Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Link to 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.

Steve Hutchins (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Can I see it, Senator?

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

I am happy to show it to you, Mr Acting Deputy President, and I seek leave to table it.

Leave granted.

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President. The caption on Time reads: ‘What happens if we leave Afghanistan: Aisha, 18, had her nose and ears cut off last year on orders from the Taliban because she fled abusive in-laws.’ If that is not bad enough, the Taliban has been attacking girls schools throughout the country with poison gas. That photograph, in my view, epitomises the barbarity that we will force upon those women and young girls in Afghanistan if we take the move that Senator Brown wants us to adopt. It is absolutely intolerable, in my view, that we could put anyone at risk of a repetition of what is on the front page of the Time magazine. What Senator Brown and his Greens party colleagues are effectively advocating is open slather for jihadi barbarity. That, in my view, is just completely unacceptable. They are effectively declaring open season on Afghan women and anyone else who believes in modernity over medievalism. Currently, the Afghan government is far from perfect, and of course more must be done to protect Afghan women from domestic abuse. But, while Hamid Karzai builds schools for girls, the Taliban destroys them. It is as simple as that.

In closing, Senator Brown may want to run, but this is a threat from which we simply cannot hide. Events such as 9/11, Bali, the London subway and the Madrid rail attacks all show that if we do not take the fight to them they will bring it to us. In Afghanistan we are fighting enemies whose determination to drag the globe into medieval darkness is only matched by their ruthlessness in achieving that goal. They represent a veiled form of fascism that must be opposed and not appeased. In that regard, we would do well to remember Winston Churchill’s quote that ‘an appeaser is someone who feeds the crocodile in the hope of being eaten last’. Charles Lindbergh was on a fool’s errand on that September night back in 1941, and I believe that the Greens are on a similar flight of folly in this debate. I speak to express my determined support for Australia’s war effort in Afghanistan. I thank the chamber.

Concetta Fierravanti-Wells (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the motion on Afghanistan. Much has been said, and so at this stage of the debate I will keep my comments brief. Members of our Defence Force are a dedicated group of professionals who joined their respective services in the knowledge that one day the government may make a decision which could put them in harm’s way, particularly when all avenues of government effort, including diplomacy and dialogue, have failed to resolve a crisis situation. Accordingly, it behoves the Australian government to ensure that our defence forces are fully equipped, well trained and able to be sustained in order to meet potential threats to our democratic way of life and, indeed, the freedoms we now enjoy today. Let us not forget the many sacrifices that have been made by members of our defence forces past and present; in all likelihood they will be called upon to do so again well into the future of our very complex and sometimes troubled world.

Afghanistan to date has had a long history of civil unrest, and our involvement in defeating the Taliban is, hopefully, a final chapter where the Afghan people will be able to go about their lives in peace and prosperity. Our involvement in Afghanistan received bipartisan support, and, although it had been a tough and protracted campaign, with many making the ultimate sacrifice for their country, we must be steadfast, stay the course and complete the mission. We should explain to the Australian people our intent and why we need to resolve the Afghan crisis.

This debate may be timely in terms of the protracted nature of the Afghan campaign. Based on military judgment, the Australian government may, as required, modify and redefine the Afghan strategy for mission success. However, I have concerns about the intent and the myopic ideology of the left through their manifestations in Labor, the Greens and their various hangers-on, including GetUp, the unions and some media commentators. I fear that beneath the surface of their intent lies a more sinister undertone. My husband served for 35 years in the Royal Australian Navy. He remembers only too well how poorly servicemen were treated during the Vietnam era, mostly by the left wing of politics and their lackeys in the community. It was a disgraceful situation then, and now today those opposing should conscientiously keep the putrid aspects of their ideologies in check. Let us not return to those dark days when service men and women were subjected to ridicule and abuse simply because they were members of the Defence Force and were implementing Australian government policy.

I remind the Labor-Green alliance to ensure that our armed forces are fully supported in their endeavours, particularly when we have sent them into harm’s way. Our service men and women, and their families and loved ones, need to know that the government is supporting them in a very tough mission in full knowledge that what they are doing is right.

Guy Barnett (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I stand here today to support the government from the opposition’s position with respect to the importance of our involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan is a direct response to the worldwide threat of terrorism, which reared its ugly head most devastatingly on 11 September 2001. Most of us here—and I think most in Australia—remember where we were at that time. I was at home in Hobart and was shocked, saddened and incredibly upset, as were my family and colleagues at work. One of the responses we had as we saw that shocking incident in New York and subsequently in Washington, DC, where I worked in the mid-1980s, was to call my local pastor to come to the office to share, to comfort those around us and to try to make reason of this shocking incident.

On that day, al-Qaeda murdered more than 3,000 people—thousands of citizens of our ally, the United States, and people from many other countries, including Australia. Millions of people around the world began to live in fear that the same could happen to them. I remember speaking to friends and colleagues in the United States to check on their health and wellbeing and their whereabouts, and the sense of insecurity and concern was significant indeed. The terror did not end on September 11, and since 2001 more than 100 Australians have been killed in extremist attacks overseas, among them 88 Australians killed in the Bali bombing in 2002. Four Australians were killed in the second Bali bombings in 2005, and our embassy in Jakarta in Indonesia was bombed.

I had the honour of being in Jakarta in June this year with the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs delegation. We were looking at the antiterrorism laws in that country as well as in Singapore. We visited the bomb site at the Jakarta embassy, paid our respects and shared a special memory of those who were killed. In each case the terrorist groups involved had links to Afghanistan. A highlight—or, perhaps, even a lowlight—of my parliamentary career was being involved in attending the memorial service for those who died at the Bali bombings in 2002. It was one of the most moving and significant experiences of my parliamentary career and it brought home to me just how terrorism affects people’s lives all over the world, including here in Australia.

But the reach of terrorism goes beyond just these examples. It goes beyond state borders. It threatens beneath the radar and it does not play by the rules of war. With these things in mind and in response to this threat, there are two primary reasons why Australia is involved in the war in Afghanistan. Firstly, it is to make sure that Afghanistan never again becomes a safe haven for terrorists, a place where attacks on us and our allies begin. Secondly, it is to stand firm behind our alliance commitment to the United States, which was formally invoked following the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. Having worked in Washington, DC myself some years ago, I very much appreciate Australia’s relationship with the US and support the importance of that alliance. I am steadfast in my support for it. They have stood by us in time of need, and it is only right and proper for us to do the same and to be committed to finishing the job in Afghanistan in this instance.

I have many good friends and colleagues still living in the USA. The bond of friendship and the relationship are deep. The Australia-US alliance should not be underrated, including our involvement with them during the Second World War. I had the privilege of being in Kokoda and walking the Kokoda Track in 2008 and learning about the sacrifice, endurance, mateship and courage demonstrated by Australian diggers together with the US veterans. It was fantastic, something I will never forget.

In response to the barbarism of the 11 September attacks, the US launched Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan citing article 51 of the UN charter and invoking article 5 of the NATO treaty as legal justification. Australia invoked the ANZUS treaty and the International Security Assistance Force was soon after established by the United Nations Security Council, on 20 December 2001, by resolution 1386 and reaffirmed each year with NATO taking a lead role. As part of ISAF, Australia has participated in the war in Afghanistan as part of a global coalition. Our continued involvement has been the subject of ongoing review and the international legal basis for this war is indeed an important issue.

To remain involved in such a critical life-and-death battle, Australia as a nation must be clear in its own mind why it is involved in the war. The first objective of Australia’s national security is freedom: freedom from attack or the threat of attack—that is, the capacity to protect our citizens and interests at home and abroad. Australia has lost 111 citizens to terrorist attacks abroad with all of these attacks linked in some way back to the freedom of action that terrorist forces enjoyed in Afghanistan. We must remove safe havens for extreme Islamic terror groups capable of extending their influence into Australia’s region and thereby further impacting on our national interests.

One of the principles of Australia’s national security is to support the UN to promote a rules based international order. Australian forces are under ISAF command under a UN mandate. If our alliance with the United States remains the key strategic partnership and the central pillar of Australian national security policy, then we have a responsibility to join with the US and its partners, under the auspices and sanctions of the UN, to continue to achieve the mission in Afghanistan. The maintenance of a strong ANZUS alliance is critical to Australia’s regional security. US hegemony within our region is fundamental to regional stability, given an increasingly engaged China that is focused on territorial strength particularly over ocean sovereignty and regional influence.

Moving to shrink our relationship with the US, as some have argued, including the Greens, would be counterproductive to our own security and to wider regional stability. Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan serves at least in part to reaffirm the strength of the ANZUS alliance and indeed the value of the ANZUS treaty. Having worked in Washington DC for some years, I very much appreciate Australia’s relationship with the US and support the importance of that alliance.

The welfare of Afghan citizens who have been barbarically brutalised and repressed under extreme Islamic law is also vitally important. Australia is committed to doing what it can towards the creation and maintenance of stability within the Middle East more generally, particularly in Pakistan, a nuclear state—and I will speak more about that shortly. I observe that the Greens’ position to withdraw would cause havoc and chaos and do untold damage to the people of Afghanistan, particularly to the women and children of Afghanistan. That was rightly noted and well espoused by Senator Ronaldson a few moments ago.

International coalition forces in Afghanistan now number around 140, 000, comprising 120,000 ISAF troops from 47 nations and an additional 20,000 US troops under Operation Enduring Freedom. Australia’s military contribution to ISAF is deployed under Operation Slipper. Of the 1,550 ADF personnel deployed within Afghanistan, 1,241 are deployed in Oruzgan province and around 300 in Kabul, Kandahar and elsewhere in Afghanistan. These numbers vary depending on operational requirements and shifting seasonal conditions. A further 830 personnel provide support from locations within the broader Middle East area of operations, including our maritime commitment.

Compared to the US’s 80,000 troops, Britain’s 10,000 and even Canada’s 2,800, Australia’s military commitment is relatively modest, but still our 1,550 soldiers have the lion’s share of security responsibility in a province that has long been Taliban heartland. Twenty-one combat deaths, including 10 since June, and 152 combat injuries so far make this our most serious fight since Vietnam. Afghanistan has become a central front in the most important struggle for civilisation in our time. I understand outside of NATO our contribution is the largest.

The coalition supports the US objective that, in partnership with our allies, we seek the strategic denial of Afghanistan as a training ground and operating base for global terrorist organisations—and that is what it was. The overall progress of the war has been a long road already but not without some success. Al-Qaeda has been dealt a severe blow in Afghanistan and it is no longer a safe haven for training camps in the country, but there is still a long way to go, and that has been noted by General Petraeus and others. President Karzai earlier this year committed to improving governance, pursuing electoral reform, taking effective anticorruption and antinarcotics measures and creating social and economic opportunities for all Afghan people, including women and girls.

