Preparing for the Afghan Surge:

Australian Interests and Strategy in Afghanistan

Edited Transcript of a conference by the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU

Old Parliament House, 5 March 2009

Morning Session: Coalition Strategic Objectives in Afghanistan

Graeme Dobell: All right well you’re all here to have fun, the man who has actually done all the
work is Stephan, who is about to kick it off; Stephan.

Stephan Frühling: Members of the diplomatic community, Senator Johnston, ladies and gentlemen,
let me welcome you on behalf of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the ANU to today’s
conference on Australian interests and operational strategy in Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan is now in its eighth year, and coalition combat units are now deployed in
Afghanistan as long as US combat troops were deployed in South Vietnam, and yet the war isn’t
coming to an end yet. This is two years longer than the Second World War and soon twice as long
as the First World War. For many of these years, Afghanistan was a holding action as the Coalition
concentrated its efforts on Iraq, although that is now changing. But that doesn’t change the fact that
Afghanistan is a long war by any standards, and certainly by the standards of Western post-cold war
societies and militaries. No one leaves a long war the way they entered it, be it governments,
militaries, or societies at large, and nothing concentrates the mind like the imminent prospect of
defeat; which the United States, and Britain, and the rest of the Coalition members faced in Iraq in
2006.

So if we think back eight years, theories that were fashionable in 2001 such as Rapid Decisive
Operations have long gone out of the window, and the long war is confronting policy makers and
commanders with some basic aspects of the Clausewitzian nature of war. And one of these aspects
is that ‘war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political
intercourse carried on with other means’. So policy changes war, but war also changes policy, and
rarely does a country enter a long war with the same goals as it ends it in the end. And this is where
the first half of today’s program is going to pick up. In a moment, Geoffrey Garrett, Klaus-Peter
Klaiber, and Andrew Shearer will review and discuss the Coalition strategic objectives from a US,
from a NATO, and from an Australian perspective. After morning tea, Frank Lewincamp will
introduce a wider discussion of what exactly Australia should today be seeking in Afghanistan in
the eighth year of the war.

But long wars also highlight the importance of strategy as ‘the use of engagements for the object of
the war’, because tactical excellence is simply not enough to win a long war, and certainly not a war
in which Western force levels are always going to be much below what traditional metrics suggest
are necessary. So in the US and British militaries, the experience in Iraq in particular has led in
recent years to a deep and sometimes remarkably self-critical introspection in terms of their
operational and strategic approach to these kinds of conflicts. The result is the revival of the study
of counterinsurgency as an operational strategy in both countries, which has informed the surge in
Iraq, and is now informing the revision of Coalition strategy in Afghanistan.

This context raises some important questions for Australia, in particular, how the ADF deployment
in Afghanistan, and especially the deployment to Orūzgān province, fit into this wider developing
operational level strategy. After the lunch break that operational aspect will be the focus of the

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second half of today’s session. Unfortunately there has been a change in the program in that session.
The Australian Army has informed us that no serving Army member will be given approval to
attend today’s event, because the policy response to a surge in Afghanistan is under consideration
by government. Therefore, my colleague Daniel Marston will present on the counterinsurgency
strategy in Afghanistan as it is developing in US and UK thinking, before we move on to a wider
round-table discussion introduced by Admiral Chris Barrie.

Before we begin with that program though, let me make a few remarks on the somewhat
idiosyncratic setup of this room. In order to allow an in-depth debate and to bring out the different
opinions as they exist on these quite important questions, we have invited this inner table of
participants. At specific times, our able and very disciplined moderator Graeme Dobell will ask
them to give their opinion on some issue or another. For the wider audience there will be the
opportunity to participate but no requirement to do so, both during the panel Q & As and the wider
round-table discussions. And finally we will produce an edited transcript of today’s discussions and
I would like to ask everybody who wants to receive it by email, probably by early next week, to
drop their business cards in the box provided at the end of the room. And with that, it’s my pleasure
to hand over to Graeme.

