Gillard renews Australia's commitment to Afghanistan

Prime Minister Julia Gillard gave Australia’s annual justification (hansard transcript) for the Afghanistan war to parliament yesterday. Since last year's speech, 11 Australian soldiers have been killed bringing the 10 year death toll to 32. Almost 3,000 coalition troops have died in that time as well as countless thousand Afghans. Gillard admitted it was a long and difficult war that with Iraq has cost Australia $4 billion (it costs Americans that every two weeks). But she said it a “just cause” – with a time limit. By end 2014, international forces will hand over security to local forces when Gillard expects Australia’a aim for Afghanisation will be realised: “a functioning state able to assume responsibility for preventing the country from being a safe haven for terrorists.”

Australia’s mission was clear, the PM said. Protecting Afghans, training security forces and building the capacity of the Afghan Government. She said there was progress and the sight of “ramp ceremonies overseas and funerals at home” were only part of the story. Australia has 1,550 troops on the ground, two thirds in Oruzgan Province. Troops rotate every nine months with many on second and third deployments. Aussies patrol Oruzgan with US troops with contingents also from Slovakia and Singapore.

They are training the Afghan 4th Brigade to remove explosive devices and search for components. They maintain patrols up to 75km from Tarin Kowt and join operations in other provinces to cut out “rat runs” to Oruzgan. The Special Forces units target rebel leaders, bombmakers and the heroin trade. In the last year the Afghans have been taking the lead while Australians provide mentoring and support. Gillard said Australia was one of the top 10 aid bilateral donators to Afghanistan spending $125m in 2010-11. Programs include primary schooling, agricultural training, small business loans and mines removal. Australian Police are offering training too as are civilian administration. In Oruzgan they are setting up basic infrastructure in health, education and rural development.

Gillard said 2011 was a good year which brought the death of Osama but it also showed the complexity of the war. She said it has claimed 35,000 Pakistani lives, mostly civilians, but Pakistan needed to do more against extremists. After 10 years, the Taliban have not been defeated though the Afghan National Army is improving. She said Afghanistan’s wealth went backwards from 1960 to 2002 but is climbing again. Education is up from 1 million to 7 million students including access for 2.5m girls. Access to basic health reach has climbed from 10 percent to 85 percent of the population. The economy has grown 11 percent each year since 2002, she said (though that statistic is debatable.)

Gillard admitted the rogue army attacks on Australians (and others) had “grave significance”. She said they killed Afghans and Aussies alike and they are a small number in a force that was now 300,000. She said the attacks did not represent a pattern and the 4th brigade was on track to take the lead role in Oruzgan security in 2014, or possibly earlier. The US will reduce its number by a third to 68,000 in 2012 but the shape of the US commitment beyond 2014 was not known. The Afghan presidential election that year will also be a big test.

Gillard said the new Australian embassy in Kabul was a “bricks and mortar” symbol of investment in the region (though information on the embassy remains scanty). She said vigilance was still needed against al Qaeda and the groups it has inspired though she could not confirm if Australia would play a longer term counter-terrorism role. She did say a continued Special Forces presence beyond 2014 was “under consideration”.

Gillard thanked the ADF for the burden they had endured since 1999. As well as the dead, over 200 Australians have been wounded including 18 this year. She said the best tribute to those who died was to “live by their example”. Gillard said Australia would defend its national interests. “We will deny terrorism a safe haven in Afghanistan. We will stand by our ally, the United States. We will complete our mission of training and transition in Afghanistan,” she concluded.

9/11: A journey through memory and airspace

This is a picture of me on the top of the World Trade Center South Tower in late August 1991 or early September, roughly ten years before 9/11. The picture was taken by my then-wife when we were on a delayed trip around the world a year after we married. Memories being fragile and fragmental, I don’t have much recollection of the building other than vague inklings conjured up by that photo. I do remember the fantastic views and from that spot I looked out to the Statue of Liberty. In those days the Statue was still open to the public but the queue to climb the stairs was too long so we didn’t bother going to the top when we were there the day before.

Getting to the top of the World Trade Center was far less problematic. I don’t remember the queue being onerous, the minute long trip to the 107th floor was probably just as uneventful as this one in September 2000 just one year before the towers were obliterated. Yet something had already changed between 1991 and 2000 – the World Trade Center had been seriously bombed. While I was on honeymoon, the planning to destroy the towers had already begun. The aim of the 600kg explosion that went off in February 1993 was to knock one tower into the other and bring both tumbling down. That didn’t happen but the blast killed six people, seriously damaged five sublevels and sent smoke spiralling up 93 floors of both towers making evacuation difficult and two hours long.

The 1993 perpetrators came from all over the Middle East led by Kuwaiti-born Ramzi Yusef. The bombing was financed by Yusef’s uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who is now in Guantanamo Bay and probably the main reason Obama broke his election promise to close it. As well as WTC 1993, his terror credits included the 1995 Bojinka Plot to blow up 12 US airliners and also crash a plane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yusef said the idea for using planes to crash into buildings came from his friend Abdul Hakim Murad, who in turn heard it from the CIA. An undeterred Khalid Mohammed apparently proposed the plan of the 9/11 plot to Bin Laden in 1996.

Whether that is true or not is debatable, but the idea of suicide attackers has long been an extreme staple of warfare because it is so difficult to defend against. It entered the political landscape in 1881 when Tsar Alexander II of Russia was attacked by Nihilist Ignaty Gryniewietsky who who blew himself up killing the Russian ruler in the process. Gryniewietsky’s last letter read: "Alexander II must die...He will die, and with him, we, his enemies, his executioners, shall die too...How many more sacrifices will our unhappy country ask of its sons before it is liberated? It is my lot to die young, I shall not see our victory, I shall not live one day, one hour in the bright season of our triumph, but I believe that with my death I shall do all that it is my duty to do, and no one in the world can demand more of me.”

Gryniewietsky's dangerous conflation of honour and purpose was exactly the same as that inspired Japanese kamekazes in WW2 and later infused Yusef, Sheik Mohammed and those that came after them in 2001. Osama Bin Laden is now dead so there is no way of knowing what role he played in 9/11. What is clearer is the role of Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 19 terrorists that brought down the four planes in the attack. Atta was one of just 4 who weren’t from Saudi Arabia.

Born in Egypt, he graduated in architecture at the University of Cairo and was the key person in the Hamburg cell of radical jihadists that got together from 1998. Atta and other members of the cell went to Afghanistan to meet Bin Laden where they agreed to work with Al Qaeda. In March 2000 he sent an e-mail to 60 companies inquiring about flight training, "Dear sir, we are a small group of young men from different Arab countries,” Atta wrote. “We would like to start training for the career of airline professional pilots.”

His application for a 5-year US visa was approved and he flew to Newark in June 2000 to enrol in the Accelerated Pilot Program at the Academy of Lakeland in Florida, bankrolled by Sheik Khalid. Within a month Atta was flying solo as was his friend Marwan al-Shehhi (who would lead the South Tower attack as Atta took out the North). With daily training. Atta earned his commercial pilot’s licence in November 2000. He told trainers he was hurrying because he had a job lined up at home. With plenty of money to wave around, no one asked him any questions.

By the end of the year, Atta was studying flight deck videos for most of the major commercial airline planes including Boeing 767s and Airbus A320s. In July 2001 Atta went to Spain to meet Yemeni-born Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a fellow Hamburg cell co-conspirator. Ramzi was supposed to be one of the attackers but could not secure a US visa because immigration officials thought Yemenis would illegally overstay their visit. Ramzi supposedly passed on Bin Laden’s instructions what was to be targeted: "four symbols of America”: Congress, the Pentagon, and the two towers.

A plan to get a 20th hijacker to replace Ramzi was thwarted when Saudi-born Mohammed al-Qahtani (also now at Guantanamo) was not allowed in the country because he arrived with a one way ticket and not enough cash to convince authorities he wouldn’t end up an illegal immigrant. It meant Flight 93 had four hijackers unlike the five on the other planes making overpowering them slightly more feasible.