There are many inputs that are vital to success in war and the importance of high-quality, responsive military procurement and supply to our troops can never be underestimated. In recent times there have been concerns raised on the frontline about lack of support. It is timely to note and be reminded of the importance of ensuring our troops are properly provided for.

I just want to note that three Australian soldiers have been charged by the military Director of Public Prosecutions as a result of an operation conducted by special forces in February 2009. In that raid, six Afghan people were killed. These events certainly highlight the complexity of war in a harsh environment where it is not always readily apparent who the enemy is. We should be very slow to judge our forces in cases such as this. I would urge the government to use every available resource within its power to ensure that a proper defence and adequate resources and support are given to those who have been charged. I question why there is a need for that in the first place. But, without being an expert and without all the information available, I cannot add anything further at this time other than to say that I think our troops should be given as much support as possible. This is a war zone.

I want to comment on Australian development aid in Afghanistan, apart from our direct military involvement. There will need to be a transition to education, health and infrastructure support in the years ahead as we move from military support through to development aid. In my view, the delivery of development assistance is a vital element in helping Afghanistan to become a nation with the capacity in and of itself to stand up to the threat of terrorism. I note that Afghanistan is the fourth biggest recipient of aid from the Australian nation. That is something to be proud of.

Progress in Afghanistan’s development over the last nine years includes a dramatic increase in school enrolments, from around one million in 2001 to six million today, one-third of whom are girls. That is great news. There has been a significant increase in the availability of basic health services, which were available to less than 10 per cent of the population under the former Taliban regime but are now extended to around 85 per cent of the people. There has been the identification and management of over 39,000 community based infrastructure projects, such as wells, clinics and roads. That is good news. We have seen the rehabilitation of almost 10,000 kilometres of rural roads. The telecommunications industry has created about 100,000 jobs since 2001. Ten million Afghans today have access to telecommunications, compared to about 20,000 in 2001.

There have been two elections for the lower house of parliament since 2001. Around 27 per cent of the seats in the lower house and one-sixth of the seats in the upper house are reserved for female members. That is a good initiative, for sure. The lower house has significant powers, including the right to reject or approve draft laws, to hold votes of no confidence in government ministers and to reject cabinet nominees. So there is a move towards democracy.

The Taliban suppressed free speech. That needs to be noted and remembered. Afghan people now have access to over 400 print media publications and radio and television outlets. These give Afghans an outlet to discuss publicly their views.

Development assistance through AusAID has grown from $26.5 million in 2001-02 to $106 million in 2010-11. Australia’s development assistance focuses on improving the capacity to deliver core services, such as health and education, and supporting agriculture. Around 50 per cent of that aid to Afghanistan is delivered through Afghan government systems. It is a figure well in advance of that of many other donors, and that is good news. Australia’s main military and civilian effort is focused, as I indicated, on Oruzgan province. Oruzgan ranks as one of the least developed provinces in Afghanistan. The literacy rate for females is zero and only 10 per cent for males, compared to national figures of 12.6 and 43 per cent respectively. So it is having some impact.

Our aid program is only just beginning to increase, but already Australia has supported basic health and hygiene education, enabled community de-mining and mine risk education and improved food security through the distribution of wheat and other food items. Australia is working to build capacity within the provincial administration and encourage stronger links with the central government. That is certainly worth while and a positive development.

The Millennium Development Goals have bipartisan support in the Australian government, which is excellent. It should be noted that this aid should be granted consistent with our aim to meet the Millennium Development Goals. The Giving Australia report notes that Australians are the most generous in the world. That is something to be proud of. This was particularly noted vis-a-vis the disaster in Pakistan very recently. All of this should be seen as part of the bigger picture and in the broader context of international peace and security.

I want to talk about the merit of having key performance indicators and benchmarks and reporting progress. On this issue I would like to refer to the Canadian approach. The Canadian parliament recently produced a report entitled Canada’s engagement in Afghanistan: quarterly report to parliament for the period of 1 April to 30 June, 2010. Canada provides quarterly reports, with benchmarks, key performance indicators and progress to date in reaching the targets. That is a great way to go. I commend it to the government for consideration. We should have at least six-monthly reports on targets, benchmarks and KPIs so that we as a nation know exactly where we stand and can understand the progress in Afghanistan.

Terrorism should be seen in the context of the Middle East—and Israel and Iran in particular. The war in Afghanistan is part of the broader fight against terrorism throughout the world, and particularly as part of our Middle East Area of Operations, to which a further 800 troops are committed, in addition to the 1,550 committed to Afghanistan. The Middle East plays a unique role in the peace and stability of our fragile world, and at the heart of those issues is the nation of Israel. In recent times, the activities of, and comments made by, the nation of Iran have been prominent and have been destabilising the Middle East. Israel has a right to exist. That is something that needs to be noted and strongly supported. When nation states such as Iran do not acknowledge that and terrorist organisations, whether they be Hamas or otherwise, do not acknowledge that, it destabilises the region. I was pleased to be part of the Australia Israel Leadership Forum last year and will be again this year. It plans to meet in Israel in December. I commend the leadership of that forum and the instigators of it. They do a great job.

I indicated earlier that I had been to Indonesia in June this year. I am very concerned about the possibility of terrorist activity in Indonesia. I just ask the question: is there an adequate commitment—a comprehensive political commitment with political will and resources across the board—to deal with terrorist activity close to our shores? I am not convinced that there is. I call on all those decision-makers in Indonesia to redouble their efforts to stamp out terrorism wherever possible. We have seen the activities of Jemaah Islamiah—we had the Bali bombings of course; and I note the Indonesians have acted in response to that. But Abu Bakar Bashir still holds views which are prominent in Indonesia. So there is still more to do. I am totally committed to our support for Afghanistan and for making a difference. I do see the merit of having a parliamentary inquiry into this matter. (Time expired)

Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to take note of this ministerial statement on Australia’s commitment in Afghanistan. I recognise that this is a very significant debate. It is not an easy debate. The war in Afghanistan, and Australia’s participation in it, is an issue that weighs on my conscience—as it should; and as I know it weighs on the consciences of all members of this parliament. So, as a member of this parliament, I welcome this valuable opportunity to discuss this issue. We have a collective responsibility to ensure that Australians are only placed in harm’s way for the most worthy of causes. The deaths of 21 Australian Defence Force personnel and the taking of the lives of more than 100 Australians who have been killed in terrorist attacks overseas all underscore the significance of this responsibility.

Our responsibility is also underscored by the plight of the Afghan population, a population that has become vulnerable to the exploitation and manipulation of extremists because of the grinding poverty, oppression and human rights abuses the Afghan people face everyday. This is especially the case for women and children. Is it any wonder that Afghanistan provided the breeding ground for terrorists when it ranks 181st out of 182 countries in the UN’s human development index? Only 30 per cent of people there can access safe drinking water, and Afghanistan is the most food-insecure place on earth.

The 2010 report from the Canadian government to the Canadian parliament on that country’s engagement in Afghanistan highlights:

Thirty years of conflict, political instability and economic hardship have decimated Afghanistan’s infrastructure and institutions, and diminished the confidence of the Afghan people in their government.

The report goes on to say:

Rebuilding this confidence is largely dependent on increasing the capacity of the Afghan government to deliver basic, essential services such as education, health care, roads, job creation, irrigation, clean water and electricity.

I commend the Canadian parliament for its reporting process. I think this is something that the Australian government should be looking at in order to give greater transparency to our own participation in Afghanistan.

You can see from this that our military efforts in Afghanistan are part of some much broader goals. One of those goals is to improve conditions for women and children, and to advance human rights more broadly. Afghanistan’s long-term stability is important for us. The population must be protected and Afghanistan’s civil society and institutions must be strengthened so that the country’s government can properly serve its people. While military engagement is part and parcel of achieving the security conditions needed for sustainable civil institutions and services, I have to say that it does not always engender trust and it can even serve to undermine these broader goals for Afghan civil society. So, in my opinion, we must be mindful of this, as we strive to get the balance right between our military engagement and reconstruction and support for building civil society and services. This is something Australia already recognise, because we do have a significant aid program which, in contrast to many other countries active in Afghanistan, can be seen to be broad and comprehensive. But we must do more to get this balance right and to insist that other nations participating in Afghanistan also work to get this balance right. Success in Afghanistan does not simply depend on our military engagement but also, and more importantly, on the way our aid program builds and supports civil society.

The Australian Council for International Development has expressed concern that, as military engagement has intensified in Afghanistan, aid programs in the region have become militarised. I share these concerns. As the peak organisation of non-government aid agencies in Australia, ACFID asserts that increased militarisation has meant that the role of many aid agencies has become increasingly marginalised and fragile. ACFID has suggested that Australia’s aid and defence operations should be disaggregated to mitigate this problem. It is important to make clear the distinctions between the provision of military operations and the provision of civilian aid and reconstruction efforts because, as ACFID suggests, the direct relationship between military operations and the provision of aid leads to a perception of the militarisation of that aid. This in turn reduces the effectiveness of that aid and the trust of the Afghan people.

ACFID has also expressed concern that the delivering of aid to those places in which there is increased military activity at the expense of those regions that are considered ‘more secure’ effectively destabilises and ‘penalises’ more secure regions. I believe that this is an effect that deserves further investigation, because we need to be sure that we have, and we continue to have, the balance right between military engagement and reconstruction and civil aid. Nevertheless, I do believe that Australia’s aid program is making important differences to the lives of Afghan people. We know that for many years women and girls have been excluded from education by the Taliban. Australia’s aid commitment has contributed to the provision of primary education programs that promote the education of girls in remote communities. Our contribution through the World Food Program encourages the attendance of girls at school through the provision of take-home rations. These are real on-the-ground programs that are providing for the basic needs of young women and girls so that they have, for the first time, the chance to get an education—an opportunity that we here in Australia take for granted.

We also know that Afghanistan’s maternal and infant morality rates are amongst the highest in the world. Australia’s aid program is assisting to bring down these rates, which are unacceptable. We are doing this by providing antenatal, postnatal and children’s health programs. These are just a few examples of the positive effects that Australia’s civilian aid program is having in Afghanistan; there are many, many more. We are going to ensure that these important contributions continue, and in order to ensure that they have their intended effects we must continue to evaluate our role and these contributions.

In conclusion I would like to say I do understand that, in order to achieve the goal of building a stronger civil society in Afghanistan, security is of paramount importance. Afghanistan cannot become a successful state in an environment where Afghan people, and NGOs and others on the ground, face extreme risks every day. The role of the Australian defence forces in training and supporting Afghan security forces is vital. But we must always ensure that this role supports the building of a stronger, more sustainable civil society in Afghanistan, with social services that truly meet the needs of the Afghan people. It is only through building a peaceful and stable Afghanistan that the globe, and Australia, will also become a more peaceful place. An Afghanistan where people have basic human rights, food security, water sanitation, education: these are the things that will support peace in Afghanistan and across the globe.

Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to have the opportunity to participate in the debate on Australia’s involvement in the Afghan war. At the outset I would like to recognise the commitment of the Australian Defence Force and particularly the ultimate sacrifice made by 21 of our military personnel. I would like to personally express my sympathy to the families, friends and comrades of our soldiers who have lost their lives in Afghanistan. Given the current circumstances in Afghanistan, I support the government’s policy on Afghanistan. In saying this, I have been a long-term peace activist in the trade union movement. I am not a pacifist, and support the need to defend our nation during times of war. Notwithstanding this, I am inclined to be anti war, not pro war. I have never served in the military. Nevertheless, I have a direct family experience of the horrible consequences for mainly working-class soldiers serving in the front line.

I was born in Bellshill, Lanarkshire, Scotland. This is a community just outside Glasgow that was part of the Scottish production line for front-line troops for the British Army. Like many other working-class Scots, my grandfather and father served in the British Army. My father was a sergeant major in the Cameronians, the Scottish Rifles, and saw active service in Burma and India. He was part of the British expeditionary forces under General Wavell who were known as the Chindits and he fought in the Burmese jungle behind Japanese lines in extremely tough conditions. My father was physically and psychologically affected by his wartime service. Apart from ongoing bouts of malaria, he, like many Scottish working-class soldiers, used alcohol as a crutch in those days when there was little or no recognition of the psychological effects of war. My father was a tough man. But, no matter how tough you are, the horror of war spares no-one. My family suffered the aftermath of my father’s wartime service. He died a relatively young man. My experience, which was consistent with the experience of many working-class Scottish and Australian families, confirms my opposition to and hate for war.

I am not in a position to know the psychological and physiological scars that will affect our returned soldiers from Afghanistan. There will be undoubtedly ongoing challenges for our returned servicemen and their families as a result of their service in Afghanistan. It is absolutely essential that high-quality and professional support for returned servicemen and their families is available if and when required. I am deeply concerned to think that we could be involved in the war in Afghanistan for another decade. It is worth remembering that the first contingent of the Special Forces Task Group left Perth on 22 October 2001.

I have an abhorrence for the behaviour of the Taliban. I have two grown-up daughters who have been extremely fortunate to have been brought up in Australia. They have not been faced with the horrendous challenges and discrimination faced by young girls and women in Afghanistan during the era of the Taliban. It is almost incomprehensible to me that any group within society could abuse young girls and women in the manner that the Taliban have.

I have often thought that if, by accident of birth, I had been born in Afghanistan and had two young daughters, I would have been prepared to do almost anything to achieve a better life for my children. Is it any wonder that many Afghans flee the country as a result of the activities of the Taliban or of the threat that the Taliban might one day control Afghanistan to the detriment of the community and, in particular, women? There is a great deal of hypocrisy from some who stand up and make speeches about the need to bring democracy and peace to Afghanistan while, at the same time, vilifying and marginalising those who flee Afghanistan because they genuinely fear for their lives and the welfare of their children.

Labor is committed to building a stable, equitable and peaceful future in Afghanistan as part of an international team consistent with relevant United Nations mandates. I support the need for a comprehensive approach to the situation in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. I support the development of aid and civilian assistance in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which both desperately need this aid. I support the training of the local Afghan National Police force and army forces, consistent with strategic objectives and international alliance commitments and obligations. Sustaining non-military assistance to Afghanistan to enhance, particularly, the education, skills and training of the Afghan people is essential. And we must work towards the capacity for the Afghan government to manage its own affairs. I support continued development assistance for Afghanistan.

I recognise that a lasting settlement in Afghanistan will require a political settlement, because war will not settle this. Ongoing commitments to decades of war are not the way forward in Afghanistan. There will have to be a political settlement, and it must be led by a government of Afghanistan. And, eventually, the military control in Afghanistan must be in the hands of a government of Afghanistan.

There is much merit in the analysis that the US war in Iraq has been responsible for a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. The strategic mistake made by the Bush administration, and compounded by those who supported the war in Iraq, has meant that it has become much more difficult to settle the war in Afghanistan. It meant that resources that should have been used to consolidate military gains in Afghanistan were diverted in a fruitless quest to find non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This simply complicated an existing complex situation in Afghanistan.

We should always remember not only the cost to soldiers in Afghanistan but the cost to civilians of war. Afghanistan is no different to past wars. While there is no official figure for the overall numbers of civilians killed by the war since 2001, estimates put it in the range of 14,000 to 34,000 persons. Much to my surprise, systematic collection of civilian fatality data only began in 2007. Talk about the fog of war!

Apart from the cost in military and civilian lives in the Afghanistan War, there is also a huge financial cost to Australia and the US administration. I note that, since our military involvement commenced in October 2001, the estimated cost to the budget has been over $6 billion. This does not take into account the cost of repatriating and medically assisting returned soldiers. This will be a long-term legacy as our troops return with physical and psychological damage that needs expert and lasting medical support.

The eminent Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has estimated that the total cost of the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan to the US government has been $3 trillion—not billion, but trillion. Stiglitz has estimated that the cost of direct US military operations, not including long-term costs such as taking care of the wounded, already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War. It is already 10 times the cost of the Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War, and twice that of the First World War. In 2008 the projected cost to the US for the Iraq War was $12 billion a month, and when Afghanistan is added to the total it is $16 billion a month. This is a huge investment from a country still reeling from the global financial crisis. Is it any wonder that there is increased opposition, not only to the war and the implications of the war but to the financial obligations that this war places on the US administration? There is no doubt that economic issues cannot be divorced from the capacity of the US government to continue its engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan in the long term.

I think this is one of the reasons that President Obama is seeking to have clear goals in the conduct of the Afghanistan War. One of these goals is to deny safe haven to al-Qaeda and to deny the Taliban the ability to overthrow the Afghan government. It is my view that Australia’s engagement in Afghanistan will be influenced by the success or otherwise of the six operational objectives that will be limited in scope and scale to what is necessary to obtain the US goal. These objectives are: reversing the Taliban’s momentum; denying the Taliban access to, and control of, key population and production lines and lines of communication; disrupting the Taliban outside the secure area and preventing al-Qaeda from gaining sanctuary in Afghanistan; degrading the Taliban to levels manageable by the Afghan national security force; increasing the size of the Afghan national security force and leaving the potential for local security forces so the US can position that responsibility for security to the Afghan government. This is seen as permitting the US to begin to decrease troop presence by July 2011. I find it quite disturbing that there have been calls for us to increase our troop engagement, involvement and numbers in Afghanistan, when it is clear that the US are looking to decrease their involvement in the Afghan war.

The US are also looking to selectively rebuild the capacity of the Afghan government with a military focus on the ministries of defence and the interior. President Obama has also raised the need for improved governance in Afghanistan, including on whether President Karzai has made progress in establishing merit based appointments in ministries, provinces and districts that are critical to the US mission. The US government are also seeking to demonstrate that they can assist the Afghans in promoting effective sub-national governance based on the campaign that the US are undertaking. Specifically, the US and Afghans need to generate sufficient civilian capacity to partner with the US in what is described as the ‘hold, build and transfer’ phases of the war, and they are estimating when these resources can begin to take effect.

These goals are complicated by the lack of proper governance in Afghanistan. The corruption in Afghanistan is very much complicating our approach and our capacity to achieve our goals in Afghanistan. These goals are further complicated by the situation in Pakistan. The US are looking to make sure they can shift what they call ‘the strategic calculus’ in Pakistan and end their active and passive support for extremists. They are also looking to ensure that Pakistan has dealt with al-Qaeda and other extremists, including the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network. Given these complications in this region of the world, I oppose any open-ended commitment to the Afghan war.

In conclusion I would like to touch on the words of Franklin D Roosevelt, one of the iconic political figures of the last century, who influenced political thinking around the world. In relation to war, Roosevelt said the following:

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded … I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed … I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

I also hate war and will be glad to see Australia disengage from this war as soon as practically possible.

Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to 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.

John Faulkner (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before I commence my remarks, as discussed with senators in the chamber, I seek leave to speak for longer than 20 minutes in this contribution, if that is required.

Leave granted.

In today’s world Australia’s national security interests extend well beyond our borders and well beyond our region. As a result, the events of the world demand our response, our involvement and our engagement. Security threats are global and they are real. We cannot make ourselves safe through isolation. We cannot ignore the threats or the responsibilities that come with the modern interdependent, international community.

The situation in Afghanistan highlights this challenge. More than 100 Australians have been killed in terrorist attacks in recent years, including in the Bali bombings, attacks on our embassy in Jakarta in 2004 and the 2009 attacks on international hotels, also in Jakarta. These attacks were planned and perpetrated by terrorists with links to Afghanistan. These attacks brought new horror to Australia and to our region. We should reflect on how we felt when we heard the news that 202 people were killed in the first Bali attack, when we saw the faces of the 88 Australians who died on the front pages of our newspapers. Together with other countries, Australia also felt the horror of the attacks on the United States on 11 September. It was following that world-changing event that the Australian government agreed, under the ANZUS Treaty, article 4, to commit military forces to coalition operations in Afghanistan.

It is sometimes said that we fail to acknowledge the importance of our alliance with the United States as a reason for our involvement in Afghanistan. Not by me. Our commitment in Afghanistan falls under the ANZUS Treaty and has always reflected our alliance obligations with the United States of America. Our deployment was approved by the Australian parliament on 17 December 2001. Today, the Australian Defence Force is providing a significant contribution to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force operation in Afghanistan. It is also important to remember that there is no dispute about the legality or international basis of the mission. ISAF operations are conducted under a United Nations mandate, at the request of the government of Afghanistan. And that UN mandate has been renewed annually.

Australian personnel currently provide military support to mentoring, security and reconstruction activities in Afghanistan. However, our commitment and the work we are doing there has evolved over time in response to changing operational circumstances and changes in ISAF strategy. Australia’s military contribution to the conflict in Afghanistan commenced in October 2001, when the first contingent of special forces troops deployed to southern Afghanistan as part of Operation Slipper. This commitment to military operations in Afghanistan lasted until the end of 2002, when the focus of US operations moved towards supporting reconstruction activities as a result of the establishment of an interim Afghan government under Hamid Karzai.

At that time, ADF special forces elements in Afghanistan were withdrawn. It was not until 2005, that the then government agreed that Australia would re-enter the Afghanistan conflict. In July that year Australia deployed a force of approximately 150 special forces for 12 months. This deployment came at the request of the United States and Afghanistan governments, as the government in Afghanistan had come under pressure from the Taliban and some elements of al-Qaeda. A year later Australia’s first reconstruction task force deployed to Oruzgan province in southern Afghanistan.

