Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to participate in this debate on Afghanistan and happy to speak in concert with all those who are in support of our troops, as was the member for Reid and other members on the Labor side and also those on the government side. Deploying troops anywhere means that their lives can be put at hazard. Deploying troops into a known war zone which is now more difficult and more dangerous than it was previously is an even greater burden. The decision cannot be taken lightly. I am sure the preparation of Australian troops to go to that theatre will be deeper, stronger and more purposeful than it was to deploy troops to Iraq because, whereas conditions in Al Muthanna province have been difficult and dangerous, the conditions that exist in Afghanistan, where our troops will be further deployed, are much more dangerous.

On this day, all Australians, particularly those who are directly affected by it, will be thinking of what this emblem means—the remembrance of the Battle of Long Tan when 18 Australians died. The 108 men of D company, 6RAR, fought a pitched battle in blinding rain against a vastly greater opposition. For several hours they held out. They were reinforced. They used artillery, and they had ammo supplied, brought in to them from helicopters. But 18 young Australians lost their lives in a war that the government sent them to—a war that was not of their own choosing. Because they were part of our military forces, they had to put their lives at hazard and they lost them.

On this particular day, it is important to remember that, in sending troops to Afghanistan, we have sent troops to many different theatres. Some people have already been injured and some people have died, and maybe more people will die over time. It is with a heavy heart that I say this, because I know just how difficult it is and how brave the people in our defence forces are. We need to make sure, particularly with what has been highlighted recently, that they have the best available equipment—the best equipment that is necessary and useful for that country—and that it is as up to date as possible. I have seen a fair amount of that. From the recent comments that have been made, we need to be absolutely sure that its quality is guaranteed and that the Defence Materiel Organisation ensures that.

It is a difficult day in many ways. When the Battle of Long Tan occurred I was all of about 16 years of age. In the following two years, a lot of my waking thoughts were about whether I would be in Vietnam and whether I would be in that situation, because we had a lottery as to whether people would be in or out. My birthday was not picked, but I had thought through those issues strongly. I did not go, but I worked, studied and played footy with people who did go, who were drafted and who were put in that situation. For people who are still alive today, and remembering those who lost their lives, there has to be a very good reason for people to go and a very good reason for us to say, ‘While we stay, others are in a forward position doing something significant and defending something that is good and strong.’

The Labor Party believes—and I believe this very strongly—that the commitment to Afghanistan is absolutely necessary. I also believe we should not have left when we did and left one single Australian soldier there. I think it was entirely a mistake that Australian, US and British forces formed the coalition of the willing to go into Iraq when they did. They could have finished off the problem with Saddam Hussein in Iraq 12 years before. It did not happen. One of the reasons it did not happen is that Iraq can simply dissolve into the three constituent elements that made it up in 1924. This is a country of convenience. It is dissolving, in front of our very eyes, into the Sunni and Shiite elements, and the Kurdish elements in the north. If civil war in Iraq breaks out, as it looks as if it will, then the Shiites in Iran will link up with the bottom part of Iraq and then press on top of Jordan and what will then be a very unstable regime in Syria. And the current difficulties in southern Lebanon, with Israel’s invasion and their attack on Hezbollah, will reach higher orders of magnitude as a result of that.

Those problems are directly linked to the situation in Afghanistan, and part of the background to it was quite well laid out by the member for Flinders in this debate. He took a broad strategic view and looked at the struggle in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and the broad struggle against Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda—or ‘the base’, as it is known—and he looked at its background ideology and the drivers of the situation we face. He was quite correct. Most of the groups who are involved here take a very fundamentalist approach to Islam. They are part of what is known as Wahharbism, which is a sect that developed in Saudi Arabia a couple of hundred years ago—very hard line, very exclusionist. We saw its most frightening modern expression in the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is effectively a medieval force which seeks to take people back to an enclosed world and an Islam that is not outward or open and willing to deal with other faiths but an Islam that completely turns in on itself.

The member for Flinders spoke of the desire of the people leading these revolutionary groups. Bin Laden, of course, is a very wealthy upper middle class person, like most of the big revolutionaries in the past. He is not someone from the very lower working class but somebody who has been enormously privileged. He has been willing to be used by the West previously and the West was willing to use him in the period during the Cold War when we had a simpler world, when bin Laden and his forces were used as mujahaddin against the Soviet forces that were in Afghanistan.