On 23 August 2001 two events occurred that might have raised the alarm about Atta. His driving licence was revoked in court for failing to turn up to defend driving when without a licence earlier that year. The same day Mossad included him on 19 names they gave to the CIA they said were planning an imminent attack. But no-one connected the dots. On September 10, he drove to Portland, Maine where he was scheduled to fly to Boston at 6am on the 11th. At the airport the following morning, Atta was selected for extra screening by the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System.

The Clinton administration launched CAPPS in the late 1990s as a response to the growing terrorist threat. The system uses information on the ticket booking matched against no-fly lists, FBI fugitive lists and other data to assign a risk score. CAPPS deemed 8 of the 19 attackers worthy of further attention. One was ignored because he had no bags, and the rest, including Atta passed muster because their bags contained no explosives. The process was designed to stop people leaving bombs in the luggage and then leaving the airport. But it did not take into account people who wanted to use the planes themselves as another example of the poor man’s air force.

On arrival at Boston, Atta and the others had to go through security again – something the hijackers were not expecting and got angry about - but they got through without incident. The Portland detour served several purposes – a smaller airport was easier to get through, it deflected attention from the fact 8 other Middle Eastern men were leaving directly from Boston and also left the operation intact if Atta had been arrested in Maine.

There was no evidence Atta had box cutters aboard the plane. He did have two Swiss Army knives and a Leatherman multi-tool. He boarded American Airlines Boeing 767 Flight 11 to LAX scheduled to depart at 7.45am. 81 passengers (out of a 158 capacity) and 11 crew were aboard. Two hijackers sat in first class, Atta and two others sat in business class with none in economy (coach). Flight 11 took off at 7.59am and was close to cruising altitude in 15 minutes. The last routine instruction the plane responded to was “American 11 turn 20 degrees right”. When air traffic control radioed Flight 11 seconds later to climb to 35,000 feet, there was no response. They asked 8 more times in the next 10 minutes with no answer.

By now Atta and his 4 helpers stabbed and slashed their way to control of the cockpit. At 8.19am flight attendant Betty Ong rang the NC reservations office to say there was something wrong. She rang that number because it was a common help line for passengers with reservation issues. Her call lasted 25 minutes, though only a default first four minutes was recorded. A calm sounding Ong told the bemused operator the cockpit was not answering her calls and she thought they were getting hijacked. She said two attendants had been stabbed.

By 8.25am Boston air traffic control knew there was a hijack situation. They heard a hijacker’s voice saying “We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you will be okay. We are returning to the airport”. Seconds later Boston Control heard him say “If you try to make any moves you will endanger yourself and the airplane.” As they escalated the information, Ong told NC the plane was flying erratically. Boston told FAA command in Virginia the flight had entered New York air space.

Another Flight 11 attendant Madeline Sweeney got through to Boston Airport and spent 12 minutes talking to the American Airlines flight service manager. The airline then set up an emergency response centre. By now Ong was reporting a fatality in seat 9B held by former Israeli soldier Daniel Lewin. A minute later Boston heard another message from the cockpit: "Nobody move please. We are going back to the airport.” Boston desperately tried to raise Cape Cod military staff to get fighters airborne to tail the plane.

By 8.38am Ong was telling the operator the flight was descending rapidly. At the same time, Boston told the North American Aerospace Defense Command's Northeast Air Defense Sector a plane had been hijacked. Battle Commander Colonel Robert Marr was getting ready for a NORAD exercise when he confirmed this was "real-world" and ordered fighter pilots at Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts to battle-stations. He phoned Major General Larry Arnold who confirmed the order to scramble the planes and “get permission later”.

At 8.44am the Ong call ended abruptly. At the same time Sweeney was saying “Something is wrong. We are in a rapid descent... we are all over the place." The flight service manager asked her to look out the window to work out where they were. Sweeney told him, "We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low." Seconds later she said, "Oh my God we are way too low" and her call ended.

A minute later the Air Force was scrambled but had no idea where to go. At 40 seconds past 8.46am, American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the World Trade Center. Atta, Ong, Sweeney and 89 others in the plane were dead as well as countless others in the North Tower. The full horror of Sheik Mohammed’s planned day would take just two more hours to enfold on the world, mostly on live television. The scars it left on America’s psyche, the Arab world and the airplane-travelling public have yet to heal 10 years later.

Ultimately Sheik Khalid Mohammed and Osama Bin Laden were successful in hastening the destruction of US power. In October 2001, Bush turned down a Taliban offer to hand over Bin Laden to a third country and as early as late 9/11 Rumsfeld was pushing the line to bomb Iraq “because there were no targets in Afghanistan”. At no point was any effort made to punish Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah for providing most of the terrorists or Egypt's Mubarak for providing Atta.

Instead the PNAC agenda pushed the 9/11 disaster cost of $240 billion out to the dubious double war cost of $1,248 trillion and counting. At 10 percent of US GDP in a time of financial crisis, neither crippling war can yet be considered a success. Instead, they represent a victory to terrorists far greater than they could have imagined with the long-planned destruction of large buildings.

Australia's war against Afghanistan

An ongoing commitment to the war in Afghanistan is one of the few policy areas where both major Australian parties are in step. Only the inconvenient matter of the growing Australian death toll is making it an item of public debate (dead Afghans don't count - and aren't counted in the west). There has been bi-partisan support for the mission since John Howard invoked the Anzus Treaty for the first time ever three days after 9/11. Australian troops were in the invasion force in October 2001 and have been part of the International Security Assistance Force since it was founded in December 2001. (photo: Aref Karimi/AFP/Getty Images)

After a year of fighting, Australian efforts switched to reconstruction in November 2002. Special forces were withdrawn as the focus switched to Iraq in 2003. But the war against Saddam hid the fact the Taliban had never been eliminated and the Iraqi distraction was a huge boost to their morale. Meanwhile a second group known as the Pakistani Taliban - unaffiliated with the Afghan version - were becoming increasingly important and operated with impunity on their side of what was a fairly lawless border at the best of times.

Despite denials, it is well known the Pakistani ISI have provided military and logistical support to both Talibans making a difficult task almost impossible. While Iraq hogged the headlines, Australia continued to have a tiny presence in Afghanistan until 2005 when the US asked Howard to deploy a force of 150 personnel for 12 months to undertake security tasks similar to those of 2001-02.

The war escalated in 2006 as insurgents began to use improvised explosives and suicide bombers. The Australian presence slowly rose in Uruzgan Province during the Howard and Rudd Government eras, gradually replacing the Dutch who ended their mission last year. In April 2009, the Rudd Government increased the Australian commitment by 450 to 1,550 troops. The ADF is currently mentoring the 4th Brigade of the Afghan National Army in Uruzgan, and Special Forces are also there.

According to the ADF’s 2009 white paper Force 2030, success in Afghanistan is dependent on ensuring “the local population is protected and separated from the insurgents, economic and social reconstruction occurs, indigenous security capacity is strengthened, insurgent networks are disrupted and the prospects for a long-term political solution are enhanced.” It foresaw significant international support for at least 10 years. Afghanistan was a source of instability because of its potential as a terrorist base and its narcotics trade. Crucially, the paper acknowledged any solution would need to address “insurgent safe-havens located in Pakistan, and there will need to be found a comprehensive solution to the problems of cross-border movement between Afghanistan and Pakistan by al-Qaeda terrorists and Taliban insurgents.”

As the Afpak situation becomes increasingly murky, public unease has grown. Neither major party has been able to clearly articulate a vision for Australian action in the region outside the murky goal of defeating “international terrorism”. The official ALP policy on Afghanistan is buried in a “Labor Plan for Defence” fact sheet: “Federal Labor has maintained Australia’s commitment to the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force operation in Afghanistan, in recognition of the fundamental importance to Australia’s security interests that terrorists be denied a safe haven in that country.”