The reconstruction task force worked in partnership with Dutch military forces and civilian personnel within the provincial reconstruction team. The task force supported ISAF’s security and reconstruction efforts, and worked on community based projects to assist the government and people of Afghanistan. Today, Australia’s military contribution is around 1,550 personnel. Our efforts in Afghanistan fall primarily within the area of Regional Command (South). This is a dangerous part of the country. Twenty-one Australian troops have been killed in action in Afghanistan, and 156 Australians have been wounded. ISAF is working to counter insurgent influence over the population, protect the population in threatened and key areas, create time and space for governance to improve, and create conditions for development. And Australian troops are working with them to achieve these goals.

Some commentators have argued that Australia’s contribution should be larger than that currently provided. I believe that our current commitment is appropriate. Australia is the largest non-NATO contributor to the ISAF mission and the 11th-largest contributor overall. Well, why are we in Afghanistan? Why do we continue to believe that the conflict is worth the heavy price we have paid in Australian lives? We are there to protect our own security—because our own security depends on security in Afghanistan. We are there to contribute to the stabilisation of Oruzgan province, because there will be no long-term security in Afghanistan without self-determination, justice or governance.

Our primary role in Afghanistan today is to train the 4th Brigade of the Afghan National Army so that the Afghan people can protect themselves and their country from those who would destroy every safeguard of civil life. Our objective is to be able to safely transfer responsibility to the ANA and for them to prevent Afghanistan again becoming a training ground, staging point, and operating base for global terrorism.

As defence minister I delivered four ministerial statements on progress in Afghanistan. Since my last statement, the Dutch have ceased operations in Oruzgan and responsibility for the province has been transferred to Combined Team Uruzgan, a multinational framework including the United States, Australia, Singapore, Slovakia and New Zealand. Our mentoring and training role is progressing steadily. By the end of 2010, the Mentoring Task Force will be providing operational mentoring and liaison teams to train the entire ANA 4th Brigade, including all five kandaks and the brigade headquarters.

But our efforts in Afghanistan also extend beyond the training mission. Australia’s Special Operations Task Group continues to disrupt insurgent networks by targeting key Taliban leaders and improvised explosive device facilitators in Oruzgan and surrounding areas. We have other troops providing key enabling support in Afghanistan, including the Rotary Wing Group, our Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Task Group, strategic airlift, an artillery detachment working with UK forces, and support elements. And we should not forget that Australia also has around 150 embedded officers inside Headquarters ISAF and Headquarters Regional Command South. These personnel fill key roles within these organisations and make a highly valued contribution. The ADF currently provides 10—soon to be increased to 20—embedded staff in Kabul to develop artillery training for the ANA. The school is a key ISAF initiative and Australia will be designated as the lead nation. The ADF also continues to directly support other Australian government agencies operating as part of the Uruzgan Provincial Reconstruction Team through the provision of life support, including protected accommodation and force protection.

The job we are doing in Afghanistan is not yet complete. Abandoning it half-finished would be abandoning the Afghan people after giving them the promise of a secure and a stable future but with no way to achieve it. This is not my idea of working for, to quote a man who led Labor through both war and peace, the ‘betterment of mankind not only here but anywhere we may give a helping hand.’ We must continue to engage with the world. It was this fundamental Labor value that drove the efforts of Doc Evatt at the founding conference of the United Nations, to shape that organisation into one where the civil, political, economic and social rights of people around the world were seen as fundamental to a fair and a just world order.

To my Labor colleagues I say: Labor governments in Australia have had a proud tradition of engagement with the United Nations and international coalitions and a proud tradition of working to better the lives of those within and without our borders. And, in my view, it is in this tradition that Australia are playing our part in the international effort to build a better future for the people of Afghanistan.

We know how difficult and dangerous this task is. Nearly every speaker in this debate has said that 21 Australian soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan. From 2002 to 2009, 11 Australian Defence Force personnel deployed to Afghanistan were killed in action: Sergeant Andrew Russell, Trooper David Pearce, Sergeant Matthew Locke, Private Luke Worsley, Lance Corporal Jason Marks, Signaller Sean McCarthy, Lieutenant Michael Fussell, Private Gregory Sher, Corporal Matthew Hopkins, Sergeant Brett Till and Private Benjamin Renaudo.

The last few months, of course, have been particularly difficult. Since early June, 10 soldiers have died in the course of duty in Afghanistan: Sapper Jacob Moerland and Sapper Darren Smith, who died as a result of an IED strike on 7 June in Mirabad Valley; Privates Timothy Aplin, Scott Palmer and Benjamin Chuck, who were tragically killed in a helicopter crash in northern Kandahar on 21 June; Private Nathan Bewes, who died from an IED strike in the Chora Valley on 9 July; Trooper Jason Brown, who died in the course of duty from small-arms fire while on operations in northern Kandahar on 14 August; Privates Tomas Dale and Grant Kirby, who died from an IED strike while on operations in Baluchi Valley on 20 August; and Lance Corporal Jared MacKinney who died from small-arms fire while on operations in Deh Rawud on 24 August.

We must remember all these fine young men, and in reflecting on those losses we must acknowledge that the men and women of the ADF carry out their work with courage and professionalism in conditions of real hardship and very real danger. As Minister for Defence, I discussed our operations on a very regular basis with the Chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, and the Secretary to the Department of Defence, Dr Ian Watt. It would be no surprise to anyone that I engaged closely with defence as to why we were suffering increased casualties. Defence confirmed that violence across the country was increasing, which was to be expected as ISAF and Afghan forces entered areas strongly contested by insurgents. The fight is being taken into areas where the coalition and the Afghan National Army have not been before, contesting areas that have been dominated by the Taliban.

This is also the traditional fighting season, which normally sees a rise in operational tempo. The Taliban are fighting back, and we are seeing a lot more violence and a lot more activity. With the surge of additional US and NATO forces almost complete, increased coalition forces as well as Afghan National Security Forces are being committed to the fight. We can expect that in this period ADF operations in Afghanistan will continue at a high tempo and continue to be challenging. We must never resile from our commitment to protect our troops in every way we can at this dangerous time. Force protection must remain our highest priority. There is no-one in this parliament who hopes more than I do that there are no more casualties in Afghanistan.

The time it will take to train the ANA 4th brigade is becoming clearer. Defence has undertaken a professional and thorough assessment with input from our ISAF partners on that time frame. CDF has advised that, on the basis of our progress to date, defence estimates that within two to four years we will be able to transition the main security responsibility to the Afghan National Army in Oruzgan province. While that remains a decision to be made in the future, I expect we will then be able to move from a training mission to an overwatch role, as occurred in Iraq.

This transition must be based on conditions on the ground, and—let me be frank—the task will not be easy. Afghanistan faces a complex insurgency consisting of multiple factions motivated by historic grievances and ideologies at both the local and the national level. Key problems facing Afghanistan include lack of security, poor physical and social infrastructure, illiteracy and corruption. These problems are particularly bad in southern Afghanistan. To combat them, ISAF’s revised counterinsurgency strategy focuses on an integrated civilian-military approach to delivering improved security, governance and development with an emphasis on protecting the local Afghan population. The revised strategy has the support of the 47 nations that currently comprise ISAF.

As defence minister, I met regularly with Australian troops deployed to Afghanistan who were enduring long separations from their families. They have endured hardship and faced real, daily, deadly danger. I saw the work that they were doing there, and I have seen the difference they are making. I do not take the risks they run or the burden they bear lightly, and I never will. I have said before and I repeat today that I do not want to see the men and women of the ADF stay in Afghanistan one day longer than necessary; nor do I want their efforts and their sacrifices to be wasted. Our task in Afghanistan is not an easy one; nor is it one we can shirk. We cannot ignore the strategic reality: less security in Afghanistan means less security globally and for Australians. To allow terrorist organisations unimpeded operations in Afghanistan would be to put Australian lives at risk, and to turn our back on an international effort shared by 46 other countries and operating under a United Nations mandate would be to ignore our responsibilities to our allies, our partners, the international community, the Afghan people and to the people here at home.

I will never forget the hardships and dangers faced by the men and women of the Australian Defence Force and the sacrifices they make. Nor will I ever forget those soldiers who have been killed in Afghanistan, those wounded in action or those who have fought or are still fighting in Afghanistan. Our involvement in Afghanistan is a cause worth those efforts and worth those sacrifices. It is a task our country, along with many others, has taken on. It is a task we should complete.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am in no doubt that the commitment of Australian troops to combat missions overseas is always a difficult one for any government to take. And while it is a terrible equation to consider, we must balance the potential individual and personal costs for our serving men and women against our national interests in the collective good.

Having met and spent some time with some of our serving personnel, Australian troops who have served in Iraq and in Afghanistan, I am in no doubt that they are absolutely committed to the cause. They also recognise the importance of what they are doing, which is, and we should make no mistake about this, suppressing the threat of terrorism and helping to build a stable and safe society. That is why they deserve our support.

It is important that our troops know that we do support them, so I want to send my best wishes to all Australian troops wherever they are deployed. I say to them: you are serving this country with honour, with courage and with dedication and I wish you safety and success in your endeavours. My family and I, indeed all Australians, the entire nation, owes them a debt of gratitude, just as we do their predecessors and we will to their successors in our ongoing battle for freedom.

But one cannot acknowledge the commitment of our troops without addressing the true cost of sending them into combat zones. I am not talking about the dollars and cents that I have heard the Greens refer to, but about the true costs to individuals and to families. This is an aspect of war that makes us all reflect upon the potential implications of the loss of life. It hurts us all, and I know that so many Australians mourn when we hear of the loss of life of one of our serving personnel. In Afghanistan we have had 21 combat deaths. There have been 152 combat wounded. I have met with some of those injured, and their commitment to our cause remains undiminished. But I can only imagine how the families and loved ones of these troops must feel and I place on the record that I am in awe of those who are prepared to sacrifice so much for so many in defending our national interests and that of all Western societies.

None of us would be human if we did not reflect upon the circumstances of this war, and the mission of our troops. One aim of our mission is to ensure that a stable government can be established in Afghanistan. It concerns me that as our own troops risk their lives it has been reported that a member of the government of Afghanistan has been openly calling for the persecution and the deaths of Christians in Afghanistan. I refer to Abdul Sattar Khawasi, the deputy of the lower house. It concerns me, and many Australians, when we read about the widespread allegations of corruption and other issues which can make you wonder about the commitment of the Afghani government. Are they as committed to a free and stable democracy as our troops and the allied forces who are putting their lives at risk every single day? I do not know the answer to that question. But despite these concerns, even a flawed government is better than the Islamo-fascist society that prevailed under the Taliban. And make no mistake: Islamo-fascism is the greatest threat to Western values and democracy we have faced.

We should be under no illusions as to its threat and its potential implications. It faces every Western democracy, not just America, not just Australia, not just the United Kingdom. And the threat is one of fundamentalist Islam. Fundamentalist Islam is a totalitarian ideology that strips away individuality and subsumes the individual in a system that is completely incompatible with Western values. Fundamentalist Islam is a system of barbarity where people have three choices: conversion to Islam, live as a second-class citizen or be put to the sword. Fundamentalist Islam is a way of life that forces women to wear the cloak of nothingness, the burka. It is a way of life where homosexuals are persecuted, adulterers can be stoned to death and the innocent are slaughtered in the name of Allah.

