Category: Defence

On Sunday, Taiwan will elect its next president, the successor to President Ma Ying-jeou from the Kuomintang (KMT) party who has been in power for the past eight years and is ineligible to run for another term. The vote will almost certainly record a decisive choice for political change.

In the run up to the election, the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate, Tsai Ing-wen, appears to be heading towards a runaway victory — with polls suggesting that she has about 45 per cent voter support. This puts her far ahead of the ruling KMT party candidate, Eric Chu, with around 20 per cent, and the smaller People First Party (PFP) candidate James Soong with 10 per cent. Around 25 per cent of voters remain undecided. With three-quarters of a million more voters this election than last time, the many young, first-time voters are likely to vote for non-mainstream parties or the DPP.

A series of political stumbles — with the governing KMT forced to change presidential candidate midway through the election — and a steady trend towards independent-mindedness, especially among the younger generation in Taiwan, has left the KMT government struggling to mobilise its support base. The polls suggest that the KMT might also lose control of the Legislative Assembly for the first time in Taiwan’s history.

The coming election result will be widely, if wrongly, read as a referendum on cross-Strait relations. President Ma has focused on improving relations with China and negotiated a succession of agreements with the mainland that have seen relations between Beijing and Taipei at their most cordial since the end of the Chinese civil war. The opening of cross-Strait economic relations was given a major fillip in 2008 after the election of Ma and the return of a KMT majority in the Taiwanese legislature. There followed a series of high-level exchanges between then Chinese and Taiwanese leaders that laid the foundations for steps that saw a major breakthrough in the relationship with the eventual signing of Cross-Straits Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) on 29 June 2010.

But implementing follow-on arrangements to give effect to the agreement wasn’t all smooth sailing. The passage of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement through the Taiwanese legislature was disrupted by the emergence of the Sunflower Student Protest Movement in 2014. The movement gave vent to concerns about incomplete disclosure regarding the nature and potential costs of the agreement, as it related to telecommunications and other issues. And the backing it gained, from the opposition DPP and among students and young people, exposed the underbelly of anxiety about the deepening economic relationship with Beijing and its political implications. Taiwanese are glad to see tensions with Beijing reduced. But many also fear the Ma administration and the KMT might have made Taiwan too economically dependent on the mainland; that might lead to loss of independence and inability to fend off pressure one day to reunify with China on unfavourable terms.

In fact, the profound political shift in Taiwan is more closely associated with the economy’s failing struggle to re-invent itself. With per capita income around US$22,000, Taiwan is above the middle income threshold, but it has been unable to emulate its neighbours like South Korea and Japan in Asia in climbing up the income scale. Its export-dependent manufacturing sector faces competition from South Korea from above and emerging economies, like China, from below. GDP grew a measly 1 per cent in 2014; wages are stagnating and unemployment, at 4 per cent, is considered high. The irony is that Taiwan’s tortured, ‘one-sided’ economic relationship with China — which Ma had been trying to correct — might well be a core element in Taiwan’s economic woes. While direct trade has opened up across the Strait, Taiwan has continued to restrict Chinese imports and investment, essential to enjoying the fruits of fuller integration into the regional and global economy. South Korea has imposed no similar burdens on its international competitiveness.

This week’s lead essay from Mark Harrison points out that while the KMT government may have overstayed its welcome domestically, Taiwanese affairs have looked very different internationally. While the Ma–Xi meeting last November seemed merely to confirm the voters’ view that the KMT had lost sight of Taiwan’s democratic ideals and their everyday concerns, internationally it looked like an historic moment in cross-Strait relations and a step towards resolving one of modern history’s longest-standing ideological conflicts. Indeed, one conception of China’s diplomatic intention in agreeing to the meeting was that it was designed to lay down new benchmarks in cross-Strait relations in preparation for working with a DPP leadership.

‘Should Tsai be elected president, managing these two very different perspectives will be a key task for the incoming administration’, says Harrison. ‘As president, she will need to take heed of the international view of Taiwan and communicate the reasons why the electorate have voted for a more circumspect relationship with Beijing. Tsai’s task will be complicated by memories of the last DPP president, Chen Shui-bian, which still rankle foreign ministries around the world. At the same time, the United States and Japan have both become far warier of China’s assertive regional policies and a Taiwanese government that is less accommodating towards Beijing may suit their policy responses and leadership inclinations’.

It’s true, as Harrison says, that from an international perspective, policymaking in Taipei by a government that will base its legitimacy on its openness to public debate and political activism may appear less reassuring than the policies of accommodation with Beijing under Ma. Certainly Washington was anxious to be reassured that Tsai was not going to disturb the status quo on that front. But this is the tide of Taiwan’s modern political history. Beijing has shown respect for the process and provided a bridge to Tsai and an incentive to meet in the middle. And the policy outcomes that open government can deliver on China and other issues will ultimately stand on stronger foundations of political legitimacy.

Professor Peter Drysdale is Editor ANU East Asia Forum. This article was first published in the East Asia Forum on 11 January 2016.

During the last 10 years, North Korea has resigned its membership of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and conducted four nuclear test explosions. It claimed that the latest of these, detected four days ago, was of a hydrogen (fission-fusion) bomb. It made no such claim for the earlier three tests; said to be merely atomic (fission) bombs.