According to the policy, the Gillard Government will not keep Australian troops in Afghanistan “any longer than necessary”. But Labor remains committed to our troops being there as long as the mission requires. Neither the withdrawal nor the commitment are expressed in any clear terms of objectives or critical success factors. The policy says Defence expects to complete the Uruzgan training, transition security responsibility, and move into a supporting role “within two to four years”.

Recent Liberal policy on Afghanistan is harder still to find. It doesn’t appear in either its Foreign Affairs or Defence policies. The only references to Afghanistan found on the Liberal Party website are in press releases such as after the latest death which says Australian troops are in Afghanistan “fighting in defence of our values of liberty and democracy, wearing our uniform, serving under our flag, against the world's most dangerous enemy.”

The last policy statement was issued in April 2009 which supported the Labor move to deploy the additional troops. Shadow Minister for Defence Senator David Johnston said boosting troop numbers “sent the right message to our allies that we are in for the long haul in terms of rebuilding Afghanistan so it was no longer a safe-haven and training ground for terrorists.” Senator Johnston said Australians should never forget the terrorists that perpetrated the Bali bombings were trained in Afghanistan. “It is dangerous to be there but it is even more dangerous for us not to be,” he said.

The link between the Bali bombers and Afghanistan is undeniable though a little disingenuous. Indonesian police said bombing “field commander” Imam Samudra went to Afghanistan in 1991 and learned how to make bombs there. The attack’s overall co-ordinator Mukhlas also worked with the mujahidin in the 1990s as did fellow planner Ali Imron. Nevertheless, these were all there well before the Taliban were installed in power. Initially the mujahidin were supported by the West who wanted to overthrow the Communist Najibullah regime. Although that objective succeeded in 1992, fighting continued throughout the mid 1990s as many of the mujahidin forces began to fight each other for control of Kabul. The war continued until the Pakistan-backed Mullah Omar took control with his Taliban forces in 1996.

The point is that Afghanistan has always been a volatile training ground for jihadists, sometimes with western support. The terrorists had training there not because it was a “haven” but simply because it is a war-torn country where the norms of law and order don’t have much standing. Fighting this fire with fire does not seem like a way to solve the problem. Not only that, but the long war there is seriously undermining Afghanistan and Pakistan’s ability to function as democratic states. In his acceptance speech today for the Sydney Peace Prize, Noam Chomsky said no-one wanted Afghanistan to be run by the Taliban or the US-backed warlords. “There are very significant Afghan peace forces, pro-democracy forces, but if you check with them, they regularly regard themselves as facing three enemies: the Taliban, the US-backed warlords, and NATO forces," he said. In a world where politicians and media prefer to keep messages black and white, there are too many shades of gray in this Afghanistan war to sustain it for much longer.

Media miss the news in first Aussie Wikileak

Oblivious to the fact that one of the dreaded new media was providing the scoop, the Australian newspaper reported on its front page today the first Wikileaks document to mention Australian officials was “Rudd’s plan to contain Beijing”. It’s hardly surprising The Australian would go data-mining for the thing that would most embarrass the Federal Government. But it’s hardly surprising too they got it wrong.

In the haste to follow a narrow political agenda, the Oz skipped over far more substantive elements to the story. Not only that, they also misquoted Rudd. The first line of Paul Maley’s front page story said Rudd had warned the world "must be prepared to deploy force” if China didn’t co-operate with the international community.

Compare this to what the cable actually said:
Rudd argued for “multilateral engagement with bilateral vigour” - integrating China effectively into the international community and allowing it to demonstrate greater responsibility, all while also preparing to deploy force if everything goes wrong.

Suggesting the world has a Plan Z for China that involves force is a long way from advocating it and certainly doesn't make it “Rudd’s plan”. It wasn’t just The Australian that took this slanted approach. The ABC took a similar tack with the material saying it was Rudd's "suggestion that the US use force against China in a worst case scenario”.

It was nothing of the sort and a poor way of using what was remarkable information put out in the public domain. The ABC added insult to injury by turning it into a petty domestic squabble by harvesting a meaningless quote from Julie Bishop about “disturbing reading”. Don't read it Julie, if it disturbs you.

Beyond this dross, the reportage ignores some major issues discussed when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Australian PM Kevin Rudd in Washington on 24 March 2009. Private Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and his army of Wikileaks helpers deserve praise for putting the material in the public domain nine years ahead of schedule. The cable about the meeting 09STATE30049 was marked “confidential” which is a mid-level security due to be released into the public domain in 2019.

The meeting talked about problems in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Russia, China was the biggest topic. Some of it was just polite platitudes with Rudd buttering up a valued friend but most of it was extremely useful and informative sharing of intel among allies.

Rudd told the Americans one possibility was the little-known philosophy of Kang Youwei which he said provided China’s idea of a harmonious world and could potentially fit in well with the West’s concept of responsible stakeholders. He also said Hu Jintao did not have the same level of power as former leader Jiang Zemin.
“No one person dominated Chinese leadership currently, although Hu’s likely replacement, Xi Jinping, had family ties to the military and might be able to rise above his colleagues,” Rudd told Clinton.

He also noticed an important distinction between China’s attitude to Taiwan and Tibet. With the former it was purely “sub-rational and deeply emotional” (because China has no intention of disturbing the status quo on Taiwan) while the more concrete hardline policies against the latter were designed not only to show who was boss in Llasa but to send a message to other minorities within mainland China.

Rudd also told Clinton the Standing Committee of the Politburo was the real decision-making body in China which then passed decisions to the State Council for implementation. He saw the new Asia Pacific Community initiative as a bulwark against any Chinese plans to issue an Asian Monroe Doctrine, but understood American reluctance to get involved in another international initiative. Rudd did say the 2009 Australian Defence White Paper was a response to Chinese power, something most people assumed but he could never admit publicly at the time.

In return for this information, Rudd wanted Washington’s intelligence on Russia so he could prepare for an upcoming meeting in Moscow. Conversation centred on the power struggle between Medvedev and Putin with both sides agreeing the President’s desire for “status and respect” could drive him closer to western thinking. But it was an outside chance.

On the AfPak situation, both parties agreed there was no point in “total success” in Afghanistan if Pakistan fell apart. Pakistan needed to drop its obsessive focus on India and attend to its western border problems.

What comes across in the cables I have read is not so much the “brutality and venality of US foreign policy” as its growing impotence. This is the reason the US is after Assange. It is the embarrassment he has caused them rather than the exposing of any international secrets that angers them so much.

The one phrase that sums up the problem was uttered by Hillary Clinton to Rudd in relation to China: “how do you deal toughly with your banker?” A damn good question and given China is our banker too, one Australian media should be asking. “Rudd’s embarrassment” has nothing on our media’s for missing the real news.

Wikileaks and the War in Afghanistan

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told us he released all his documents to get people talking about Afghanistan. The US has charged 22-year-old Pfc Bradley Manning with releasing the files and has demanded Assange take them down from his site, but Assange said he and Bradley were not the problem. "The most dangerous men are those who are in charge of war. And they need to be stopped," he said. Assange is right to question the intent of the war which is showing no signs of success after 9 years. So far however, all people are talking about is the tool itself: Wikileaks.

For several years Assange has been acting in the best tradition of news: revealing something someone wants hidden. People sent him electronic files under the cloak of anonymity and he published them on his European-based servers. Many governments including Australia’s have been embarrassed by his findings. But the Afghan documents were his biggest coup yet. On Sunday 26 July, Wikileaks released 75,000 detailed secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.

But Wikileaks weren’t flying solo. Aware in advance Assange had access to something extraordinary, a Guardian editor convinced him the files needed the sense-making capabilities and resources of journalism. Assange was not immediately convinced but compromised by giving the information to three newspapers to do what they wanted with them. He knew the three papers would add perspective and attention. The Guardian with its links to both Manchester and London and its ownership locked in trusts, is one of the few genuinely left of centre broadsheets in the English speaking world. Germany’s Der Spiegel is a weekly newsmagazine mostly owned by its Hamburg workforce – it would give a non-Anglosphere view.

