Strategist Article Archives - Page 1103 of 1187

An ambassador for countering transnational crime

11 November 2013

The Australian Crime Commission has warned that a significant amount of Australia’s organised crime problem is generated overseas. Foreign countries are often the sources of drugs and guns, and may provide the bases where criminal syndicates are organised, or house the banks where money is laundered. Criminal gangs might also undermine the governments and economies of neighbours. With all of these vectors in play, Australians will feel the effects of offshore-based crime in some way.

But while our domestic arrangements have received significant attention lately, there’s been little mention of how we should enhance our ability to attack the problem of organised crime when it’s based offshore.

There’s something the Australian Government could do right now, and it’d be cheap and quick to organise: it could add responsibility for serious and organised crime to the portfolio of an existing Ambassador with specific security responsibilities. This isn’t a new idea, but its time has come.

Leaving the wars of the US alliance

10 November 2013

Australia is leaving the Afghanistan war well before the war is over. This is one of the Vietnam echoes in our experience of Afghanistan. Both were coalition wars fought by Australia with a central focus on securing the alliance with the US.

As with Vietnam, so with Afghanistan; Australia departs a disastrous war without any damage to the alliance. Indeed, this time Australia withdraws with far fewer doubts about the alliance than last time. After Vietnam, Australia had to rethink its defence doctrine based on the new reality that never again could it expect US ‘boots on the ground’ in Southeast Asia. Australia’s grand self-defence rethink after Vietnam was driven by that ‘no-more-GIs’ understanding.

ASPI suggests

8 November 2013

There’s been a lot of commentary this week on Australia–Indonesia relations. For a seasoned Indonesian perspective, watch this Fairfax interview published today with Lieutenant General (rtd) Agus Widjojo, regarded as one of the post-Suharto era’s more reform-minded generals, on the trust deficit in the relationship.

There’s speculation from Geneva that Iran and the P5+1 may be approaching a deal over Tehran’s nuclear program. Reuters reports:

After the first day of a November 7-8 meeting, they said progress had been made towards an agreement under which the Islamic state would curb some of its nuclear activities in exchange for limited relief from sanctions that are damaging its economy.

Regional architecture: IORA

8 November 2013

Students of regional security architecture will now have another acronym to add to their lexicon. Last Friday the 20 member states of the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation (IOR-ARC), at its annual meeting held in Perth, changed the name of the group to the more pronounceable Indian Ocean Rim Association, (IORA). Ministers even agreed that there’ll be a new logo by year’s end.

Australia has taken over the chair of IORA for the next two years, with Indonesia as vice-chair. It’s the only body of its kind with a broad-based agenda and a membership that spans the Indian Ocean region. Read more

Australia’s Bougainville challenge: aligning aid, trade and diplomacy in the national interest

7 November 2013

An ASPI report published this morning sets out a plan to help deliver a sustainable solution for the future of Bougainville.

A decade after the successful peacekeeping mission, and a year and a half before the window opens for a referendum on Bougainville’s political status, the peace process is dangerously adrift.

The pathbreaking unarmed regional peace effort, begun by New Zealand in late-1997 and led by Australia from early 1998 to mid-2003, is cited as a model of innovative and flexible peacemaking. It ensured large-scale fighting didn’t resume and it bought time to prepare for an orderly political settlement. Sadly, those preparations have been insufficient to ensure a workable and sustainable political outcome. The Papua New Guinea Government, donors, neighbours and officials on Bougainville have failed to build the capacity the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) requires to remediate the causes of the earlier conflict. Read more

Reader response: why Indonesia won’t side with the US (despite non-alignment)

7 November 2013

Last week in The Strategist Benjamin Schreer offered a stark view of the forces shaping Indonesia’s future strategic choices. Schreer argues that Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea might (or will?) eventually encroach on Indonesia’s maritime interests, pushing it to modify or altogether discard its traditional non-aligned posture and side with the US against China. I think there are good reasons to be sceptical of this picture.

