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

I had the opportunity in April this year, along with three colleagues from the House of Representatives, to meet members of our armed forces, members of the Australian Federal Police and Australian public servants in both Kandahar and Tarin Kowt. In fact, we met three young men who were killed subsequently to our visit to Afghanistan. Their deaths were very sad for their comrades, families and friends, and very sad for this nation. The soliloquies by the leadership of the nation and the parliament for those men have been heartfelt, solemn and respectful. Their names are etched in the earth in Afghanistan. They were proud men dedicated to the cause of freedom and liberty.

Some fine contributions have been made to this debate over the last few days. I take nothing away from those who have spoken, but of the contributions I have heard I think Senator Mason’s was by far the best. Senator Mason eloquently stated the savage oppression conducted by the Taliban against their own countrymen. He outlined their pursuit of what we may see as a nihilistic, social and cultural agenda unleashed against all levels of Afghan society: the destruction of cultural symbols of other faiths, the overwhelming denial of individual and human rights, and what looks to those outside as a pursuit to turn back the clock and savagely close the door to the modern world.

Too many people in the Third World see globalisation, the modern world, as some sort of US or Western project—that it provides for the hegemony of the West in both politics and the economy. That is one of the significant factors that we must recognise when we think of where the Taliban has come from—also, as we have heard articulated in the parliament, where opposition within our nation has come from. There is only one party in this parliament that is antiglobalisation, and that is the Greens. Despite them being a secular force, the Greens are probably today’s mediaeval monks and nuns who are forever warning us about impending gloom and doom, that Armageddon is just around the corner and that we should prepare ourselves for the next life because this one is so onerous. We have heard that articulated by all their spokespeople in the last few days. I am not comparing them to those with the nihilistic approach that has been taken by other people around the world, but, indeed, their raison d’etre is almost the same.

The Taliban have ruthlessly hijacked one of the great monotheistic faiths, Islam, and I want to talk about that briefly in my contribution. I think it was President Bush who, in speaking about one of the conflicts in the Middle East, suggested that it was a ‘crusade’. There are many conflicts in the Middle East, and it is too simplistic to put them all into one box. But we can identify the Taliban, because the actions of the Taliban have been to turn Islam into an ideology. They have used that gentle religion to justify murder, mutilation and the denial of individual and human rights. That is a distortion of religion, because the Koran does not advocate fear, rage, hatred or murder. The Koran condemns warfare as abhorrent. The Koran is adamantly opposed to the use of force in religious matters. The Koran recognises all rightly guided religions, and the Koran says, ‘There shall be no coercion in matters of faith’. This exploitation of religious identity is not unique to Islam; it also occurs in both Christianity and Judaism. The background to this exploitation of faith is the same, and the way it is dealt with is the same. I want to talk briefly about why one needs to identify where these people have come from.

Jean-Paul Sartre referred to the situation that we are confronting as a ‘God-shaped hole’. I want to refer to that for three reasons. The first is that we should never confuse the conflicts in the Middle East by saying that they are all of the same background. The second is that we should not lump together all followers of the Islamic faith, because we have unfortunately seen too many examples of intolerance displayed to practitioners of that faith. Thirdly, we must understand the phenomenon so that we may contain or even annihilate it. As I said, we must understand the motive.

When I talked about what Sartre called the situation, it is what a number of commentators have observed about the motives of the Taliban and others: it is a quest to fill a void left by the victory of reason in the modern world, because the modern world is godless and meaningless and the sacred has been denigrated and disregarded. So we have to do something about this feeling of helplessness. To find succour and comfort, we need to resort to the domain of the sacred. This action would limit the advance of the secular ethos, so we can erect barriers and establish within our faiths a segregation so that we can ensure the survival of our wonderful sacred enclave. I know that sounds a bit airy-fairy, but that is in essence, from what I have read, a large part of the motive of the fundamentalists who have been in action in some parts of the world over the last 20 or so years. They have a rejection of the modern world. For them the Enlightenment was a great defeat for the sacred and the only way to reinstate that is to withdraw and put up barriers to make the world safe for the God-fearing. And with these fundamentalists, they believe that whatever they do is justified, because they believe that their interpretation of either the Koran or the Bible is justified in the actions that they take.

I do not think that we will be able to identify a clear victory in Afghanistan. We have not seen any major land battles, and we have known for many years now that there will be no modern warfare as we have known it for the millennia. We may never know in our lifetimes whether we will have a clear victory. Mao Zedong was reportedly once asked what he thought the outcome of the French Revolution was, and he said that it was ‘too early to tell’. That why I say: we may not know now just how effective our operations will be and have been in Afghanistan, because we will only know in the fullness of time. But it is pleasing to know that there have been talks and that there may be, at some point, a preparedness by those psychotics to enter into some arrangement with the legitimate government in Kabul. But we should never expect to walk away from that conflict. We have lost a number of Australian servicemen there, all volunteers, and they, like their country, are prepared to do what is just and right in a cause that I think is correct.