Tag Archive for: Afghanistan

Graph of the week: ANZUS – will the love affair continue?

Having had the privilege this week of participating in the United States Study Centre’s Alliance 21 workshop, I’ve had a good chance to think about the fundamentals of the alliance, and why Australians consistently value it highly. At one level that’s not too hard to understand. As Mark Thomson has pointed out, we get a lot more back than we put in—as is usually the case with junior alliance partners. Australians are as fond of a good deal as anyone else.

But one of the best questions to be raised throughout the week was how relevant the alliance is to today’s youth. It’s a good question because they don’t see the benefits as directly as their forebears did. Their grandparents (and increasingly their great grandparents) see the alliance through the eyes of people who saw the upheavals of WWII first hand, and understand in a visceral way the benefits of allied power when national security is threatened. Their parents don’t have that experience, but grew up in a world still heavily influenced by the outcomes of WWII (I still remember the schoolyard ditties about Hitler and company) and the vicissitudes of the Cold War. Despite the problematic Vietnam War and the very public push back against the alliance, the benefits of the alliance were real enough in the face of an enduring security concern to keep support levels high. In fact, the level of support for the alliance remained above 80% even as Australian forces were about to leave Vietnam.

This chart (click to enlarge) shows the level of support for the alliance, culled from a variety of sources. Because the questions asked differ, they aren’t completely compatible data sets, but the picture is remarkably consistent. From the 1970s onwards (and there’s no reason to think it was different earlier), a large majority of Australians have attached a high value to the alliance. Read more

Killing the source: Uruzgan and The Liaison Office

The first step to victory is always working out the vital ground. Occupy that and you force the enemy to come to you. You’ve already achieved dominance and are halfway on the path to victory.

Unfortunately, when the battlefield is being fought for hearts and minds, the terrain becomes highly complex. It’s difficult to work out exactly which ‘ground’ is commanding, and what features are irrelevant. That’s why intelligence is so important. Without it, the commander can’t know how to direct their forces or where to fight.

This is particularly the case in situations such as in Uruzgan. Australian forces involved in reconstruction have been deployed here since 2006, but the social dynamics are shifting all the time. This is a prime instance of a battlefield where deciding where the human contours lie is a highly complex task.

Perhaps the best (although by no means the only) instance of this is the tribal nature of society. Like everyone, before I first travelled to the country I’d been aware of the difference between the Hazara and Pashtun people. What brought the distinction home to me, however, was a map pasted onto a wall at The Liaison Office in Kabul. A mass of coloured pins indicated the real diversity of inhabitants within the province. Read more