Argument about the veracity of the current claim is underway. There was seismic evidence of a test, but there is good reason to doubt that it was of a hydrogen bomb. We might have a clearer reading on that soon. The UN Security Council has condemned the test, as it has done in the past, describing it as constituting a “threat to international peace and security”. North Korea’s statements have spoken of a remarkable scientific achievement and their ability to threaten the destruction of its enemies, chiefly the United States.

Any rational appreciation of this current piece of theatre would begin by recognizing its elemental ludicrousness, but then acknowledge the great dangers and deadly earnest politics it incorporates.

Life in North Korea is appalling. Its people have little to eat and as Justice Michael Kirby has reported to the UN, there are virtually no human rights there, just widespread and relentless abuses. Expenditure by the regime of its resources and technological efforts on nuclear weapons is cruel.

Interested western oriented countries, particularly US, Japan, South Korea have attempted to have North Korea end its nuclear program, offering a range of economic and political incentives In return. These have failed. Attempts have also been made to engage China and Russia in diplomatic efforts to the same end. These have also foundered.

China is crucial to any solution given its alliance with North Korea and the depth of the latter’s reliance upon China for economic survival. China is known to be angry with its partner and has joined in the Security Council’s condemnation of the nuclear testing program, but it has taken no serious action against it.

At a fundamental level, the North Korean nuclear weapons issue is now emerging as possibly the paradigm case, even more so than the Iran case, of two pervasive phenomena in contemporary international relations.

1. The reversion by most States to traditional forms of competition and balance of power politics as the determinant of outcomes in international relations. This development has specifically rejected the purposes and principles of the Charter of the UN; the post Second World War compact.It has resulted in the wretched failures we have witnessed in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and a number of countries in Africa and the Middle East.
   The abiding aspect of these failures has been the refusal of key States, particularly Permanent Members of the UN Security Council, to permit collective action to make or keep peace, if it would disadvantage them as such, or in their competition with others. Permanent members have also been the most egregious violators of the Charter by invading or attacking other States, for which actions they have not been sanctioned.

2. As the key extension of this first notion, which places the possession of power, particularly military power, at the centre of legitimacy; the second phenomenon is the insistence by those States which possess nuclear weapons that they alone are legitimately able to determine who else might and might not have those weapons.
   That they are able to make this determination, including through the use or threat of use of their own weapons, is beyond doubt, in the short term. That it is legitimate for them to do so, given global legal and moral commitments to nuclear arms control and disarmament, and the dangers nuclear weapons pose, is preposterous.
   Above all, the consequence of the elemental hypocrisy involved in the attempt to manage the world on such a basis is that it will fail and possibly lead to horrendous war.

The first of the two phenomena identified above is not new, as such. But the extent to which relations amongst States have become militarized is extreme. It has been the result of: the failure to reach a new compact, following the end of the Cold War, then the convulsions consequent upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union and, the wests attempts to treat Russia as the loser. Russia will not accept this and overall, the world has progressively rejected an imperial America. The principle victim in this situation has been the UN Charter system for the resolution of conflict.

The application of these circumstances to the North Korean case is illustrated by China’s obvious interest in the North Korean irritant to the US, Japan and South Korea, given its conflict with them over it’s South China Sea policies and actions. Simply, it can be expected to indicate that a price for it stepping up pressure on North Korea will be that the others make concessions on the South China Sea and more particularly recognize that if North Korea were to collapse it would not be acceptable for it to be folded into South Korea, as a State allied to the US. Russia could be expected to support China in such a stance.

On the specific issue of North Korea’s bomb, the previous policy of Obama’s first term – “strategic patience”- will need to be supplemented by a refreshed diplomacy and some new incentives, but only if China has significantly stepped up its effort with The North Koreans.

But, the current global situation described above, where nuclear weapon states attempt to hold the ring on the possession of such weapons, is failing. Israel, India and Pakistan have won that game. They have nuclear weapons and have refused to join the NPT and the Test Ban Treaty. Iran is on ice, for now, but Saudi Arabia is not. This is an unstable situation.

The hypocrisy which is intrinsic to the NPT, which privileges States with nuclear weapons, is coming home to roost. NPT is only acceptable if those privileged States implement their Treaty obligation to progressively eliminate their nuclear weapons. Instead what we see today is their expansion of their arsenals and their manifest reversion to power, not law or principle, as the reliable determinant of political and security outcomes.

If states were ever to become serious about ending the threat posed to all by the continued existence of nuclear weapons, they would begin a process of negotiated reductions in which all such weapons were in the frame. This is in fact what they have undertaken to do in NPT, a commitment which the International Court of Justice has ruled is an obligation in international law.

Interestingly, Australia was once a leader in the search for progress on nuclear non proliferation and disarmament. A practical process for the safe elimination of nuclear weapons was outlined in 1996 by the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, established by Prime Minister Keating. The Commission’s report continues to be recognized as a realistic one. But, Australia’s leadership in this field was terminated by Prime Minister Howard. To widespread dismay, this saw Australia actually vote against a resolution of the UN General Assembly calling for enhanced action on nuclear disarmament.

The Canberra Commission report was supplemented, in 2009, by a Japan/Australia study on nuclear dangers, managed by Gareth Evans.

