Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There is a great danger in debates such as this on the ministerial statement on Afghanistan that people become very repetitive and there is not much novelty, so I will not traverse areas that many have covered earlier. However, I do put on the record my appreciation of Australian forces on an individual and collective basis in Afghanistan. I see this locally with my good friends and political colleagues Peggy and Phil Gordon, whose son Matthew has served in Iraq, Timor and Afghanistan. I see the duality of, first, their pride in his efforts for this country and the fact he is a voluntary serviceperson and, on the other hand, the fear that they always have about his circumstances. So I do at the outset salute those efforts.

I want to comment on a few contributions in this debate, and I turn first to that of the member for Denison. This was one of the most pompous, self-important performances I have had the honour of hearing since I have been in the federal parliament. He essentially said that all other members of this parliament, unlike him, are not pure, have the wrong motivations and hide behind their party labels. Quite frankly, he will be the first person in Western parliamentary civilisation at the end of this term to be able to say that every time there was a vote in this parliament he voted as his electorate thought he should. To quote public opinion polls and say that everyone else is not following their electorate is absolutely ridiculous. I do say, however, on a broader front, that I question some of the arguments he put forward. Yes, the fact that the Western world supports Israel, that it supports extrajudicial killings, that it supports the bantustans that are being created for the Arab people and their expulsion from their lands, that it supports racist laws in Israel with regard to citizenship, that it supported nuclear engagement between South Africa and Israel during the apartheid period—yes, those kinds of decisions do lead Arabs and Muslims to be hostile to the Western world.

Similarly, in Iraq, obviously the total disaster there, where Iran’s influence has been so massively increased to the point where we see last week that Iran is essentially deciding who will be in coalition in Iraq in the future, getting forces to support al-Maliki rather than having a secular government, is indicative of another interference which does lead people in the Arab world to become more hostile to Western values and Western civilisation. However, for the member for Denison to say that some bloke said in a court case that he was motivated by the fact that Kevin Rudd went to Berlin for a conference, and therefore we are aiding and abetting extremism and radicalisation, is ridiculous. We support these positions because they are right on balance; we do not necessarily get affected by the impact they might have on the rest of the world and on individuals. I also note that he joined with the Greens in having a dream world about infrastructure, welfare, foreign aid et cetera being delivered and that will solve all the world’s problems. Quite frankly, we see every day of the week organisations that are themselves sometimes critical of Western engagement being targeted in their foreign aid delivery in Afghanistan by the Taliban. To say that we can basically solve this by foreign aid and walk away is extremely simplistic.

I heard the Leader of the Greens, Senator Brown, being pressed by Fran Kelly last week on ABC Radio. On three or four occasions she put to him: ‘Can you simply have foreign aid delivery, can you solve all these problems, in the current environment in Afghanistan if you withdraw all forces?’ Three times he ignored that question. There is this idea that we can basically just deliver money, there is going to be fantastic governance, there is going to be no corruption, foreign aid will be delivered effectively and education and health will somehow be assisted massively without infrastructure in the country. He failed to answer that question and then finally said, ‘I’m pleased to see they are negotiating with the Taliban.’ That was not the question. We are all pleased to see there are negotiations with the Taliban.

This was reiterated, of course, by the member for Melbourne in his contribution in this debate. He basically said that the whole problem there can be solved by money and foreign aid, and he made an analogy between Yemen and Oman. I do not want to decry the role of Oman and its emphasis on education. I am actually going to a conference there next week and I am not a detractor of that country. But to compare these two countries is absolutely ridiculous. Forty-six per cent of Yemen’s population are from the Shia minority. Oman has the advantage that its population virtually all belong to a Sunni sect called the Ibadis. The population sizes are 10 times different. Oman has far more oil reserves; Yemen’s are just running out. Yemen was the creation of two separate countries, it has had a number of civil wars and it had Egyptian Nasserites fighting monarchists decades ago. It is not comparable and to say that we can simply build Afghanistan by foreign aid and by spending on education is not a recognition of the realities.

As I say, I find these arguments that we can just walk away and that all will be well rather difficult to cater for. These are the same people who, like me, would say that the Hazaras have been mistreated not only by the Taliban but for centuries. They have legitimate humanitarian refugee claims in this country. It is a recognition of some of the realities of this country that on the one hand the Greens and other refugee advocates say how dire the circumstances are, how dreadful it is for these people, and yet somehow they believe that a Taliban victory, not by negotiations but by a military victory, is somehow going to be good for the country. I have heard a number of these speakers talking about the circumstances of refugees in Iran, Pakistan and India. Why the hell do people think they are there? They are there because of the situation in Afghanistan that forced them out: the persecution that occurred, the fact that the Taliban instigated a theocratic state, restricted the rights of women to education, prescribed how long people’s beards were to be, banned music, banned kite flying, banned football, persecuted minorities and destroyed the historic Buddhist relics at Bamiyan. These are some of the realities that have to be dealt with in these circumstances.