Graeme Dobell: Alright, if the first three could come and join us please; and I think Professor
Garrett is going first.

Geoffrey Garrett: It’s a real pleasure for me to be here today but I should make an important
observation at the beginning. Unlike many people in this room I’m not an expert in national security
matters, especially not in an operational sense. So there are two ways I can try to add some value to
this session – the first is to say some things at essentially the 10,000ft level about the US and
Afghanistan; and the second thing is to be as brief as possible to leave more space for the rest of the
conversations, so let me see if I can achieve that.

Let me start at the very highest level, maybe now its 10,000 meters rather than 10,000ft. I think
there are some profound ironies in the election of Barack Obama, but to my mind the biggest irony
concerns the mismatch between the forces and expectations that got Obama elected and the way he
is, and is likely to, govern, Obama rose to prominence as a result of his pristine anti-Iraq credentials
plus the fact that he gave a great speech in 2004 at the democratic national convention. He quickly
then became a global messiah , with the high-point being the quarter of a million Germans who
came to hear him speak in Berlin in July 2008.

This is ironic because most of what we know about the Obama presidency now, as opposed to the
Obama candidacy, is that it is going to be much more domestically oriented than anyone would
have expected and the world wanted, and that the division of time and effort between economics
and national security has tilted much more heavily on the economic side than anyone would have
thought.

So here is a person that the world was looking to for a new kind of global leadership. But my sense
about the kind of leadership that Barack Obama wants to show the world is a leadership that says
‘I’m going to lead by example at home, fixing my own house’, rather than being out there on the
world stage building new global coalitions to do new global things. Irrespective of how hard one
wants to push that line, it’s just clear that the US’s focus at the moment, and the president’s focus, is
obsessively concentrated on domestic economic issues. I was just reading an op-ed in the Wall
Street Journal this morning, the headline of which is there is a 20% chance that the US is about to
enter a depression, not just a recession. My sense is that will focus many minds.

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So that was my first point. My second point is that if Obama himself is going to be focused more
domestically than we might have expected, he knew he had to put together a very experienced
international team. I wouldn’t suggest that Obama in any sense is out-sourcing foreign policy, but
certainly if you look at his team the thing that one immediately notes is that there aren’t many
Obama-maniacs in the Obama foreign policy team. In fact, the only one who was with Obama from
the beginning, who made it to the end, is Susan Rice, Ambassador to the UN.

The Obama foreign policy team is an all-star Clinton plus Republican team. What are they going to
do? Well, it seems to me that Obama’s Afghanistan policy has more to do with winning an election
than with what is the right policy in Afghanistan. Last northern summer, Obama was really facing a
challenge: ‘I rode to the democratic nomination on the back of my pristine anti-Iraq credentials but
now I’ve got to convince the establishment and swing voters that I’m tough about national security’,
So how did he do that? ”Less Iraq more Afghanistan”. It was the perfect political stratagem. It was
the combination of that move plus McCain’s problems over ‘the fundamentally sound American
economy’ followed by the subsequent Lehmann Brothers collapse that ultimately tipped the balance
in Obama’s favour.

So less Iraq, more Afghanistan made good political sense. The question is – is it good policy? It
seems to me that the key question that is now being asked more overtly in the US debate than it has
been for a while is -- what is the mission in Afghanistan? And the mission as it is being re-defined
doesn’t look like the same mission that the US and the allies had in 2001, which had a sort of
visceral personal ‘lets get Osama’ flavour to it, but against a sort of pretty traditional ‘bad behaviour
that isn’t punished is rewarded, therefore we must punish bad behaviour’ backdrop. The bad
behaviour was state sponsorship of terrorism in Afghanistan, so the US and the allies had to
retaliate against Afghanistan’.

