When I moved to Afghanistan to work as a lawyer with the UN mission’s human rights unit, one of my first meetings was with an Afghan teammate. He fled to Pakistan as a five-year-old to escape the Taliban and returned in manhood, at great personal risk, to press for his people’s human rights. Early into our conversation I dropped that I was Australian. What came next stunned me: he started crying.



“The Afghan people will be forever grateful”, he told me, for the sacrifices that we have made, for the lives that we have saved.

Few nations have matched our commitment. Our troops took on Uruzgan province in the country’s hellish south. Forty-one Australian Defence Force members have died in Afghanistan and another 261 have been wounded in action, suffering amputations, fractures, gunshot wounds, hearing loss, lacerations, traumatic brain injuries, penetrating fragments and multiple severe injuries. These figures make no account for the men and women who have come home forever changed, some with debilitating mental trauma.

Yet our commitment goes further. During my time in the country, an Australian brigadier general served with distinction as the UN’s senior military adviser. We have Australian aid workers, doctors and nurses, engineers and diplomats over there.

Further afield, we’ve been lead country on Afghanistan during our two-year term on the UN’s security council, deftly leading debates and negotiations. The UN mandate I worked under had Australia’s fingerprints all over it. We’ve committed over $134m to Afghan democratic and development projects in our current budget and have recently earmarked $300m to support Afghan security forces over 2015-2017, an allocation that could be affected by this week’s foreign aid cuts. We’re also an ardent supporter of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, probably the country’s most respected institution.

There’s so much for us to be proud of. Now that I’m home after 15 months over there, things make less sense.

When an Afghan reaches our waters in a leaky boat, we see them very differently. They change in our eyes. A person we’re prepared to give so much for in Afghanistan somehow becomes repugnant. “Illegal” is a label I hear, and that’s just our government talking.

Then the “processing” begins. We dehumanise the person by tagging them as an unauthorised maritime arrival – a UMA – and send them to indefinite detention on Nauru or Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, where we at one time put Japanese soldiers on trial for war crimes. They will never live among us. They’ll never be Australian.

Others we are forcibly returning. One of two Hazara men we recently sent back to Afghanistan was swiftly captured and tortured by the Taliban. Undeterred, we had slated a third Hazara man for return on Wednesday and at least half a dozen more are waiting in the wings.

I struggle with the utter incoherence of this home-versus-away policy.

The most confronting and appalling part of my work in Afghanistan was meeting with the war’s child victims. Our team were regulars at Jalalabad hospital. Its rudimentary emergency room has one doctor for every 16 patients.

Beds are crammed into small wards and spill out into the corridors. Sheets are often reused. Doctors pull 24-hour shifts. Male visitors sleep on the floor while burqa-covered women and dusty children press themselves into dim corners. At peak times, guards control pedestrian traffic between wings with wooden batons. This is the top hospital in eastern Afghanistan.

On my final visit to the hospital before coming home, I visited a 15-year-old boy. He lay in stoic silence and wore an all-too-familiar vacant stare. His head and torso were tightly bandaged, bloodstained gauze protruding from between the layers. A ceiling fan cranked to full capacity was useless against the oppressive summer heat.

A villager keeping vigil by the boy softly recounted his story to me. The Taliban had targeted the kid with a remote-controlled bomb as he delivered water to an Afghan army check post. The shrapnel shredded him; his donkey collapsed dead beneath him. The boy’s little sister rushed to the scene. She was killed in a second blast. The kids, the villager continued, were orphans. The boy had taken the work to support their extended family.

I share this story because we have put children who have escaped these circumstances into detention. We are compounding the harm. The recent amendments to the Migration Act now deny citizenship to kids born in Australia to an asylum seeker who came by boat. In practice, this could render them stateless.

During a debate on Afghanistan in 2010, Tony Abbott, then opposition leader, said that we “should honour the Australian battle casualties so far. We owe it to those who have died to remain confident that the cause has been worthy of their sacrifice”.

The best way for us to live up to these sentiments is to meet the moral courage and convictions we have asked of our servicemen and servicewomen. Let’s show the same commitment to humanity and fundamental decency to the Afghans here that we do to the Afghans there.

We are back to war in Iraq, our special forces have hit the ground in Baghdad. They are supporting a campaign tied to rights and freedoms that underpin our way of life. They will again help to save lives. When prime minister Abbott first announced the deployment of our Super Hornet jets, he said that “Australia will be acting as part of a large coalition of countries supporting Iraq in the fight against [Isis] and contributing to the humanitarian relief effort”.

These are noble aims. But if desperate Iraqis and Syrians reach our waters seeking freedom and relief here, how will we receive them?