Now if people choose to live under such a repressive and regressive cultural regime because they believe in it, that is one thing. But when the Islamo-fascists are intent on exporting hate and terror and their totalitarian ideology throughout the world, we have a responsibility to protect our national interests. Let me say that again: when Islamo-fascists are intent on exporting their totalitarian ideology throughout the world, we have a responsibility to protect our national interests. That is one reason why our troops are fighting in Afghanistan.

There can be no doubt that the Taliban regime was a training operation for pure evil. It is part of a movement that is responsible either directly, or indirectly through inspiring others, for acts of terror that have killed thousands of innocent people, including the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York, in which 10 Australians died, the Bali bombings, which killed 88 Australians, and various other acts of terror in which eight Australians have been killed.

Fundamentalist Islam aims to export its culture of hate to the four corners of the globe, and I regret to say that Australia is not immune to this. Indeed, there are examples of it in our own country. Just recently, the fundamentalist Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir held an international conference in Sydney. This is a group whose spokesman, Uthman Badar, has said that ‘democracy is a bankrupt and irrational idea’ and ‘all indicators are pointing to the decline and inevitable collapse of Western ideology’. Make no mistake: that is their mission. These are the people who regard Israel as ‘an illegitimate state; an occupation’, claiming that it ‘has to be removed’. That sort of talk is happening in our country. It is happening right here. It is not something that is confined to the borders of the Middle East. It is not something that is confined to Afghanistan. While some may regard this as just talk at this stage, we must remember that violent movements all begin as just talk. The counterterrorism white paper stated:

The continuing resonance of the violent jihadist message within sections of Muslim communities in the Western world (including Australia) will lead to the creation and activity of new violent cells.

And as the Leader of the Opposition said in his speech on Afghanistan:

Ultimately at stake is the West’s ability to assert itself against deadly threats before they have materialised into another September the 11th-style atrocity or something even worse.

After nine years of fighting it can sometimes be difficult to clearly recall the reasons why our troops are in Afghanistan, but we should never lose sight of what our troops are fighting for. It is for the safety of all Australians and of billions of people around the world. We have to make sure that an ideology that is committed to the violent overthrow of Western democracies in the name of the so-called religion of peace can never be allowed to develop again. To abandon our cause is to abandon the hopes of billions of people around the world who aspire to live in peace, harmony and prosperity. Regrettably, sometimes there is a terrible price to pay for our freedoms and our causes, and hearts break all over the country whenever an Australian soldier is killed or is wounded. But the price of not engaging against such a dangerous enemy is far greater.

In expressing my support for our troops and the importance of the mission that they are undertaking for all of us, I wish them good grace and godspeed. I want them to know that Australians respect their continuing contribution to protecting our democracy and defending our freedom.

Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Sustainability and Urban Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In recent months, the tragic deaths and injuries suffered by 10 Australian Defence Force members led me to reacquaint myself with the heartbreaking history of Afghanistan. It is a history of conflict, economic struggle, corruption, division, progress, unity, interference, intervention and self-interest, all subject to ever-shifting tides of national and international loyalties, allegiances and alliances.

Afghanistan has been mired in conflict since civil war was declared in 1978. Since then, Afghanistan has been torn apart by power struggles between monarchical and parliamentary leaders and by the Soviets in conflict with the Islamist Mujaheddin resistance, which then had the support of the United States, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt and other Muslim nations. Of course, now there is the Taliban, fighting a bitter war for supremacy, for the abolition of democracy and for the subjugation of the Afghan spirit to its own warped and extreme account of Islam, one of the great world religions and one which we all know is predicated on peace and understanding.

To this unholy mix we add the diabolical ingredient of terrorism. In this far-flung and inhospitable corner of the world, international terrorism has set up training institutions, production lines and warehouses and it is from here that it exports mindless hatred and indiscriminate death to the world at large.

It is in this context that Australia maintains a commitment of approximately 1,500 ADF personnel to serve in Afghanistan as part of the NATO led International Security Assistance Force. Known as Operation Slipper, this Australian commitment is an important and visible component of the Australian government’s commitment to working with the international community to help prevent acts of terrorism around the world. In Afghanistan, the ADF deployment makes significant contributions to mentoring and reconstruction, international security, helicopter uplift capability, unmanned aerial surveillance, liaison, logistics, assets and artillery. In addition there are Australian Federal Police and Australian Secret Intelligence Service personnel in Afghanistan.

After the Vietnam War, the ADF was largely a non-operational force for many years. Now the ADF is distinctly operational and, as well as in Afghanistan, the ADF has deployments in East Timor, Iraq and the Solomon Islands and in a couple of peacekeeping missions in the Middle East and Africa.

As is to be expected when Australia puts the men and women of the ADF into harm’s way, opinions as to the appropriateness of Australia’s involvement are many and varied, expressed with varying degrees of vehemence and volume. Of course, this is how it should be. The right of ordinary Australians to hold and express opinions in confidence and freedom has been fought for and paid for over the years by successive generations of Australian servicemen and women. We forget this at our peril. We also forget that, sometimes, there is a sacred obligation to exercise this right to speak out when our conscience demands it of us. Australia would be diminished considerably if governments of either persuasion could commit the ADF to military adventurism in our name without being held to account by the people. However, in contrast to the war in Iraq, it is of note that there is only some—and certainly not overwhelming—public opposition to Australia’s contribution to these overseas deployments, especially Afghanistan.

I am the father of three girls of whom I am very proud. As an ordinary father, I am mindful of the terrible pain endured by the families and friends of the 21 Australian soldiers—just recently mentioned by Senator Faulkner—who have lost their lives in our name in Afghanistan. I can scarcely imagine the heartache of losing a husband, father, brother or close friend to the conflict in Afghanistan or indeed any conflict. These losses are not merely headlines or radio and television news reports to be forgotten in a day or two; these losses are real. They are small children who will never be tossed, laughing, into the air by their fathers, they are empty seats around the Christmas table, they are photographs in the front room of ordinary suburban houses around the country to be wept over on birthdays and anniversaries, they are empty seats at school plays, sports nights, graduations, weddings, christenings, anniversaries.

These are real sacrifices, enduring and painful, made by those who have lost their lives in Afghanistan and by their families. And let us not overlook those who have returned to us alive but with their lives permanently compromised by physical or psychological injury. Their sacrifice—and that of their families—is no less real and no less painful. In some cases, it might be said that their sacrifice is more painful because it is to be endured every waking moment.

When people wonder, as they will do and are entitled to do, why Australia maintains its presence in Afghanistan, perhaps the answer is this: we stay to honour the sacrifice of those who have died or been injured pursuing a world in which terrorism has no place to hide, a world in which ordinary Afghani men, women and children can go about their days free of fear, hatred and mindless religious extremism, a world in which all of us can live in peace, security and harmony.

Australia will not stay in Afghanistan forever—nor can we or should we. Our job is to assist the Afghani military to get to the point where they can guarantee the security of their own country. But for those brave men and women who have fought and died, or have been injured physically or psychologically—and for their families—we stay in Afghanistan to finish the job they started, to say to them that this is a fight worth having and that the dream remains undimmed. For now, we stay to honour their sacrifice and to complete the job they started. We should do no less.

Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are many reasons that Australians believe that we live in the ‘lucky country’, though I think we take for granted most of those reasons. One of the obvious reasons is the fact that we can go to football stadiums or concerts with tens of thousands of other people and we feel completely safe in this country. We do not even give it a second thought that somehow there is going to be somebody with explosives strapped to their chest who is going to blow us all up. We can go with some mates to a busy cafe on the side of the road and we do not think twice about being at risk from a car bomb threat. I guess one of the great things that makes us such a lucky country is that we have the freedom to live our lives without fear.

Australians have a deep and abiding respect for the men and women of our defence forces, and this is why the decision to place them in harm’s way is never taken lightly. So what was our motive in making the decision to contribute troops to the Afghanistan conflict? The principal motive—and I think it is a very healthy motive—was national self-interest. I think that is an interest that every nation, if they are fair dinkum, needs to put right at the forefront.

The world was shocked on September 11, 2001 with the bombing of the World Trade Centre and then the Pentagon. I can remember where I was, and I suspect that, for most Australians, it will be one of those moments where they can think back and they can remember where they were when they heard the news. I was on the way to Canberra. It was evening and I was in the lounge in Darwin Airport. I can recall seeing on the television screen one of the planes hitting the side of the tower, and it was all a bit hard to conceive that this was actually happening. Nobody really knew what had gone on. Before our plane took off, there was some discussion about another plane that had hit and people wondered whether it was vision from a camera on the other side. It was all a bit inconceivable. But, as it all rolled out the next day, to the horror of the world, we realised that this was not an accident; that this had been a group of people who had organised themselves to the extent that they would deliberately attack innocent civilians to somehow broaden their agenda in bringing Islamic fundamentalism into the spotlight. They certainly did that.

It had such an effect, because of the devastation. Of the 2,996 deaths, there were 19 hijackers who died, but there were 2,977 victims—246 on the four planes, on which there were absolutely no survivors. These people just wanted to go and see their mum and dad, do a bit of business or see their children in the expectation of freedom, but, sadly, that day that freedom was taken away. There were 2,606 in New York City who were at work in the towers, were on the ground or were firemen or policemen trying to help out the injured at the time who lost their lives, and 125 at the Pentagon lost their lives. It is very important to note that all the deaths in these attacks were civilians, apart from the 55 military personnel who were killed at the Pentagon—and, sadly, for us as Australians, amongst them were 15 Australians.

As part of our motive, Australians then accepted that international organised terrorism could only be challenged with an international response. The decision to support the International Coalition Against Terrorism in Afghanistan was made in October 2001. It had strong bipartisan support across this parliament. I note that in the prelude to this debate there was some assertion that a government and not parliament had made the decision. Perhaps that is technically correct but, if anybody reads the Hansard of this parliament from that time, it would indicate that there was bipartisan support, certainly from the previous opposition leader, Kim Beazley, which continues today under opposition leader Tony Abbott. At that time, there was considerable evidence to suggest that further terrorist attacks were on the way and, tragically, this evidence was correct.

Sadly, on 12 October 2002, there were the Bali bombings at the Sari Club where 202 people were killed, including 88 Australians, and 330 people were wounded. There was the notion of freedom: someone simply going out to a pub or a tourist operator just trying to make money to feed his family and send his kids to school. Those people were not involved in any particular conflict. We had the hotel bombing in Jakarta where 12 were killed and 150 were wounded—amongst those were two Australians. Then we had the Australian Embassy bombing in Jakarta, clearly targeting Australians. Very sadly, 11 were killed and 150 were wounded. We were very lucky that no Australians were killed at that time. At the London bombings, 50 were killed and 700 were injured. One Australian was killed then. On 1 October 2005, there was another attack in Bali at which four Australians were killed. A total of 26 were killed and a further 100 were injured. There was a hotel attack in Pakistan, but no Australians were killed. On 17 July 2009, at hotel bombings in Jakarta, seven people were killed and 50 were injured. Again, tragically, three Australians were killed.