On the other hand I fully endorse the beginning of negotiations with the Taliban. I refer to a very interesting article by Jonathan Steele in the London Review of Books recently. He makes the point that the only account of the Taliban period by an internal player of any substance was by Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Ambassador to Pakistan for the Taliban. He made a number of points in the book, and one was that the Taliban very strongly condemned the bombing on September 11. He said the Taliban is a complex group of people. On the one hand they were historically very rigorous hard-line Islamists, but he says we should not deny their other crucial feature: that they are Pashtuns, that they believe the Pashtuns have been excluded from power structures in the country and that they want to see rights for that group that constitutes 42 per cent of the population. He also makes the point that the negotiations up till now have been manifestly inept and failed. Of the UN sanctions list of 142 Taliban leaders, only 12 have come in from the cold, basically to accept money et cetera and to reconcile with the government.

Jonathan Steele also makes the point that there is a real need to deal with the Taliban on a localised basis. This is not a monolithic organisation. It is a combination of a wide variety of localised forces. There can be localised ceasefires with tribal leaders. The situation will probably demand in the long term a weak central government. One of the things that has to be overcome is the total dominance of the officer corps within the Afghan army by the Tajik minority. It is going to be very difficult to bring Pashtuns into the central army. While I support our involvement there, I very strongly support negotiations. It is pleasing to see that this has been occurring and that the United States is essentially not hampering this process.

We have to be very aware that Afghanistan has a very complex ethnic mix. It is very difficult to see a strong central government emerging. You have a situation in which nearly half the population are Pashtuns, with the rest being Hazaras, Uzbeks and Tajiks. This has always been a central issue. During the negotiations in Rome as to who would be president of Afghanistan—while Karzai eventually succeeded—originally Abdul Satar Sirat, an Uzbeki, was chosen to be the new president. But he could not become president because he came from a small minority, the Uzbeks. We have to understand that this is a central problem in the country.

We have to appreciate that it is not going to be a Western democracy. It is not going to be an extremely advanced country with regard to women’s rights. We have to be very careful, given the fact that military victory for the allies seems extremely doubtful, of making too many demands of the Taliban. At this stage, we are saying that they must subscribe to the constitution and that they have to basically put down all their arms. Good luck accomplishing that in any kind of negotiation. We have to be mindful that at the end of the day we are probably not going to succeed militarily. We have Obama giving dates for withdrawal; we have a number of Western countries reducing their forces, sending a clear signal that they are not there for the long haul. In these negotiations we have to emphasise the possibility of a solution rather than putting restrictions in the way.

I am very mindful of the need to ensure that all forces are part of the negotiating process. Even in our own country, Australia, we see the difficulties in reconciling ethnic groups. I was on Hazara radio last week. The first question that they asked me was not about the future of Afghanistan as a nation but the rights of Hazaras and their persecution. I went to Melbourne and met a very educated, sophisticated and well-off Pashtun community. Their starting point was to decry the fact that Hazaras are monopolising refugee places in this country. I went to a ceremony of the Tajik community recently in commemoration of one of the great people of their country, Ahmed Shah Massoud, a leader of the Tajiks who was murdered by al-Qaeda, and their whole preoccupation was with him and Tajik rights. That is the situation that we have in the Afghan community in our country. So you can imagine what is occurring in Afghanistan.

To those who decry the military intervention and talk about the various failures in regards to the delivery of services, the fact that health services are still stretched and the fact that there are still a large number of females in particular who are not receiving education, I say that these are manifestly realities. It is very difficult to accomplish things. I read a US congressional review recently that showed that the Taliban, or people close to them, have some of the US contracts for security in Afghanistan. They are ripping off that system. To somehow say that forces should never have gone there because it is so difficult, because there have been failings and because there is a struggle around these things is ridiculous. The counterpoint that is put by some that essentially all will be well if we withdraw is really quite difficult to subscribe to.

In conclusion, on balance I support our continued engagement. Despite the fact that in Pashtun areas there is a very high level of support for the Taliban, there are also indications in some areas that people are receiving rights, have more involvement in the political system, are receiving education et cetera through allied intervention.

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