The third is still generally regarded as the best newspaper in the world, despite many failings. The New York Times under the old family money of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr added the ultimate prestige to Assange’s enterprise. Although the NYT’s motto is “All the News That's Fit to Print” even it had to condense down the narrative to a few thousand words. All three news angles were similar in that they said the release of the data itself was the biggest story.

With so much data still left to go round, Assange encouraged the crowdsharing potential of the Internet. The reports described the majority of lethal military actions the US military were involved in. They were categorised by the type of mission or engagement. Between them enemy action (27,000) and explosive hazard (23,000) accounted for over half the files. They showed the number of people killed, wounded, or detained during each action, together with the precise geographical location of each event, and what military units involved and major weapon systems were used. In the one and only file marked “counter terrorism”, the data states:

“Weapons seized in Herat City, Injil District, Herat Province 15 Jan 08: Counter Terrorism Department reported Anti-Terrorism Directorate personnel located and seized 1x 82 mm mortar launcher and 1 x PK machine gun from local Herat City (41S MU 25688 01079) residence (Source ARSIC-West ROC)”.

While the data are pure intelligence reports which are terse and difficult to interpret, Wikileaks provided a reading guide to help out but it not very exciting stuff.

When releasing the documents, Wikileaks said they hoped it would lead to “a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary to change its course”. But what they forgot was that the rest of the media which did not get the exclusives might have a different slant. Murdoch's papers expressed mock outrage over their release. The Washington Post were also so annoyed at not being chosen, they got Mark Thiessen from neo-conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute to write an op-ed calling Wikileaks a criminal enterprise which had to be shut down. He also wanted the US to arrest Assange regardless of whether jurisdiction he is living under gives its consent. Thiessen may be living in a forgotten Bush-Cheney fantasy world but he is not alone in wanting Assange eliminated.

The New Yorker called Assange a “trafficker” which made him sound like a drug dealer. But it did make the useful point Assange has made diverse enemies including failed British bank Northern Rock, Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi and the “Church” of Scientology. Assange sent back a lovely letter to demands from the Scientologists’ lawyers: [We] will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than Wikileaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centres, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon.”

While perhaps nettled by being listed next to kleptocrats, The White House response merely expressed its annoyance about what Assange’s “irresponsible leaks” wouldn’t do. “[They] will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people”. Otherwise National Security Advisor General James Jones was agreeing with everything leaked because he said they had already acted on its problems.

That leaves most of the case against Assange about consequences. “Innocents will die” is a short summation of it. Under this argument it does not matter what good can come from the documents in the public domain, because the possible death of Afghans identified as helpers is too high a price to pay. The right to kill innocents is an option the armed forces wants to keep exclusively for itself.

Noticeably this argument has not been used against the three newspapers each of which used the data for their stories. They are part of the social responsible press who are also answerable to laws both at home and wherever they publish. Wikileaks does not have these constraints. Jay Rosen calls Wikileaks the world’s first stateless news organisation. Wikileaks releases information onto the Internet without regard for national interest. Rosen said that up to now, the press was free to report on secret matters only so far as their local law protected them. “Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it,” Rosen said. “This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.”

This spatial elasticity means Wikileaks gets to be play by multiple sets of rules. Assistant Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island CW Anderson sees it as asymmetric journalism which can either go it alone or else perform a dance between two informational cultures “one of hackers and one of reporters”.

With so much information in the public sphere, Jeff Jarvis asks where the line should be drawn. His conclusion is that “the line has to move so that our default, especially in government, is transparency.” Jarvis said the “sane response” to leaks was to open up as much as possible. “Then there’s nothing to leak except the things that shouldn’t be leaked,” he said.

Good. Now that we’ve got that straight we can move beyond the infatuation with the stateless tool and get back to Assange’s question, which is simple and grounded in geographical reality. Why are we in Afghanistan?

Refugees as election pawns: Labor's immigration shame

In the minute or so it took to issue an infamous media release, the Rudd Labor Government blew away all the goodwill it generated with its previous attempts to undo the shabby Howard era treatment of refugees. On Friday, Labor went back to the future and tore shreds out of Australia’s already battered international reputation on the humane treatment of refugees.

The release began ominously with the words “effective immediately”. These two words had a double meaning. Firstly it showed Labor were not going to give anyone time to prepare, and secondly it was showing it was going to hide behind an instruction delivered in management-speak. The instruction itself was a knock-out blow “the Australian Government has today introduced a suspension of the processing of new asylum applications from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.”

What did the unfortunate people of Sri Lanka and Afghanistan do to deserve this sudden treatment? Apparently, according to the breathtaking insouciance of the Government, there are “evolving circumstances” in these countries that “will mean that it is likely that, in the future, more asylum claims from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan will be refused.” Evolving circumstances is a fancy way of saying things have changed though even these weasel-words of this sentence did not dare claim circumstances have evolved necessarily for the better.

That arduous task was left to the sentences that followed. Looking through Asian politics with glasses so rose-tinted it matches their shameful embarrassment, the Labor Government has somehow concluded that wartorn Afghanistan is now safe for Hazaris and post-war Sri Lanka is safe for Tamils. Afghans will be surprised to hear about the “Taliban’s fall” and “durable security” (admittedly only “in parts of the country”). Meanwhile lucky Tamils have “hopes for further improvement and stabilisation in conditions.” Based on this flimsiest of evidence, the Australian Government has suspended the processing of new asylum claims by Sri Lankans for three months and Afghans for six months.

This is a breathtaking assumption for these “developments” that the facts on the ground simply do not support. In 2009, the worsening humanitarian crises caused by the American occupation and “surge” in Afghanistan and the Sri Lankan army’s brutal crushing of the Tamil independence movement has led to more desperate boatloads of Hazaris and Tamil refugees arriving. They will now be detained for three or six months as political pawns in an Australian game.

The blame for this shameful announcement can be shared equally between three pollyannas - Immigration Minister Senator Chris Evans, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith and Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor. Nevertheless the release has the fingerprints of their mutual boss all over it. Kevin Rudd is enough of a foreign policy wonk to know this message about “evolving developments” is complete rubbish. But this announcement has nothing to do with the political situation in Afghanistan or Sri Lanka – even a cursory glance at either country would not support this spurious nonsense spouted by his three stooges Evans, Smith and O’Connor.

No, the real reason is that opinion polls are showing 64 percent of Australians are afraid of the refugee boats and want them “stopped”. These numbers are dangerous but not yet near Tampa territory and the last thing Kevin Rudd wants in an election year is an issue Tony Abbott can wedge him on. So his solution is breathtakingly efficient and hypocritical – Park the issue for six months until the election is over.

According to Evans et al’s presser, the Australian Government believes “asylum seekers should only be granted the right to live in Australia if they are genuinely in need of protection.” This has nothing to do with evolving circumstances and everything to do with treating every case on its merits. But the hysterical media reaction to a few dozen boats arriving on our northern shores has dusted off the fears that always seem to lie just under the surface of Australia’s fragile settler mentality. According to the UNHCR’s 2009 report, Australia / New Zealand had 6,500 asylum claims last year out of a worldwide total of 377,200 – barely 1.6 percent of the world’s refugees.

But this data is conveniently glossed over in the vapid heat over the asylum “debate”. Nor is the truth of conditions on the ground in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan of any local interest. Instead the agenda is set by dangerous stupidity from politicians such as Barnaby Joyce and fuelled by talk show hosts and tabloid editorials who speak only in the xenophobic language that panders to the fears of their readers and listeners. As a result, what we share as a people matters less than what we might lose as individuals. This is a human tragedy and not just for the asylum seekers. Kevin Rudd is to blame, but we are all indicted.

Afghanistan: anatomy of a failed election

A new UN report prepared by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon shows just how protracted and flawed the Afghan presidential election was. His report released at the end of 2009 for the UN Security Council is couched in diplomatic language but its frustration is obvious between the lines. Entitled “The Situation in Afghanistan and its implications for international peace and security”, the document outlines a series of selfish actions in which none of the major Afghan players come out with any credit.