The aim of these fundamentalists is, quite simply, to set up what we call a caliphate. If you look at the way bin Laden operated you see what they started to do. Over a period of more than 10 years, his attacks on Oman and northern Africa, and within Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War, were based on the presumption that Saudi Arabia had been soiled by the presence of American troops and that all American troops had to be gotten out. But the direct targets for his campaign were governments in the Middle East which were Islamic but which did not have a hard enough form of Wahharbism. They were not of the brand that was demanded by him, they were not fundamentalist enough, they did not hate the West enough and they did not want to create a worldwide Islamic state in the Middle East. In the Asian version of that, we faced, with Jemaah Islamiah, an attempt to draw together all people who follow Islam under a caliphate within East Asia.

They have failed so far, but there were a number of attempts to set up a base—and al-Qaeda means ‘the base’—in an Islamic country in the Middle East. They found that too hard. They could not win people over and they changed tack. During the period when they were undertaking that, of course, there were the attacks on the USS Cole and on the US embassy in Kenya. There was a series of other attempts, such as the attempt to knock out the World Trade Center building in 1994, where they tried to demolish it from the car park underneath. But, increasingly, because they failed elsewhere, they took on the softer targets—civilians in the West. We know from the deaths of those thousands of people in the World Trade Center, in the Pentagon and in the planes that were hijacked—and there are those people who, luckily, will not die because recently the British were able to apprehend two dozen or so people who were planning attacks to occur around the fifth anniversary of the attacks in the US—that we are dealing with a very serious business. It is fundamental and it is the real reason why our troops are in Afghanistan.

I think it is very unfortunate that we went into Iraq, because it was the wrong war at the wrong time. Having got rid of the Taliban—an extraordinarily difficult thing to do—we were in a position where we could have run down bin Laden and not allowed him to escape. As the Leader of the Opposition quite rightly argued in his response to the Prime Minister’s statement the other day, trying a flash new way of being able to fight by proxy by paying bribes to local groups of warlords seemed like a good idea at the time but it was as dumb as anything because they just took higher bribes from bin Laden. So they took from both and it appears bin Laden was able to escape into southern Pakistan, which is still uncontrolled and a forbidden country to Western forces and even to Pakistani intelligence and military forces.

We have a real problem that, in Afghanistan and that part of Pakistan, the core of the assault on the West has not been run to ground and has not been, as George Bush referred to it, ‘brought to justice’. The Americans made a fundamentally incorrect decision, so our troops now going back to Afghanistan go back to an Afghanistan that is a lot more dangerous than the one that existed after the Taliban had been cleaned up in the first instance. Hamid Karzai, as Prime Minister of Afghanistan, has a very difficult job to try to bring back together the Pashtun people in the land of the Afghans as a coherent reality. I think it is highly possible, despite the fact that there is a layered series of warlords throughout the country. It is possible to bring these people back as an integrated entity and the country can be secured as a modern democracy, but it will be enormously difficult to do.

I agreed with almost everything the member for Reid said. It was well advertised that, during the period they controlled the country, the Taliban, apart from destroying one of the greatest Buddhist shrines the world has ever seen in an enormously destructive act, suggested that they had aborted the heroin trade operating out of Afghanistan by stopping people growing opium and so on. It is my information that that is not the case—that they continued to allow poppies to be grown and raw opium to be shipped out of Afghanistan, and they utilised that money to consolidate their regime. But it was part of their propaganda campaign to say that they were not the kind of group that people thought they were and that they really had a concern for peoples’ health and welfare and so on.

This is a tough and difficult area for our troops to go back into because, in the two years or so that troops were not there on the ground—only a small number were there—the assistance needed by the government of Afghanistan to rebuild itself was very great, and terrific efforts have been under way. The Taliban and al-Qaeda forces have re-established themselves and put themselves in a position to endanger the continued existence of the new government of Afghanistan. That would not have been the case if the field had not been deserted and Iraq had not been chosen as the place for the battle.

We are going to have a long, hard and bitter war in Afghanistan as a result of those decisions. Here again the member for Flinders is correct: this is not a short-term conflict; this is one where, if you go back and look at English history, you will find we are in for a 30-year or a 100-year war, and not many people will favour it. In his book the Clash of Civilisations, Huntington, an extremely good political scientist from the United States, is I think pretty much on the money in terms of the depth and strength of the battle we face. Any great ideological war that is founded on a religious impulse will be extraordinarily difficult to deal with, because most of the war is in people’s heads. It is not in terms of rationality but in terms of people’s emotional reaction to things. So we need to fight this on many levels. I can only give my strongest support to our troops who are going into a very difficult area. Good luck to them.

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