...Apart from the obvious, which this article points out; that being the question mark raised over the legitimacy of the war, the answer is simply our obligation to the ANZUS treaty. The article failed to mention the extension of the original ANZUS agreement, which was intended to be an alliance applicable to the Pacific zone.

...The article more correctly points out the grief of families at the loss of loved ones in battle. This outcome is more an unavoidable fact of life, and will always remain one while most nations remain committed to raising armies.

...If the facts are obvious, that casualties are inevitable in battle, I would think a more relevant question arises; why is it necessary to present our young “women” to the perils of front line combat. This is the mute point begging new debate, and missing in this article.

If a foreign army invaded Australia and accidentally or deliberately killed some of our family or friends, I wonder how many of us could be relied upon not to take any opportunity for revenge.
I think the last "successful" invasion of Afghanistan was by Alexander the Great, his army soon got fed up and announced that they were going home, and did so.
Britain invaded Afghanistan numerous times over a hundred year period. They always came back with fewer soldiers and no success.
Why would the present occupation of Afghanistan by white,"Christian" soldiers succeed?
When the USA can no longer pay its soldiers they will go home.

Julia Gillard,we must stay the distance, what for,to have more young lives lost in a never winning war.
Julia Gillard is mourning the loss of her 83 year old father, but this is nothing compared to young lives lost, I always feel when the somber face & voice comes on that it is false, it is time politicians joined the front rank in any war, I am positive it would soon stop, but while the insignificant are being killed at their whim,as with all wars past & present I really cannot feel compassion for her at this sad time. Stop the war now Julia and stop bowing to what the USA may want of us.

AT&T

This is a good article making some important points. We also, on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11 need to reconsider the original justification for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. It was the alleged involvement of Osama bin Laden and the refusal of the then Taliban government to hand him over for American "justice".

Like just about the entire official 9/11 conspiracy theory that was a lie. Until our media (including OLO) have the courage to address that issue Australia will continue to be dragged into wars of America's choosing.

There was no legal or military reason for Australia to join in. John Howard's invocation of ANZUS had no authentic basis, as that treaty is subject to Art. 51 of the UN Charter, even if one accepts the US line that they were "attacked" on 9/11.

We now know that Bush authorised the decision to attack in July 2001, and did so for reasons relating to US geopolitics, including the Caspian pipeline, and the encirclement of China and Russia through bases in Afghanistan and the former Soviet Caspian republics.

The opinion polls show that the majority of Australians want our withdrawal from Afghanistan. The politicians ignore that message, possibly because they fear the wrath of the Americans more than they fear their own electorates. That needs to change. Re-instating accountability for the crime of aggression would be a good place to start.

I think we'll see scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975 or Mogadishu in the 1990's anyway, the lone helicopter gunship covering the last convoy out through the Khyber pass will be the defining image of this war.

What's even worse is that a report in the Guardian shows that over 30% of Afghan kids are starving in Helmand and Oruzgan where the British and Australian soldiers live in relative luxury and the wonder why the families of starving Afghan children kill them.

And we give $7 per person per year in aid and spend $500 million a year jailing AFghan refugees and now we are going to flog them off to Nauru and Manus island as punishment for not accessing a system that does not exist.

We are a nation run by fools with 13 good men and women in dissent.

When I saw the title "blood on their hands" I immediately thought of Labor and the 1000 dead asylum seekers.

Marilyn Shepherd:

…The open border solution of the minority “13 good men and women in dissent”, have cost Australian taxpayers, (the workers of this country), $5bn dollars in avoidable stupidity Marylin; (that’s a lot of new schools and hospitals).

…The new-version of off shore processing is still a half-hearted approach to placating the irrational position of the “irrelevant 13” of your hearts desire: And to all their stupidity, add 704 lives lost at sea by unsuccessful ocean crossings, of those “wailed” for!

Well done, Diver Dan. It has taken only 8 posts (and your second) to go completely off topic.

Afghan refugees we are torturing after they flee our war is sort of the point.

How about the refugees that Labor is drowning?

The real reason for being in Afghanistan are the $ trillion + worth of Lithium,oil and gas piplines from Turkmenistan,re-opening of the poppy fields which the Taliban closed in 2000 and to contain China.Remember the heroin drought? Afghanistan supplies 90% of the world's heroin.

http://ae911truth.org/ Today is the 11th Anniversary of 911 and this site shows the scientific proof that not only the towers were a controlled demolition,so was WTC 7 which no plane impacted.

You see,is was impossble for the towers to come down at freefall speeds unless is was a controlled demolition.

An argument could be raised using science, or simply physics and its attachment to the laws of gravity, to support a reasonable hypothesis supporting reasons for the collapse of the twin towers building, but that is not scientific evidence that "proves" the event was engineered.
I wish you could "get over it". The reality is, the psychotic attacks of 9/11 were the "catalyst" for the re-engagement with the Afghan war; that's what matters!

What else matters is the residual effects of the war on Australians. The biggest of which will continue well in to the distance of history. If we continue to support "idiot thinking" such as evinced from the Marilyins' of this life, who wish all Afghans could jump on a plane and set up permanent camp in Australia, where they could be surrounded with "love and affection" and nurtured for days eternal by the ever-loving welfare state, funded by Australian workers, fighting off the horrors of 427 visas entries from Asia, willing to work for $2.00 a day. AJ, I am increasingly convinced you are camped under a "gum tree" in the wilds of the west...get with it!

Diver Dan if you cannot understand the science,then this site might help convince you http://www.patriotsquestion911.com/ We are taking about thousands of political leaders,scientists,professors,doctors engineers,ex-CIA,Ex-FBI,pilots,media professionals etc who say we need a proper investigation into 911.