The problem with that seven years later is, well, you’ve retaliated, so what are you doing now? The
best place to look is the words at Robert Gates and Obama because the comprehensive policy
review is apparently ongoing but we don’t know what the result of that will be. So what have Gates
and Obama said?

I was struck by Secretary of Defense Gates’ essay in Foreign Affairs January/February 2009. Here
are a couple of quotations from Secretary Gates that I think are interesting and instructive.

“The United States’ ability to deal with future threats will depend on its performance in current
conflicts. To be blunt, to fail – or to be seen to fail – in either Iraq or Afghanistan, would be a
disastrous blow to US credibility both among friends and our allies and among potential enemies.”
That’s the first line in this Gates essay, it’s about credibility, not about winning on the ground, it’s
about how the world will view how we do.

Then Gate’s had something to say about Afghanistan, and the first thing he wanted to say was that
in Afghanistan as president Bush announced last September, US troop levels are rising, with the
likelihood of more increases in the years ahead. So Obama Afghanistan policy is an extension of
Busy policy and of course that in an important sense is personified by the continuation of Gates in
his role.

But then Gates says because of its terrain, poverty, neighbourhood and tragic history, Afghanistan
in many ways poses a more difficult challenge than Iraq. Now Obama has handed the Afghanistan
baton to Richard Holbrooke, and what did he say? Holbrooke said this is much harder than Iraq and
we have a big problem which is that we’re not so sure we can rely on the Afghani government, in
particular Karzai to help us through.

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So now we’ve had the surge announcement by the President. What should we make of that? My
sense is that both the President and Secretary Gates have been redefining the mission and reducing
expectations about what the goal is, probably with a view to making it easier ultimately for the US
to get out of the Afghanistan business.

On NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ last Sunday, Gates said that the goal in Afghanistan was a level of
stability which at least prevents it from being a safe haven from which plots against the US, the
Europeans and other can be put together. I don’t know what makes something a safe haven against
terrorism but it certainly doesn’t sound like victory.

A couple of days later, President Obama was on the PBS Jim Lehrer News Hour and he said that he
agreed with what Secretary Gates said on Sunday. But he added that this goal requires the entire
arsenal of American power: ‘we’ve been thinking very militarily but we haven’t been as effective
thinking diplomatically, we haven’t been thinking very effectively about the development side of
the equation’.

That reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearings, where she wanted to sell more Joe Nye
books by referring to ‘smart power’ as often as she could. If you are a US Democrat trying to sure
up your national security credentials, you can’t embrace ‘soft power’ but you can certainly have
‘smart power’.

What is smart re: Afghanistan policy? The first element seems to be putting more heat on Karzai.
But I’m not sure that’s so smart unless you know what the alternative to Karzai is, and I don’t know
whether anyone knows what the alternative is. Second what’s smart in Afghanistan is to say that
since all the allies agreed that this was a ‘right war’, its time for the US to ask the allies to deliver
on their commitment that Afghanistan is the right war. The third thing that’s smart is probably to
say that the surge is a temporary thing, not a permanent thing. We’re doing the surge to try and
create some stability that will allow us to do a serious policy rethink about Afghanistan – and that’s
the way that the surge is being spun.

If you put all this together, what do you think about the future? I wouldn’t presume to get inside the
President’s head in terms of what his gut instinct is on Afghanistan. But I would make three
structural observations about the US that have obtained in Iraq and will obtain with respect to
Afghanistan it seems to me. The US people are sick and tired of war. The military is over-stretched.
The country is going bankrupt.

Those three were the pressure points that led to a get out of Iraq policy being the winning policy n
the US. This is what happened re Iraq. People reasoned, we’ve got to figure out a way to get out of
Iraq that doesn’t look like a Vietnam from the rooftops exit, and the fact that things have stabilised
on the ground in Iraq is fantastic.

