Locke Keith: General Debate 
Locke Keith: General Debate 
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KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 Nicky Hager’s  
Other People’s Wars 
 should prompt us to assess the so-called war on terror which will be 10 years old this Sunday. The September 11 attack on the Word Trade Center caused such destruction and loss of life that it spooked the world community. The Bush administration seized the opportunity to increase State powers at the expense of civil liberties and to engage in foreign military adventures. Unfortunately it pulled other Western countries including New Zealand in its wake. New Zealand SAS troops were sent to Afghanistan the Terrorism Suppression Act was passed and the police the SIS and the Defence Force were instructed to develop a much greater anti-terrorism capability. 
Most New Zealanders have doubts about America’s wars and now they would rather our SAS was not involved in Afghanistan. Nicky Hager’s book reinforces this particular view. It is a war where our SAS and our intelligence operatives embedded with the Americans have been providing targets for missile attacks often by drone planes which commonly kill civilians. Prisoners captured by our SAS have been handed over to possible mistreatment in US or Afghan detention centres. Nicky Hager also questions how separate our provincial reconstruction team in Bamian Province is from the larger war despite the Defence Force saying when the team was sent that its “Personnel are not going to war.” and that “The focus of this mission is reconstruction.” 
Yesterday defence Minister Wayne Mapp did not deny that there were US operatives in Bamian collecting intelligence including it seems signals intelligence for the wider war. The New Zealand public relations people do not tell the whole story. For example we are told that our provincial reconstruction team has handed over some responsibilities to the local police which is good but it seems that surplus New Zealand soldiers have been assigned to the north-east corner of Bamian Province away from the peaceful Hazara-populated zone where they are more likely to be engaged in the wider war. 
The Hager book details that New Zealand helped American and British occupation forces in Iraq with our frigate  
Te Kaha 
 by escorting American troop ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Also Kiwi army engineers based in Basra from 2003 helped by repairing British combat riverboats and helping the British occupation force to build roadblocks to control what were described as Iraqi rioters. 
Domestically our police and SIS have been on a mission to justify their extra anti-terrorist staffing and find some actual terrorists. This has led to unwarranted suspicion being placed on refugees and migrants most notably in the Ahmed Zaoui case where a democratic opponent of the Algerian regime was imprisoned in New Zealand because of pressure from other Western Governments that tended to support the Algerian dictatorship. Even local political activists have been labelled terrorists as in the so-called Tuhoe raids of 2007. Thankfully with the dropping of most of the charges yesterday this case is collapsing. 
Of course the one group the SIS did not want to spy on because these people are supposedly Western allies was Israel’s Mossad agents. They happen to be the only group engaged in terrorism-related crime in New Zealand in the last decade. Mossad agents obtained fraudulent New Zealand passports to use in terror acts in other countries of the sort they have carried out in Jordan and last year in Dubai. 
So what can be done at the end of the war-on-terror decade to rectify this situation? The Greens offer the following suggestions all of which will achieve the Government-stated objective of reducing State expenditure. Firstly we should move quickly to withdraw our SAS unit from Afghanistan. Secondly we should sell off our two frigates which unlike the multi-role vessels and the patrol boats are only useful for helping in America’s wars. Thirdly we should significantly reduce the budget of the SIS in light of the realisation that it is not practical to have so much resource devoted to finding terrorists in New Zealand when we have not discovered a single terrorist in the past decade. Finally we should listen to the New Zealand people more. They do not want our foreign policy and our defence policy to simply be a carbon copy of the United States’ policy. They are tiring of this war on terror.