Alison Broinowski

Most Australians live in cities where the only newspapers are owned by Murdoch. So unless they found Fairfax on line, they were spared the sorrowful report on 3 May that Afghan government troops have pulled out of more ‘strongholds’ in Uruzgan province. http://www.smh.com.au/world/australian-troops-fought-and-died-in-uruzgan-now-afghan-troops-are-pulling-back-20160302-gn7z1i.html To the surprise of no-one who read it, Taliban are back.

The withdrawal, Reuters reported mournfully, followed ‘many years of work and much blood shed by Australian troops to maintain peace and stability in the province, before the last Australians left in 2014’. After Australians spent thirteen years in Tarin Kowt, 41 died, and many more were injured, the Afghan authorities have made ‘a tactical decision to deploy forces more effectively’. So many Afghan soldiers and police have deserted or been killed, they say, that the province is short of its ‘assigned strength’. (One thing they appear to have learnt from years of US/NATO training is Western management-speak).

The sombre announcement stirred barely a ripple of interest in Australia, for three possible reasons.

First, Australia is over Afghanistan. Only a fortnight ago those at Anzac day services swore not to forget our past wars, which include several egregious disasters, but we do forget them. Many of us forget, for example, that Australia has not declared or won a war since 1945, unless East Timor and Gulf War I count as victories. Since well before Federation, Australians have habitually and repeatedly gone to fight in distant countries, which are then forgotten as we prepare for the next one. As Henry Reynolds says in his new book Unnecessary Wars (2016), most Australians don’t ask why we fought or what resulted, only how we fought, as if war was a game of football.

Second, Afghanistan can’t be occupied. The British learned this to their cost in the Afghan wars of 1839-42 (‘Auckland’s folly’), 1878-80, and 1919, after which the rulers in Kabul took control of their country. The USSR fell into the Afghan quagmire in 1979 and was forced to withdraw ten years later by the United States’ proxies, the Mujahideen and the Taliban. In 2001 America attacked Afghanistan in revenge for the 9/11 attacks (in which no Afghan took part). The invasion made even less sense after Osama bin Laden fled al-Qaeda’s Afghan headquarters and was allowed to escape to Pakistan. Iraq was top on Bush’s list of target countries: Afghanistan was merely low-hanging fruit on the way to the invasion. Starting as a counter-terrorist war, the conflict in Afghanistan became a counter-insurgency, in which the only local support the US/NATO could expect for their objectives was what money could buy, and only for as long as they kept paying.

Third, Uruzgan is not Australia’s province. It can no more be claimed as uniquely Australian than Nui Dat or Kapyong, the Kokoda track or Gallipoli could. As the junior ally of Britain and the United States, our troops have always gone where they tell us to go, fought who they tell us to fight, and left when they leave (with the honourable exceptions of Curtin bringing Australian forces back to defend Australia in 1942 and Whitlam pulling them out of Vietnam in 1972). Uruzgan meant no more to Australia than it did to our Netherlands predecessors there, who gave it up as a bad job. Australia was stuck in Uruzgan at the United States’ pleasure, as a consequence of John Howard’s unilateral globalisation of the Anzus Treaty.

If anything can be learned from the current collapse of ‘strongpoints’ in Uruzgan, it is that invasion rarely defeats insurgency, that neither invasion nor occupation can last forever, and that Western invasion of Islamic countries attracts Muslim hostility like a magnet. Australia, learning nothing from Vietnam, repeated its errors by invading Iraq in 2003 and again in 2015, and by bombing Syria in 2015-6. The sooner the decision to commit Australian forces to these futile wars is taken out of the hands of an ill-advised prime minister, the better.

Dr Alison Broinowski is Vice-President of Australians for War Powers Reform and Vice-President of Honest History.

Strategically timid.

In his final book, which was too little noticed, Malcolm Fraser declared that we must reassess the strategic dependence which has determined our defence policy throughout settler Australian history. ‘We need the United States for defence’, he wrote in Dangerous Allies (2014), ‘but we only need defence because of the United States’. It is the ANZUS alliance, presented as guaranteeing our security, that poses the greatest threat to Australia, he concluded.

The reason most Australians in the security establishment held their noses, rolled their eyes, and looked the other way was that Fraser had said the unsayable. If any of them had suggested that the United States is a declining power and is unable or unwilling to defend Australia, their careers would no longer flourish. The reputation of ANZUS, as unilaterally invoked and extended by John Howard in 2001, remains like that of Caesar’s wife, beyond suspicion.

