It has been two decades since Australia joined in the invasion of Afghanistan. Tragically, the profound concerns raised before the invasion occurred, and throughout Australia’s involvement, have been borne out. The Australian Greens have consistently raised concerns about Australia’s role in the invasion of Afghanistan, including before the invasion even occurred and when Australia committed troops.
Midway through Australia’s involvement, Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlum spoke on this issue, highlighting the failure of a decade of Australia’s involvement, and the disasters that lay ahead:
More than 2,700 coalition dead has been the cost in lives of this war, and an uncounted number of Afghan civilian deaths. If this parliament stood in silence momentarily and acknowledged the civilian loss of life in Afghanistan, we would not have time to conduct any business at all. The estimate over the last four years is that nearly 9,000 Afghan civilians have been killed in the conflict, with civilian deaths increasing each year. It is these profoundly disturbing numbers of civilian deaths that I think give the lie to the picture that is being painted that we are in this struggle for the long haul, that all we need to do is stay the course and eventually there will be some kind of happy ending, and that we will be able to depart the country with some form of democracy in place.
Tell the truth. Tell the Australian people the truth. Why is it so difficult to even have these issues debated in the Australian parliament? We would not have even had a mature debate in this parliament if Senator Brown had not got that into the agreement with the Gillard government last August. Tell the truth as to why after a decade in this quagmire there is now the strongest opposition to this war by the Australian people. A recent Essential Media poll showed that 64 per cent of Australians think that troops should withdraw-that is up from 56 per cent this March and just under half about this time last year. This is now a profoundly unpopular war.
It is justified, as we heard to some degree from some of the previous speakers, that this has been a great cause for the emancipation of women. A June 2011 Trust Law report by the Thomas Reuters Foundation found that violence, dismal health care and brutal poverty make Afghanistan the world's most dangerous country for women. After a 10-year occupation, Afghanistan has emerged as the most dangerous country for women overall and the worst in three of the six risk categories-health, non-sexual violence and lack of access to economic resources. So tell us the truth, government spokespeople and opposition spokespeople, who stand up in here and tell us that things will be fine if we simply toe the line. What if that is not true? German General Kujat told the German Daily in July 2011: The mission fulfilled the political aim of showing solidarity with United States, but if you measure progress against the goal of stabilising a country and a region, then the mission has failed.
There has been no such honesty from Australian policymakers. We catch a glimpse, of course, of how this war is really seen in the higher levels of the United States government-again thanks to the huge release of US State Department diplomatic cables by the audacious organisation WikiLeaks. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, who served in Afghanistan as a three-star general, at the end of a 9 October cable marked 'confidential' said: One of our major challenges in Afghanistan is how to fight corruption and connect people to the government, and their key government officials are themselves corrupt.
In another cable, quoted in Bob Woodward's book on the war behind the scenes, Obama's War, Eikenberry said: Right now we're dealing with an extraordinarily corrupt government.
These are our partners. That underscores the tragedy of the events we saw over the weekend. Senator Faulkner says that we are there at the invitation of the Afghan government; we are there at the invitation of the government of the United States. Let us be absolutely clear about why we are there. This is the only time in its history that the ANZUS Treaty has been invoked. Prime Minister Howard, without recourse to parliament, put us into that war, took us directly into that conflict. That, I think, tells us more than anything else.
Australia’s involvement in the invasion of Afghanistan has caused tragic deaths, with no clear purpose or benefit. Australia’s involvement should be addressed through a deep and profound examination of the factors that led to that failure. We support the work of this Committee in scrutinising Australia’s involvement, and the recommendations in the interim report that call for greater transparency and scrutiny. Australian Greens Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Janet Rice summarised:
an invasion serving the interests of the invading powers—that imperialist war—was not the solution … It has made the world less safe. It has created more terrorism and it has meant the forces withdrawing, the government collapsing and the institutions not surviving. We could have done things differently if we had had a human rights centred approach rather than an approach of having power over and control over. But we didn't.
The Australian Greens have introduced the Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Approval of Overseas Service) Bill 2020. That bill would provide an important measure of transparency and accountability in relation to the deployment of Australian forces overseas:
The Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Approval of Overseas Service) Bill 2020 inserts a new section 29A into the Defence Act 1903 to require that decisions to deploy members of the Australian Defence Force beyond the territorial limits be made not by the executive alone but by Parliament as a whole. This means debate in both houses, followed by a vote.
This bill also contains a section which provides that, when members of the Defence Force are deployed overseas in the circumstances covered by the section, the Minister for Defence must report in writing to each House of the Parliament every two months on the status, legality, scope, and anticipated duration of the deployment, on efforts to resolve the circumstances requiring the deployment, and on any reasons why the Parliament should allow the deployment to continue. This provision is designed to ensure ongoing transparency and accountability, as well as an opportunity for the parliament to reconsider the decision should the circumstances change.
The Australian Greens believe that retaining a tradition of keeping the prerogative to deploy our defence forces within the decision-makers of the executive is antiquated and undemocratic. Instead, we must undergo a process of change that would see all elected leaders within our federal parliament accountable for this decision. The outcome of such an evolution in process is that our democracy is strengthened as the capacity for a small group of people to make erroneous and deeply consequential decisions is checked against the will of the public through robust parliamentary scrutiny and transparency.
Recommendation 1: That decisions to deploy members of the Australian Defence Force beyond Australia’s territorial limits be made not by the executive alone but by Parliament as a whole.
Australia also has a moral obligation to those in Afghanistan whose lives have been devastated by the invasion and poorly managed withdrawal. As the Australian Greens have repeatedly called for, that should include offering an additional 20,000 places in our humanitarian intake:
Australia should immediately offer permanent protection visas for up to 20,000 people from Afghanistan who are at risk of persecution from the Taliban … These places should be in addition to our regular humanitarian intake, and include protection for people like female leaders, human rights advocates, LGBTIQ+ people, alumni of Australian Universities, journalists, Afghan government workers and people from ethnic and religious minorities previously persecuted by the Taliban.
Recommendation 2: That Australia provide an additional 20,000 permanent protection visas for people from Afghanistan.
Senator Janet Rice
Australian Greens