The American public hasn’t been thinking about Afghanistan at all. It was all Iraq all the time for
several years. And now it has been followed by myopic focus on the economy. I think you have to
expect in political terms that as the American public comes to understand what a real sustained
commitment in Afghanistan would be, political support for that sustained commitment will only go
down,. So if you think that’s right, if you think President Obama needs to execute his exit from Iraq
deftly, if he needs to deal with economic problems at home and abroad and he is committed to a
surge in Afghanistan, how would you execute all of that ? Well, it comes to the point of this
meeting. Obama will say to his friends and allies abrorad, this is the right policy, but we’re going to
need a lot of help.

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I wouldn’t presume to speak for the NATO allies. But I would just make a couple of observations
about the northern hemisphere. The first one is that my understanding is that Canadian politics has
been torn apart by the Afghanistan war for many years. And that there is a wing of the Prime
Minister’s party that says foreign entanglements are bad and that we should certainly be out. So my
reading of the tea-leaves is that asking for more heavy lifting from Canada in Afghanistan is a tall
order. Second, and I think this was true before the economic crisis, but it’s surely more true today --
even if Angela Merkel and her side of the government in Germany would like to be committed to
do more in Afghanistan German politics just won’t sustain that. I was in Berlin less than twelve
months ago as part of an American delegation. The view coming from the Germans was please
don’t ask us to do more in Afghanistan, because there are only two outcomes: either we don’t do it
and we get embarrassed publically, or we do it and we lose power domestically. That’s not an
attractive pair of options. Gordon Brown isn’t Tony Blair when it comes to the war on terrorism.
But in addition, Gordon Brown has now staked his political future on the G20 and solving the
economic crisis. It is hard to imagine Gordon Brown playing a Tony Blair like role in saying
Afghanistan is the right thing to do even if the British people are opposed.

I’d be happy to be pleasantly surprised about the northern hemisphere. But you go through the list
and you get to Australia pretty quickly it seems to me. I’m going to end my remarks right there.

Graeme Dobell: Well on the don’t ask, don’t tell note, we might turn to Klaus.

Klaus-Peter Klaiber: I thank you very much. NATO in Afghanistan. After the events in 2001 United
States correctly assessed that this attack on the United States had been masterminded by the Al-
Qaeda network which had established itself in Afghanistan with the help of the radical Taliban
government. A military coalition led by the United States removed the Taliban government in a few
months, NATO was not involved in this military campaign, NATO could not be involved because
at the time a consensus existed among member countries that NATO was a regional organisation
responsible for the safety and stability of the Euro-Atlantic area, since there seemed to be no
security threat for the alliance countries NATO could not be invoked for the campaign in
Afghanistan, but two years later, however, at the NATO summit in Prague this regional limitation
was not upheld, realising that the threat of terrorism threatened the security of all allies. In
Afghanistan it became apparent very quickly that the security situation in the country did not
improve satisfactorily after the establishment of the transitional government in Kabul.

Mandated by the United Nations an international stabilisation force for Afghanistan ISAF was
dispatched to the country to provide security and stability for the new transitional government and
help Afghanistan to get back on its feet after more than thirty years of continued strife and war. The
reasons for this unfortunate situation were three-fold; firstly, the mandate of ISAF was limited in
scope, the troops were deployed only in and around Kabul to provide security for the transitional
government, and major parts of the country were without international military presence, and due to
a lack of security much needed development projects in the regions could not be started, this also
led to the re-emergence of regional warlords. Secondly, the forces were very limited in size,
contrary to the military truism (which, by the way, was developed by the Chinese about 700 before
Christ) that is you want to be successful you have to go in with overwhelming forces. Thirdly,
command structure which foresaw change of command in six month intervals, did not provide the
much needed continuity of leadership needed in these uncertain circumstances. I think it was upon
suggestions of the Netherlands and Germany, I think, that NATO decided to take over the command
of ISAF, since then not only the number of troops has grown exponentially but their responsibility
has been extended to the whole of the country. As we speak, 56,000 ISAF troops are deployed in
Afghanistan with particular emphasis in the south of the country where resurgent Taliban and Al-

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Qaeda fighters are most active and try to unsettle the democratic elected government and to prevent
a successful economic restructuring.

