The failure of the US in Afghanistan is much greater than a need for more troops on the ground. While most of the Western media accepts official spin on the country, a recent Human Rights Watch report explains the real truth: “Numerous high-level officials and advisors in Afghanistan’s current government are implicated in major war crimes and human rights abuses that took place in the early 1990s.”
Australia and America have no hope in building a so-called democracy while such figures are in power, funded and supported by the US.
Furthermore, the Greens have revealed the hypocrisy of the latest deployment. Senator Kerry Nettle says that Australia still holds eleven Afghanis (and sixteen Iraqis) on the Pacific island of Nauru. “Whilst the government considers Afghanistan and Iraq to be war zones worthy of Australian troop deployment they have not accepted that Afghani and Iraqi asylum seekers on Nauru cannot return home.”
In other words, Australian immigration officials refuse to grant these Afghan and Iraqi refugees asylum – despite many of them being on Nauru for nearly four years – refuse to accept that returning them back home is unacceptable in the current situation and yet maintain their limbo status.
The Age may naively claim that the latest “intervention offers a more immediate hope of a stable and secure Afghanistan”, but the reality on the ground makes this an unlikely prospect.