The majority of security experts around the world made a connection between those attacks and terrorists, at an organisational or operational level, who gained their skills in death, slaughter and misery in Afghanistan. During the nineties it was a relatively safe haven in Afghanistan, where people could train, organise and launch attacks with relatively little interference, and that obviously led to a very high level of attacks. Invoking the ANZUS treaty and pledging military and other assistance was considered the right course of action for Australia to take. We had an obligation to join our allies in protecting Australians and other civilians against further attacks. We certainly understood that terrorist organisations could no longer be allowed a safe haven to continue to organise, train and launch their attacks, predominately on civilians across the world.

Sadly, there is another impact that is perhaps not spoken about as much: the perverse impact that Islamic fundamentalism had on the Muslim population across the world. I particularly speak for the Muslim population in Australia and say that people were very confused. Australia is home to more than 300,000 Muslims and, to state the obvious, Islamic fundamentalism under the banner of al-Qaeda does not represent the views of the vast majority of Muslim Australians. To me personally it is such a perverse interpretation of Islam that a god would want innocent children and civilians to be murdered for some greater good. It is something that I simply cannot fathom. Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations that link their destructive activities to Islam have done a great disservice to the religion. It is a source of ongoing prejudice against Muslims in Australia. We all need to remind ourselves that the notion of Islam is one of peace. Muslims around Australia are predominantly a very peaceful bunch of people and have absolutely no support for Islamic fundamentalism. I was privileged as a younger man to have lived amongst thousands of Indonesians who at that time went to great lengths to assure me that their beliefs were not associated with the acts of terror claimed to be in the name of their god.

The Australian deployment to Afghanistan has made such a difference. They are doing an absolutely remarkable job there and at home to ensure that there is no safe haven for terrorists. When people think about Australian involvement in Afghanistan, they immediately think about our military operations, as they should. The conduct of men and women in our Defence Force overseas, particularly in Afghanistan—a very difficult theatre of operation—has been second to none. They are much admired. Through my parliamentary work and through my association with the Australian Defence Force program, I have met men and women from other defence forces around the world. They are always extremely complimentary and respectful of the work of the men and women from our Defence Force. They have a special capacity to be able to engage with people in peacekeeping activities or in warfare activities in Afghanistan. They have a capacity to be able to interact with local people and have a broad range of expertise and professionalism.

Whilst we only think of our military operations, we are also involved in a host of diplomacy and developmental operations in Afghanistan. Our operations are as much about protecting rights and improving the living conditions of Afghan civilians as they are about protecting Australia’s national interest. Our specific tasks include the 4th Brigade training and mentoring the Afghan National Army in Oruzgan province in order that they can assume responsibility for the province’s security. This is about building capacity. If we are to ensure that there is never a safe haven again in Afghanistan, we need to ensure that, when security reaches a certain level, they have the capacity to take over and sustain, as they should, their own national interest, peace and prosperity—having normal lives and freedoms as we enjoy in this country.

We also contribute to building the capacity of Afghan National Police by assisting with civil policing functions in Oruzgan. If they are ever going to have a democracy, they have to have the capacity to not only run elections, as we have seen in the very difficult circumstances in Afghanistan, but also run their nation and the security of their nation. We are helping to improve the Afghan government’s capacity to deliver core services and generate income-earning opportunities for its people—the normal things that we take for granted that have not been available to their government or their people for a very long time. Most importantly, we are also conducting operations that will disrupt insurgent operations and supply routes by utilising the Special Operations Task Group.

A contingent of Australian Defence Force personnel are working in Afghanistan as part of the Netherlands-led provincial reconstruction team. Australia’s contribution, which is the Reconstruction Task Force, is a mix of engineers, security and support personnel. These personnel are working on reconstruction and community based projects as part of our commitment to helping Afghanistan achieve a stable and secure future. It is so important that that future is sustainable, and that is why, as areas are cleared and become secure, we need to focus also on providing opportunities to those Afghan people. Many members of the task force are drawn from the Darwin area, from the 1st Combat Engineer Regiment—who as many would know, were famous for their work after the tsunami in Aceh. The 1st Combat Engineer Regiment provides combat engineers, tradesmen, carpenters, plumbers, electricians and plant operators, who are fundamental to providing that infrastructure that is so necessary for an active economy and a democracy.

These men and women are also providing skills training for the local population to ensure that the benefits of the deployment continue well after our personnel have returned home. This is one of those areas where Australians just do so well, because of our capacity to engage and to pass on information to local people and that is driven very much by the enjoyment that Defence Force men and women get from that process. They have often said to me that a fundamental part of what they brought back was the knowledge that they had left a gift of skills, upskilling and infrastructure in that country.

Command logistics support elements have come from Darwin based 1st Brigade, and of course almost every element of 1st Brigade is being used in one way or another in Afghanistan. I commend these Territorians for their work. I also commend the fantastic contributions being made by personnel from not only the Australian Defence Force but also the Australian Federal Police and other Commonwealth agencies who are assisting to ensure that Afghanistan does not continue to be a safe haven for terrorists.

A sustained effort in Afghanistan is absolutely crucial to keeping countries around the world safe from terrorism attacks and to helping restore stability to the entire region. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates based in Afghanistan and Pakistan continue to pose a direct threat to countries all over the world. As I said earlier, almost all terrorism attacks can be linked back to this region, so the need to continue to disrupt the training, the finances and the movement of terrorist operatives to the region is absolutely paramount. Afghanistan is one of the least developed countries in the world. Sadly, thousands have died throughout the course of this conflict. There is an international obligation, clearly recognised and assisted by this country, to help rebuild the country so that its civilians can live in safety. The Australian contribution makes a real difference to the lives of Afghani people. The tragedy of the mounting casualties in Afghanistan, the deaths and injury of Afghani civilians, Australian soldiers and others reminds me of the sacrifice involved to ensure that people can live without fear of attack here or overseas.

I want to say to everyone who is associated with the families of those people who made the ultimate sacrifice that those sacrifices are not in vain. We have seen an enormous change to the state of security and the confidence of the people in rebuilding their nation. In the future that nation will no longer play a role as a safe haven for terrorism. There are also encouraging signs that Hamid Karzai’s high council for peace may have some success, with reports as recently as last week of an increased number of Taliban leaders at a very high level wanting to undertake dialogue. This would not be possible without the work, at every level, of our fantastic Defence Force men and women. To you all: thank you for your effort and your sacrifice. We as a nation must stay the course to build a strong, free nation of Afghanistan to prevent a safe haven for terrorists and to protect our nations and Australians, wherever they may find themselves around the world.

Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Nine years have passed since al-Qaeda launched its murderous 11 September attack on the United States, killing 3,000 people, including 10 Australians. It is also nine years since coalition military forces, including Australian special forces, began operations against the Taliban regime which openly harboured al-Qaeda and allowed it to recruit, train and plot terrorist attacks like that of 11 September 2001. So it is an appropriate time for the parliament to discuss the rationale behind Australia’s military commitment to the coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Joining with my colleagues in the government, especially the Prime Minister, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Defence, I welcome the opportunity to outline in the parliament the arguments—the overwhelming arguments—for why Australia must stay the course to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a safe haven for terrorists and to build the capacity for the Afghan national security forces to take responsibility for managing Afghanistan’s security and protecting its people. We are also supporting activities which increase the capacity of the government to govern and to deliver essential services to the people, promoting development and helping to build civil institutions.

Our commitment to the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan is in our national interest. As the Prime Minister and others have said, it is also part of our enduring commitment to our alliance with the United States. For generations now, the commitment to the US alliance has been fundamental to Australia’s overall national security. The alliance relationship is very strong, mature and based on shared commitments of democratic values and deep mutual respect between the peoples of Australia and the United States. It is something that I think the vast majority of Australians should, and do, place great value in. It has been reaffirmed by Labor in government in the 2009 defence white paper and in the government’s National Security Statement to the Australian Parliament.

Australia’s key ally and close friend was viciously attacked by terrorists supported by the Taliban regime in September 2001. Ten Australians were murdered in the attack. On 17 September 2001, the Australian parliament passed a unanimous resolution of the House of Representatives formally invoking articles IV and V of the ANZUS treaty and the commitment of Australian forces in support of United States led action against those responsible for these terrorist attacks.

Australia’s contribution in Afghanistan is also an expression of the common interest we share not just with the United States but with the other 45 countries of NATO and the International Security Assistance Force in countering international terrorism. The UN Security Council Resolution 1386 of December 2001 authorised the establishment of an international security force in Afghanistan and called upon ‘member states to contribute personnel, equipment and other resources to the International Security Assistance Force’. It also authorised member states participating in the International Security Assistance Force to ‘take all necessary measures to fulfil its mandate’. I note that this resolution has been renewed a number of times, including most recently earlier this month. So in my view the argument in favour of Australian forces joining the international effort in Afghanistan was overwhelming according to any sober assessment.

Unfortunately, not all assessments have been altogether sober. I note that just last week, the Australianwhich I find myself referring to quite a lot these days—published a claim by Mr Kevin Bracken, the secretary of the Victorian branch of the Maritime Union of Australia and President of the Victorian Trades Hall, that the ‘official story’ of the September 11 attack ‘doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny’. The article states that Mr Bracken claims that ‘the United States government, the military and the security services were involved in the attacks’. Mr Bracken’s commentary is hardly supportive of the efforts that Australian forces are making in very dangerous circumstances working with our US allies and our international partners to counter terrorism.

Mr Bracken has a powerful friend for his cause. This is of course Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, who recently made similar claims at a speech to the United Nations. While I can understand the motivations for the propagation of such fiction by the leader of a regime which is regularly accused of sponsoring international terrorism, I struggle to see why Mr Bracken should associate himself with such bizarre lies.

I note that there are others in the community, indeed some of my parliamentary colleagues, who raise questions in relation to the continued role of Australian forces in Afghanistan in a more considered manner. And I do think it important that the government explains the importance of our continued military involvement—after all, the decision to send ADF and AFP personnel into difficult conflict situations can never be made lightly. However, I would say to those who are opposed to our continued military commitment that the case for remaining a strong contributor to the coalition forces in Afghanistan is just as clear now as ever before. Coalition forces have had significant success against al-Qaeda. They have disrupted its operations and neutralised some of its leadership. But Al-Qaeda remains a persistent terrorist network with global links to violent extremist and terrorist organisations.

