Alliance Commitments

Shadow of the Taliban

Patricia Karvelas, political correspondent December 29, 2007

link: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au

KEVIN Rudd's secret pre-Christmas visit to Australian troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan was motivated by his political and personal desire to demonstrate his Government is deeply committed to fighting the war on terror in both theatres, if differently to the previous government's approach.

It was a deeply symbolic visit that sent a message to troops the new Government will back them all the way. It also sent a message to the US that the election of the Labor Government will not weaken the alliance; both countries believe that Afghanistan is still central in the fight against terror.

Rudd has been consistent both before and after the election. The Labor Government will now move to withdraw the 550 combat troops from the south of Iraq by the middle of next year, leaving 1000 troops in the region to train Iraqi soldiers and protect the Australian embassy in Baghdad.

Rudd's message while in Iraq was that Australia will continue to make an important contribution to the prospect of long-term stability in Iraq. On his surprise visit to Afghanistan a day later, the Prime Minister declared Australia was there for the long haul. The NATO-led force of nearly 40 nations is fighting an intensifying Taliban insurgency. Rudd urged other allies to extend their commitments in Afghanistan, warning NATO and the allies that they risk losing against the Taliban, overthrown by US-led forces after the 2001 al-Qa'ida attacks, unless they adopt more effective military tactics.

Bombings in Kabul have increased dramatically in recent months, while the death toll among allied troops from clashes with the Taliban is rising. The Rudd Government believes ending the Taliban insurgency is an important first step before democracy can be established, a goal that will be discussed at a NATO summit in Bucharest in April. Rudd also warned that Australian troops in Afghanistan face an even bloodier year ahead.

It was a stark warning. Rudd was one of three world leaders who visited their troops in Afghanistan last weekend.

Rudd, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi each separately met Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, underlining the growing NATO concern over the deteriorating security situation across Afghanistan.

Rudd used his visit to the army's 400-strong reconstruction taskforce in southern Oruzgan province to promise that Australia would be staying in Afghanistan. But he was given a grim assessment of the Afghan situation, and he told troops of his own concerns for their safety. It is this grim assessment that has forced Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon, who accompanied Rudd on the trip, to take a leadership role in a new NATO military blueprint for Afghanistan, to be led by the US.

Fitzgibbon tells Inquirer that Australia will play a leading role with the US to develop a proposal to be signed by eight nations in Canada in January on a new military strategy in Afghanistan.

Defence ministers representing the eight nations with military forces stationed in the south will meet in Canada late in January to sign off on a new integrated military strategy that will be pushed at a NATO meeting in April. Fitzgibbon categorically rules out Australian troops shouldering more of the security burden after the Dutch decided to withdraw their entire 1600-strong force from Oruzgan by 2010.

Fitzgibbon says the new military strategy he will push would give NATO countries a renewed sense of hope and allow one of them to take the senior security role in the area where Australian forces are deployed. "We just can't be playing a lead role in Afghanistan when we are already so overstretched and there are so many potential contingencies in our own backyard where we will need to play a lead role," he says.

"If we can demonstrate that we have a strategy and things are going well in Afghanistan sometime in the near future, then The Netherlands parliament might take a different view and stick around. Alternatively, it will be easier to get alternative participants," he says.

The submission signed off in Canada will be put to the NATO meeting in Bucharest in April. Fitzgibbon argues it is appropriate that as a good international citizen, we maintain our alliance commitments and make a contribution to the collective effort in addressing extremist behaviour.

"The former Howard government's open-ended, ask-no-questions approach led us to an untenable situation in Iraq and a commitment in Afghanistan which lacks the strategic direction required for success," he tells Inquirer.

"We have discovered that the situation in Afghanistan is far more sobering than we understood to be the case with the limited information we had available to us in Opposition. That means that we've got very, very significant challenges ahead. The new Government is determined to maintain Australia's commitment in Afghanistan but is equally determined to ensure that a coherent strategy is put in place."

The Defence Minister says his worst nightmare is "NATO keeps bumbling along in Afghanistan, people continue to lose their lives without clear progress and the domestic pressures become so great on a whole range of NATO countries that they slowly but surely start to withdraw or wind down their numbers. We can't afford to allow that to happen."

But Australian National University political analyst Michael McKinley says Rudd's promise to stay in Afghanistan for the long haul is "a fatuous statement because the British were in Afghanistan for a long time and didn't win. The Soviet Union went in for 10 years with vastly more troops than had ever been committed by the (West) and came out because it was proving to be impossible to win and doing terrible things to the morale of the Soviet forces. NATO and the US have now probably got half of the maximum number of troops that the Soviets ever had and it's quite clear that although there are isolated pockets of improvement, the Taliban are getting closer and closer to Kabul."

"The main game is actually in Pakistan," he says.

Rudd did not miss this point yesterday, saying of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto: "It reminds us all ... that terrorism is alive and well in the world, that terrorism remains an enemy of all civilised people and that terrorism therefore needs to be confronted with the full vigour and resolve of the democratic community of states."

But McKinley says he hopes the Government's realisation about Pakistan becomes more entrenched in its policy considerations. "I hope people will actually come to realise this. For Rudd to talk about being there for the long haul means staying there until there is a democratic Afghanistan, and that's an indefinite commitment," he says.

"I found the whole thing to be the sort of feel-good statement that some people make when they are in the country but geo-strategically and politically it doesn't seem to make sense to me."

McKinley is blunt in his analysis. "You're not going to get democracy in Afghanistan unless you are prepared to put in very very large numbers of troops, in excess of 200,000. And then you have to keep them there."

He says Bhutto's assassination is a "dramatic reminder" there has to be more emphasis put on Pakistan.

"The notion that if you pacify Afghanistan you've had a major blow against jihadist terrorism suggests that while you are doing this they are not going to somewhere else, like Pakistan."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22981797-31477,00.html