Goff Phil: Urgent Debates — SAS—Deployment to Afghanistan 
Goff Phil: Urgent Debates — SAS—Deployment to Afghanistan 
[Volume:656;Page:5603] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 If the SAS goes back to Afghanistan its personnel will go with the thoughts and prayers of everyone in this House for their safety. But in its last term in office the Labour Government made a considered decision not to recommit our SAS forces and it did so for very good reasons which I want to talk about today. Putting the lives of New Zealand troops at risk is not a decision that any Government takes lightly nor is it an issue to play politics with. It is too serious for that. It is an issue that requires careful analysis of the risks of the benefits to be gained and whether this is the most effective response that New Zealand can make to the situation in Afghanistan. I am the first to say that there are times when it is necessary to stand up and fight for one’s country for its protection for our values for the beliefs we hold and for what is right. Thousands of New Zealanders of our parents’ generation laid down their lives to fight for their country. 
In Opposition in the past I have endorsed decisions made by the National Government to send troops overseas. I did so after returning from Timor-Leste in 1999 as a monitor for the United Nations in the referendum there. In Government I have contributed to decisions that have seen our people placed at risk—in Afghanistan with our SAS where we were one of the first countries in after September 2001 and in Bamian where we were the third country to set up a provincial reconstruction team. I have contributed to decisions to send our forces to the Solomon Islands and to redeploy in Timor-Leste after 2006. I stand by those decisions because I believe they were the right decisions to make at the time. There is a huge responsibility in making such decisions. We have to do the right thing not only in a moral sense but also in terms of the choice of options that are before us. In determining to make a deployment we have to consider what the cause is that we are fighting for. We have to look at the options that we have at what positive difference a deployment by New Zealand forces can make and whether the benefits to be gained outweigh the costs that may be incurred. 
The previous Labour Government withstood pressure to commit troops to a war in Iraq that we did not believe in and we were proven right by history. Regarding Afghanistan we made a different decision. I think the rationale for sending troops to Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 was understood by most New Zealanders. Al-Qaeda had killed thousands of people in its terrorist attacks and if left undisturbed it would have continued to do so. But as I said before after the third rotation of SAS forces came back in November 2005 the Labour Government reassessed the situation and decided not to recommit the special forces. That in no way reflects on the decency the discipline the effectiveness and the competence of the SAS personnel themselves. I know many of them personally and they are some of the finest people we could meet. I have absolute confidence in them. The decision we made not to send them back reflected our assessment of the situation that had evolved in Afghanistan on the basis of the information that the Government had before it and from our belief that in this new situation there were much better options to contribute to finding peace in that country. The big difference that had occurred was that the conflict had moved from being about rooting out international terrorist forces of al-Qaeda to a much more local conflict between disparate ethnic religious and political elements in Afghanistan. 
If we were worried about al-Qaeda in the world today we would be deploying troops to Pakistan where most of its leaders are now based not to Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is in many other countries—in the Yemen in the Sudan and in Somalia—but we have not found it necessary to send combat forces to those countries. Most people in this House know that although Afghanistan is a country the primary loyalty of its people is to its ethnic and religious groups whether they are Pashtun Hazara Uzbek or Tajik. The lack of successful interventions by the United Kingdom over hundreds of years and by the Russians more recently demonstrates how difficult it is to establish a centralised form of control. I do not believe that Afghanistan can be reconstructed from the top down today. 
We rightly deplored the excesses and the fundamentalism of the Taliban but we should not pretend in this House that the conflict in Afghanistan today is a simple one between the forces of good and evil. The values of the current Afghan Government are such that many of us find it hard to sacrifice New Zealand lives to protect that Government. This week’s decision that it was legal for a man to starve his wife to death if she denied him conjugal rights is not the sort of values I believe that we should sacrifice New Zealand lives for. Nor do I believe in the sharia law that says that a person can be executed for changing his or her religion. We have to ask questions about whether it is appropriate to send our troops to support a “narco-State”. On  
60 Minutes 
 last night we saw Australian troops walking through hectares of opium crops without being able to touch them. Afghanistan is a country that provides 93 percent of the opium around the world in this current day. I do not find it easy to want to sacrifice New Zealand lives for a State that suffers from endemic corruption. Some members—and I think the Minister of Foreign Affairs is one—have argued in the House that those are secondary considerations to stopping Al-Qaeda re-establishing in Afghanistan. But the truth is that it is currently operating across the border in Pakistan and nobody is suggesting that we involve ourselves in that country. 
The United States - led intervention has been in Afghanistan for 7 years yet the defeat of the Taliban forces looks further away than ever before. The Taliban now controls one-third of the country notwithstanding the 90000 United States and allied forces that are involved in the conflict in that country. Last month 75 United States and NATO troops died in Afghanistan; it was the deadliest month since 2001. More than 1000 Afghan civilians died which was 24 percent above the same figures for the previous year. The hard fact is that when a person an innocent civilian dies in a village villagers do not ask whether the Taliban were embedded in that village and therefore that was why the allied forces responded. They simply know that their loved one was killed by a foreigner and we lose the battle for hearts and minds. The contrast is in Bamian itself where we have won the battle for hearts and minds. We have helped establish stability and security we have provided the basis for development and we can work alongside an administration led by Governor Habiba Sarabi who is both honest and competent. We can see the difference we are making and there is less risk to our troops in making that difference. That was an effective deployment. 
I cannot understand why we would swap commitment to something that was working well at a lower risk to New Zealand lives for something that is absolutely unproven as to its effectiveness and has a much higher risk to New Zealand lives. I understand that the Americans and others have asked for it but this is a decision that we make on our values and according to our analysis and judgment. For the reasons I have set out from 2005 the previous Labour Government decided not to recommit the SAS to Afghanistan; we do not support that action now.