There are few political processes more sensitive than national elections, particularly one that’ll be historic in its implications. Afghanistan’s recent election will mark its first peaceful, democratic transition of power. It was the first poll held under the sole responsibility of the Afghan government since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

Understandably, Afghan efforts to date have minimised the international community’s role in the election process. While the international community supported the elections process and preparations, the elections were Afghan-led and Afghan-managed. President Karzai’s goal was for a ‘purely Afghan process’.

But much like the 2009 presidential elections, this year’s run-off election appeared marked by rampant fraud. That not only delegitimises the eventual winner, regardless of a credible audit, but risks pushing the country towards civil war. Read more

As with Vietnam, the Australian military will leave Afghanistan believing it won its bit of the war, even if the Afghanistan war is eventually judged a disaster. This is the limited right of small alliance partners to claim small victories, even if the total effort fails.

The Army can sit close to the shade of the farewell epitaph offered by the Prime Minister:

Australia’s longest war is ending, not with victory, not with defeat, but with, we hope, an Afghanistan that’s better for our presence here.

The Liberal and Labor Party joint interest in not disturbing their unbroken political consensus on Afghanistan, discussed in the previous column, will aid an Army interpretation that it fought a good war and brought it to a good end. Read more

The tragic death of Corporal Cameron Baird—killed in action in the Khod Valley in southern Afghanistan—and the wounding of two other ADF personnel, reminds an Australia reluctant to pay attention that the war in Afghanistan isn’t over yet. According to Defence Minister Stephen Smith, around 1,000 troops will be withdrawn by the end of the year. Based on the Minister’s statement to Parliament on 19 June, it looks as though at least 650 personnel will remain in country during 2014. After that, the Minister assesses there will be around 125 ADF trainers divided between Kabul and Kandahar and an undetermined number of staff embedded with the International security Assistance Force (ISAF)—there are currently over 100—as well as a possible continuing Special Forces role.

In short, even though everyone’s eyeing the exit signs, the reality is that Australia is committed for another eighteen months to an operation that will be every bit as large as, say, our Iraq deployment. Beyond 2014, we’ll also be there in appreciable numbers for the long haul. Our involvement will be every bit as long as Prime Minister Gillard speculated back in 2010: ‘for the next decade at least.’ In all likelihood, casualties will continue. Read more

In The Strategist’s debate on Australia’s 2003 entry to the Iraq war kicked off by Graeme Dobell, it seems the balance of the argument tilts more towards him than to Peter Jennings’ rejoinder. Further, the process Graeme identifies affected not just the way that Australia went to war but how it became mired there for years to follow.

Graeme’s case on the silence of Canberra’s national defence bureaucracy is supported by stronger evidence than he chooses to use. Brian Toohey cites an unnamed official confirming Graeme’s claims, but the clincher comes from former Secretary of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) Ashton Calvert who said that, ‘DFAT did not argue against that war role. In my view there was a strong and shared sense of policy direction on Iraq from Howard and Downer. In my view they didn’t need advice on what they should do because they had, in effect, made up their minds’. Read more

Strategist reader Linsday Dorman, an associate at Future Directions International, has submitted this comment:

I enjoyed the report by Peter Jennings of 1 November. However, I note that he stresses ‘that our primary focus should come back to the Asia- Pacific’. Does he have an eastern states blind spot, the Indian Ocean and South Asia, where we have two susceptible nuclear-armed nation states as well as an unstable MENA? We are part of the whole world, not some narrow-minded Pacific scenario.

To which Peter Jennings has responded:

Thanks to Lindsay Dorman for his comment. I hope I don’t have an ‘eastern states blind spot’, but when I think about areas where the ADF is most likely to deploy in the next few years, I tend to think that our so-called ‘Inner arc’ to our North and North East may well produce occasions requiring stabilisation tasks, or HADR responses. In the Indian Ocean we will most likely see a continuation of the border protection role. I would also expect an increase in activities designed to show an ADF ‘presence’ in the oil and gas fields of the North West Shelf. We may also see further exercising and training cooperation with Indian Ocean and South Asian countries and further west to the UAE. Australia will probably remain committed to a range of maritime operations in the Gulf region. (I won’t speculate here about the Iran situation and possible international responses.)