Axioms which the Canberra Commission identified and thought were of enduring importance were: as long as nuclear weapons exist, they will be used, whether by accident or decision; any use would have catastrophic effects; as long as any State has nuclear weapons, others will seek to acquire them.

Were the Commission to meet again today, presumably it would add a further basic warning about the consequences of the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons capability by a group such as DAESH.

Only if the nuclear hypocrisy ends will we avoid these outcomes whether at the hands of North Korea or any other State.

On Australian actions, as a country possessing a major proportion of known reserves of uranium and as a permanent member of the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Turnbull government should review the resumption by Australia of an active role in global efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons.

Richard Butler AC is former Ambassador to the UN and was Convenor of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.

Repost from 17/09/2015

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — Few in the West remember the fact that China was the first country to enter what would become World War II, and it was an ally of the United States and Britain from just after Pearl Harbor in 1941 till Japan’s surrender in 1945, an Oxford expert said.

In an article titled “Forgotten ally? China’s unsung role in World War II (WWII),”circulated on U.S. TV network CNN’s website Tuesday, Rana Mitter, a professor of modern Chinese politics and history at the University of Oxford, elaborated China’s role in WorldWar II.

As China will hold a major parade in Beijing on Thursday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, “China’s memory of the war is becoming more, not less, important,” he wrote.

“Chinese suffering during the war is not in dispute,” he added, referring to the fact that during China’s resistance against Japanese aggression from 1937 to 1945, the fire of war scourged half of the Chinese territory, with around 260 million Chinese involved in the war and more than 35 million people killed or wounded. The direct economic loss reached some 100 billion U.S. dollars at then price.

The United States and China were allies during WWII and more than 250,000 Americans served in what was known as the “China-Burma-India” theater, many photos showed.

On July 7, 1937, Japanese troops attacked Lugou Bridge, also known as Marco Polo Bridge, a crucial access point to Beijing. This was the beginning of China’s eight-year warof resistance against full-scale Japanese aggression. A year later, by mid-1938, the Chinese military situation was desperate.

Many cities of eastern and central China, including Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuhan, fell in Japanese hands. Many foreign observers assumed that China could not hold out, and a Japanese victory over China was most likely.

Nonetheless, China refused to surrender, retreating inland to carry on resistance. “This decision changed the fate of Asia,” Mitter said.

If China had surrendered in 1938, Japan would have controlled China for a generation or more. Japan’s forces might have turned toward the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, or even India, the article reads.

The European and Asian wars might never have come together as they did after Pearl Harbor in 1941.

As Chinese hung on, and after Pearl Harbor, the war became genuinely global. The western Allies and China were united in their war against Japan.

China’s contributions were very important to the war efforts. China held down huge numbers of Japanese troops on its territory and acted as an example to other non-Western countries, showing that it was possible to fight with hegemonism and strongly oppose imperialism, Mitter stressed.

This article was first published in Xinhua, The Chinese Daily, n 2 September 2015.

Repost from 02/09/2015

Australia and the War in Syria: Perverting a Noble Vision in International Law for Ignoble Domestic Political Purposes

In 2005 a summit of world leaders at the United Nations unanimously endorsed the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Along with the establishment of the International Criminal Court, it constitutes one of the most noble contributions to international law, ever. Basically the doctrine declares that where a state is incapable or unwilling to protect its citizens, the international community should come to their aid. Intervention may take one or more of several forms: debt forgiveness, manageable loans, direct financial and logistical aid, sanctions, peace keeping operations and – as a very last resort – threatened or actual military intervention.

Like so many modern legal and ethical advances, especially in international law, R2P has been honoured more in its breach than its observance. Since its endorsement by the United Nations, the international community has sat on its hands while vicious ruling elites around the world have unleashed mass atrocities on their pitiless subjects. The prime contemporary example is the criminal Assad regime in Syria. Where interventions in the name of R2P have been initiated (by the UN or other regional or global authorities), they have generally been too little too late, or so badly coordinated they have worsened the very problems they were intended to solve.

It is surely ironic, therefore, that one of the main architects of R2P, Gareth Evans, and another former Labor Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, are now urging the Abbott government to accept the alleged “invitation” from President Obama to extend Australia’s bombing of Islamic State (IS) targets in Syria. They have suggested that this proposed intervention will be in the interests of the hapless victims of the Assad regime and IS, and other opposition elements in the horrific humanitarian catastrophe that is Syria today. That is, they want us to believe that it would entail a humanitarian intervention in line with the principles of R2P. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The bombing campaigns presently being conducted by the United States, Canada, Turkey and other allies are classic illustrations of an inadequately resourced and disastrously coordinated campaign that amounts to much too little, far too late. It will not stop IS in its tracks, nor will it bring down the Assad government. Probably nothing short of a very large number of American, Saudi Arabian, Iranian, NATO and other allies’ boots on the ground will begin to achieve those objectives. As the world well knows, the likelihood of this happening is precisely nil.

Meanwhile the Erdogan government in Istanbul is using the conflict as a cover for its brutal bombing of Kurds in southern Turkey and northern Syria and Iraq. Iran and Saudi Arabia are meddling in the various conflicts in Syria to wage a proxy war for their own nefarious purposes. Russia and China are blocking any genuine R2P attempts in the Security Council. And even if IS is destroyed and Assad and his ruthless cronies are toppled, there is no plan, no strategy, in place to bring order to the region and enable the tragically suffering peoples there begin to rebuild their lives.

