As the Iraq war has now wound down, it is past time to examine Australia’s other major military operation: the war in Afghanistan.
The best place to start examining Australia’s Afghan commitment is, perhaps strangely, by reading the Australian Parliament’s “debate” of October 2010.
I say strange because there has not been, since the original commitment was made in 2001, any sustained effort by the Australian Government to explain the Afghanistan commitment in terms readily comprehended by the Australian people. Australia is not alone here and none of our major coalition partners in Canada, the United Kingdom or the United States have conducted anything similar to the war information campaigns of the Second World War. Perhaps the assumption was that the horror of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2011 and in Bali provided the war with a justification that needed no further elaboration.
Sadly, the Australian Parliament’s debate, despite any noble aims, ended up reflecting, in the worst possible way, Australia’s major challenge in resolving defence and national security issues: a national politics that is not just local but, where matters of war and peace are concerned, absurdly provincial and uninformed.
A reasonable citizen would assume that, after 10 years of Australian deployments to Afghanistan to fight local and foreign jihadists (as well as Afghans opposed to the Coalition’s presence), there would be sufficient community interest in the Afghan war would have been aroused, which would have percolated into the Parliament. After all, by October 2010, some 21 Australians had been killed and more than 150 had been wounded in that war (we have now lost 33 killed in action). Moreover, at any time, roughly 1500 or more Australians were and are deployed either in Afghanistan as part of the NATO coalition, or elsewhere in the Middle East. Finally, Afghanistan was the training ground for the terrorist network, Al Qaeda, that launched the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. This combination of factors - war, Australians in harm’s way, and the 9/11 attacks – should have ensured a debate that built on many Australians’ interest in the Afghanistan war. Just as importantly, ambitious members and senators would be keen to show leadership and demonstrate their interest in and knowledge of Australia’s largest military commitment.
If the reasonable citizen assumed this, then she or he would have been wrong, indeed grievously so.
Instead, Senators and Members’ speeches were, with few exceptions, of a truly lay nature, verging on the negligently uninformed. Parliamentarians who would be embarrassed to be ignorant of carbon pricing, the NBN, wireless technology, mining super-profits, and various ‘greatest moral challenges of our time’, demonstrated little or no interest in Afghanistan or the war generally.
To be sure, parliamentarians were sincere in their well-meaning personal reflections of the “what is to be done?” variety, even if punctuated by angry cliché. But only a few parliamentarians used the debate to inquire into and speak on Australia’s role as a member of the ISAF-NATO coalition, our war objectives and, particularly, our own and NATO’s campaign plan (to the degree that a coherent one exists). It was, sadly, demoralising, in every sense. Some MPs, inexplicably and lazily, sought to summon the ghosts of Vietnam, despite the clear differences between a war fought 40 years ago in SE Asia by a partly-conscript army, and a war fought in south-central Asia by entirely volunteer warriors. (If Santayana was right and only the dead have seen the end of war, then one wonders who, if anyone, will ever see the end of the Vietnam meme.
Re-reading the Australian Parliament’s effort at debating our current war, one almost envied the US Congress in having the Texan vagabond Charlie Wilson, who was at least a man of action rather than talk.
The broader lesson from 2010’s Parliamentary Debate on Afghanistan may have less to do with the Afghanistan war and instead reflect that Australia is now experiencing the inevitable result of the decades-long ‘dumbing down’ of western, democratic culture. Australia is not alone here; the same is true of the rest of the Western world. In the United States, the present Republican competition for the presidential nomination indicates that there is no heir apparent to the mantle of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower, let alone a statesman-like loser like Charles Evans Hughes or Thomas Dewey. Simply put, those elected and paid by the citizenry to inform themselves and to guard the national interest demonstrate little interest in doing so and little curiosity about the serious matters they are charged with. Instead, national politics is too often dominated by time-serving hacks and factional enforcers, and, sadly, the public do not demand anything more of their representatives. Only last year, Australians learned that both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard had sent staffers to represent them at National Security Committee meetings, something that would be unthinkable in the United States or the United Kingdom.
The lineage of Australian constitutional democracy extends back through its “Washminster” origins to ancient Greece and Rome, in which factions and demagogues also held sway. However, those ancient polities were still able to discuss serious issues of peace and war at some length, and one reads the Athenian, Spartan and Roman debates recorded by Thucydides, Xenophon and Plutarch with awe and not a little envy. Even as recently as World War II, a comprehensive parliamentary debate on an ongoing war was possible. The British House of Commons convened in May 1940 to debate the disastrous Anglo-French campaign in Norway and, by extension, Neville Chamberlain’s prime ministership. The failure of the allied expeditionary force ordered by the Chamberlain Government to combat the Nazi invasion of Norway, and its poor command and organisation, was a national controversy. This was, it is true, a war for national survival, and even if dilettante MPs were not involved in debate and the war’s conduct, their constituents were fighting or otherwise engaged in the war effort. This campaign’s dismal failure prompted a British parliamentary debate of great ferocity, with one Tory MP, quoting Oliver Cromwell, telling his leader Neville Chamberlain to “in the name of God, go!”.
Seventy years later, our Parliament’s debate on Afghanistan had no air of a crisis or even a problem. Few politicians showed interest in interrogating the senior leadership of the country on the war, let alone bringing them down; one suspects a quotation of Oliver Cromwell would have been regarded less enthusiastically than, say, tears. After all, only that small segment of Australia that serves in the armed forces is affected by the war in Afghanistan, with the result that no decisive voting bloc is truly at stake here.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard said in her speech to the Parliament last October 2010 that “our troops offer their lives for us. They embrace wartime sacrifice as their highest duty. In return we owe them our wisdom. Our highest duty is to make wise decisions about war.”
That duty to our troops, and to the national interest at large, remains, so far, undischarged by our Parliament.
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