The very freedom we praise our armed forces for defending is not exercised in the security industry. Officials, academics, and mainstream media columnists are too timid to tell the unpalatable truth, face the facts, and sort out the consequences for something as vital as Australia’s defence.

The 2016 Defence White Paper was delayed for years, as political leaders and defence ministers came and went. But this cannot be the only reason it took so long. As the fundamental planning document for future defence budgets, activities, equipment, training and recruitment, it should prepare us appropriately for decades ahead by correctly reflecting changes affecting Australia since the last White Paper. Foremost among these changes are two: the further rise of China and the stationing of US troops in bases in Northern Australia.

American and Australian responses to China’s rise are ambivalent. On the one hand, consultations and exchanges of many kinds take place, and even exercises for military confidence-building. China ‘owns’ much of American debt, and Chinese corporations own the port of Darwin and Cubby Station. China is Australia’s largest trading partner, and its saviour from the worst of the Global Financial Crisis. China is a massive sponsor, through student fees, of Australian higher education. China, Australia and the US regularly consult with our neighbours in the East Asia Forum.

On the other hand, China threatens to surpass the US as the world’s largest economy, and is testing American resolve in the South China Sea. Containment of China is the unspoken purpose of President Obama’s 2011 ‘pivot to Asia’, which Australia welcomed. Successive ministers have claimed Australia ‘does not have to choose’ between the US and China in the event of conflict in our region: but the fact is by offering northern Australia as an expanding base for US surveillance, troops, and now bombers, we have chosen already, and against our best interests. Australia is now implicated in any war the US wages in the region, and beyond.

The White Paper foresees US hegemony for the next 20-30 years, as a dependent ally must. But the United States, Obama admits, has neither the will nor the capacity to wage a land war in Asia, and is seeking to enlist Japan and Australia as its proxy combatants against China. Pushing back against China in the South China Sea, and risking a confrontation, could result in Japan changing its anti-war Constitution and both Japan and Australia breaching the terms of the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia, involving us in a war which would be unlikely to attract an endorsing resolution of the UN Security Council, and whose outcome might briefly benefit the US or China but not Australia or Japan.

Australians may be concerned about a well-armed China, but a declining United States which still owns weapons of mass destruction in massive numbers should raise equal anxieties. An overreaction from either of the rival superpowers of the future could be catastrophic. With such a prospect, an independent, self-interested Australia had an opportunity with this White Paper to seek a more sophisticated resolution of our ambiguity than ‘we don’t have to choose’. We have chosen, but in 2016 we were too strategically timid to admit it.

As a result of this White Paper – one which the ALP could itself equally have written – Australia has become even more strategically dependent on the United States and has postponed even further the prospect of regaining some form of sovereign control of our defence and foreign policy. Extending the usual spheres of security (land, sea, and air) to include space and cyber is a further exercise in sycophancy to the US and a further abandonment of independence.

Australia is less well prepared for this century than we were before the White Paper’s belated release. In spite of what some have claimed, the 21^st century is not America’s, but the Asian Century. Yet without question, we now accept that answers to differences with our neighbours will be militarised, and that those disputes will be mediated by the United States. We are forgetting that under Howard, with a UN mandate, and without US boots on the ground, we managed a reasonably peaceful transfer of power in East Timor. Before Howard, we did the same in Cambodia. Now, we are forgetting our international obligation to refrain from threat or use of force against other countries.

We seem to have forgotten too, that in another White Paper, on Australia in the Asian Century (2011), China and Indonesia were among five countries to which Australia was urged to give priority status in broadening and extending relationships. Australians at all levels in government, academia, and business were exhorted to become ‘Asia-capable’, not just the young, but people who had been in their positions of influence for decades. Authors Ken Henry and Allan Gyngell offered a resolution to our ambiguity: but the Gillard government didn’t fund it and the rest is history.

Until the contradictory propositions of the 2016 Defence White Paper and the Asian Century White Paper are reconciled, Australia will continue to flounder between its defence alliance and its economic interests, its history and geography, and two superpowers.

Alison Broinowski was formerly a senior officer in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Director of the Australia Japan Foundation.  She is a Visiting Fellow at the ANU. 

