Australia in Afghanistan: Is the war counter-productive?

above: the author, Justin George

Justin George argues that Australia's involvement in the war in Afghanistan is compromising rather than enhancing its national security...  Similar questions face other countries.

by Justin George

With the release of the Australian government's Counter-Terrorism White Paper and its admission that Australia is at risk of 'homegrown' terrorism, the logic behind Australia's involvement in Afghanistan has been severely weakened.

Only months earlier the Rudd government was announcing Australia's continuing commitment to war against the Taliban and Al-Qaida in Afghanistan, reiterating the tired line of 'its better to fight them over there than here' that has been touted as justification for Australia's involvement in a war that it had little need to join.

While Australia joined under John Howard's Liberal government, Kevin Rudd's Labor government has happily continued involvement in the 'good' war in Afghanistan in comparison to the 'bad' war in Iraq. However public support for the Afghanistan campaign has dwindled since it began in 2001 and with this release of the Counter-Terrorism White Paper the war seems to not only have made Australia a target from external groups but it has managed to create threats within Australia through its involvement. However, the White Paper itself while it clearly identifies what the threat is, it does not identify the reasons why such threats have targeted Australia.

By reading between the lines, the White Paper has announced that the Afghanistan war and Australia's wider contribution and decision to join the so called 'War on Terror' has made the country less rather than more safe .

While many of the news reports on the White Paper released have focused on announced heightened security measures to be introduced at airports such as biometric and thumb scanners and threats from a variety of groups in the Middle East and North Africa, none of the reports have examined the more pressing and important question of ‘why?’.

Australia now faces an increased threat from home and abroad: but what connections are there between these threats and Australia's support and involvement for the 'War on Terror', the Afghanistan & Iraq Wars and even its ever growing unilateral support for Israel within the region?

All of these issues have gone largely unreported of late in Australia, yet they remain the key causes that drive and enable fundamentalist groups to recruit and indoctrinate in the areas of conflict and within Australia.

The Counter-Terrorism White Paper's solution to these issues is not one of critically evaluating Australia's role in helping the fuel and create jihadist and resistance activity, but one in which the only response to terrorism seems involve enlarging the powers of Australia's security agencies and border protection schemes.

These concerning measures fail to address the causes of terrorism; merely responding to the symptoms, the violent attacks and attempts that come from a range of issues and conditions of which current Australian foreign policy directly contributes.

With all these factors along with the wider damage to lives and infrastructure in the Middle East, continued involvement by Australia in the 'War on Terror' particularly Afghanistan, seems like the biggest cause of our apparent growing insecurity.

nb: If you enjoyed this article pls join our Facebook group - to link up with other readers, and to receive regular updates on new material.

see: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=58243419565

http://www.dpmc.gov.au/publications/counter_terrorism/docs/counter-terrorism_white_paper.pdf
“extremists who follow a distorted and militant interpretation of Islam that espouses violence as the answer to perceived grievances” (Counter-Terrorism White Paper 2010: Securing Australia,

p.ii);  It is interesting to note within the paper itself, the word 'war' appears only once and not in relation to Australian involvement in the Afghanistan and the famous phrase 'War on Terror' does not appear at all.

The Berlin wall had to fall, but today's world is no fairer - by Mikhail Gorbachev

Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin wall, one of the shameful symbols of the cold war and the dangerous division of the world into opposing blocks and spheres of influence. Today we can revisit the events of those times and take stock of them in a less emotional and more rational way.


The first optimistic observation to be made is that the announced "end of history" has not come about, though many claimed it had. But neither has the world that many politicians of my generation trusted and sincerely believed in: one in which, with the end of the cold war, humankind could finally forget the absurdity of the arms race, dangerous regional conflicts, and sterile ideological disputes, and enter a golden century of collective security, the rational use of material resources, the end of poverty and inequality, and restored harmony with nature.

Another important consequence of the end of the cold war is the realisation of one of the central postulates of New Thinking: the interdependence of extremely important elements that go to the very heart of the existence and development of humankind. This involves not only processes and events occurring on different continents but also the organic linkage between changes in the economic, technological, social, demographic and cultural conditions that determine the daily existence of billions of people on our planet. In effect, humankind has started to transform itself into a single civilisation.

At the same time, the disappearance of the iron curtain and barriers and borders, unexpected by many, made possible connections between countries that until recently had different political systems, as well as different civilisations, cultures and traditions.

Naturally, we politicians from the last century can be proud of the fact that we avoided the danger of a thermonuclear war. However, for many millions of people around the globe, the world has not become a safer place. Quite to the contrary, innumerable local conflicts and ethnic and religious wars have appeared like a curse on the new map of world politics, creating large numbers of victims.
Clear proof of the irrational behaviour and irresponsibility of the new generation of politicians is the fact that defence spending by numerous countries, large and small alike, is now greater than during the cold war, and strong-arm tactics are once again the standard way of dealing with conflicts and are a common feature of international relations.

Alas, over the last few decades, the world has not become a fairer place: disparities between the rich and the poor either remained or increased, not only between the north and the developing south but also within developed countries themselves. The social problems in Russia, as in other post-communist countries, are proof that simply abandoning the flawed model of a centralised economy and bureaucratic planning is not enough, and guarantees neither a country's global competitiveness nor respect for the principles of social justice or a dignified standard of living for the population.

New challenges can be added to those of the past. One of these is terrorism. In a context in which world war is no longer an instrument of deterrence between the most powerful nations, terrorism has become the "poor man's atomic bomb", not only figuratively but perhaps literally as well. The uncontrolled proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the competition between the erstwhile adversaries of the cold war to reach new technological levels in arms production, and the presence of the new pretenders to an influential role in a multipolar world all increase the sensation of chaos in global politics.

The crisis of ideologies that is threatening to turn into a crisis of ideals, values and morals marks yet another loss of social reference points, and strengthens the atmosphere of political pessimism and nihilism. The real achievement we can celebrate is the fact that the 20th century marked the end of totalitarian ideologies, in particular those that were based on utopian beliefs.

Yet new ideologies are quickly replacing the old ones, both in the east and the west. Many now forget that the fall of the Berlin wall was not the cause of global changes but to a great extent the consequence of deep, popular reform movements that started in the east, and the Soviet Union in particular. After decades of the Bolshevik experiment and the realisation that this had led Soviet society down a historical blind alley, a strong impulse for democratic reform evolved in the form of Soviet perestroika, which was also available to the countries of eastern Europe.

But it was soon very clear that western capitalism, too, deprived of its old adversary and imagining itself the undisputed victor and incarnation of global progress, is at risk of leading western society and the rest of the world down another historical blind alley.

Today's global economic crisis was needed to reveal the organic defects of the present model of western development that was imposed on the rest of the world as the only one possible; it also revealed that not only bureaucratic socialism but also ultra-liberal capitalism are in need of profound democratic reform – their own kind of perestroika.


Today, as we sit among the ruins of the old order, we can think of ourselves as active participants in the process of creating a new world. Many truths and postulates once considered indisputable, in both the east and the west, have ceased to be so, including the blind faith in the all-powerful market and, above all, its democratic nature. There was an ingrained belief that the western model of democracy could be spread mechanically to other societies with different historical experience and cultural traditions. In the present situation, even a concept like social progress, which seems to be shared by everyone, needs to be defined, and examined, more precisely.

see:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/30/1989-capitalism-in-crisis-perestroika/print