It is more than likely that extending bombing into Syria is illegal under international law. Moreover the puny contribution that the few sorties the RAAF is capable of mounting in Syria will be pointless as far as ending the conflict is concerned. Given the propensity for allied bombs to incur “collateral damage” it is inevitable that Australian warplanes will add to the wounding and killing of innocent civilians. Any attempts to dress this up as a humanitarian R2P intervention simply advances the despicable rationale advanced by Tony Abbott for plunging Australia more deeply into a conflict that makes no sense in terms of the country’s real security interests.

Why then is Abbott urging the Americans to let Australia lend a hand in this unholy mess? Two morally grotesque answers immediately come to mind.

First, yet again Australia is cozying up to the United States in the naïve belief that Uncle Sam needs constant assurance of our abject loyalty to the ANZUS alliance. The fact is that the US takes Australia’s uncritical support for granted, end of story.

The second answer relates to Abbott’s electoral fortunes – or misfortunes. There is clearly a belief in the government that scaring the Australian electorate is the surest way of winning the 2016 election. This perverse rationale for recklessly spending Australian blood and treasure in an unwinnable, stupidly conducted, and cruel war reeks of the very basest kind of cynicism. Abbott’s strategy must be exposed for all to see what it truly is: a desperate and despicable attempt to cling on to power, no matter what the consequences for the country or for the world.

It’s time for the Labor Opposition to take an unambiguous stand against sending Australian warplanes into Syria. Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek must denounce the plan in the strongest possible terms. They have to explain to the Australian people that their country’s involvement in Iraq and possibly Syria is in fact endangering their security, not protecting it. In addition, Labor needs to advocate a strategy for immediate withdrawal of all Australian troops and materiel from the Middle East. Bring the troops home. There is no way their presence there will end this terrible conflict or reduce the appalling suffering of the civilians on the ground.

And Gareth Evans and Bob Carr should be turning their intelligent minds to theorizing a revised version of R2P. The first version has palpably failed. It needs a comprehensive rethinking. A future Australian government should be at the forefront of advocating the new version of this noble ideal at the United Nations and every other global forum it can attend. In the meantime compounding Abbott’s lie that America wants us by its side in Syria has to be treated with the utter contempt it deserves.

Allan Patience is a foreign policy researcher in the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne.

There is no doubt that Malcolm Turnbull’s visit to Indonesia and his and Lucy’s contacts with President Jakowi and his wife have very substantially improved the situation between Indonesia and Australia that existed before Malcolm’s visit.

The most recent and important meeting was between the Indonesian Ministers for Foreign Affairs and Defence with our Ministers for Foreign Affairs and Defence.  This meeting of the “two plus two”, as it is called and the press conference which followed underlined how the situation between Australia and Indonesia has changed and substantially improved.  This does not mean however that there are no on-going differences.  It was clear from the responses to the questions at the press conference that Indonesia, which is not a claimant state, is very careful not to adopt a negative attitude towards China’s activities in the South China Sea.  Both the Indonesian Foreign Minister and Defence Minister made it plain that all countries in the region shared an important interest in a stable peaceful approach to claims.

Both the Indonesian Ministers for Defence and Foreign Affairs made it clear that they wanted Australia to maintain firmly the position that West Papua was a part of Indonesia.  The Australian Ministers in response to these comments indicated that Australia acknowledged West Papua as a part of Indonesia.  This does not entirely rule out Indonesian fears that we may over time change our position as we did in respect of East Timor.  But  East Timor had never been a part of the Dutch East Indies, as was the case with West Papua.

My considered view is Australia needs to refocus on the important interests in our own Region – South East Asia, North Asia and the South West Pacific in what is now generally called the Asian Century.  Former Indonesian Ambassador to Australian Sabam Saigian and currently the Editor in Chief of the Jakarta Post wrote earlier this year the blunt commentary that “Australia is still stuck in the 20^th Century mode.  It is a Monarchy with a Head of State in London and its security arrangements are largely Cold War relics…..Australia is out of sync with the emerging geo-political environment of Asia today”.

I do consider we need to establish an updated and more balanced approach to the vital relationship between the United States and China.  There is a danger that adversarial attitudes towards China could become a self fulfilling prophecy.  The present debate on China mainly assumes that Australia has no choice but to support American primacy in Asia against the perceived rising Chinese hegemony, something which Xi Jinping has always denied.  Former Prime Ministers Hawke, Keating and the late Malcolm Fraser as well as most former Ambassadors to China and a number of academics can be expected to resist American” hegemony“ although they accept a cooperative and constructive United States role in Asia.  In my view Australia should not take sides on China Japan disputes or on rival territorial claims.  Our focus should be on unimpeded passage through international waters and trade routes.  Provocative actions by all claimants should be avoided.  Malcolm Turnbull was in his very recent visit to Japan cautious in this respect and very firm in opposing the resumption of whaling by Japan.

Turning to the Middle East we should acknowledge that while there were reasons for joining the US led invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, fourteen years later with forty Australians killed, over five hundred billion dollars spent and more than thirteen thousand Afghan civilians killed on objectives once deemed to be indispensible such as national building and effective counter insurgency have been downgraded or abandoned because there are  no longer adequate resources, time or even a clear US will to achieve them.  Polls suggest that the US public  opposes US ground forces being involved in further conflicts in the Middle East.

