that the Afghan soldiers are underpaid and underresourced. Their barracks are of poor quality. They do not have uniforms or enough weaponry. They are performing a thankless task for not much in return and they know that they and their families will be the first to be targeted if the Taliban ever takes power again.

If a staged withdrawal of our troops is dependent on the Afghan National Army being able to protect the province then we should be taking further action to make sure they have the resources and equipment they need. We cannot continue to muddle through and hope it will all work out sometime in the future.

After a recent visit to Afghanistan, the Sydney Morning Herald’s international editor Peter Hartcher wrote a well-considered and moving piece on how hard it is for coalition forces to run counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan, because you simply cannot always work out who is Taliban and who is an ally. Peter Hartcher went on to write about the tentative successes of a counterinsurgency that Australia is helping to fight. The Taliban was driven out of a number of villages. That was a big success as a result of the direct support of Australian troops and Australian advice to the locals to take on the Taliban. It was a good news story.

Peter Hartcher quoted Australian commander in Afghanistan Major-General John Cantwell as saying:

Our mission is not to defeat the insurgency in Oruzgan. That’s not our mission. It’s not our mission to hunt down and kill or capture every Taliban or insurgent in this province. Our mission is very clear—train the Afghans to manage security around the key population areas of Oruzgan. That’s a limited scope ... Our mission is to train those guys. And we need, I think, to make that clearer to the public and in some case to our own soldiers.

Major-General Cantwell is right. We need to be clear about what our aims are, both to the troops we are asking to carry them out and also to the Australian public. The need for the Afghan National Army to defend and protect their citizens on their terms cannot be underestimated.

Our aid program to Afghanistan also needs to be reassessed in view of withdrawing our troops. As we scale our aid programs up—as we must—we need to ensure there is a sufficient security presence to enable these aid programs to be delivered and to protect our aid workers. Non-government aid organisations have resources, skills and experience that troops do not have—and nor should we expect that of our troops.

Because aid workers are not soldiers, locals, for many reasons, are more likely to accept the help they offer. And we must restructure our aid so that it is linked to specific projects so we can eliminate the breathtaking and endemic corruption and rorting that exists throughout the Afghan government.

Bob Woodward’s report in his recent book that US General David Petraeus told President Obama that the Karzai regime is a criminal syndicate rather than a functioning government must be heeded. The fact that President Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali has been implicated in the opium trade—opium that ends up as heroin in the veins of so many young Australians—should disgust all of us. We know that 90 percent of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan, and we know that Afghan government officials are making money from the drugs that destroy so many lives here and in the rest of the world.

The cruel irony of the exponential growth in opium crops in Afghanistan, and with it the flooding of cheap heroin into the West, should not escape us. It is linked to a failure of leadership on the part of the United States to tackle the breathtaking corruption of the warlords that the Karzai government is dependent upon and is in fact part of.

Even more recently, former United Nations deputy special representative to Afghanistan Peter Galbraith spoke out about the huge cash payments President Karzai has been accepting from Iran, one of the countries of the ‘axis of evil’ that President George W Bush referred to so often. Peter Galbraith is one of the few who has spoken out about the widespread corruption in Afghanistan. Last year, he blew the whistle on vote rigging in the presidential election, and lost his job with the UN. He says:

A counter-insurgency strategy requires an Afghan partner to work, and when the Afghan partner is so obviously corrupt from top to bottom, there’s no chance the strategy will work.

We need to be sure that all of the Australian aid is being used for rebuilding lives, for giving real hope to a nation that has been wracked by conflict for decades. The report just a few days ago that suitcases and plastic bags stuffed with cash from corrupt dealings are being spirited out of Kabul airport on a weekly basis should appal all of us.

Lastly, as part of any withdrawal strategy, we need to acknowledge our relationship with the United States. There is a lot of criticism around saying that we are too close and too dependent on America. Rightly or wrongly, there is no denying that Australia benefits from US intelligence, resources and the protection this strategic alliance offers us. But as a close ally, we need to have the courage to tell the truth to our friend—to tell them that, for the last nine years they have not had a coherent strategy in Afghanistan; to tell them that it is wrong to enter a conflict without a clear exit strategy from the very beginning; to tell them that not backing up a military campaign with massive and effective humanitarian aid would lead to disaster, both in Afghanistan and abroad.

And we need to tell them that it is not good enough to replace the brutal fundamentalism of the Taliban with a regime that is so fundamentally corrupt that it risks corroding so much of the good that we have done. The consequences of not telling the truth have led to this quagmire. Australia needs to take assertive action to ensure this nightmare ends. It is time to draw a line in the sand. It is time to bring this to an end. It is time to begin the countdown to an exit date from Afghanistan.