Mal Washer (Moore, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am one of the few folk here who opposed this war bitterly. Before I talk about that I want to tell you how much I admire our troops. They fight with courage, they fight with honour and they fight with morality. To lose 21 and have 156 wounded—and, being a doctor, I know when they come home how many more will be emotionally injured—is an absolute tragedy. I have heard many people say why we went into the war in 2001. I want everyone to know that I support that reason. But it is now 2010, and you have to ask yourself: why the hell are we still there? I am telling you: it is because we are crazy. The No. 1 reason given is the American alliance, and the No. 2 reason is that we have to look after the population, that we have civil duties and that we have to make sure that al-Qaeda has gone.

Let me tell you the problem. The Dutch have pulled out—they are smart. The Canadians are going to pull out next year. The Americans are reducing their troops next year; so are the British. The Americans now really know they cannot win this war. Obama himself knows that. Vice President Joe Biden acknowledges that this war is unwinnable. McChrystal was removed because he was too light on the civilian population and lost too many American lives. Petraeus has gone in. He is heavier and he will lose fewer American lives, but the collateral damage in killing the civilian population will increase dramatically.

That is all very good—but for what? What do we aim to gain? Let me tell you what we have in the presence on the ground. I will tell you about two people I know who have fought in Afghanistan and today have influence in Afghanistan at a very high level. Before I tell you that, there are a few hundred—I do not know the exact number—SAS special fighters. Some of them I know. Some of them are friends of my son. They are certainly the friends of the person I am going to talk about. These guys love to go to war. I know them. They love war. This is what we train them to do, and they are damn good at it. I love them. They are warlords. They fight, and they are fighting tough people. But I will come back to that in a second.

The second mob we have are training the 4th Brigade of the Afghan National Army. These are the most hopeless bunch of critters that God ever put on the planet, and I will tell you why: they are not the cream of the population, because those people are already working for the warlords. Every warlord has an army. Every drug dealer has an army. Karzai has armies. His brother is the biggest poppy grower in the whole of Afghanistan. They cut deals to get the poppies out through Nimruz province into Iran to sell to your kids. I would have bought the stuff and turned it into morphine or papaverine—legitimate drugs. Unfortunately, Karzai and company—the drug lords and the warlords—have got it all tied up. Here we are, teaching the 4th Brigade how to fight. The warlords fought the Soviet army and killed 100,000 of them. What the heck are we deluding ourselves with?

Let me tell you about the two people I know so well. One is an ex-SAS, and I cannot mention his name. I will call him G for the sake of it. He was just recently in Afghanistan and is back now in Australia. He is a special operative who works for himself, so when I tell you the places he has been you do not need to have a war with Pakistan, like Bob Katter suggests. He has been in every province as a special ex-SAS operative now in security technology, from Oruzgan to Kandahar to Helmand to Nimruz, across into Pakistan and up into Waziristan. He cuts deals with different people there to try to save lives. When I rang him last Saturday to get an update on how things are going, he said it is the most futile war he has ever seen. This guy has been in Iraq. If I mention too many places, people might know who he is, so I will not do that. He has been in South America. He has been in literally every war you can imagine. He is a professional fighter. He is a decent guy but a professional fighter. He knows literally every SAS guy on the ground—and they are good.

When he went across to help cut deals in Pakistan, he went there because we went to get the Taliban to go talk to Karzai, who has the most corrupt government on the face of the planet. The Taliban need to be in this government because we need to exit this as soon as possible with some dignity. So we need representation—forget about democracy—on the ground if we are not going to leave a slaughter yard behind. You can stay there for five generations, but the Taliban are not going anywhere. He said to me that when you cross towards those areas where our boys are trying to stop these people building the IEDs that kill so many of us, you see no fathers. You do not see any brothers. It is obvious why not. We have the best professional teams in history in there, but we are not winning hearts and minds. You cannot send any aid people into this country unless they have military protection or they will be dead in 24 hours. They hate you. You are deluding yourself. You are seen as a foreign, occupying army with different ideologies, with Western principles they do not adhere to and with a religion they find infidel and repugnant. They already have plenty of armies. What are we training armies for? As I said, we could get a couple of warlords who would knock up a better army.

