Afghanistan: Australian Trooper

By: Tony Clifton

Thursday 11 October 2007

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column for NewMatilda.com asking the question, ‘What are we doing in Afghanistan?’

If we had two political Parties in this country with opposing views on policy, whether in foreign affairs or Tasmanian pulp mills, the death of the unfortunate Australian soldier Trooper David Pearce, killed on Monday by a roadside bomb in Oruzgan Province in southern Afghanistan, might have been the point where the Government was asked by the Opposition just how it justified keeping our small, pointless contingent in such a dangerous place.

But of course, Kevin Rudd, as with many other issues, marches in lockstep with John Howard on Afghanistan.

Like the man he so often follows, Rudd wants our troops to stay in Afghanistan. So when Howard says, as he did on Tuesday, ‘The operation in Afghanistan … is a just cause and this soldier was part of an Australian contribution to that just cause,’ Rudd came out and told us the same thing: ‘We will always be attentive and responsive to requests made by our friends and allies in Afghanistan in terms of future needs.’ Unlike most Opposition leaders, Rudd didn’t ask why the Government is sending our soldiers to die. And he certainly didn’t ask our leader to define ‘just cause.’

Somewhere in the waffling about our role in Afghanistan there is always a reference to it being part of the ‘War on Terrorism.’ This is plain nonsense. To repeat myself from last month, terrorism has long abandoned Afghanistan as either a haven or training ground. Osama bin Laden and his inner circle are somewhere in the tribal border areas of Pakistan, while al-Qaeda in Iraq recruits locally and from other parts of the Islamic world, and has a successful on-the-ground training facility in … well in the streets of Baghdad mainly.

The most ambitious terrorists are probably now doing engineering and electronics degrees in the universities and technological colleges of Europe and America, and the Islamic terrorists plotting away in Indonesia would recognise Osama mostly because they buy T-shirts with his face on them in the local tourist shops.

The war in Afghanistan is now a war on the local inhabitants, who would stop killing Americans, Canadians, Brits and now Australians, if only we would go away. The Taliban, who are local inhabitants, are fighting to throw out the foreign invaders. Funny people, the Afghans, they just don’t like foreigners — especially foreigners from non-Muslim countries — invading their country. In fact, under one Afghan leader or another’s banner, they’ve thrown out every foreign....