While there were over forty candidates for president, most analysts agreed in the end it would come down to run-off election between incumbent president Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister in the Northern Alliance regime in 1998 when they ruled barely 30 percent of the country. Attacks by the Taliban severely limited the campaigning of candidates while state-run radio and television heavily favoured Karzai. Allegations of fraud, vote buying and armed coercion were rife, even before the election.

And the Taliban were not sitting idly by. On election day 20 August, Afghanistan suffered the highest number of attacks and intimidation since the Taliban took Kabul in 1996. August 2009 would prove the deadliest month for US troops in Afghanistan since the invasion eight years earlier. The violence continued into September.

On 8 September, the foreign-dominated Electoral Complaints Commission ordered a recount of the election after reporting 720 instances of fraud. The Karzai-appointed Independent Electoral Commission which administered the ballot was unhappy with the order but after two weeks of intense negotiation they agreed on a partial recount using a methodology which would audit suspect ballots through statistical sampling. The IEC would administer the audit with oversight from the ECC. Neither Hamid Karzai nor Abdullah Abdullah were happy with the process and both were sceptical of its outcome.

The ECC announced the audit was complete on 19 October. The preliminary results showed Karzai had gotten 49.67 percent and Abdullah had 30.59. Nearly a third of Karzai’s votes had been invalidated by the audit. Because no candidate had received over 50 percent of the vote, a run off was necessary to be held on 7 November. Karzai’s supporters and campaign team immediately protested the revised result claiming it was the result of foreign interference. There was a flurry of diplomatic negotiations led by John Kerry and after 24 hours Karzai agreed to participate in the run-off. In the meantime, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission released their report on the election which spoke of a low turnout due to many attacks and much intimidation, especially of women.

On 26 October, Abdullah announced the conditions under which he would take part in the run-off. These included the sacking of the IEC chair, the removal of election officials and the suspension of three cabinet ministers. He insisted his demands needed to be met by the end of the month. Both Karzai and the IEC rejected the conditions. So on 1 November, Abdullah duly announced he would not be a candidate in the run-off saying the government had not met his demand for a fair vote.

A day later, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon arrived in Afghanistan to negotiate with both parties. On the same the day the IEC announced Karzai the president-elect as the sole candidate in the run-off. They based this decision on the Afghan Constitution which stated the run-off could only be held between the two leading candidates from the first round. The decision immediately sparked celebrations among Karzai’s supporters. Abdullah said the decision had no legal basis but did not challenge it in court.

Afghan donor and troop-contributing countries reluctantly offered Karzai their congratulations on his “victory”. But most statements, including Ban Ki-Moon’s own encouraged Karzai to form a competent Cabinet with reform-minded ministers, to improve governance and to root out corruption. Karzai was re-appointed for a second five year term on 19 November. In his inauguration speech, Karzai reached out to the Taliban as well as Abdullah.

But his re-election honeymoon was short-lived. A new report says that 2009 was the deadliest year yet for Afghan children. Meanwhile, Taliban attacks are getting closer to the capital while there are doubts the international community has the stomach to continue the fight. As the UN report concludes “We are now at a critical juncture. The situation cannot continue as is if we are to succeed in Afghanistan. Unity of effort and greater attention to key priorities are now a sine qua non. There is a need for a change of mindset in the international community as well as in the Government of Afghanistan. Without that change, the prospects of success will diminish further.”

Baghdad bombing is a reminder that Iraq is a fiction

Yesterday’s explosion in Baghdad was a reminder that Iraq’s problems have not gone away. Opponents of the state launched two massive suicide bombs outside Justice Ministry and the council buildings with vehicles loaded with 68 kgs of explosives. It was the deadliest attack in two years and occurred two months ahead of planned elections. At least 147 people were killed and another 500 injured in a soft and indiscriminate attack on the centre of the capital just outside the heavily secured Green Zone. (photo of a 2005 Baghdad bombing by controlarms)

No one has claimed responsibility but there are plenty of enemies to al-Maliki’s Shi’ite regime with reasons to carry out the atrocity. Al-Qaeda, the Sunni Sons of Iraq, ex-Ba'athists, Kurds, Shi’ite extremists all had motives to discredit a government looking for credit for Iraq’s increasing independence. The still-large American military presence also rankles with many Iraqis. The government was due to meet yesterday to discuss laws to govern January’s proposed general election. The meeting did not happen and the blast has put further doubt on whether the poll will take place.

The street where the blasts occurred had just been reopened to vehicle traffic six months ago as the regime attempts show Iraq is getting back to normal. But this new “normal” is very different than what passed for run-of-the-mill in Baghdad prior to 2003. The US has turned the old order upside down. Democracy has given the more numerous Shi’ites power and the old Sunni Ba’athist elite are disgruntled. They boycotted the 2005 election and may do again in 2010. There are also issues on the Kirkuk faultline of Arab-Kurdish relations. The International Crisis Group has nominated Ninewa as the new flashpoint with violent sectarian attacks common-place in a town which is mainly Arab but with a large Kurdish minority.

Finding a sustainable solution to Kurdish disputed borders is one the fundamental problems threatening Iraq. The country was founded as an artificial construct after Britain cobbled together three Ottoman provinces to give to a deposed Saudi king after World War One. Strong Sunni leaders papered over the cracks for 70 years but its future is less certain. ICG’s Middle East Program Director Robert Malley says a compromise won’t happen without an assertive American role. “The US might be on its way out, but its hands will be full even as it heads for the exit,” he said.

As Vice President Biden reiterated in September, the US “recognises and supports” a united Iraq. But from a US policy perspective, Afghanistan is the now only overseas war-game in town and are anxious to withdraw large-scale forces from Iraq. There are still more US troops in Iraq than there are in Afghanistan and General McChrystal wants them badly. For the first time since the Iraqi war started, US Coalition forces deaths are going to be higher in Afghanistan than in Iraq this year with three times as many casualties to October. The Afghan numbers are not yet as high as figures for the early years of the Iraq war but have been on the increase since 2003 so it is safe to assume things will get worse there.

The Afghan presidential run-off election will dominate headlines but the Iraqi poll has the potential to be even more traumatic. As The Guardian puts it, politics of compromise and national unity in Iraq are fragile and slow-moving. The political system has been simply been unable to overcome traditional challenges leading to an inevitable consequence of violence. Iraq’s same old “issues of oil, federalism, provincial borders and reconciliation [are] still festering”, says The Guardian. Expect more bombs in Baghdad and elsewhere until these challenges are addressed.

Taliban’s Mullah Omar issues warning to West on Afghan war

The Taliban leader says the West lacks the will to fight in Afghanistan and he may be right. Mullah Omar has issued a statement from his hiding place in Pakistan warning of huge casualties and said the West does not have the stomach for the war. Omar said that the more forces the US deploys in the country, the more they will face “unequivocal defeat”. He referred to history when he described the country as a “graveyard for colonial troops”. His statement came as Taliban-linked rebels have intensified use of roadside bombs, particularly in the south. This year more than 350 foreign troops have been killed, making it the deadliest year since fighting began. (picture credit: daviza)

Italy is the latest western country to question its commitment to Afghanistan after six of its troops were killed alongside ten Afghan civilians in a Kabul bomb blast on Thursday. The European nation has 2,800 soldiers in Afghanistan and had already started bringing some home before the latest attack which brought its death toll to 20. Now Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is publicly questioning the mission. "We are all convinced it's best for everybody to get out soon," he said.

Berlusconi’s statement will not be welcomed by the White House which provides two-thirds of the 100,000 troops in the Nato-led occupation force. With a new administration in the White House, the US has re-examined their motives for fighting the eight-year war. In March President Obama made a pledge to expand the US military presence in Afghanistan. But as the World Politics Review puts it, the essential question now is not whether the war is winnable, but whether the mission is vital to American national security interests. And from this perspective, says the review, the open-ended strategy fails.

