Doug Lorimer
While the ALP has endorsed the federal Coalition government's decision, announced on July 13, to send Australian combat troops back to Afghanistan to join the US-NATO occupation, the Greens and the Socialist Alliance oppose the move.
In a media statement issued on the day of the government's announcement, Greens Senator Bob Brown said that "for such a troop deployment to be announced without any debate in parliament is travesty of democracy".
The government should send civilian aid, not troops, to Afghanistan, Brown argued. Treasurer Peter Costello's aid budget "allocates only $26 million to Afghanistan. Amid strong reports that the US wants to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, John Howard should not put Australians in the role of convenient substitutes."
"Our troops should be reserved for our own region of the world", Brown added. "We need a foreign policy based on Australia's relationships with our region and south Asia, not on a White House strategy." Brown did not specify to which countries in "our" region of the world he thought Australian troops should be sent.
In its media statement, the Socialist Alliance said that the government's decision to send a 150-strong Special Forces Task Group to Afghanistan "will not make life better for the people of Afghanistan, nor will it make the world safer from the threat of terrorist bombings or war".
"This military intervention should be totally opposed by the anti-war movement and all progressive people."
The alliance argued that the deployment will help the US and British governments "prop up the puppet regime of President Harmid Karzai, which was installed by the US occupation forces in 2001. US occupation forces in Afghanistan [were] involved in killings, torture and other abuses of prisoners well before the exposure of torture in Abu Ghraib and other US-run prisons in Iraq, according to Human Rights Watch."
The Karzai regime, the Socialist Alliance states, "is based on a coalition of reactionary warlords. These warlords and their private armies have ruled much of Afghanistan for years, in the words of John Pilger, through 'fear, extortion and monopolising the opium poppy trade'. Opium production has increased seven-fold under the Karzai regime."
The statement criticised federal ALP leader Kim Beazley for applauding "this latest reactionary troop deployment", and condemned "this return to 'shoulder-to-shoulder' bipartisan support for the neo-conservative Bush administration's permanent war policy".
The Socialist Alliance called on "trade unions, most of which still donate millions of dollars each year to the ALP, to repudiate this shameful stance by the Labor opposition". It also called on "all progressive people" to "join the anti-war movement's campaign to force the Australian government to acknowledge and act on the majority public opposition to Australian troops' presence in Iraq and Afghanistan".
From Green Left Weekly, July 20, 2005.
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