Australia needs a fundamental change in our national psyche focused more on Asia than on our well established links with the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand (the “anglosphere”), and Europe.    We need a much more sustained conversation with our neighboring countries in Asia and the South West Pacific.

Essentially terrorism has to be dealt with in each country, although discussion on dealing with it internationally can be useful and there was evidence  of new discussions between the AFP and the Indonesian police ,, although the Indonesian Foreign Minister did say that Indonesia wanted to check some of the information which they had received from the AFP.

In the long term no bi-lateral relationship will be more important to Australia than that of Indonesia.  The stability, unity and economic growth of a predominantly (81%) moderate Muslim nation of two hundred and fifty million people stretching across our north and trade routes a distance from Broome to Christchurch in New Zealand is vital to Australia.

There is some discussion in New York at present about an Australian interest in the Secretary Generalship of the United Nations, at present held by Ban Ki-Moon.  This will come up in the middle of next year.  It would normally be for the Eastern European group to nominate a candidate but there is some doubt that they will be able to agree on a candidate.  Although he publicly says he is not a candidate, it is quite widely regarded that Kevin Rudd is interested in the position and is privately working on securing it.

We are to some extent locked into participation in the Middle East through our cooperation with the present Iraq Government and our role in support of British air activity. The essential fact however is that Australia cannot influence the outcome of the kaleidoscope  of changing activities between extremist Shiites,  Sunnis and Kurds and a range of countries with different objectives including Saudi Arabia,  Iran, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Israel, China and the Yeman.  Because our role is symbolic in that it will not lead to a solution in the foreseeable future, it would be desirable for Australia to withdraw from the enormously complex situation in the Middle East and focus our attention on our region of the world when we can do so.

Tony Abbott on a number of occasions said that the first duty of a PM was to increase the safety of the Australian people.In fact his approach has made the Australian people LESS safe.

As Australians enter the end-of-year ‘doze zone’ they would do well to take time to watch a report, available online, prepared by the BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, which lifts the curtain on China’s bid to permanently militarise the South China Sea.

Wingfield-Hayes and his crew defied threats from the Chinese Navy in order to video construction activity at several disputed coral reefs currently being turned into military airfields and bases through massive dredging and construction operations. The BBC report shows scores of ships moored around what previously were largely submerged atolls.

This is the modern equivalent of the Great Wall of China going up before our eyes­­––except that it’s not easy to train our eyes, or our cameras, on specks of land in a distant sea. China is counting on that.

The Spratly Islands are variously claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and, of course, China. Beijing is intent on resolving this long-running territorial dispute unilaterally, by chasing its rivals out of the area and using its engineering and military muscle to illegally transform several of the atolls into exclusion zones.

Wingfield-Hayes states the case succinctly:

China is bound by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which it has ratified. The law states that sub-sea structures, such as reefs, cannot be claimed as sovereign coastline, and that building artificial structures on top of them does not turn them into sovereign territory either.

A country that owns a natural island can claim a 12-nautical-mile territorial limit around it, both on the sea and in the air. But artificial structures do not confer any such right. In other words, we would be able to fly our aircraft right up to China’s new islands without breaking any international laws, and China should not interfere with our flight.

But interfere China did. As the BBC-chartered aircraft flew even within 20 nautical miles it was bombarded with radioed warnings: ‘Unidentified military aircraft [the aircraft was a single-engine Cessna, about as civilian as you can get] in west of Nanxun Reef, this is the Chinese Navy. You are threatening the security of our station! In order to prevent miscalculation leave this area immediately!’ Nanxun Reef, also known as the Gaven Reefs, naturally comprise 150 hectares of coral outcrops less than two metres above sea level at their highest point. Furious reclamation activity since last year has turned it into another fortress in the new Great Wall.

The biggest construction project, however, is at Fiery Cross Reef in the Spratlys, which, according to reports, is being turned into an artificial island twice the size of the US military base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. At Mischief Reef, just 140 nautical miles from the Philippines coast, a new runway is also under construction. The BBC cameras caught a view of ‘the lagoon teeming with ships large and small. On the new land, cement plants and the foundations of new buildings’.

The United States and its allies do not recognize China’s bid to assert sovereign rights over virtually the entire South China Sea by means of this island-building exercise. The US military has undertaken well-publicised cruise and overflight operations to uphold ‘freedom of navigation’ principles. Australia, on the other hand, is attempting to steer a middle course––exercising the freedom, but on the quiet. The BBC chanced upon an RAAF aircraft traversing the area and sending out the following radio message:

China Navy, China Navy, we are an Australian aircraft exercising international freedom of navigation rights in international airspace in accordance with the international civil aviation convention and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea––over.

The BBC said the message was not acknowledged. But neither was any warning directed against this Australian military aircraft, as it had been against the BBC’s civilian plane even after it identified itself.

The RAAF overflight, conducted several weeks ago, was not publicised at the time by the Defence Department in Canberra. Only after the BBC report disclosed the incident did the Chinese acknowledge it. Beijing’s position is that it ‘resolutely opposes any country using freedom of navigation and overflight as a pretext for harming China’s national interest’. For now, however, it doesn’t want to draw Australia into the squabble and thus is content to play along with the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ gambit being run out of Russell Hill.