The US administration has acknowledged the new policy raises the stakes by transforming the Afghan War from a limited intervention into a more ambitious and potentially risky counter-insurgency. The statement was made in a Senate Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations which was released last month. The report stressed the importance of a counter-narcotics policy in winning the war. For years commanders on the ground said that going after drug lords was not part of their mandate. But now the US has targeted drug traffickers who help finance the Taliban as a major priority. The report said tens of millions of drug dollars are helping the Taliban and other insurgent groups to “buy arms, build deadlier roadside bombs and pay fighters.”

Afghanistan’s opium industry supplies 90 percent of the world’s heroin and generates $3 billion in profits. But the UN says production is on the decline for the second year in a row. The Americans have targeted 50 of the major drug traffickers on a military hit list to be “killed or captured”. It has also set up an intelligence centre to analyse the flow of drug money to the Taliban and corrupt Afghan officials, and an international task force to pursue drug networks in southern Afghanistan. But stopping the flow of drug money will not be easy. Most transactions are conducted in cash and are concealed by an ancient and secretive money transfer system. The strategy acknowledges that counter-narcotics will not be enough to win the war. The other major aspect of the change of direction relates to the activities of farmers. The Obama administration has admitted a program to eradicate poppies is a failure and emphasis will now be on promoting legal alternative crops.

The report did not dodge two important questions that will impact the success of the change of direction. It asked whether the US Government has the capacity and the will to provide the hundreds more civilians to transform a poppy-dominated economy into one where legitimate agriculture can thrive. It also wondered whether Nato allies be counted on to step up their contributions on the military and civilian sides at a time when support is waning across the Western world. It also asks the questions that Obama’s team will need to honestly answer if the president is to avoid Afghanistan becoming his Vietnam: Does the American public understand and support the sacrifices that will be required to finish the job? And what is the job anyway? Obama and the other western leaders cannot use the hoary “terrorist safe havens” argument forever. And as Mullah Omar reminds us, forever is likely to be a very long time.

Rasmussen primes the world for Afghanistan military surge

As Afghanistan counts down to its presidential election on Thursday, NATO's new Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has claimed the country could become the “grand central station of international terrorism.” Rasmussen said NATO would support the Afghan people for “as long as it takes” and called on “anyone who believes in basic human rights” to support the mission. While the former Danish right-wing Prime Minister’s terror claim needs to be treated with caution, Taliban forces did their bit to help his cause by ramping up attacks on military and civilian targets in an effort to discredit the election. (photo credit: Soldiers Military Centre)

Eight years after the US invaded Afghanistan, the country is no closer to peace and is instead awash with suicide bombers, AIDS victims and a resurgent Taliban. Drug barons run the country that produces 90 percent of the world’s heroin. There are over 100,000 multinational forces in Afghanistan under NATO and American command. Casualties have increased markedly since February and 75 foreign soldiers have been killed in the month of July alone. Yet General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan is asking member countries for a significant increase in international troop numbers.

Yesterday US President Obama reaffirmed his commitment to wind down the US operations in Iraq and to re-focus efforts in Afghanistan. America has 62,000 troops in the country and will deploy another 6,000 by the end of the year. But as Terence O’Brien wrote in the May/June edition of the US Foreign Policy journal, Afghanistan has a host of forbidding problems that make it a challenge that exceeds that of Iraq. These issues include the country’s size, its rugged geography, poverty, ethnic diversity, mistrust of centralised government, cross-border sanctuaries as well as its opium economy, plus the tenacity of the Taliban and other insurgent groups.

In March, Obama admitted America was not winning the war and said dialogue with moderate elements of the Taliban ‘should be explored’. “Part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us,” said Obama at the time. In response President Hamid Karzai appointed his brother Qayim as envoy to the Taliban. The leader of the Taliban Mullah Mohammed Omar reportedly approved entering into peace negotiations but recent activity suggests that positions have hardened. The Guardian reports that overnight a rocket struck the presidential palace in Kabul and a second hit the Afghan capital's police headquarters.

But it is in the south where the Taliban is strongest, particularly in the provinces of Helmand, Kandahar and Uruzgan (where Australian forces are stationed). The west is not winning the battle of hearts and minds in these areas. Jan Forrester says the Afghan rumour mill tells people of the increasing number of civilians being wrongly targetted and killed. So many locals now believe foreigners are
in Afghanistan just to promote their own interests, she says.

What exactly Australian interests are in Afghanistan have never been properly explained by either the Howard or Rudd Governments other than referring to vague threats of terror. However, Australian Major Mick Bassingthwaighte has given an intriguing insight into operational matters in a recent edition of the Australian Army Journal. Bassingthwaighte commanded a Security Task Group in Afghanistan during 2007 and 2008. In an article called "Taking tactics from the Taliban" he says the fight against the Taliban is run according to the following principles drawn from previous wars in the region:
- Limited and poor condition access roads to narrow valleys make it difficult to use conventional motorised forces
- Afghans are aware of psych op campaigns and are easily alienated if promised action does not arise,
- individual Afghans change sides at whim,
- most ambushes occur on the way back to base camps,
- helicopter support is crucial to preventing such ambushes, and
- it is “a platoon leaders’ war” of engaging small forces which will only fight when the terrain and circumstances are favourable.

While it is difficult to disagree with Major Bassingthwaighte’s military expertise, the worry here is that none of these principles look like changing any time soon. And without an exit strategy, Australia and the other nations of Rasmussen’s coalition could be waiting a long time for a train to get them out of Afghanistan’s “grand central station”.

Romero Centre refugee week film festival at Yungaba

Life throws up a few unexpected pleasures from time to time. If I hadn't checked Facebook this morning, I wouldn't have known Andrew Bartlett was broadcasting live on 4ZZZ Brisbane community radio at the time. if I hadn't listened in, I wouldn't have heard the interview he did about refugees with Kathi McCulloch, the coordinator of the Romero Centre. If I hadn't heard the interview I wouldn't have known that there was a Refugee Week film festival tonight at the wonderful Kangaroo Point building known as Yungaba. So on the spur of the moment, I went along and was treated to an evening of three films, discussion, food and drink, and good company.

The Romero Centre is a faith-based ecumenical social justice organisation. The centre is named for El Salvadorian Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero who was assassinated by his own government in 1980 for fighting human abuses. As part of the spiteful regime of the former Howard Government, the Romero Centre was ineligible for funding from the Department of Immigration because of its work with Temporary Protection Visa (TPV) holders. Now that is beginning to change and new funding possibilities are opening up along with the great ideas they can purchase.

The film festival about refugees is one such great idea and Yungaba is a perfect venue to host it. The heritage listed building was built as an immigration depot for Brisbane in 1885. For over a hundred years it became a local version of Ellis Island and was listed recently as a Queensland icon. But the building has now been sold to private developers who will probably turn it in to boutique apartments for the wealthy. In the meantime it was an honour to be among a hundred people at one of the final public gatherings in what McCulloch called this “joyous space”.

There were three films shown in the festival, all of which touched on the refugee experience. The first, and shortest, was “See Through Me” a collection of tough street experiences of ten young Somali-Australian immigrants made by the Refugee Health Research Centre of La Trobe University in Melbourne. The “fight or flight” mentality became easier to see from their perspective. As one Somali boy said when taunted by a gang, “I was outnumbered, I had to ignore them or I would have copped the damage”.

The second film was Freedom or Death. “Freedom or Death” was the slogan of the refugees held in Nauru detention centre for several shameful years during the height of John Howard’s notorious Pacific Solution. The mendicant state of Nauru was bought off by the Australian Government to house boatpeople in an environment that was excised from Australian law. The refugees became sick of living with no hope of release in an environment where phosphate got into the food and into the feet. They fought back with the only weapons they had: their bodies. Howard branded the Nauru 2003 hunger strike as “blackmail” and refused to negotiate with them. But as lawyer Julian Burnside said “they were playing the only card they had”.