Firstly, there’s little evidence that Indonesia feels as threatened by China as is sometimes assumed in Australia. Secondly, Indonesia would be unlikely to respond to a ‘China threat’ in the way that Schreer suggests. I’ll go through these points in turn. Read more

A cyber Pearl Harbor?

7 November 2013

Discussion of a cyberattack of such gravity to be considered a new Pearl Harbor or even a 9/11 moment is now almost clichéd.

For example, in early 2011, then CIA chief Leon Panetta warned the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that the next Pearl Harbor we confront could very well be a cyberattack that cripples our power systems, our grid, our security systems, our financial systems, our governmental systems.

A response to this threat has been the development of offensive as well as defensive cyber capabilities. The US has a large Government cyber security construct across civil and military agencies, including US Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Forces who, under the leaked US Cyber Operations Policy, have the authority to ‘defend the nation’ using both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. In September, UK Secretary of state for Defence Phillip Hammond announced that the UK will pursue the development of its own offensive cyber capabilities to deter would-be attackers, and supplement conventional strike, capabilities as part of a £500 million expansion of military cyber personnel (at a time of deep cuts to UK defence expenditure). While not wanting to add more hyperbole to an already overheated discussion, a possible outcome of developments like this is something of a cyber ‘arms race’, as offensive capabilities solely developed as a deterrent to such an attack would also function as strike capabilities in their own right.

Amphibious capability is exactly what Australia’s maritime strategy needs

6 November 2013

Hugh White got it wrong last week. He erroneously asserted that the two amphibious Landing Helicopter Dock (LHD) and three Air Warfare Destroyer (AWD) ships currently being built for the Navy are destined for a ‘pointless and unachievable mission.’ But last week’s offering is just more of the same anti-large ship rhetoric that Professor White has pushed over the last ten or so years. It’s an argument which is becoming quite weary. Here’s why.

Professor White’s assumptions are wrong. Australia’s nascent amphibious capability, centred on the LHDs, isn’t intended to land ground forces into high-intensity conflicts in Asia. And the AWDs aren’t exclusively designed to escort the LHDs in a major war scenario. (For this discussion hereon, I’ll focus on the amphibious capability. James Goldrick last Tuesday ably retorted Professor White’s misrepresentation of current naval thinking in another chapter of their ongoing banter worthy of reading!)

ASPI suggests special edition: Indonesia and spying allegations

6 November 2013

Last week, the furore over spying allegations revealed in reports leaked by Edward Snowden that rocked Europe reached Australia. On Thursday 31 October, Fairfax papers reported that Australia had been spying on its neighbour from its Jakarta Embassy.

Regional reporting has since been dominated by the strident reactions of Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa including the comment ‘it’s not cricket’. Last Friday, he sought an explanation from Foreign Minister Julie Bishop in Perth while Australia’s Ambassador to Indonesia, Greg Moriarty, was called into the Indonesian Foreign Ministry to ‘please explain’. The issue was further compounded on Sunday with reports that Australia and the US used a climate change conference to mount a joint surveillance operation on Indonesia in 2007.

Electronic surveillance of all by all

5 November 2013

The arcane world of electronic surveillance is suddenly prominent. Based on Edward Snowden’s comments, the media holds that America dramatically expanded electronic surveillance after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to include Angela Merkel, 35 other foreign leaders and the populations of France, Brazil, Spain and many others.

So what? The supporters of such types of surveillance claim that everybody is doing it. That’s not the soundest of arguments however, and it’s worth understanding why ‘everyone’ is so enamoured with the idea.

Machiavelli advised that any action was valued that advanced the state. The national interest should drive a state’s actions but these actions should be judged against the results achieved. Actions that weaken the state, that are reckless and that are indifferent to the range of possible consequences are deemed imprudent. The results achieved justify the actions taken; this is ‘the morality of results’. So for those that are international relations realists the question of electronic surveillance shouldn’t be related to some higher moral frame—or some obsession—but in terms of advancing the national interest. Success generates its own morality.