There is a big game being played out here from which Australia cannot hide. If our rights and interests are being impinged by China, as clearly they are under the terms of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, we should not hesitate from forthrightly defending them. Instead, we invite a Chinese entity, the Landbridge Group, which has close links to the PLA and the Chinese Communist Party, to operate the strategically important port of Darwin, and quietly watch as the new Great Wall goes up across the South China Sea, the main pathway to Darwin.

When Japan sent ships into the southern ocean to hunt for whales, Australia took it to the International Court of Justice to uphold its rights under the International Whaling Convention. It was a high profile, hard-fought case on a principle. China asks: Why should Australia involve itself in the South China Sea dispute when its ships and planes are still allowed to travel through unimpeded? Japan asks: Why should Australia object to another country catching an unthreatened species of animal that Australians don’t even eat? To both of them, the answer is the same: You signed up to be a good international citizen, behave like one.

Walter Hamilton is a former ABC Tokyo correspondent.

In this blog on 6 December 2015 ‘Turkey’s new neighbour – Daesh (Islamic State)‘  John Tulloh referred to an article by David Graeber in The Guardian on how Turkey is obstructing Kurdish forces that are the most effective opponents of Daesh.

In that article, David Graeber asserts that ‘Western leaders could destroy Islamic State by calling on [President] Erdogan to end his attacks on Kurdish forces in Syria and Turkey and allow them to fight ISIS on the ground‘.

David Graeber is an American anthropologist, political activist and author. He is currently a Professor at the London School of Economics and was formerly an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Yale University.

John Menadue

David Graeber’s  article ‘Turkey could cut off Islamic State’s supply lines. So why doesn’t it?’ is linked below. This article first appeared in The Guardian on 19 November 2015.

http://gu.com/p/4ebvc/sbl

On December 2^nd, the UK House of Commons debated for 10 hours, a motion moved by the Government, that it should authorise bombing of DAESH targets in Syria by UK airforces. (Prime Minister Cameron announced early in his statement that, henceforth, ISIL should be referred to as DAESH: the acronym of its name in Arabic).

Some 150 members of the House took part in the debate. The motion was approved by a vote of 397 for, 223 against. Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn had approved a “free vote” for members of his party. 66 Labour members exercised that right and voted with the Government.

The debate saw repeated interventions on points of order and points of detail from both sides. More significantly, it was somewhat overshadowed by repeated opposition demands that the Prime Minister withdraw and apologize for remarks he was heard to have made, the previous day, that those who would vote against his motion would do so because they were “terrorist sympathizers”. He refused to do this.

The debate was certainly lively, if not always edifying. It served to justify the notion of a house of elected representatives of the people as the key place in which matters of undoubted public importance and policy should be aired.

That airing included the reliance, by both sides, on their gut political credo, rather than on hard evidence for any particular point of view. Prime Minister Cameron, was particularly light on evidence for his views.

On the Conservative side, the main elements of that credo, were the beliefs in: the efficacy of military action in bringing about political outcomes; fighting the enemy abroad would keep the homeland safe; and, the notion that Britain had an indispensable role in maintaining a civilized world. This last idea seems not dissimilar from the US’ notion that it is the “exceptional country”, or indeed former Prime Minister Abbott’s now revealed notion that the current crises in the Arab and Russian worlds meant that history had, once again, handed to the “Anglosphere” the unique duty to put things to rights

On the Labour side, the fundamental concerns expressed were: that military action was not the solution to the problem of DAESH; what was needed was concerted political/diplomatic action to bring about an end to the Syrian war, and extreme doubt that expanded military action would be effective in both curtailing DAESH or preventing further terrorist acts outside the Middle East, indeed, it might fuel them.

The undoubtedly remarkable feature of the debate was that it took place. It was never going to fully satisfy the evident need for an improved public and revealed official understanding of the dreadful complexity of the situation in the region extending from Turkey in the North West to Yemen and the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, in the South East. The same would appear to be true of the extent to which the turmoil in that region is authoring a post-Cold War competition, by proxy, between the US and Russia.

But, the debate will surely prove to be an important marker in the passage towards resolution of the challenges now posed by the disorder in the post colonial Arab world, the need for what could be termed a post Cold War settlement, and the challenges posed to international law and order posed by non-State actors such as DAESH.

Where is the debate in the Australian Parliament? The Abbott government committed Australian military assets to action in both Iraq and Syria without any such debate. Labor acquiesced, for reasons unstated.

Infamously, Prime Minister Howard committed Australia to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, ignoring massive public demonstrations against it and without Parliamentary debate. That invasion is now widely regarded as having stimulated the formation of DAESH.

We now learn from Peter Hartcher’s series, “Shirtfronted” (SMH), that the basis of Abbott’s decisions on these matters was gut instinct.

We have not yet heard from Prime Minister Turnbull on how he might arrive at decisions on matters which might involve Australian forces, although we also learn from Hartcher that Abbott exclude him from membership of the National Security Committee of Cabinet because he knew Turnbull would not support his gut instincts.