Out of their midst emerged a born leader. Chaman Shah Nasiri (pictured seated next to Kathi McCulloch) was a young man whose dignity could not be repressed and it was he who got his fellow inmates to end the hunger strike before anyone died. Chaman, like most of the rest of them, is a Hazara, a Shia community which were heavily discriminated against in Sunni Taliban Afghanistan. He described the terror of trying to get to Australia in leaky, dangerous boats and pay $16,000 for the privilege. He was a natural spokesman for the group and he was in the delegation that spoke to the then-Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone’s office in 2003. Chaman is now happy to be settled in Australia where “he can breathe the air of freedom” and reminded the audience that Australia is a signatory of the UNHCR convention/protocol on refugees.

The final film was called “Pacific Solution: from Afghanistan to Aotearoa”. It tells the story of those rescued from the MV Tampa in 2001 who were taken in by New Zealand. While Australia and New Zealand share a common colonial heritage, they treated refugees radically differently in the early 2000s. While Howard banged on stridently about “us” deciding who could stay in Australia and under what conditions, the Helen Clark government took a more compassionate approach (often against the anger of many New Zealanders worried about immigration). New Zealand immediately accepted 131 of the 438 Tampa asylum seekers (including about 40 unaccompanied boys). The film took in the touching story of how the rest of the family joined one of these boys in Auckland, and the culture and language difficulties they found on arrival. This family was also Hazara and had to leave Afghanistan. As Julian Burnside said “when your own country wants to kill you…what choice do you have?”

While TPVs and Nauru are gone, the problem has not fully gone away. There is compassion fatigue within the industry. The media is always ready to play up fears about “border protection”, despite the reality that Australia is no danger of being “swamped” by refugees. The current Australian Government is worried about being wedged on the issue – they remember only too well that Howard had a 90 percent approval rating over Tampa. Yet they could also do well from learning how the Kiwis quietly and effectively dealt with the problem. Refugees need help and by international law and the covenants that Australia has signed, we must help them. Nights like tonight at Yungaba are a useful reminder of how that help can be sustained at an individual level.

India blames Pakistan’s ISI for Kabul embassy blast

Last week National Security Advisor MK Narayanan said the Indian government has good evidence linking Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI to the 7 July embassy bomb in Kabul that killed 56 people. Narayanan refused to elaborate on the nature of the evidence but said “the ISI needs to be destroyed”. Pakistan Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gillani earlier denied his country's intelligence service had any involvement in the bombing. 'Why should Pakistan destabilize Afghanistan?” he said. “It is in our interest to have a stable Afghanistan.”

But whether or not the ISI was directly involved in the Kabul bombing, there is little doubt they have played an active role in Afghan affairs. ISI stands for the directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence. Very little happens in Pakistan or its proxy state Afghanistan without the knowledge of this powerful but shadowy group. The ISI has been crucial in maintaining order and sustaining military rule in an otherwise semi-anarchic state.

Critics now say the ISI is out of control answering to neither the president nor the Prime Minister. Mariane Pearl, writing about the murder of her husband Danny, described the ISI as a “kingdom within a state”. Many in the organisation are ideologically sympathetic to jihadi organisations. The Pearls were both journalists working in Karachi in 2002 when one Jihadi group kidnapped Danny and executed him. Mariane’s account of the incident reached a wider audience with Michael Winterbottom's film version of A Mighty Heart (starring Angelina Jolie). The Pearls had gotten an inkling of official Pakistani views when they interviewed Hamid Gul who accused the “Jews and Mossad” of carrying out the 9/11 attacks.

Hamid Gul was no ordinary conspiracy theorist. He was the director of the ISI from 1987 to 1989 and was considered the architect of the Afghan jihad. Gul masterminded the mujahideen war against the Soviets, financed by the CIA. In the nineties Gul was called “the Godfather of the Taliban”. Gul fell out of power but remains an important background voice. After the US invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, he told Robert Fisk he was not a Muslim extremist "but I support the implementation of Shari'a and we must be governed by the rules of Allah."

After the Afghan mujahideen war, Pakistan terrorists turned their attention to the “liberation” of Kashmir. By 1995, the ISI engaged the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeM) to raise a Taliban-type force of young Pakistani students to fight Indian forces in Kashmir. But now the Jihadi monster it created has gotten out of control. In 2003, JeM suicide bombers attempted to assassinate President Musharraf. A year earlier Pearl was killed by Sheikh Omar Saeed, a double agent of the ISI and JeM.

The ISI did not like journalists getting too close to their operations. As well as Pearl, they persecuted two Pakistani journalists who dared write about their activities. Ghulam Hasnain, whose work was syndicated to Time and CNN, was investigating Indian fugitive and smuggler Dawood Ebrahim when was arrested by the ISI a day before Pearl disappeared. He was so traumatised when released 36 hours later, he has refused to speak of it to anyone since. They also physically threatened Shaheen Sehbai, the editor of Islamabad’s The News, in a vain attempt to stop him from linking Pearl’s assassin, Sheik Omar Saeed, with the ISI.

Other leading Pakistani journalists such as Kamran Khan have struck a Faustian pact with the ISI in order to continually report freely. In order to maintain a relationship with them he writes as much to please them as about them. Khan freely admits the ISI have funded madrassas which have harboured Al Qaeda operatives. But he said that some of the Islamists are actually double-agents. He explained how it works to PBS Frontline: “the bottom line here is that, ‘Look. Whatever you are doing, whatever you do, we understand. But mind you, we cannot afford to harbour Arabs here. We cannot afford to harbour non-Pakistanis here. So please, please cooperate with us on that count.’ There is a very deep connection between the religious madrassas, and the key religious scholars, and the establishment.”

Given their power, Mariane Pearl could never understand why the ISI took an active interest in her husband’s disappearance. While the investigating police told Pearl that the ISI had been to her house on the day after the kidnap, she was unaware of their presence except the two occasions they sent a sullen, unhelpful and unsympathetic man who gave his name and rank, in possible homage to Catch-22, as “Major Major”. But if Major played dumb, others in the ISI definitely knew more about the killing than they were letting on.

When the Pakistani police finally tracked down Omar, they found he had already turned himself in to the custody of the home secretary of the Punjab state. Brigadier Ejaz Shah gave Omar sanctuary and kept his detention secret a week. Shah was a powerful figure behind the scenes. In the 1990s, he worked for the ISI and was the official “handler” for Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Musharraf appointed him to the Punjab role on taking power in 1999. It is likely the ISI interrogated Omar during that week.

The Pakistanis weren’t the only people interested in Omar. In 2001, the FBI were tracing a link between Omar and 9/11 leader Mohammad Atta. Omar wired $100,000 to Atta in the month before the US attacks and the FBI wanted to know who authorised him to make the money transfer. It seemed the order had come from Omar’s boss: ISI head Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed. But while this might have shocked the FBI, it would have been no surprise to another well-known American agency. Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Former Pakistan High Commissioner to UK, told the South Asia Tribune in 2004 it has long been established, “the ISI has acted as go-between in intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA”. Yet this unpalatable truth remains hidden in a patchwork of Byzantine alliances. And as the Indian embassy bombing showed, it remains out of control.

why are we in Afghanistan.

On the eve of the Labor’s first budget, Professor Hugh White, the head of the Strategic and Defence Studies at the Australian National University (ANU), has called on Labor to review its commitment to Afghanistan. White said today the Rudd government has adopted the policies of the Howard government without examining what it is doing there and what the most cost-effective way of achieving it is. In an era of a so-called “open ended” commitment, White’s question is a valid one. The Afghanistan engagement is costing the Australian taxpayer almost half a billion dollars a year.

With Wayne Swan about to bring down the budget on Tuesday week, the government are not giving away how much Defence will be impacted by the activities of the almost mythical “razor gang”. Defence policy did not get much of a look-in during the election campaign but Kevin Rudd has made two commitments he must look after during his first term in office that will blow out defence spending.

The first of these directly affects the budget: During the high-stakes poker of the election campaign, Rudd matched Howard’s promises of at least three per cent increases in defence spending annually until 2016. With both sides keen to convince us we live in dangerous times, that means putting more than one billion dollars extra each year into Defence coffers.

