Australian Green Party Leader: Leave Afghanistan Now

Greens Leader on Afghanistan: Australia Should Bring
its Troops Home Now

By Peter Boyle
GreenLeft (Australia)
October 25, 2010

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/45824

Greens federal parliamentary leader Senator Bob Brown
spoke in the parliamentary debate on the Australian
military intervention in Afghanistan on October 25.

His speech came amidst reports of growing unease in the
Australian Labor Party ranks over the conservative line
being implemented by the Gillard Labor minority federal
government and an associated rise in support for the
Greens to a record 14%.

Senator Brown called on the government to repect the
wishes of the majority of Australians and bring the
Australian military contingent back home.

He said that the war in Afghanistan was getting worse.

"The death toll of civilians and ISAF personnel is
rising and, extraordinarily but sensibly, the new Obama
administration is now openly backing talks with
moderate factions of the Taliban and other insurgent
groups. I, and many other Australians, wish those talks
rapid success.

"I acknowledge the complexity of the Afghan situation
and the dangers of leaving this war-torn country to
sort out its own affairs. But surely our job is to help
Afghanistan reshape its future through civil aid rather
than force of arms! I am advised that current American
expenditure on the war in Afghanistan is 10 times as
much as Afghanistan's Gross Domestic Product. There
should be a commitment to reverse that spending
imbalance."

Senator Brown dismissed PM Julia Gillard's claim that
ongoing Australian military intervention was needed to
prevent terrorism. He cited the assessment of the
former Deputy Director of the CIA's Counter-Terrorist
Centre, Paul Pillar, that the withdrawal of foreign
forces from Afghanistan will not significantly increase
the risk of terrorist attack against Western countries.

When Pillar was asked what difference it would make if
terrorist training grounds did re-emerge in
Afghanistan, he replied:

"Not nearly as much as unstated assumptions underlying
the current debate seem to propose. When a group has a
haven it will use it for such purposes as basic
training for recruits. But the operations most
important to future terrorist attacks do not need such
a home, and few recruits are required for even very
deadly terrorism. Consider: The preparations most
important to the September 11, 2001 attacks took place
not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in
apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight
schools in the United States."

The prepared text for Senator Brown's speech is
published in full below.

* * *

President, I welcome this debate which is a direct
outcome of the increased vote Australians accorded the
Greens in the August election.

It should not have waited nine years. But already out
of this first Parliamentary debate on Australia's
involvement in the war in Afghanistan comes one uniting
and unanimous opinion. We Senators, and all members of
the House of Representatives, stand in total support of
our troops in Afghanistan. The 1550 members of the
Australian Defence Force contingent, and our twenty-
eight police trainers in Afghanistan, can be reassured
that this nation is with each and every one of them all
the way back to these homely shores. Regardless of
political allegiance, this body politic gives the
Australians in Afghanistan our thanks and our
congratulations for their service at the behest of the
Government and in the cause of the nation.

Yet the question which should have been regularly
raised and debated in this parliament - as it has been
in other parliaments around the world - is this: does
it remain in our nation's best interests to keep our
armed service men and women in harm's way? We owe it to
our people in Afghanistan to justify the growing toll
of death and injury, and their exposure to the
increasing ugliness and violence of this protracted
civil war. Safely in this parliament, we are required
to move out of our comfort zone to, much better and
more demonstrably, understand and relate to events in
Afghanistan. It is our responsibility to ensure we get
our service men and women out of harm's way as soon as
that is prudent and feasible.

For the Greens, this justified time of withdrawal has
arrived. This belated debate has drawn out the
commitment of Prime Minister Gillard and Opposition
Leader Abbott to years more - the Prime Minister
flagged as many as 10 years more - for Australian
personnel in Afghanistan. Yet the Netherlands, after a
much more detailed and engaged parliamentary debate,
which in turn triggered a national election, has now
taken its troops home. The Greens believe Australia
should also bring its troops home.

Twenty one Australian diggers have already died. How
many more will die? And for what? Hundreds more have
come home physically or mentally scarred by this war
and, again, I ask my fellow parliamentarians, this
government and this Prime Minister, how many hundreds
more will come back injured because we did not return
them safely home now? Is that predictable toll
justifiable? I think not.