Terrorists have killed some 100 Australians since 11 September 2001. Ninety-two were killed in the two Bali bombings. Many were also horribly injured. In these bombings and the attack on our embassy in Jakarta, the terrorist groups involved had links to Afghanistan. I think it is likely to be the case that deployment of coalition military forces to combat the insurgency has significantly disrupted and dismantled al-Qaeda’s capability in Afghanistan.

But Afghanistan remains vulnerable. If the international community were to withdraw from Afghanistan, then the current insurgency might succeed in destabilising the Afghan regime. There would be a heightened risk that Afghanistan would again fall to Taliban control and al-Qaeda could then regain a safe haven for its operations, re-establish its terrorist ‘boot camps’ and regain a place from which to transact its criminal operations. More importantly, terrorists worldwide would be emboldened and would seek to expand their plans to kill innocent people. So a significant rationale for staying the course in Afghanistan is to help protect innocent people, including Australians, from the threat of terrorism. In addition, the costs to the Afghan people of a reinvigorated Taliban would be enormous.

The international force in Afghanistan was originally focused on a stabilisation mission. However, insurgent violence started to increase in 2005 and the security situation started to deteriorate. Military efforts then focused more on counterinsurgency. In December 2009, President Obama announced a revised strategy for Afghanistan and a surge of 30,000 US troops. NATO has contributed more, and so has Australia. From these and other nations we now have a combined coalition force in the field of some 120,000 troops from 47 nations—including: some 80,000 Americans; nearly 10,000 British; 4,500 from Germany; 4,000 from France; 3,500 from Italy; 2,500 from both Canada and Poland; and approximately 1,500 from Turkey; Spain and Australia. The coalition also has an experienced commander in General Petraeus. He has the resources needed to deliver the new strategy.

In addition to direct counterinsurgency operations, the new strategy is focused on preparing the government of Afghanistan for managing its own security. This strategy involves protecting the civilian population, conducting operations together with the Afghan National Security Forces to reduce the capability and will of the insurgency. This means training, mentoring and equipping the Afghan National Security Forces to enable them to provide their own security and to facilitate improvements in governance and socioeconomic development by working with the Afghan authorities and the United Nations to strengthen institutions and deliver basic services.

There is progress being made already. The Afghan National Security Forces are being mentored and trained. The Afghan National Army reached its objective level of 134,000 and the Afghan National Police met its target of 109,000 members by October. The Afghan National Army is becoming increasingly capable and supporting coalition operations more effectively. The majority of the Afghan National Army is now fully partnered with ISAF forces for field operations. Afghan forces have already assumed leadership of security arrangements in Kabul.

The situation remains difficult. There will be hard days ahead. But there are signs of progress and Australia needs to stand with its allies, especially the United States, in this important phase of the fight. Australia cannot allow its commitment to Afghanistan to wane. Australian troops and personnel are making a difference. Our mentoring task force is on track in its core mission of training the 4th Brigade of the Afghan National Army within the next two so that it is able to manage security in the province. Our AFP contingent has trained almost 700 Afghan National Police. Our special operations task force is assisting the broader ISAF mission of disrupting and dismantling insurgent groups. In Uruzgan province Australian foreign aid has increased to $20 million but our aid workers require significant force protection in order to do their job, which is currently provided by the ADF and our US allies.

The very serious decision to go to war is a decision of the government of the day. It is probably the most fundamental executive decision a government can make, so it should ultimately be a matter for the executive—the cabinet—not the parliament. Having said that, decisions by the government of the day are always tested, or able to be tested, on the floor of the House of Representatives, which of course determines who forms government. Parliaments are rightly able to consider and debate important matters of state, as parliament has done on Afghanistan these last two weeks. But it is for elected governments to exercise responsibility for—and be held to account for—the decisions they make, including going to war.

It is in Australia’s national interests to continue to combat the insurgency in Afghanistan by standing firmly with our ally the United States, by standing firmly behind our troops and supporting them in their brave endeavours and by standing beside the Afghan people and supporting them in their continued efforts to build a nation that is free from the evil and destructive influence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be able to make a contribution to the debate in support of Australia’s bipartisan commitment to Afghanistan. As this commitment is coming up to its ninth anniversary, it is, however, incumbent upon us to revisit our original objectives, evaluate progress and chart a clear course for the future. Of course, no mere words can lessen the immense loss to our nation, its grieving families and its communities of the 21 young lives lost—gallant Australians who have paid the ultimate price in the service of Australian interests. We owe it to them to at very least have a sensible, informed and thoughtful debate about Australia’s future mission in Afghanistan.

But we also owe it to an increasingly sceptical public, whose initial support for Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan may be waning, to explain what we can hope to achieve by the allied effort, in what time frame and at what cost. It may be that many, if not all, Australians’ understanding of why we are there goes not much further than the task of training the Afghan army in Oruzgan province, ensuring Afghanistan does not provide a safe haven for terrorists and honouring our commitment to our most important ally, the United States of America. It is understandable that, as some allies announce staged withdrawals from what must seem like an unwinnable war in support of a corrupt regime, some 60 per cent of Australians in a recent survey wanted to bring our troops home. It is fair to say that Australia’s interests and objectives have evolved over the course of the conflict. So the majority of us in this place who have resolved to support the continuing Australian troop commitment in Afghanistan must face the tough questions and make a convincing case for Australia’s continuing role in this war. Put simply: what is the rationale for us remaining?

As many commentators have noted, although the overthrow of the Taliban was the basis for destroying al-Qaeda and thereby securing our safety, it is well recognised that the real threat to safety is not to be found in Afghanistan but rather in Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia. But this uncomfortable truth is in my opinion no reason to abandon Afghanistan, especially now that there is real progress towards bringing the Taliban to the peace table. The prospect of the Karzai government now discussing a political settlement with the Taliban is a development that could redefine the basis for our presence in Afghanistan. However, a political settlement that includes the Taliban brings a new set of risks and challenges in the hoped-for transition to a stable government.

The US-led troop surge that is now underway may be providing the necessary peace and stability on the ground to encourage a process of negotiation, but the hurdles to achieving what might be regarded as an effective and acceptable political settlement are formidable. More particularly, hitching our wagon in support of entrenching what is widely regarded as a corrupt Karzai regime is deeply repugnant to Western liberal values. Even so, I must say that, on a scale of awfulness, the allegations of corruption, fraud, bribery and drug running levelled at the Karzai government are a lesser evil than a restored fundamentalist Taliban brutalising women, opposing education for girls and ruthlessly suppressing the freedoms and development of half the population.

While the possibility of a political compact to end the need for massive troop numbers and continued loss of military and civilian lives must be given every chance to work, a full-scale Taliban resurgence must be resisted. Of course, it is important to engage with moderate or less hardline Taliban if they can be identified, but even so the extremes of sharia law and Pashtun customs will need to be guarded against. For me, at the end of the day, safeguarding the freedoms of Afghan women and girls is one of the justifications for our continued commitment. Of course, the Afghan people more broadly must be part of this proposition. There can be no moral justification for abandoning a people who have been abandoned repeatedly in the past.

It is important to consider what additional strategic steps we might take to ensure that freedom for Afghan women and girls is not bargained away or compromised in any deal or reconciliation between the Karzai government and the Taliban. This is especially so because local Afghan women have, with great courage and conviction, been able to insert gender-sensitive or gender-responsive legislation into the new constitution to ensure women’s education and employment, as well as participation in government and protection from violence and family bartering. Names like Lieutenant Colonel Malalai Kakar, head of Kandahar’s department of crimes against women, and Sitara Achakzai, a member of Kandahar’s provincial council, come to mind. They have both been assassinated by the Taliban in the last 18 months, probably for as little—in our eyes—as the equivalent of $2,500. There are many others starting to emerge as true Afghan reformers who are fighting for reform for their gender and correctly setting new benchmarks for women’s participation as major stakeholders in the political and military outcomes in their country. The rebuilding of Afghanistan cannot take place without the advancement of its women.

These achievements have taken place—and it is worth reminding the Senate of this—against a background in Afghanistan where women conventionally were traded for animals, female literacy was around 13 per cent and legally sanctioned marital rape was common. We cannot just abandon these courageous women and girls to a future under a resurgent Taliban, risking a reversal of the progress they have fought and indeed died for over the last nine years. Laura Bush, former first lady of the United States and an honorary adviser to the US-Afghan Women’s Council, said recently

Offences against women erode security for all Afghans, and a culture that tolerates injustice against one group of its people ultimately fails to respect all its citizens.

Mrs Bush went on to say:

Afghanistan’s leaders must defend women’s rights with action and policy, not just lofty rhetoric. True reconciliation cannot be realised by sacrificing the rights of Afghan women. To do so would reverse Afghanistan’s progress and return its people to the perilous circumstances that marked the Taliban’s rule.

There are clear choices for those entrusted with ensuring Afghanistan’s peace and prosperity. Will Afghanistan be a nation that empowers women, or one that oppresses them?

I think these are important and indeed vital questions that need resolution in the affirmative.

As parliamentarians, we have a responsibility to think outside the proverbial box and to find new pathways to engage with those who can influence a better transition to democracy in Afghanistan. At the time of announcing the appointment of Richard Holbrooke as US Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, President Obama said:

There is no answer in Afghanistan that does not confront the al-Qaeda and Taliban bases along the border, and there will be no lasting peace unless we expand spheres of opportunity for the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

What we can do—to quote President Obama’s words—to ‘expand spheres of opportunity for the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan’ is what I wish to address in my remaining remarks. Tensions in the region include the need to resolve the instability in Afghanistan and the deterioration in relations not only between Afghanistan and Pakistan but also between Pakistan and India. I suggest that one way we can ‘think outside the box’ is to work to establish a ‘second-track dialogue’ process outside and in addition to formal diplomatic channels of engagement. Women parliamentarians and women more broadly share a common interest in securing safe and stable communities in which to live. Like parents everywhere, we all want opportunities for our families and the communities we represent, and those are very much denied people in those regions when internal and external conflicts are driven by violence, radicalism and historical tensions between communities or across borders. In my view, we should be exploring the opportunities to contribute to peace building by convening a forum of influential women leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and perhaps Bangladesh, together with participants from Australia and the United States. The objective would be to draw on the experience and fresh perspectives of a diverse range of women leaders in a dialogue to develop practical, unifying initiatives and activities to greatly reduce conflict in the region, engaging these women in a conflict resolution agenda within countries and between neighbouring countries.

What outcomes might be achieved from such an investment in a women’s second-track peace-building initiative? From the start, it will re-energise and add momentum to women’s networks and their organisations in the region and give a greater public profile to both the issues and the players; it would create and sustain action agendas on issues within the regions to be followed up by women to work with governments in seeking to resolve destabilising tensions; and it would add a new framework of people-to-people contacts, creating a substantive process outside usual government activity to address national security issues within the region and seek resolution of them. And, in my view, it responds in an imaginative way to President Obama’s call to identify ‘spheres of opportunity’ to build lasting peace.

