WE NOW have a Prime Minister and Defence Minister from the left of the Labor Party part of whose heritage is the active and successful protests against the Vietnam war in the late 1960s and early 1970s – a tragic, futile unwinnable war.
Australia is now fighting a tragic, futile unwinnable war in Afghanistan. But, alas, there is no sign of us extricating ourselves from it any time soon.
Indeed, on her first day in office our new Prime Minister made a point of extolling the virtue of the US alliance. And Defence Minister John Faulkner urged Australians this week not to turn against the war in light of recent casualties. He hinted, though, that Australian troops could start coming home within two years, which is at least a glimmer of light.
But it would be folly to make Australia’s withdrawal dependent on the defeat of the Taliban insurgency and Afghan stability. If it is made so, we will never get out.
We have got to accept that Afghanistan will be a hotbed of violence, corruption and instability for decades. The solution is not foreign troops – that is the problem — but alleviation of poverty and better health and education.
Sometime in the next few months, Afghanistan will become Australia’s longest war. We cannot put a precise date on it because Australia’s involvement in the Malayan Emergency is hard to date precisely because it was a guerilla war with no precise beginning or end.
On the most optimistic note Australia will be in Afghanistan for at least two more years.
By then Australia will have been at war for half the time since the end of World War II – Korea, Malaya, Indonesian confrontation, Vietnam, Gulf I, Iraq and Afghanistan. We are a belligerent nation. Not quite as belligerent as the US which has been almost continuously at war since World War II – just like in George Orwell’s 1984.
Our alliances with Britain and the US seem to be the main culprit in dragging us into nearly all these conflicts.
Our belligerence – sticking our noses in foreign conflicts – comes at great cost. We are heading for a record $26.8 billion military spend in 2009-10 – 2.3 per cent of GDP.
Further, last year’s “Defence” White Paper outlines an ambitious program of weapons spending in the next decade: lots of new toys for the boys – new submarines and frigagtes, new fighter aircraft and more heavily protected vehicles for the army.
It wants to be quarantined from the usual government spending discipline.
The absurdity of this was pointed out last month in a paper by the Medical Association for the Prevention of War.
It pointed out that the same White Paper promoting large military spending said, “Today, Australia is one of the most physically secure countries in the world. . . . The enduring reality of our strategic outlook is that Australia will most likely remain, by virtue of our geostrategic location, a secure country over the period to 2030.”
In short, these planned new toys are a waste of money. This secure Australia is the 14th largest military spender in the world.
Our neighbours have every right to view our high military spending and intended new military acquisitions with suspicion if we are at the same time acknowledging our land as physically secure. If we don’t need the spending for defence, what do we need it for?
Faulkner argued that Australia should stay in Afghanistan to fight the sources of terrorism. It is a fatuous argument. And even if it were correct, what use is a fleet of new submarines and new jet fighters against terrorists?
The argument about staying in Afghanistan is flawed on two grounds. First, the very presence of western forces in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East are the source of the resentment against western values that makes the recruiting of terrorists that much easier. Secondly, even if Afghanistan were made stable and democratic, it would not prevent terrorism. Quite a lot of recruitment of terrorism and acts of terror happen in stable democracies – the World Trade Centre attacks, the bombings on trains in Britain and Spain all happened in stable democracies.
The US alliance drew us into Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, though the Afghan folly is at least UN-sanctioned, even if US-inspired.
On this score, you could argue that the US alliance is making us less secure, not more secure. Even if we stay with the alliance, we should recognise at least this much: that one US president, George W. Bush, made grave mistakes in attacking Afghanistan and Iraq. A lot of US allies would have done the US a favour if they had expressed this to Barack Obama when took over from Bush. It would have given him the impetus to follow the policy he was elected on with greater haste, instead of being sucked into wars not of his making. Indeed, our new Prime Minister could do it now.
The executive director of the Australian Defence Association, Neil James, argued in The Canberra Times last week that talk like that above is ill-informed, dangerous and defeatist.
He said, “All Australians are at war, not just the troops we send to fight, and we have an enemy that none of us must help.”
He was arguing for more public support and understanding that it was worth fighting to final victory in Afghanistan.
But in calling for greater understanding about the war he made some very pertinent comments. He said, “Wars are nasty, difficult, rarely short and laced with unavoidable and sometimes irreconcilable moral and strategic quandaries. Wars are ultimately contests of will and end only when one side gives up. . . . Unless we fight to win, it is not morally or operationally sustainable to risk the lives of our diggers in the first place. . . . Our cause must be one worth fighting and dying for.”
It sounds like an argument for our immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan and a resolve never to engage in war unless we are defending home soil.
Getting our troops into bad wars does them no good. We should support them individually and respect that they are doing a job under orders. It is not their folly or fault but the politicians’ folly and the folly of voters who do not make their objections to foreign military excursions clear enough.
In the meantime, we should be doing we can with development aid to make what is now an unlikely invasion even less likely.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 26 June 2010.