In the new circumstances of a growing international coalition against DAESH and the UN Security Council resolution following the Paris attacks, authorizing states to “take all necessary measures”, the Australian people have a right to know what it is the Government proposes to do, why, and what it hopes to achieve. A debate in Parliament would serve that purpose.

Richard Butler AC, is former Ambassador to the United Nations and Head of the UN Special Commission to disarm Iraq

Tony Abbott has argued Australia and her allies should relax targeting rules for airstrikes to destroy the Islamic State.

At best, he is ignorant of the lessons of the military campaigns waged in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. At worst, he is willing to repeat mistakes to differentiate himself on national security and open a pathway to take his job back.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Abbott isn’t as narcissistic as the latter reading suggests. Let’s assume he was insufficiently briefed on recent military campaigns or has forgotten the lessons of our longest wars.

The battle of ideas, not body counts, will determine this war. Disproportionate use of force will only inflame and grow the Daesh insurgency. There is no military solution to destroy IS.

“A military force, culturally programmed to respond conventionally (and predictably) to insurgent attacks,”wrote General Stanley McChrystal in November 2009, “is akin to the bull that repeatedly charges a matador’s cape – only to tire and eventually be defeated by a much weaker opponent.”

McChrystal should know. He was commander of the United States-led coalition of forces in Afghanistan from 2009-2010 and headed up US Special Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan from September 2003 until February 2006.

When McChrystal took over as commander he told his troops to “get rid of the conventional mindset”.

We know the prequel. In 2005 the US was accused of being a “lawless hegemon”, one that avoided the laws of war or sought to exploit gaps within it. Commanders misunderstood the battlespace in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their “enemy-centric” mindset harmed civilians and alienated the people. David Kilcullen described US forces as “chasing their tails”.

From late 2006 military doctrine, strategy, tactics and rules of engagement began to shift decisively. Australian military advisers and judge advocates were pivotal in this change of mindset.

Phillip Bobbitt put the new position best in 2010: “The war aim in a war against terror is not territory, or access to resources, or conversion to our way of political life,” Bobbitt wrote. “It is protection of civilians within the rule of law.”

McChrystal’s tactical directive to troops in July 2009 made this explicit. “We must avoid the trap of winning tactical victories – but suffering strategic defeats – by causing civilian casualties or excessive damage and thus alienating the people.”

Losing popular support would “translate into more insurgent recruits, more IEDs, and a prolonged conflict with an uncertain outcome.”

McChrystal prohibited the use of air-to-ground or indirect fire against residential compounds with three tightly-specified exceptions, installed new battle damage assessment requirements, denied capacity for unilateral missions without regional command approval, raised the approval level for night raids, tightened escalation of force procedures and mandated civilian casualty investigations and reporting up the chain of command within 24 hours from any given incident.

McChrystal was clear: “Our success depends on our ability to escalate force proportionally, in a manner that the average Afghan civilian can understand, and respects the fact that this is their country.”

Successive studies of countering insurgencies reveal that if one loses legitimacy they lose the war. This means one cannot separate the conduct of operations from the broader, contested narrative of a war.

Securing the population and killing the enemy is a necessary condition to countering Daesh. But the chief lesson of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns is that the legality of the conduct of those operations is central to their legitimacy.

This is why proportionality has become a watchword for countering insurgencies successfully. It requires a delicate but appropriate balance to be struck between military necessity and collateral damage, in an age when allegations of disproportionality can be uploaded to YouTube and viewed across the world in seconds.

US military doctrine now asserts that “all interactions between security forces and the population directly impact legitimacy”. Complying with the law of war helps to gain local trust – violations “have a direct and significant negative impact on the ability to conduct successful counterinsurgency operations”.

Abbott now advocates “less restrictive targeting rules for airstrikes”. His position may be more nuanced. He may dispute current distinctions between civilians and combatants, including what it means for civilians to participate directly in hostilities. As stated, his position is pregnant with ambiguity.

Such hawkish ambiguity is exactly what Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull ruled out last Tuesday in his National Security Statement to Parliament. Turnbull called for “calm, clinical, professional, effective” conduct to defeat IS, not “gestures or machismo”. He said “the strongest weapons we bring to this battle are ourselves, our values, our way of life”.

In war the most significant distinction is between civilians and combatants. The latter are lawful targets who can be killed. We water down the distinction at our peril. This is but one way in which our military forces live our (and their) values.

Countering insurgencies, former US Central Command head General James Mattis once said, is only new if “we don’t read our own history”.

Given our focus these past weeks on France, it’s worth recalling that the best-known military theorist and practitioner of counterinsurgency was French. Lieutenant Colonel David Galula’s formula was simple: win the support of the people. “Antagonising the population will not help,” he wrote in 1964, “rash actions on the part of the forces should be kept to a minimum.”

An ad-hoc legal approach to fighting terrorism would return us to the fog of law within the fog of war. It is a recipe ripe for disaster.

Travers McLeod is chief executive of the Centre for Policy Development and the author of “Rule of Law in War: International Law and United States Counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan” (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Russia supports the (Shia) Assad regime backed by Iran and others while Turkey supports the Sunni backed bySaudi Arabia, the USA and others. The Turks claim the Shia are terrorists while Russia supports them as allies of the Shia, (i.e. Assad) who support Russian strategic interests.. This is an oversimplified picture but it is relevant to the shooting down of a Russian fighter. The Turks claims it was in Turkish airspace which the Russians deny. Turkey probably overreacted but it is perfectly possible that Russians were attacking anti-Assad forces within Turkey or strayed over the border in pursuit of such forces. Either way the Russians are going to deny that they were to blame and the Turks are going to say it was all Russia’s fault.