We will not be fobbed off so easily by the likes of you who want to crawl into a hole and pretend it didn't happen.

The head of ASIO David Irvine has been warning us about the threat of home grown terrorism.He wants to see our terrorism laws beefed up even more.This means less rights for us.

There is a huge body of scientific evidence proving that the official conspiracy theory about 9/11 cannot be true, and the finding of nano-thermite in the residue of WTC 1, 2 and 7 (as reported in the Open Chemistry and Physics Journal of 2010) is of itself evidence that someone other than the alleged hijackers were responsible for the destruction of the buildings.

The perpetrators of 9/11 had a number of motives, including the destruction of thousands of prosecution files relating to companies supporting the military-industrial-intelligence complex; obscuring the theft of $240 billion of gold bullion; and much else. All of this has been documented in books, articles in peer reviewed journals and elsewhere. But the evidence is never discussed in the media. People who raise serious questions are dismissed as "conspiracy theorists", an epithet incidentally that ignores that the US government's own version is itself a conspiracy theory.

The significance of 9/11 for the purposes of the present discussion however, is that it provided the pretext for the so-called "war on terror", a phoney concept that successive Australian governments have readily bought into. It might more accurately be called a war for other people's resources. As such it is indistinguishable from centuries of colonial exploitation under various guises.

Part of the tragedy is that Australia is such a willing accomplice to US imperialism. The ongoing debacle in Afghanistan that Kelley Tranter writes about is simply one manifestation of that tragedy. Other recent examples include Libya, Syria and Iran. The Australian government distinguishes itself by the stupidity of its position and by its blind adherence to the aggressive rantings emanating from Washington and Tel Aviv.

One longs for a mature, independent and considered foreign policy, but I am not holding my breath.

You interest me James; no offence but you are obviously a 9/11 conspiratist; elsewhere I have seen you support AGW.

Given that Lewandowsky has done a 'survey' showing AGW sceptics are prone to believe in conspiracies like 9/11 how is it that you are not a sceptic?

Here she goes again,
Marilyn, if the war is not in the public interest and it's not supported by Australians how is it "our" war? What's more your precious "13" have done precisely sweet FA to try and stop the endless war on terror even though they have the power to influence the government by putting their foot down on other issues. The Greens sole interest in the matter is Refugees and Andrew Wilkie cares about the welfare of Soldiers as well as Refugees, they don't care about stopping the war or preventing future imperialist deployments. We all know that if it kicks off in Iran the government will send special forces, technical advisers and warships to the Middle East and the Greens and Indies will support them in doing so, thus beginning another cycle of violence, mayhem, dislocation of populations and miserable refugee flight to the West, the Greens and Indies have blood on their hands too, failure to act puts them in the same immoral out group as the rest of parliament.

@ Cohenite. A conspiracy is simply an agreement by two or more persons to carry out an illegal act. The US government says that 19 Muslim hijackers conspired to hijack 4 planes and fly them into buildings. Ergo, it is a conspiracy theory. The question therefore is not whether or not the events are explained by a conspiracy theory but rather which theory (and there are many) best fits the known facts.

If you are seriously interested in knowing more then I suggest you read David Ray Griffin's book The New Pearl Harbor Revisited (2008) and Griffin's book (9/11 Ten Years Later (2011). The earlier book was Publishers Weekly's Book of the Month in November 2008.

If one seriously considers the evidence it is obvious in my view that the official story is a load of cobblers. The importance in knowing the truth about what really happened (and I do not pretend to know) is that the events of that day have been used to justify, inter alia, wars, bombings and all round terror campaigns, not to mention a sustained assault on our diminishing civil liberties.

It follows that if one can attack the rationale for any given action then there is a greater chance of convincing a majority of people that a given policy (in the instant case the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan) cannot be sustained.

The politicians and the media know this which is why it is impossible to find any rational and reasoned debate about 9/11 or any serious attempt to understand what happened. Instead, the evidence is suppressed, (e.g. the nano-thermite example I referred to in an earlier post, but there are literally dozens more)
and persons like myself discounted as "conspiracy theorists" or other derogatory epithets. All of which of course ignores the real issues.

If you read what I actually said about AGW then you will know that I try to adopt a similar evidence based approach. Frankly, Plimer, Monckton et al are less than convincing and that also applies to many of their acolytes in the comment section to Dr Florin's article.

It is good to see James O'Neill is one of the few who has the courage to speak the truth.

In 2009 the founder of Architects and Engineers for 911 truth Richard Gage came to Australia.He and other professionals from the USA walked the streets of Sydney with us handing out phamphlets and talking to the public.

Luke Rudkowski from http://wearechange.org/ was there.Luke is an inspiration to all young people,since at a very young age he has established this enormous website that is exposing this oppressive, fascist,imperialistic sytem that seeks to enslave us all.

I feel honoured to have met and spoke at length with Richard Gage,Prof Steven Jones,Dr Frank Legge,Prof Niels Harritt and many other people who travelled so far to expose this tyranny.

Many of our pollies know the truth but choose to live the lie.Either we wake up and show some courage or enter a new dark age.

*Afghan refugees we are torturing after they flee our war is sort of the point*

Deary me, Marylin still wants to save the world at our expense. Last
time I checked dear, they were fleeing the Taliban and the Pashtuns,
not our war.

The Greens will remain the "hearts on our sleeves" party, where emotion dominates all sense of reason. Luckily they don't run the
treasury, or they would soon have us broke and poor, ever more people squabbling over diminishing resources, just like the Afghans.

You really do ignore the laws of nature at your peril.Once again,
Australia cannot save the planet.

AJ

I congratulate you for dedication to a cause...