Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is an honour to be here today to support the Prime Minister and speak on this most important issue, and to explain to the Australian people, including those in my electorate of Holt, why the Australian government must remain committed to our mission in Afghanistan. I just want to take us back to pre-September 11 times in discussing this matter now in the House.

On 26 November 1993, the first terror attack on the World Trade Centre took place. A truck bomb parked in a car park ripped through four levels of the South Tower building, killing six people and injuring hundreds more. New York’s serving governor, Mario Cuomo, said to journalists at the time: ‘We all have the feeling of having been violated. No foreign people or force has ever done this to us. Until now, we thought we were invulnerable.’ Ramzi Yousef, one of the main planners of the attack, spent time at Bin Laden funded training camps in Afghanistan before travelling to the United States. Yousef’s plan was for the bomb to cause such significant damage to the South Tower that it would fall and subsequently bring down the North Tower. Whilst there has been some conjecture as to whether this attack was under the direct auspices of Bin Laden, it did signify the increasing threat from Islamic extremists, and their developing organisational capacity and willingness to strike at targets on Western soil.

There is no ambiguity, however, about subsequent attacks and the involvement of bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the coordinated bombings on 7 August 1998 at the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed 291 people and the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole at the port of Aden in Yemen that killed 17 American soldiers. Operatives in the attacks on the US embassies in Africa and the USS Cole attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. Then we come to September 11. The attacks on September 11 in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania killed over 3,000 people, including 10 Australians. On that day the world changed. On 11 September 2001, within the space of 20 minutes, two American airliners struck the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in Manhattan. The towers subsequently collapsed with the loss of almost 3,000 lives. At the same time, another hijacked jet crashed into the Pentagon, whilst a fourth—probably aimed at the White House—failed to reach its target due to the heroic actions of the jet’s passengers and smashed into a field in Pennsylvania.

Never before had mainland United States been the target of such a massive attack—though there was the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan, the only precedent in living memory. The carnage on September 11 was deliberately aimed at civilians and struck at the principal symbols of American commercial and military power and, missing its target in the third case, its political power. These horrific attacks were planned and resourced in Afghanistan. All 19 of the 9-11 hijackers attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. In order for the Australian government to justify our mission in Afghanistan, it is our duty to always provide an ongoing rationale and clear-cut explanation to the Australian people as to why we are there. We are in Afghanistan for clear reasons. Our mission in Afghanistan is in our national security interest. The threat posed by an unstable Afghanistan, which could once again become a safe haven for terrorism, could have ramifications that reach far beyond its borders and directly affect Australian national security interests.

A return of Taliban control to major urban centres, or an even further spread of Taliban control in regional areas, will provide a safe haven again for terrorists to plan, train and operate. Moreover, the instability that would ensue from the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan is also directly related to their fight and their desire to destabilise and control Pakistan, and has a direct impact on the strategic stability of that entire region. It is important to remind ourselves of the situation in Afghanistan prior to 2001. Let us reflect on this: the infamous ministry for the promotion of virtue and the suppression of vice; girls forbidden from going to school; significant discrimination against religious and ethnic minority groups such as the predominantly Shiite Hazaras; women unable to leave their homes, access medical care or even ride in a taxi unless escorted by a male relative; crowds of up to 30,000 people, including many children, watching near-weekly public executions, amputations and whippings at the Kabul sports stadium; and bans on television, films and music. These people basically wanted to export that model concept of society to the rest of the world.

When people say that this is a fight happening on the other side of the world, it is a fight that always directly affects us. Those who make the argument that it is not our fight because it is in a far-flung place forget that this is the place where some of the Bali bombers were trained. The Bali bombers killed 202 innocent civilians, including 88 Australians, and were trained in Afghanistan. Incidentally, according to a DFAT report on transnational terrorism, up to 1,000 South-East Asian Muslims are believed to have received military training in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Key Jamaat-i-Islami and Abu Sayyaf operatives, threats in our immediate region, fought with the Afghan mujaheddin, bringing back with them the training and the ideology to establish these organisations in South-East Asia. A number of the 2002 Bali bombers trained and fought in Afghanistan. Mukhlas fought in the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s and admitted to meeting Osama bin Laden. His brother, Ali Imron, received explosive training and Imam Samudra is reported to have received military training in the early 1990s. Eight-eight Australians died at the hands of these and other men in the attacks in Bali in September 2002 and another 66 Australians were critically injured.

Azhari Husein, who planned the bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta and was suspected of involvement in the 2005 Bali bombings in which four Australians died, also received explosives training in Afghanistan. We remember that in October 2003 some 530 survivors of the Bali bombings and the families of those who were killed filed into the Great Hall of Parliament House to light a candle and honour those who had died. It is vital that we do all we can to ensure that Australians travelling abroad—be it to London, Bali or the United States—can do so without an overarching fear of the threat posed by terrorists. We are in Afghanistan to reduce this fear and deal with this conflict so that Australians can travel freely and without fear.