I want to add a thought about possible ways to keep and add value to this type of second-track diplomacy. Australia has an established, accepted and respected role through its AusAID programs in the region and in introducing different methods of governance. The women’s peace-building dialogue that I am suggesting could be reinforced with subsequent grants for specific dialogue between participants and relevant others. Scholarships or grants could be provided for further contacts between participants to help establish their standing in their communities and reinforce their capacities to reduce tensions. Further, aid could be targeted to keeping up the momentum of a peace-building dialogue with annual revisitation of issues addressed in workshop type sessions to check on progress and to continue relationships between attendees, and expanding that to perhaps even include Iran and Uzbekistan and other areas of conflict. At the least, it could address the need for political mobilisation of important players in the Afghan community as a way of ensuring that any political settlement in Afghanistan is not achieved at the expense of women and girls.

About 18 months ago I met a delegation of parliamentarians from Afghanistan who had come to Australia. Two of their female parliamentarians took me aside and begged Australia not to give up on Afghanistan. If this debate is anything to go by, the people of Afghanistan will know Australia will not be giving up on them. I trust the government might at least consider the suggestion of my second-track dialogue proposal of including the women of the region as an additional contribution that Australia could make from a leadership position to have a positive influence on the settlement of this terrible conflict.

In conclusion, I refer to a metaphor by Dylan Thomas, used in a very different context but I think it is apt. This conflict should not be ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’. Let us instead agree that we need to find lasting solutions.

Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Link to 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.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Universities and Research) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have listened with great interest to this parliamentary debate. I have listened with great interest to this debate for the past nine years, since 7 October 2001, when Operation Enduring Freedom was launched by the United States and its allies, including Australia, so that freedom so bravely won by the people of Afghanistan from communist oppression—the freedom so cruelly lost over the following decade to civil war and then Taliban misrule—may indeed return and perhaps this time endure.

I have listened to this debate and heard arguments that we should abandon our mission in Afghanistan. Some of these arguments are passionate, others are cold and rational; some seem sincere while others, callous. All of them are wrong: wrong in principle and wrong in practice; wrong in general and wrong in particular; wrong politically and wrong morally.

Some say that force never solves anything. Tell that to the liberated slaves throughout the 19th century. Some say that there is nothing worse than war. Tell that to the ghosts of the Holocaust and other victims of Nazi tyranny. Some say that all we need is more dialogue and greater understanding. Tell that to the tens of millions who perished over the seven decades of the loathsome communist experiment, and to the tens of millions of those liberated from under its shadow 20 years ago.

Others, more pragmatic, will tell you, ‘We cannot solve all the world’s problems and so why bother with Afghanistan?’ but not Darfur or the Congo or North Korea. To that I say this: just because you cannot do everything it does not mean that you should do nothing. Think of wars on poverty, disease or, indeed, carbon dioxide emissions. Is it not strange how no-one is arguing that because we cannot completely solve these problems we should do nothing? It is funny how this tendentious reasoning only seems to be applied to wars on tyranny and terror. The same pragmatists will say that we should not meddle in other people’s internal conflicts. They say that, and will then go on to paraphrase Otto von Bismarck, that the whole of Afghanistan is not worth the bones of a single Australian SAS soldier. To that I say this: at the dawn of the new century, and amidst our smaller and interconnected world, there is no conflict so isolated that it will not sooner or later come knocking at your door.

One would have thought that we learned that lesson on 11 September 2001. One would have thought that we had learned the lessons about appeasement, isolationism and sticking our heads in the sand much earlier than that—perhaps even as early as 1 September 1939. We value the courage of our armed men and women. We are eternally in debt to them for their sacrifice and their service. We grieve with them and their loved ones for every loss that they suffer. We also know and understand that they are fighting the good fight today in the time of our choosing and on our terms so that we do not all have to fight a bigger fight of the enemy’s choosing and on the enemy’s terms tomorrow. We bring war to them today so that they cannot bring it to us tomorrow—and, just as importantly, so that they cannot bring it once again to the long-suffering people of Afghanistan.

There is hardly a cause more just than trying to prevent the return of the Taliban regime. A cause more just I cannot think of. This was the regime that treated half of its population, Afghan women, like useless trash—uneducated, unemployed, isolated, battered, hopeless and helpless; the regime that stoned to death apostates, adulterers and homosexuals, and which denied all basic human and political rights to its people; the regime that imposed theocracy and mediaeval poverty on its 28 million subjects; the regime that lived off the proceeds of the heroin trade and gave sanctuary to al-Qaeda; and the regime so obsessively repressive that it mandated beards for all men, banned music, kite flying and sport, and turned stadiums from centres of entertainment into venues of public execution.

And yet, despite that, some are saying that we should give up and leave the people of Afghanistan to their own devices and let them sort out their own affairs whichever way the cards may fall. This view astonishes me. Afghanistan should be the cause celebre of the Left: protecting women and minority rights, fighting oppression and ethnic cleansing, battling an oppressive theocracy, promoting democracy and human rights. It should be the cause celebre of the Left, and yet, according to the twisted moral compass of the Left, all these noble causes and moral considerations are trumped by one thing and one thing only: reflexive anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism.

The reasoning seems to work something like this: (a) pick a conflict—any conflict; (b) see if one of the participants is the United States or Israel; and, (c) if the answer to question (b) is yes then take the other side. It has been thus in every conflict around the world from the Russian Revolution to the armed struggles of today. There has never been a leader or a movement so odious as to be beyond the pale for the Left as long as it was deemed sufficiently anti-American and anti-Western, because that is what counts to the Left. Whole generations idolised Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet Union, then Mao, Castro, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. Noam Chomsky supported the Khmer Rouge and Michel Foucault is intoxicated by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution. Now western pilgrims travel and pay homage to Hugo Chavez.

Some even support our enemies openly. Others are strongly offended at any suggestion that they support the enemy; it is just that they simply cannot bring themselves to support our side. It hurts too much. While these two positions may differ in the degree of moral culpability that they attract, their practical consequences are all but the same. It is 70 years since George Orwell famously said:

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’.

It matters not in this context if we speak of the Second World War or the conflict in Afghanistan. No matter what your excuses, no matter what your rationales, no matter how noble and pure your views, no matter whether you call yourself a pacifist or a humanitarian and no matter whether you do not believe in violence or in meddling in other people’s affairs—by calling for the end of military involvement in Afghanistan you are aiding and abetting one of the more monstrous political and religious movements in entire human history.

Mark Steyn wrote just a few years ago:

Everyone’s for a free Tibet, but no one’s for freeing Tibet. So Tibet will stay unfree—as unfree now as it was when the very first Free Tibet campaigner slapped the very first ‘FREE TIBET’ sticker onto the back of his—

car—

               …            …            …

If Rumsfeld were to say ‘Free Tibet? … what a swell idea! The Third Infantry Division goes in on Thursday,’ the bumper-sticker crowd would be aghast. They’d have to bend down and peel off the ‘FREE TIBET’ stickers and replace them with ‘WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER’.

And so it is here.

I say this to all of those pining for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, while cloaking their stance in a lofty humanitarian rhetoric of peace, love and human rights: you are only for freedom if it does not involve getting off your armchair. You are only against oppression if it does not involve any real sacrifice. You are only for women’s rights—or gay rights, or minority rights, or human rights or democracy—as long as it does not interfere with your political agenda of opposing what you see as America’s political hegemony. Being concerned—or pretending to be concerned—is not a substitute for action. Just as no ‘Free Tibet’ sticker has ever freed one Tibetan, no amount of candle-lit vigils has managed to save one Darfurian life from genocide—not one. And no amount of posturing that you really care about the fate of Afghan women, men and children will do one tiniest bit to ensure that the 28 million people in that country continue to lead better lives and enjoy hope for the future, if at the same time you are trying to force the withdrawal of NATO and allied armed forces.

The day always comes when you have to make a choice: are you for freedom or are you against it? Are you against tyranny and oppression or for it, whether it be out of spite, misguided idealism or merely indifference? Think carefully about your answer before you say it, and when you do say it, do not say it to me. Have the courage to go and say it to the hidden face of a woman who will be imprisoned at home, to a man who will be slaughtered because he worships the wrong god or belongs to a wrong tribe, or to a child who you are condemning to a life with no future and no hope. History will judge you, and she is a very harsh judge.

Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate today about our nation’s involvement in Afghanistan, and I think it is timely that the debate is being held in this week when we have members of the Australian Defence Force Parliamentary Program here to hear it. I would like to start by acknowledging the support and admiration for our Defence Force personnel which is often and genuinely expressed by members and senators from all parties in this parliament. It is a sentiment that is overwhelmingly expressed by the people of Australia as well whenever they have the opportunity to say it. One only has to look at the increased attendances at Anzac Day ceremonies around Australia and overseas to know that support for our troops is unquestioned.

Today’s debate is not about support for our troops, but whether or not we should support the government’s presence in Afghanistan. It is important that all Australians know why the government has deployed our troops to Afghanistan, and it is important that Australians are kept informed on a regular basis about what we are doing there. We should be clear about what we hope to achieve and honest about what progress is being made to meet our objectives. Committing Australian troops to places like Afghanistan means not only that we place our troops in the face of danger but also that Australia will be seen by the rest of the world to have taken a position either in support of or against other countries or groups within countries. It exposes us to international scrutiny and may expose us to reactions from nations or groups hostile to our engagement. Governments grapple with those potentialities. They always have and always will, and deployment of troops to any conflict will always be contentious, not just because defence personnel will be killed or injured, but because Australians might become more vulnerable to retaliation and civilian populations will also be at an increased risk of violence and death in any conflict in which we participate. We need to be honest about those facts.

Like many Australians, I know a number of our young and not-so-young people who are or who have been in the ADF and have been deployed to Afghanistan and to the places our troops have been sent to. I know plenty of men who fought in World War II—there are not so many of them left now—in Korea and in Vietnam. Like all senators, I have tried to assist constituent veterans who are permanently damaged by their experiences of war and conflict. I read with horror the effect of war on civilians and particularly on women and children. The price of engagement is very high.

So, should we be there? My view is that we should. I agree with the Prime Minister and with the majority of people who have spoken in this chamber during this debate that Australia has made a commitment and we must see that commitment through. Australia is deployed in Afghanistan as part of an international effort. We joined with international forces under a United Nations mandate to deploy to Afghanistan to remove the Taliban from power and to counter the terrorist organisations that were cultivated there. Along with 46 other nations, Australia formed together to create the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF. Of course, that came after the dreadful events of 11 September 2001, when the terrorist organisation al-Qaeda, based in Afghanistan, was responsible for the deaths of more than 3,000 people, including 10 Australians and including my friend Andrew Knox.

Successive terrorist acts around the world inspired the international community to stand up and attempt to defeat the Taliban so that no further incidences like September 11 would be repeated.

Debate interrupted.