In a moment I will turn to the prospects for
Afghanistan. But first I ask another very salient
question. Our troops remain in Afghanistan, but where
are the men who began the war in 2001 with the
objective, achieved years ago, of expelling Al Qaeda? I
remember those dark post-911 times very well. The arch-
criminal Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan and, with
the invasion, fled, as did the medieval Taliban leader
Mullah Omar. Both are still alive. But they are not in
Afghanistan. Nor is Al Qaeda. They are in Pakistan. Let
no one forget, there remains well founded conjecture
that had President George Bush Jnr continued
negotiating with Mullah Omar, the Mullah would have
captured and delivered Osama bin Laden to America in
2001-02. Or, had the Americans been willing, bin Laden
reportedly could have been delivered to a third country
for trial even earlier. That would have made this whole
bloody conflict unnecessary.

There is no conjecture that the Bush administration
bungled its war strategy when, having gained control of
Afghanistan in 2002, Bush invaded Iraq under the
totally false premise of Saddam Hussein possessing
weapons of mass destruction. The bellicose president
withheld troops, military assets and attention from
Afghanistan, while Australia, under John Howard,
withdrew completely until 2005. Meanwhile, the Taliban
regrouped and began to ingrain itself within
Afghanistan once more. Should Australian troops, seven
years later, have their lives threatened daily because
of a strategic stuff-up by George Bush and John Howard?

John Howard's role of deputy sheriff, or as George Bush
put it in this parliament in 2003, "a man of steel",
cannot be forgotten or disregarded. Our troops are
fighting in Afghanistan in 2010 because Bush, Howard
and others, like Tony Blair, bungled their
international ascendency in 2001-03.

And, while Australian and other allied forces, and the
Afghan civil population, face an accelerating toll of
death and injury this year, where are these leaders who
have safely exited the stage? "I will run them down and
smoke them out", President George W Bush said. But he
failed and, leaving the task to others, he is now
comfortably retired at his ranch in Texas. His deputy,
Dick Cheney, gives speeches to right wing think tanks
in America, but not in Afghanistan or Iraq. Secretary
of State Donald Rumsfeld infamously summed up his
strategic nous with this piece of philosophy:

"There are known knowns; there are things we know that
we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say,
there are things that we now know we don't know. But
there are also unknown unknowns; there are things we do
not know we don't know."

Rumsfeld is also comfortably at home. In Australia,
this very week, former Prime Minister Howard is
publishing his memoirs - they will be launched in
Canberra.

But in Kabul the war goes on. In fact, it is getting
worse. The death toll of civilians and ISAF personnel
is rising and, extraordinarily but sensibly, the new
Obama administration is now openly backing talks with
moderate factions of the Taliban and other insurgent
groups. I, and many other Australians, wish those talks
rapid success.

I acknowledge the complexity of the Afghan situation
and the dangers of leaving this war-torn country to
sort out its own affairs. But surely our job is to help
Afghanistan reshape its future through civil aid rather
than force of arms! I am advised that current American
expenditure on the war in Afghanistan is 10 times as
much as Afghanistan's Gross Domestic Product. There
should be a commitment to reverse that spending
imbalance.

None of us can canvas all the arguments on Australia's
commitment in Afghanistan in the twenty minutes of a
parliamentary speech. However, the Greens' overriding
strategy is to have Australia's civil aid help build
Afghanistan's economy and wellbeing, not least its
schools, hospitals and transport system.

Reconciliation of Afghanistan's diverse tribal,
cultural and political groupings is not assured with
either the carrot or the stick. But the Prime
Minister's flagging of an ongoing intervention,
possibly military, possibly for ten years, is no
substitute for her government's responsibility to give
Australia a clear exit strategy for its service men and
women. All the more so, when President Obama's very
different view quoted in 'Obama's Wars' is taken into
account. "I'm NOT doing ten years" Obama said, "I'm not
doing long term nation building. I am not spending a
trillion dollars." So President Obama is not doing ten
years, but Prime Minister Gillard's got it on the
table.

I welcome her commitment to an annual debate in this
parliament, but I challenge Prime Minister Gillard to
have a defined exit strategy for the next debate, if
not sooner. I remind her that the Karzai Government is
not only imperfect, it is corrupt. General Petraeus has
called it a "criminal syndicate".

I also refer some recent recommendations from the
Australian Council for International Development to the
Prime Minister's attention. They have urged the
Government to embrace a few eminently sensible
suggestions with respect to our ongoing involvement in
Afghanistan:

* An inquiry into all aspects of our work in
Afghanistan by a committee of independent experts,
resulting in recommendations to Parliament as occurred
in Canada.

* Quarterly reports to Parliament detailing progress in
Afghanistan, particularly in the delivery of aid. These
reports should outline all of our projects and
expenditure (including overseas development assistance-
eligible expenditure spent outside Ausaid), how they
connect with our over-arching strategy, and how their
success measures up against key performance indicators.
Again, this mechanism is drawn from the Canadian
experience.

