Speech to Parliament: Ministerial Statements - Afghanistan

This is a very important debate. Fifteen hundred and fifty Australian personnel are deployed in Afghanistan. Twenty-one have died; over 150 have been wounded. By any measure, we are paying and we have paid a significant price to be in Afghanistan. Twenty-one men have paid an unimaginably high price. Their family and friends face enormous and continuing loss. The injured in many cases face a life fundamentally changed. So why are we in Afghanistan and should we stay there? This is a question best answered, I suggest, in two parts. I want to speak firstly about why Australia joined in the invasion of Afghanistan, a decision I believe that was absolutely correct, before turning to the more difficult question of what we should do now.

We went into Afghanistan as part of an international response to the terrorist outrage of September 11, 2001. Nearly 3,000 people died when four aircraft were hijacked. Two were flown into the two World Trade Centre buildings and a third was flown into the Pentagon. The fourth was apparently aiming at the White House but ended up crashing in rural Pennsylvania, evidently after a struggle between terrorists and passengers. The attacks were coordinated by the Islamic terrorist organisation al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is closely linked with the Taliban, the extremist Islamic organisation which took power in Afghanistan in the late nineties. Al-Qaeda members lived and trained in Afghanistan and their leader, Osama bin Laden, lived there.

The US and the UK responded to the outrage of September 11 by launching military operations against the Taliban in October 2001. The United Nations Security Council, by resolution 1386, passed on 20 December 2001, authorised the establishment of the International Security Assistance Force. Its initial mission was Kabul and surrounding areas, and in 2003 a further resolution expanded its role to the whole of Afghanistan. The expanded mission has been regularly reinforced by subsequent Security Council resolutions.

Australia has been involved to varying degrees in Afghanistan since 2001, although our forces were reduced to very low levels between 2003 and 2005, with more emphasis given to the war in Iraq at that time. From 2006, Australian special forces were redeployed and today we have 1,550 personnel operating as the Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force in Oruzgan province.

In my view, the decision to go into Afghanistan originally was absolutely correct. We needed to be part of a united effort by the Western world, by civilised, advanced nations, to respond to an appalling attack by extremist terrorists. Our way of life in Australia is based upon the values and principles of a modern, democratic, capitalist, pluralist world. We benefit enormously from being part of a community of nations with similar values, led by the United States but also including the nations of Europe, Canada and New Zealand, and many nations in Asia and South America.

We share core values. In these nations you are free to worship as you choose. You have the right to cast a vote to determine who governs you. If you have a grievance you can go to court for redress. If you are accused of a crime you will receive a fair trial. Our people travel freely back and forth between these nations and others for education, for work and for leisure. We read each other’s newspapers and books. The universities of each nation generate knowledge which benefits all. Our economies are intertwined. There is much cross-investment and trade, which benefits us all. Most importantly, in these nations citizens are free to pursue their goals and ambitions in life, to make a better life for themselves and their families, to seek education or to seek fortune and to help others and to do these things in as many different ways as they may choose.

September 11 2001 saw a vicious attack on these values and the nations which embody them. We were attacked by a group of extremists who believe in a primitive, fundamentalist theology and who use the force of arms to impose on all within their control the obligation to follow their beliefs. This attack happened to occur on United States soil, but it was an attack against all of us in the West. As we know all too painfully, it was followed by an attack in Bali in 2002, where 88 Australians were killed; an attack on the Australian Embassy in Indonesia in 2004; the London train and bus bombings in 2005; another attack in Bali in 2005; and the attack on hotels in Jakarta in 2009. The evidence suggests that every one of these attacks was planned and executed from terrorist safe havens in Afghanistan.

We are facing an attack on our way of life and on our values. The West had no choice but to respond, firstly, to demonstrate that those who are opposed to what we stand for cannot attack us with impunity but, secondly, to seek to root out the problem by removing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and replacing it with a more stable government which no longer provided a safe haven for terrorists. To achieve that latter objective, we needed to work to deliver a better life and better outcomes for the people of Afghanistan, because without that you will not achieve stability in that country.

It would have been feasible for Australia to decline to participate in that international effort, an effort conducted under the auspices of the United Nations and one with such widespread international engagement and approval that 47 nations are involved in the International Security Assistance Force. We could have done that. We could have stayed on the sidelines. But would that have been the right thing for us to do? We are, as I have mentioned, part of a community of nations which share core values, and those values are under attack. Would it have been the right thing for us to do to stand idly by, to do nothing? Would it have been right for us to keep our armed forces safely at home in their barracks when young American men and women, young British men and women and the men and women of many other countries were exposing themselves to enormous danger in the defence of those shared values? I do not think that would have been right. Just as importantly, I do not think it would have been in Australia’s national interest. Our national security is critically reliant on our alliance, firstly, with the United States and, secondly, with other Western nations such as the UK, to which I have referred. For us to stand by while our allies entered a conflict to protect our shared way of life would have seriously weakened those security relationships.

