Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] The Greens have been calling for the withdrawal of Australian forces from Afghanistan for at least the past decade, yet even we were shocked and appalled at the catastrophe that has unfolded in Kabul in the past four days. I was watching some footage of my former Senate colleague Scott Ludlam from the 2012-13 estimates. Going back to 2011, he was initiating debates in this place, the Senate, and asking questions about why our forces were still in Afghanistan. This was following the apprehension of Osama bin Laden and the disruption of the al-Qaeda network, the original intention when going into Afghanistan, which I note for the record the Greens originally supported. Senator Ludlam asked what the withdrawal plan was and what the strategic imperative was for having our forces remain in Afghanistan. All the way through his time in the Senate, he, Christine Milne and Bob Brown—indeed, many of us, including all of my colleagues who have spoken here tonight—were asking the question: when is Australia going to withdraw from this seemingly endless conflict?

We have been repeatedly lied to over many, many years by many politicians. Nearly 200 years ago a military strategist, Prussian aristocrat Carl von Clausewitz, wrote his treatise On War. One of the most famous passages to come from that treatise was that which said that war is simply a continuation of politics by different means. I opposed the Iraq War. I've never felt something as strongly as I did back then. I've never felt a sense of such foreboding that what we were doing was wrong as I felt back then. I opposed that because I could see the politics—the corrupted, self-interested, shallow and dangerous politics—of that war. And it's interesting to note that many experts have said one of the key reasons that we failed in Afghanistan was the illegal and unilateral invasion of Iraq—fighting a war on two fronts.

The answer is a lot simpler than that from my point of view. Afghanistan was always going to be a failure because of politics. Politics reflect the national interest, and what we've seen with the withdrawal from Afghanistan—and the way it has been conducted in recent weeks has shocked the world—is politics. The US are doing what is in their national and political interest. Here I come to a very important point: when the Prime Minister was asked on Insiders on the weekend what he knew about the shambolic and appalling chaos unfolding in Kabul, it was pretty clear he didn't know much. He made it very clear we were there to support our allies in the US and that we receive our advice from our allies in the US, just like we did when we followed them into this war and into Iraq and many, many years ago into Vietnam. And I raise that because Vietnam has been drawn into this messaging fray in the media in recent days—how we could possibly have repeated the same mistakes of history as we did back in Vietnam!

I note Mr Malcolm Fraser, one of the last true Liberals in this country, putting politics aside and urging the Australian parliament to put politics aside and immediately take a significant humanitarian intake of refugees into this country. Many of those refugees I grew up with as a young boy in this country. My dad was a Vietnam vet, and Australians felt very strongly that we should honour the Vietnamese and look after them. And, likewise, today, tonight and this week Australians feel equally as strongly that we should honour those and protect those that have supported us, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Australia's continuing participation in this war in the last 10 years.

What we have seen unfolding in Kabul is either a massive intelligence failure that has led to the Taliban controlling all the arms that have been left on the ground in Kabul—the billions of dollars worth of weapons that they now have—or the Afghan army unprepared for this contingency or unwilling to fight. There are so many questions we need answered, that we need to get to the bottom of, not just so we make sure this kind of catastrophe isn't repeated in history but, as has been pointed out so poignantly in this debate tonight by so many senators, because of the veterans in Australia and their families, for those who have died—for them so that they don't feel that their sacrifice and their time was a waste.

I want to raise two important points that we need to be thinking about as a nation. The first is: this is all the advertisement this country needs to consider war powers reform. I know my colleague Senator Steele-John will talk about this shortly, so I won't go into that in much more detail. But, while we leave the decision-making in the hands of a few people—go back to von Clausewitz—in the hands of politics and the politics of a few, without scrutiny and without debate, we will continue to go into these wars, we will continue to lose the lives of young Australians and we will continue to fail to meet the objectives of these conflicts.

I actually questioned what the objective of this conflict was. It's interesting that Mr Barnaby Joyce, when asked in question time in the other place today, said that we went into Afghanistan because of the Bali bombings and because of the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. Well, Mr Joyce didn't do his homework very well, did he? Those bombings occurred well after we went into Afghanistan and after we went into Iraq. And many of us have pointed out that these wars would not destroy or beat terrorism—indeed, they would make it worse; they would make Australia an enemy. While our national interest was coupled to the US national interest, we would become a target. Indeed, I think there's plenty of evidence that that is correct.

This invasion of Afghanistan, this occupation of Afghanistan, has failed to counter global terrorism. Indeed, I believe it's made it worse. Many of us raised those issues—as, by the way, did many, many experts on this subject—to put the politics aside, which leads me to the second point I would like to make very strongly. This was the first time that the ANZUS treaty was invoked by our Prime Minister: to take Australian troops off to Afghanistan. To use the words of Malcolm Fraser, who wrote about this just months before he died, we now need to revisit that treaty after all these years. We need to question whether that treaty is built for purpose for this age. We need to question whether Australia's interests are always the same as those of the US. I would argue very passionately and very strongly that that is not always the case. Indeed, we need to forge our own foreign policy and determine what is in our national interests, and that should be done by this parliament, not by a few politicians who are making this up as they go along. If we continue to make these mistakes, we will continue to put future generations of this country at risk.

I've got to say that it has appalled me in recent days to see our Prime Minister fronting the cameras—and we saw a bit of it on show today in Senate question time from Minister Payne and others—trying to turn this amazing effort by our military, this evacuation, into some kind of victory at the end of a very shameful and very dark chapter for this country: 20 years of occupation of a foreign country, for what purpose very few people could ever ascertain and for what purpose we were never really told, except for platitudes about why we were there and how it was honourable to fight under the flag.

Over the years, I've worked very closely with our veterans. The Greens initiated the first inquiry into veteran homelessness, suicide and PTSD, in 2015. The reason we did that was that we knew there's a cost to war, and it's not just the fact that we lost 41 Australians, who didn't need to die in this conflict and who have families who still suffer to this day. But many veterans also came home with other wounds—deep wounds, psychological wounds—that will never heal. The same applies to their families. We wanted that inquiry to help veterans, but we also wanted this country to understand the cost of war and the cost of politicians making decisions that put other lives, Australian lives, in harm's way.

We expect a lot from our Australian Defence Force. I have been a member of that institution myself, as have my father and many of my friends, including many who fought in Afghanistan over many years. I can say today that I'm not going to stand by and watch Scotty from marketing, our Prime Minister, try to spin this into a new marketing win for his government. While this catastrophe unfolds, I will, however, thank the Australian Defence personnel, who are doing a magnificent job; the staff at DFAT; and the many officials out there who are working as hard as they possibly can to try and bring these people to Australia or elsewhere. For that I thank them. That is what our priority should be now. That is why we are having this debate today. But soon we need to have an honest appraisal of not just what went wrong at the end of this conflict, why we were there for so long and what purpose it was meant to achieve but, most importantly, how we can avoid this ever, ever happening again.