To give you an idea, the last time my friend was there they were teaching them how to use rocket propelled grenades, which are pretty dangerous things. So what did they do? They shot one straight up in the air. It came straight down and killed 30. That is not unusual. When they send them out in the battlefield they generally shoot one another more than they do the enemy. It is because the warlords would have picked them up if they were any good. The drug lords would have picked them up if they were any good. These are what is left over, and most of them desert. The tragedy is that when you send the money in it goes through Karzai and the boys, and the warlords pick up all the Western money. As you have heard, they are getting it out of Iran as well. They are taking it in cash. But these guys on the ground are not getting paid. That is another problem. So they desert.

We are fighting al-Qaeda, but al-Qaeda is an ideology. You cannot stop an ideology by putting guards on a border. That is crazy. G tells me the ASIO blokes over here understand fully. Our threat is not al-Qaeda ideology coming back into Afghanistan; our threat is probably home grown—right here. So the fight against this so-called ideology is not going to be won with guns and border protection; it is going to be by being very careful with what we have back home.

Now I want to tell you about a Taliban fighter who used to work for me for a little while. You should go have a look at some of his work. He sculpted a big eagle for me—a giant eagle for Aquila—because I was a megalomaniac and owned wineries before I learnt how much money you lose! He did a beautiful job. He also carved Joseph in jarrah for the Catholic cathedral. His name is Mehdi Mohammadi. He has gone back to Kabul in Afghanistan for a short time. They tend to grab his brother every time he goes there and take a lot of money from him, because it is all corrupt. But that is life.

How he started as a sculptor and a painter—as are other members of his family—is that his uncle and his cousin made a beautiful sculpture of a human being. The Taliban caught them and had a problem with that so they killed his uncle and his cousin. He was conscripted—and conscription there is not waiting for your marble or ball to be picked; it is being told, ‘We’re going to shoot you if you don’t cooperate’. He was probably lucky because he was wounded within a year or so of that and they left him in a cave to die. He was one of the guys who got out of Afghanistan as a boatperson, came to this country and survived—with a bit of scarring. He is now an Australian citizen and you can look at his works, as I said. He has changed his name to Medhi Rasulle.

He has told me of the lunacy of what we are doing there. He is about as religious as I am. He is an incredible guy—he had no English when he came to this country but in a short time he could speak fluent English. He is an absolute genius when it comes to sculpting. However, Afghanistan is a land of tribes—it is not a country where people are identified as Afghans although they might call themselves that. It is a land of tribes ruled by tribal warlords, some of them drug dealers and some of them Taliban or whatever you want to call them. We chase them to Pakistan and they come back.

We all know this war is lost, except for the people who have never been there. G knows it is lost. Mehdi knows it is lost. What we need is to get some government that is not a democratic government but that is representative of the tribes, the warlords and all the others there so there will be some stability when we leave. When should we leave? If we cannot do that in six months I think we are wasting our time. Forget the 4th Brigade—they have enough warlords and armies to take on whatever they want, but they just do not have the will to fight. If they do not want to fight for us then let us get our people home.

I turn now to the American alliance. I suggest my American friends pull their troops out as soon as possible, as soon as we can establish that. They are already getting NATO to fly people out of Pakistan—that is, the Taliban top leaders. Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, an organisation of masterminds in Pakistan, felt some threats and caught some of the more rational of them—they are not all raving lunatics; there are a lot who are, but not all. They arrested them in Pakistan to stop them cooperating and coming back to form a government with Karzai because Pakistan has some interest in what happens in Afghanistan, as do Iran and the central Asian republics. That is a tragedy and every day we leave it we are going to lose more people in a pointless war that has to be sorted out by a different form of government to what we have now, remembering it is going to be corrupt and it is going to have warlords. It has plenty of armies and it has plenty of police forces. The ones we are training are not good quality and I can assure you they will be working for the Taliban, the local drug lord or the local warlord because that is where the money is. All the money that we have sent gets siphoned off to those guys, not to the guys we are training.

So let us get the heck out of there, let us get sensible and let us listen to people who have been to all the southern provinces recently because they are realistic guys. They know about war and they know how to win or lose battles. Let us come home and try not to leave a bloodbath behind. Let us get whatever sort of government we can and let us go back and deal with them.

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