If left to themselves, Russia and Turkey will almost certainly sort it out with much rhetoric and ittle action but the danger is that NATO will get into the act either by itself or at the urging of Turkey. This would not be a good idea. All this does, however, highlight a basic problem in the whole situation. It is not just the bad guys, ISIS, versus the good guys, everyone else. It is a host of conflicting factions and interests which overlap and vary like the bits of a kaleidascope. The more the parties involved insist on a goodies and baddies analysis the less likely it is that a solution will be found.

Everyone has an interest in opposing ISIS but how do you do this? As has been wisely said, ISIS is not an army or a state but an Ideal. Western countries find it hard to accept that local people see the West as the baddies although a brief foray into history might show them why.

This situation is unlikely to lead to wider conflict.  US increased training of Ukrainians to “combat Russian aggression” is a greater threat. The behaviour of both Russia and the US takes us back to the Cold War but more accurately should be seen as a contest for influence between two great powers. It has nothing to do with morals or political systems. The common fight against ISIS in particular and terrorism in general creates a bond which puts pressure on all parties to work together at least against ISIS. The question is, what happens next? The Coaition of the Willing opened Pandora’s box. Who will put the lid back on it?

Cavan Hogue is former Australian Ambassador to USSR and Russia.

We have had a lot of apocalyptic talk about IS – we are at war, it is a death cult, it threatens civilisation. Unfortunately these exaggerations don’t help a measured and holistic response. These exaggerations play into the hands of terrorists who hope for our over-reaction and the promotion of fear.

We know from experience that terrorism ebbs and flows over the years in intensity. We must be ready for the long haul.

There is no doubt that IS is a threat but we need to consider carefully some important facts and to put the matter in perspective.

One important fact is that climate change is really an existential threat and vastly more serious than the terrorist threat.

Many politicians seize opportunities to exploit fear. It is noteworthy that those who decry government spending in so many areas are the first to propose substantial increases in spending for intelligence and police agencies. Terrorism is good politics for conservative politicians although Malcolm Turnbull seems more sensible than most.

The Paris attack was one of many. A larger number of people were killed in the IS bombing of a Russian aircraft over Sinai. Only a few days before the Paris attacks, there were large numbers killed in Lebanon. The most violent of all is probably Boko Haram which has conducted mass abductions and killed over 17,000 people since 2009 in Africa. Columnist David Brooks, reports in the New York Times that since 1984 an estimated 1.5 million Christians have been killed by Islamic terrorists in Sudan. There is also not much doubt that in the birthplace of Christianity, the future of Christian communities is extremely bleak.

As an important news hub, Paris attracts a great deal of media attention, but the atrocities have been much worse elsewhere. We do have a ‘white man’s media’ in Australia. Just recall the almost never-ending coverage of the bombings of the Boston marathon.

It is also no consolation to remind ourselves that the threat of terrorism in Australia is small compared with the other threats we face in daily life.

The IS threat has grown out of centuries of Western involvement and humiliation of the people of the Middle East. That involvement was accelerated by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after WWI. From that time on Western countries have occupied, plundered and exploited the resources and the people of the Middle East. The most recent calamity was the invasion of Iraq by the US, the UK and ourselves. That invasion has cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. Our intervention, which our media choses to forget, sowed the seeds of the bitter harvest that we are now reaping.

With a history of ethnic, sectarian and political conflict, our participation in the invasion of Iraq triggered so much of the catastrophe we face today.

And we are so unfamiliar with the determination of IS fighters. They see themselves as martyrs and the more they sacrifice and die, the more they feel justified and rewarded. Dying is seen as desirable.

There must be a political settlement and hopefully the US and Russia can support a transitional government that will reflect the interests of all the people in the region and most importantly of all, reconcile Shia and Sunni antagonists. The Iraq war effectively disenfranchised tens of millions of Sunnis in the region. We may be called to support a peace-keeping operation. We should be willing to do that in the right circumstances.

The powers of the regional patrons, Saudi Arabia and Iran, must be encouraged to find an accommodation and a cease-fire.

It is also unlikely that there can be peace in the Middle East without a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

On the domestic front, we need more proactive domestic programs to focus young Muslims away from terrorist possibilities. Muslim leaders and elders are essential in this process. They have not done well.

Clearly, our intelligence and police agencies are keys in helping to keep us safe. They have received large increases in funding. Their powers have been increased. But what we saw in the Lindt Café siege points to the need for much improved performance and supervision.

We will have to learn to live with terrorism for a while. Picking soft targets is in the view of terrorists a legitimate and necessary response to overwhelming military power. Too often IS and other terrorists succeed in provoking an over-reaction which helps the terrorist cause. The French reaction to the attacks by dramatically increasing bombing in Syria is likely to be counter-productive. In frustration the French took the IS bait.

Our response needs to be holistic and the most important response must be political, backed possibly by some UN military intervention, improved performance by our intelligence agencies and police, and active participation by the elders and leaders in our Muslim community.