Now consider this. The Pakistani military, especially its notorious Inter-Services Intelligence, provides extensive support to the Haqqani network and the Taliban, who are murdering Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.
This year, we have had 11 Australians killed in Afghanistan, out of 32 Australian fatalities in the war so far; 213 Australians have been wounded, some seriously.
It is grotesque that our soldiers in Australia train men who belong to an army that helps terrorists murder Australians in Afghanistan. It is utterly unacceptable. And nothing could better indicate the dismal, indeed shameful, quality of the Afghanistan debate that takes place in Australia than that this stark, fundamental reality figures so little in any of our discussions.
And consider, finally, this: there is no military value to what we are doing in Afghanistan and there is likely to be little or no long-term effect from it.
The substantial things our parliament does are too little reported. This week there was a slew of important speeches on Afghanistan. The most important was Prime Minister Julia Gillard's. It contained two notable departures from previous statements.
The first was that she said: "It is time for Pakistan to do more to counter terrorism and extremism." This incredibly bland statement marks the first time I can recall that Gillard has uttered criticism of Pakistan.
That she did so at all is an improvement, but when the Pakistanis are helping forces to kill our soldiers, I think that level of public timidity is a pathetic abdication of Gillard's responsibilities as Prime Minister. She has often enough talked about being opposed to injustice. How about being outraged about training military forces that help people kill Australian soldiers? How about risking some international friction by actually telling the truth about Pakistan and standing up for Australian soldiers in this context?
Lest you think I am exaggerating Pakistani culpability, consider the statement by the recently retired chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, two months ago, that the Haqqani network acts as a "veritable arm of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency".
That Gillard will not confront in any way the central strategic reality of the conflict in Afghanistan - namely Pakistani support for the forces killing Australians - is a fundamental and profound failure on her part as national leader to provide any strategic rationale for why Australians are dying in Afghanistan and why we provide aid to the military helping their killers.
The other important departure in Gillard's speech is that she signalled that we may complete our training mission before the end of 2014. This was also a feature of Defence Minister Stephen Smith's statement to parliament. It is the best news to come out of the government on this matter in a long time. For god's sake, declare victory and leave.
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's speech on Afghanistan was considerably better than Gillard's. Abbott did not provide a serious strategic overview of the conflict. No one in Australian politics makes the slightest effort to do that, as though it were somehow beyond our comprehension. But at least he did directly face up to Pakistan's involvement, saying: "A key element in prolonging the conflict in Afghanistan has been covert support for the Taliban from elements in the Pakistani state . . . On balance it's best for Australia to maintain co-operative relations through our military training program with Pakistan."
Abbott deserves credit for at least telling the truth about Pakistan. But there is a bizarre element to this statement as the Opposition Leader is defending a program that the Gillard government itself seems too ashamed of (and, if so, it is rightly ashamed) to mention. In a long recent speech on Australia's defence co-operation with many different nations, Smith discreetly forbore from mentioning our defence co-operation with Pakistan at all.
But the best speech on Afghanistan this week came from Labor's Michael Danby, the chairman of parliament's foreign affairs committee. Danby is a true Australian cosmopolitan, with the widest range of foreign policy interests of anyone on the backbench on either side of parliament. He profoundly supports Australia's Afghanistan commitment and I think he is mistaken to do so. But Danby also has a George Orwell-like willingness to face difficult and unpleasant facts.
His speech was a passionate and thoroughly justified denunciation of Pakistan. He said in part: "The leaders of Lashkar-e-Toiba live openly in Pakistan. It is outrageous that Pakistan allows explosives factories in Lahore to be the major source of the explosives in improvised explosive devices. Pakistan . . . provides explosives from its factories to kill Australians and Americans."
Danby's anger is amply justified and his is the only voice of what you might expect to be righteous anger about the complicity of Pakistan in the process of taking our money, taking our training and killing our soldiers.
Abbott, making better arguments than the government for supporting the Afghanistan commitment, said that if the Taliban re-took Afghanistan then Pakistan could become "critically destabilised". But Abbott, like the government, here has the causal relationship back-to-front. The longer we are in Afghanistan the more we destabilise, and help to radicalise, Pakistan.
Let me give you one example. Danby referred to a devastating new Atlantic Monthly article, "The Ally from Hell", by Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder. Some of it is the usual catalogue of Pakistani horrors. But among much that is new is the revelation that the Pakistanis are so paranoid that the Americans might try to steal or destroy their nuclear arsenal that they have taken to moving their nuclear weapons around in unmarked trucks to hide them from US satellites.
They "de-mate" the weapons first, keeping warheads, fissile cores and delivery systems separate. But this is spectacularly insecure and hugely increases the risks that the components of a nuclear weapon will eventually be stolen or obtained in some other fashion by terrorists.
The Pakistani paranoia is a direct result of US drone strikes on their territory. I support the drone strikes and think them necessary if we are going to fight in Afghanistan. But it is the absolute reverse of the truth to think that what we are doing in Afghanistan is helping to stabilise Pakistan.
Much of the talk about improved security in Afghanistan is baloney. When our politicians visit the diggers in Tarin Kowt they are almost never taken outside the secure base, and if they are it is to be whisked by helicopter for a short visit to another temporarily secure base. We have 12 AusAID staff in Afghanistan and 1550 soldiers, not because we don't emphasise development but because it's too dangerous for aid workers. This is all madness and almost no one in the political establishment is willing to speak about it plainly.