The second commitment involves troop deployment. Rudd will withdraw some troops from Iraq, but with increase numbers in Afghanistan. The government has said it will withdraw troops from Timor Leste but with Jose Ramos-Horta’s attempted killers still on the loose, the situation could quickly worsen without Australian support. Labor has also committed to continued to support in RAMSI.

Australia will keep some troops in Iraq. The US has pressurised Australia to keep some symbolic presence in the multi-national command centres in Baghdad and Basra. Australia will also keep up naval and air deployments in the Gulf. Those that will be leaving are a thousand combat troops from the Overwatch Battle Group in Dhi Qar to be withdrawn and re-deployed to Afghanistan.

They will be joining an increasingly sticky situation. After an initial dream run of lack of casualties for several years, the Australian death count has been slowly rising in the last 12 months. Last week, Lance Corporal Jason Marks was the fifth Australian to die, killed by gunfire during a shootout with Taliban forces in Uruzgan.

The political commitment for Afghanistan appears to be there for the long haul. Since the election victory, Kevin Rudd has successfully kept up the unchallenged fiction of his “Iraq war bad, Afghanistan war good” argument. Given the sorry state of both countries in the wake of their invasions by the US this century, there seems little a western military force can do except exacerbate hatreds and delay the inevitable political transitions to hardline Islamist states. There is a consensus that without political dialogue only a long, hard war lies ahead. Yet as a puzzled Andrew Bartlett remarked earlier this year, there is very little public debate about it.

The war in Afghanistan is now almost seven years old. When asked why Australia is still there, Rudd responds in terms of the vague need to contain “threats of terrorism”. This argument fails to understand that the genie is well and truly out of that bottle. The London bombers were home-grown and more likely to have visited a Bora Bora disco in Ibiza than a Tora Bora cave in Nangarhar. Terrorism can no more be contained within Afghanistan’s borders than its copious opium crop.

The war itself has largely escaped without scrutiny in the Australian media as has the fact that President Hamid Karzai is these days little more than the mayor of Kabul. Reliant on the dubious support of various warlords, Karzai is also a marked man and cannot even trust the support of his own police and armed forces as last week’s assassination attempt revealed.

Tom Hyland in the Sunday Age has been one of the few Australian journalists on the ground to try and tell a more complete story. Yesterday, he wrote how prisoners captured by Australian and Dutch troops were tortured after they were handed over to Afghanistan. Australia has no facilities to hold prisoners and the Dutch camp is limited so they handed them over to the National Directorate of Security (NDS). The world knows about the problem because a Dutch journalist obtained documents under FOI that had testimony of prisoner ill-treatment at the hands of the NDS.

Such considered verdicts of what is occurring on the ground in Afghanistan are rare. For most it merely expedient to demonise the “Taliban” as an enemy that must be defeated. The fact that the “Taliban” no longer exists as one single, integrated body is not considered. The John Howard argument (inherited fully by Rudd) was that our troops were helping to save democracy, prevent the setting up of a narco-state and stop terrorism. It has failed on all three objectives.

The Afghan government and their laws are no better than the enemy they fight. Kabul residents are already seeing gradual returns to the Islamic law that they endured in the 1990s. The war, meanwhile has increased Afghanistan’s prominence as a drug exporter. And as for sponsoring terrorism, Afghanistan plays second fiddle to neighbour and supposed-ally Pakistan.

The total casualty figure for the war in Afghanistan is not known but likely to be in the hundreds of thousands. The central objective of Operating Enduring Freedom has not been met. Osama Bin Laden was never located. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has been involved from the outset with bi-partisan support from the main political parties. With a nod and a wink to cricket analogies, the Australian mission is known as “Operation Slipper”.

As of April this year, the ADF has 1,025 personnel in Afghanistan’s slips cordon. Those forces included a national command centre in Kabul, a liaison group at International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters, two task forces in Uruzgan, RAAF surveillance at Kandahar airport and a helicopter group also in Kandahar. There is a small artillery contingent embedded with the British in Helmand. Australia also has federal police and a Secret Intelligence Service station on the ground.

But that is not enough for some politicians. According to then defence minister Brendan Nelson, the 2007 budget handed down an additional $1.3 billion over five years to support the ADF. That massive amount did not include Afghanistan for which another hefty $703 million was found over four years.

Unsurprisingly the Liberals are saying Nelson's replacement Joel Fitzgibbon must protect their defence patch from this year’s cuts. For now Swan has refused to rule out the multi-billion dollar defence budget from being quarantined from the spending reductions. But Rudd's election promise means the Afghan war will be spared the razor.

Rudd goes the wrong way on opium

Australian PM Kevin Rudd has failed in his bid to get NATO support for a firm timetable on his Afghan opium eradication strategy. Rudd had called for benchmarking at next year’s summit for the eradication of Afghanistan’s $4 billion opium crop but NATO has not agreed to his timing. At the Bucharest summit NATO had pledged to "continue to support Afghan-led efforts to tackle the narcotics problem". Rudd wanted a more specific outcome and said Britain had backed his call for the elimination strategy to be subjected to annual performance measures analysed each year. During the debate Rudd said that if efforts to reduce opium were not to be subject to measurement, "then I will have something further to say on that".

Rudd will now have his chance to say more as the European NATO leaders rebuffed his specific timetable. The Sydney Morning Herald accuses Rudd of “opiaphobia” and says Rudd should concentrate on “bigger issues”. The SMH defines opiaphobia as the irrational fear of opiate drugs particularly favoured by US politicians, and attributes the term to John Morgan, a professor of pharmacology at the City University of New York. US efforts to reduce the crop have been ineffective and opium production has increased 30 per cent in last 12 months. Opium accounts for half of Afghanistan’s $6 billion GDP and the country produces 93 percent of the world’s opium.

The opium crop had almost eliminated under the rule of the Taliban. But corruption in the post 9/11 administration and the distraction of the continued fighting has seen it come back with a vengeance. About half of the crop is grown in Uruzgan province, where Australia has its troops. Much of Uruzgan is classified by the United Nations as “Extreme Risk / Hostile Environment.” The Taliban effectively controls four-fifths of the province. There the Taliban has now done an about-turn on poppy growing and imposes a 25 per cent tax on the estimated US$1 billion earned by farmers to finance their military campaign.

Because of the dangers on the ground, the US is advocating aerial spraying from the air using chemicals to kill the crop. Washington is now pressuring the Afghan government to agree to aerial spraying of opium crops with the weedkiller glyphosate. But this is no smart bombing exercise. Glyphosate destroys all crops and leaves two million farmers without income. Harvard professor Robert Rotberg says the US is hell-bent on eradication regardless of its disastrous consequences elsewhere. “They claim it worked in Colombia and so will work in Afghanistan,” he said “It is not clear to anyone it worked in Colombia.”

Now the London Senlis Council has promoted an alternative to eradication. It is advocating the use of poppies for medicine. It wants to converts poppies into morphine for the global south. There is a worldwide shortage of morphine. Poppy for Medicine’s strategy involves licensing the controlled cultivation of poppy to produce essential poppy-based medicines such as morphine, and unlicensed poppy cultivation remains a criminal activity. It was established in Turkey in the 1970s as a means of breaking farmers’ ties with the heroin market without resorting to forced poppy crop eradication. Within just four years, this strategy successfully brought the country’s illegal poppy crisis under control.

This could solve Afghanistan’s problem too. Its dilemma is that this crop is vital to the Afghan economy but is at the same time destroying thousands of lives elsewhere. Destroying the crop only makes the situation worse, so the solution is to buy the opium crop from them. Currently there are only four nations in the world allowed to grow opium for morphine production (France, Spain, Turkey & India). 80 percent of the world’s supply is used by just six percent of the world’s population If Afghanistan was added to the list the price of morphine would fall dramatically and end the shortage. It could also end the opiaphobic solutions preferred by Rudd and the Americans.