(or – when you get in a hole, stop digging)

To the sound of approaching drumbeats, first the ever-reliable Jim Molan, then Peter Jennings, and after them Liberal MP Dan Tehan have been wheeled out to tell us in recent days that the RAAF should start bombing in Syria. Right on cue, on 13 August Kevin Andrews said Australians would soon direct drone attacks into Syria, and Tony Abbott said expanded RAAF raids across the border had –wait for it – ‘been discussed’. Always briefed, Greg Sheridan informed us on 14 August that Australia was in discussions with the US, Iraq and other ‘coalition allies’, which he did not name, but some of whom had ‘already joined the US in attacks inside Syria.’ (Sheridan, ‘RAAF Syrian bomb missions loom’, Australian 14 August 2015, 1,2. David Wroe, ‘Australia in talks to bomb IS in Syria’, 14 August 2015, 3)

Australians with long enough memories will be smiling grimly as the band strikes up again for the old song-and-dance routine, Mission Creep, nicely orchestrated to distract from noises offstage about travel rorts, captain’s picks, and climate change. This latest re-run stars Abbott in Iraq III, reviving Howard’s 2003 role in Iraq II, which he understudied when Menzies starred in Vietnam. All Australia’s undeclared wars since the 1960s have had the same plot, and all of them have been disastrous flops, yet our leaders expect the punters to rock up to the box office every time.

Here’s what always happens. First, conservative governments press the US to ‘do more’, offering Australian support in return. They then make a surreptitious preliminary contribution, while the major deployment is organised. When that’s ready, they dribble out the ad campaign, denying we’re at war or even thinking of it because it may be illegal. Still they point to atrocities and dangers, real or fabricated, claiming the enemy (Communists, Terrorists, Death Cult, whoever) can reach Australia, so we’re all under threat. Then off the troops go, and patriotic support kicks in, particularly if anyone is killed, right in time for the next election.

There are a lot of problems with putting the Mission Creep show on yet again. Everyone knows we have not won a war with the Americans since 1945. We also know – even though the government refuses to hold an inquiry into the invasion of Iraq – that it was illegal and disastrous. We know too – even though we are told very little about what our troops are now doing in Iraq – that the Baghdad government won’t let them out of the bases where they train soldiers who are conspicuously underperforming against IS. Since late last year, Australians have been refuelling US aircraft flying missions into Syria, and many US drone strikes are coordinated from bases in Australia. What we don’t know is what would change if we sent more of them, or managed to get a Status of Forces Agreement that would let them do more. We also don’t know what effect the RAAF bombing has had, or what would be gained by expanding it into Syria. Even the loyal Sheridan admits that any difference it could make is ‘very marginal’.

We remember from Vietnam and Iraq II that local movements can metastesize across borders, particularly artificial ones. Even if IS is ‘defeated,’ the tumultuous reshaping of Iraq and Syria will continue. IS must right now be planning new publicisable atrocities, hoping that Shorten will be forced to share Abbott’s righteous outrage, and Australia and other US allies will be drawn into a wider war. This, surely, is the last chance for Shorten and Plibersek to restate Labor’s opposition to any Australian mission creep into Syria. They should ask the government to explain what we want from such a civil war, how we propose to win it, and how Syria is to be governed and reconstructed. If the Opposition stood up now and denounced Mission Creep as a time-worn farce, Australia could avoid responsibility for another disaster.

Instead, the shadow Foreign Minister put out a statement on 15 August http://gu.com/p/4bg9v/sbl

echoing Tony Abbott’s line about ‘Daesh’ as an evil cult, and calling it ‘a shockingly brutal force that is destroying the lives of many innocent people.’ The fact that Australia has sent one solider to Iraq for every 24 000 of our citizens has clearly not made much impression on IS. Plibersek didn’t say why we should fight them, and not other nasty groups like Boko Haram. Nor did she mention that when President Assad was the enemy of choice, the US subsidised IS in the first place http://universalfreepress.com/former-dia-director-gen-flynn-says-obama-created-isis-supposedly-to-overthrow-syrian-government/ )

Most significantly, she didn’t repeat Shorten’s condition of Labor support for the Iraq mission last year: that it now overflowing into Syria. ‘If the government has a case to make about a potential change to Australia’s existing mission in Iraq,’ she said obligingly, ‘the Opposition is ready to hear it.’

Alison Broinowski was formerly a senior officer in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Director of the Australia Japan Foundation. She is a Visiting Fellow at the ANU. She recently edited a book ‘How does Australia go to War’. The book carried a foreword by the late Rt.Hon. Malcolm Fraser.