The question of what we should have done in 2001 is one thing. Today, of course, we face an even harder question. We are in Afghanistan. We have been there, to varying degrees, for nine years. It is a difficult war. We are fighting against an enemy which is hard to distinguish from the local civilian population. We are fighting to support a regime, the Karzai regime, which is very far from perfect. We are fighting a war in circumstances where the objectives have changed and reduced since we began. We are fighting a war which is increasingly costly to Australia not only in economic terms but, vastly more importantly, in human terms. Should we stay in or is it right for us to pull out now? That is the question which faces Australia. In my view, it is also the key point which answers the argument which is made by some, including the Greens. Afghanistan is a failed state and terrorist haven, they say, but so are other places, like Somalia, yet we are not in Somalia. That is quite true and that is precisely the point. We are not in Somalia. Hence, we do not face the decision about whether to stay or go. In Afghanistan we do. That is our choice.

In my view, the right way to analyse this question, to analyse the decision which faces the Australian government, is to recognise two realities. The first is that we are part of an international coalition led by the United States. We are not the decision maker. We may have some modest capacity to influence the thinking of the US through our diplomatic relations, although we should not overstate that, but we are not the decision maker in terms of the overall international effort. Clearly, if the United States were not in this war, we would not be in it. The second reality is that, sooner or later, the US will exit this war. It will cease to have a military presence in Afghanistan. It may be in one year; it may be in five years. Very clearly, at that point at the very latest, we will exit too.

Let me in passing make the point that no nation on earth has the track record of the United States for entering other countries, stabilising them, getting them back on their feet and then exiting. Why is Japan a stable and prosperous democracy today? It is because, after a vicious conflict in World War II, the United States occupied Japan, its former enemy, and helped it; and when Japan was ready to be independent the US troops went home. Germany is a stable and prosperous democracy today because of the wise, far-sighted, generous and humane conduct of the United States immediately after World War II. So too is much of Europe. The US is not perfect, of course, but at their finest, the values displayed by the US are very much to be admired. It is far from irrelevant that this is the nation which is leading the international effort in Afghanistan.

That being said, the decision which the US and its international allies face in Afghanistan is a very difficult one. We have not secured a comprehensive victory or anything like it. We have not established Afghanistan as a prosperous, liberal democracy. But I do not think that we should be wholly gloomy. We have certainly demonstrated very powerfully that you do not launch terrorist attacks against Western targets and Western civilisation without facing a powerful response. Of course the world would be a better place if it were not necessary to use force, but when you are dealing with evil people who are prepared to use it themselves, regrettably there is sometimes no choice but to respond. We have hugely disrupted the Taliban and tipped them out of government, and we have made some modest, cautious progress in stabilising Afghanistan and delivering some benefits to the population. The work of the Australian mission in Oruzgan province is an important part of that.

The real problem is that the outcome is finely balanced. An ill-judged pullout could leave Afghanistan vulnerable to the Taliban taking power again and making that nation once again an international terrorist haven. The aim of the international community in due course must be to depart from Afghanistan in a way which leaves that nation best able to govern itself and to guard itself against the Taliban or other unsavoury forces.

For Australia, the choice we face today is whether to exit now and leave more of a burden on our friends and allies or to exit later. To stay in is costly. There will be more deaths. There will be more devastated Australians. There will be more children growing up without fathers. We politicians, comfortably situated here in Canberra, cannot pretend to really understand the sacrifices that soldiers and their families make. As other speakers have correctly noted, there is little we can say that is of genuine assistance to families when a son, father, brother or partner has made the ultimate sacrifice. But the hard fact of more pain and death to come is not of itself sufficient to make our decision. As a nation we have to decide whether to stay in while our allies stay in.

We went into Afghanistan because our civilisation was under attack. For the moment, we continue to make progress in stabilising Afghanistan and helping it to re-emerge as a more stable and secure nation. It is slow and painful progress, hard won, and there are many reversals and defeats. We have a worthwhile goal to aim for: to exit at a time when Afghanistan has a reasonable prospect of making it on its own. If the international community, led by the US, ever makes the judgment that even that goal is unreachable then it would be logical to exit. If we reach the point at which that goal is achieved, we should exit. But we are not, I would suggest, at either point yet, and for those reasons the international community has not yet made a decision to exit.

In these circumstances, I believe that although staying in will undoubtedly expose Australia to further pain—in particular, for Australian service personnel and their families who, sadly, may experience further difficulty and tragedy—I nevertheless believe that we should not be making the decision to exit at this time, that we should remain as part of the international coalition in Afghanistan.