* Decoupling of development and military projects, to
protect the impartiality and security of the former and
to ensure that development work targets the most
pressing development needs.

I draw the attention of the Senate to the assessment of
the former Deputy Director of the CIA's Counter-
Terrorist Centre, Mr Paul Pillar, that the withdrawal
of foreign forces from Afghanistan will not
significantly increase the risk of terrorist attack
against Western countries. That, of course, includes
Australia.

And when asked what difference it would make if
terrorist training grounds did re-emerge in
Afghanistan, the former CIA counter terrorism expert
said; "Not nearly as much as unstated assumptions
underlying the current debate seem to propose. When a
group has a haven it will use it for such purposes as
basic training for recruits. But the operations most
important to future terrorist attacks do not need such
a home, and few recruits are required for even very
deadly terrorism. Consider: The preparations most
important to the September 11, 2001 attacks took place
not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in
apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight
schools in the United States."

Mr Pillar has called for a timetable for troop
withdrawal.

I ask why, given these realities, should Australia's
good and courageous service men and women be kept in
such increasing hardship, hostility and danger?

Some tell me there is now a change of mission: we must
uphold human rights by force. We must ensure that the
women, children and the illiterate men of Afghanistan
have their interests upheld. And what of the threatened
Hazaras in this Pashtun dominated country? What of the
domino effect on Pakistan if we leave Afghanistan. In
Pakistan, we are told the nation's intelligence
agencies are covertly backing the Taliban!

The answer is twofold. Firstly, this war was entered by
the Howard Government to stimy Al Qaeda's threat of
terrorism to the US and Australia. And while CIA
analysts tell us Al Qaeda is not in Afghanistan, it is
ensconced elsewhere. Let me cite Somalia. This failed
state in East Africa is now a hotbed of Islamist
violence and Al Qaeda operations, including the bombing
attack in Uganda after the World Cup final. It is
perhaps now the focus for terrorist training. That
includes allegations of the training of young men who
are Australian or who have lived in and returned from
Somalia to Australia. Our own intelligence agencies are
alert to this direct threat to Australia.

To the extent that humanitarian concerns motivate our
involvement in Afghanistan, they also apply to the
situation in Somalia. Human Rights Watch reports that
"the population is subject to targeted killings and
assaults, repressive forms of social control, and
brutal punishments under its draconian interpretation
of Sharia". Perceived transgressions are punished with
beheadings, amputations, stonings and floggings. Around
3.2 million people require humanitarian assistance, and
a camp near Mogadishu that shelters half a million
people is now the world's densest concentration of
displaced people. Yet there is not the faintest impulse
by the Australian Government or opposition to join the
small contingent of troops from African countries
trying to return order and safety, and to rid Somalia
of Islamist terrorists.

Recently, I helped an Australian photographer and a
Canadian journalist escape from being shackled to the
floor in Somalia where they faced death at the hands of
a criminal gang.

Despite having employed their own guards, they were
kidnapped on their way to visit a vast, ugly slum or
refugee camp outside Somalia's capital Mogadishu, where
life and safety are daily at stake for up to half a
million women, children and men. The world has left
them to the Sharia law of the Islamist extremists
controlling Somalia. Nor has it invaded other
countries, like Yemen or Algeria, where, these days, Al
Qaeda or parallel terrorist groups are openly active.
Should we? How can we?

The answer is that Australia, a small to moderate
nation in terms of international clout, should secure
its own region while offering aid through the United
Nations to solve greater global problems. Except in
very extraordinary cases, and Afghanistan in 2010 is
not one of them, our troops should be available for
Australia's immediate regional security, stability and
welfare.

We do not underestimate the need for armed services to
defend this nation and its neighbourhood. The Greens
urged military intervention to stop the bloodshed in
Timor Leste before the Howard Government decided on
that justifiable deployment.

This parliament should recall that, faced with no
prospect of clear victory, the ANZACs were withdrawn
from Gallipoli in World War I, precisely because the
justification for them remaining in Gallipoli had
become less persuasive than the justification for them
leaving. We honour those ANZACs no less than had they
conquered the Dardanelles. So will we honour
Australia's troops, brought home sooner, no less than
if they had stayed a decade longer accruing casualties
in the unwinnable mountains and valleys of Afghanistan.

Mr President, the opinion polls show that most
Australians believe our troops should come home.

I agree and, while noting the Government and
Opposition's determination, I call on Prime Minister
Gillard to bring our Defence Force contingent back home
to Australia.

Source:
http://bob-brown.greensmps.org.au/content/bob-browns-afghanistan-debate-speech

Video: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/45824

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