In the days when the Taliban regime was completely in control, Afghanistan was a state-sponsored terrorism haven; a place that generated the horror of September 11 and the base for the attack on the US that day. This is why the war in Afghanistan falls within Australia’s ANZUS obligations. Afghanistan and the Pakistan border region is where the Taliban and al-Qaeda are based and where Osama bin Laden may still be hiding. It is in Afghanistan and the Pakistan border region that al-Qaeda continues to operate. It is in Afghanistan and that border region that the Taliban continues to represent a real security threat to the Pakistan government and people, to the people and the nascent government of Afghanistan and, frankly, to stability in the entire region. It is in Afghanistan that rampant opium and heroin production provides a continued source of funding for al-Qaeda’s global terrorism operations and it is in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions that the al-Qaeda command structure, albeit degraded, including Osama bin Laden, remains operational.

To meet these regional and global security challenges requires a global security effort which Australia is rightly and proudly part of. Under the mandate of the United Nations, 46 other countries are contributing, including two of our closest allies the United States and Great Britain. We know that the Department of Defence is doing an amazing job with our brave service men and women in this region. We know that we have, through Operation Slipper, up to 1,550 Australian Defence Force personnel currently deployed within Afghanistan. We know that 1,241 of them are deployed in the Oruzgan province and about 340 in Kabul, Kandahar and elsewhere in Afghanistan.

Australia’s substantial military, civilian and development assistance focuses on training and mentoring the Afghan National Army 4th Brigade in Oruzgan province to assume responsibility for the province’s security;  building the capacity of the Afghan National Police to assist with civil policing functions in Oruzgan; helping improve the Afghan government’s capacity to deliver core services and generate income-earning opportunities for its people; and, importantly, operations to disrupt insurgent operations and supply routes using the Special Operations Task Group. That is some of the great work they have been doing. In particular, the Special Operations Task Group is working with our NATO allies and the growing Afghan National Army to prevent and deter a return of Taliban control and tyranny across the country. The role of this group is to disrupt Taliban command and control of supply routes. Our soldiers are on the front line fighting Taliban extremists on our behalf. It is a tough fight and, sadly, at times a deadly fight for our troops, some of whom have made the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf to keep us free of further terrorism incidents like the Bali bombings. Make no mistake, this is and continues to be a war against a determined and vicious enemy, but it is a necessary fight.

Let me talk about the overall progress in Afghanistan since 2001, when the overseas forces were put in there. There has been a dramatic increase in school enrolments in Afghanistan from around one million in 2001 to over six million today, of which one-third, or over two million, are girls. 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 about 85 per cent of people. There has been the identification and management of over 39,000 community infrastructure projects such as wells, clinics and roads in over 22,000 communities throughout Afghanistan through the Afghan led National Solidarity Program. There has been the rehabilitation of almost 10,000 kilometres of rural roads, supporting the employment of hundreds of thousands of local workers through the National Rural Access Program. The telecommunications industry has created about 100,000 jobs since 2001. Today 10 million Afghans have access to telecommunications compared to only 20,000 in 2001. So I think there is pretty strong evidence that there has been constructive change.

The Taliban suppressed free speech. Afghan people also have access to over 400 print media publications, 150 FM radio stations and 26 television channels. These give Afghans an outlet to discuss public issues that were previously off limits such as human rights abuses and women’s rights.

In concluding, I wish to pass on our deepest condolences and our prayers to the families of the soldiers killed in Afghanistan in the service of our nation. All Australians will be thinking of the thousands of Australian men and women who are serving their nation abroad in order to keep it free from the sort of terrorism that we saw almost visit our shores in Bali in 2002.

Australians know that our troops understand the dangers involved in deployments to hostile regions. They know that they face deadly and extremist enemies on a daily basis and they do it with pride and conviction. And our troops do a magnificent job. They are highly skilled, brave and dedicated. All Australians are proud of them and appreciate what they do in defence of our nation and its interests.

I want to read an extract from a letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald in October this year. It was written by Vicki Hopkins, the wife of Corporal Mathew Hopkins, who was shot and killed on patrol in Oruzgan in March 2009. It says more eloquently anything I have said here today:

I knew that, with Mat, he was over there with a job to do and that was to make the world a safer place by getting rid of these evil people. And for that I am very, very proud of Mat. The army is not over there only to shoot and kill bad people; they are over there rebuilding the lives of the Afghan people.

People say this isn’t our war, but a lot of Australians have died as a result of the attacks on Bali and September 11. Afghanistan is the heart of where these people trained to do these horrible acts against the Western world. To pull the troops out now when the job isn’t done, then, really, all those guys did die in vain.

They are powerful and moving words and why we have to be there to see out the mission to its full course.

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