Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today and start with the following quote:

The entire future rests upon our shoulders. It depends upon our action, our courage, and our intelligence. If you oppose our intervention in the war, now is the time to make your voice heard.

These words were not uttered by Senator Brown during this parliamentary debate over Australia’s military involvement in Afghanistan—but they could have been. Nor were they spoken by the other Greens members of this parliament, whose opposition to the war is equally unyielding—but they could have been. Those words were not expressed by Mr Andrew Wilkie, who, during his maiden speech in the other place, called the war ‘a great lie peddled by both the government and the opposition’—but they could have been.

The words I have just quoted were first spoken by Charles Lindbergh on 11 September 1941 at an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa, USA. The America Firsters wanted the US to stay out of what they called ‘the European War’. At the very time Lindbergh was preaching his isolationist creed in the American mid-west, Australian troops were besieged in Tobruk, the Germans were driving deep into Russia, and Britain was just barely hanging on. The SS were giving Zyklon B gas its final test run against the mentally infirm before deploying it wholesale in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and the countdown to the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbour, less than three months later, was already underway. The America First movement was a testament to the human capacity for self-delusion.

We see that same delusional state on the other side of this debate today. Now, before going any further, allow me to pre-empt the protests that are doubtless welling up in the throats of my colleagues from the Greens. I am not making a comparison between the Second World War itself and the current conflict in Afghanistan. That would be both silly and totally inaccurate. But I do see similarities between those foolish isolationists of the 1940s who thought America could duck Nazi aggression and these neo-isolationists seven decades later who advocate a rash, foolish pull-out from Afghanistan. They are both afflicted by the same fatal naivete. They both suffer from what Thomas Sowell of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution calls ‘stage 1 thinking’, which he describes as ‘the seeking of immediate gratification without thought of any long-term consequences’.

If I may say so, the ‘stage 1 thinking’ syndrome is a very common affliction within the political Left. But here in this parliament we owe it not only to our troops in the field but to the Australian people to consider what would come after. We have an obligation to think about what would really happen if Senator Brown got his way. First, we must define what that way entails. It goes without saying that the Greens demand the immediate withdrawal of Australian troops from Afghanistan, but their ambition does not end there. Indeed, the record shows that my crossbench colleagues regard the entire NATO mission in Afghanistan as illegitimate. In fact, way back on 23 September 2001, Senator Brown issued a press release that described US military action against the Taliban in the wake of 9/11 as:

… a breach of the UN Charter and of the ANZUS Treaty.

So it is not just our troops that concern the Greens. They want the whole lot out.

That brings us to ask what would take place if we cut and ran from Afghanistan. That is the real question, yet it is a question that can be answered with one simple word—chaos. There would be absolute chaos and death and destruction on a massive scale. It would trigger a flood of Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists, who would pour out of the Hindu Kush to exploit the vacuum left by departing NATO forces. And those terrorists would do what terrorists do best—maim the innocent, kill the defenceless and persecute the vulnerable. The inevitable result would be bloody civil war, a war where there is no guarantee that the government would prevail.

But then I hear Senator Brown protesting that the Afghan government is so terribly corrupt—and, yes, it is true. There is no denying that President Hamid Karzai presides over a flawed administration marred by graft, bribes and electoral fraud. But we live in the real world, not in a utopia, and in that very real world we are forced to deal with things as they are, not as we might wish them to be. While we would all like to see a more honest Afghan government, while we work hard towards that goal we must really ask ourselves, ‘What is the alternative?’ Senator Brown’s alternative means the resurrection of the al-Qaeda sanctuary where the 9/11 plot was hatched and harboured. It means the further destabilisation of an already shaky government in next-door Pakistan, which is struggling against its own radical Islamic insurgency. Anyone who worries about the prospect of Pakistan’s 100-warhead nuclear arsenal falling into jihadi hands should support the war effort in Afghanistan. And anyone who does not have such worries is a ‘stage 1 thinking’ fool.

But there is more here at stake than just high strategy and nuclear geopolitics. This debate hits home at a much more human level as well. It is an undeniable fact that Senator Brown’s alternative also means casting Afghan women into a new dark age of illiteracy, impoverishment and oppression. I find it sadly ironic that a political party espousing such impeccable feminist credentials is willing to sell 15 million Afghan women and girls down the river into Taliban servitude. I find it morally outrageous that Senator Brown and his Greens colleagues would sacrifice half the Afghan population on the altar of a naive isolationism. We all recall the August 2001 photos of women being beaten by the Taliban religious police in the streets of Kabul—beaten for the crime of removing their burqa.

I would like to draw the attention of the Senate to another, much more recent, photograph. This photo appeared on the front cover of the 9 August 2010 edition of Time magazine, just a couple of months ago. I have it with me, and it is an absolutely horrific photograph. I will show it to my colleagues later. It shows a young Afghan girl with a hideous hole where her nose should be.