Despite the considerable surge in numbers ISAF has not been able, so far, to create the peaceful
environment the Afghans themselves and the international community want to ascertain the new US
administration has pledged to dispatch another 17,000 troops, at the recent NATO defense ministers
meeting a number of European nations, among others Italy and Germany, have announced to also
upgrade their military presence in the country. What is the purpose of NATO’s presence in
Afghanistan? The alliance has tried to answer this question in a vision statement which was issued
at the Bucharest summit in April 2008, and this vision statement contains four main elements: first,
NATO will be engaged in the long term, there is no pre-defined end date of the mission, only an
end state, namely, Afghan national security forces [ANSF] are able to provide security and
sustainability in Afghanistan; secondly, increased responsibility of Afghan security forces; thirdly,
apply a comprehensive civil-military approach; and fourthly, a stronger involvement of
neighbouring counties.

How does NATO now intend to reach these objectives? At the moment, there are 70,000 Afghan
troops that have been trained in the last couple of years, mainly by United States’ experts, these
troops support the operations of ISAF, and since September 2008, interesting, the responsibility of
the security of Kabul city lies with the Afghan forces, not with ISAF. And it is important to note
that the national forces of Afghanistan are involved today in about 80% of all ISAF operations, and
that demonstrates very clearly the close co-operation and co-ordination between the NATO troops
and Afghani forces, and the objective of NATO is that the Afghani forces will have 80,000 trained
troops in 2010 and around 134,000 two years later. NATO has decided to increase its support for
the training of these forces, at present the alliance develops a comprehensive concept for training
and equipment support to the Afghani forces, at present, NATO entertains 49 operational mentor
and liaison teams, and to achieve the objectives of 134,000 troops in 2010 91 of these teams will
have to be sourced, and independently the US entertains 40 training teams in Afghanistan and it’s
clear that each support for the Afghan military is, and remains, the clear objective of NATO and is
the pre-condition of an exit strategy. In the same vein, the training of adequate police forces is
another priority.

Police reform is one of the most critical issues for Afghanistan’s security and stability, even greater
efforts are needed in this area, and law enforcement is a supporting task also for ISAF. The Afghani
national police have a key role to play in demonstrating the authority and capability of the
government to exercise effective control over the national territory, and according to a spokesman
of the Afghani government, the high number of casualties of Afghani policy underlines the urgent
need for better training, equipment and tactical employment; and as you all know, the European
Union is in charge of the training effort, 400 experts are envisaged to help with the training, at the
moment there are around 76,000 Afghan police in the country and the objective put forward by the
Afghan government is a number of 82,000. NATO’s vision statement also pleads for a
comprehensive integrated civil-military approach. The idea is to bring together the lines of
operation security, governance, and development. While ISAF, as NATO sees it, plays the lead role
in security, it has a supporting function in governance and development. Let me give you one
example there is a concrete NATO ISAF support for all counter-narcotics activities of the Afghani
government. There is a clear nexus of the narcotics trade and the financing of the insurgents. Each
year the insurgency benefits from an estimated 100-200 million US dollars from this trade,
according to NATO the nexus between narcotics trafficking and the insurgency is a security and
force protection threat, and therefore, a legitimate target, which means that ISAF is prepared to
support the Afghan government in taking action against drug labs and traffickers supporting
insurgents when asked to do so. By the way, the number of poppy free provinces in Afghanistan has

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increased lately from 13 in 2007 to 18 provinces in 2008; of course, there are altogether 34
provinces in Afghanistan so there is a lot of work to do.

The clear objective of NATO’s integrated approach is the close co-operation with the Afghan
government, and the Afghan government itself has agreed on a Afghan national development
strategy [ANDS] in its preamble it reads, and I quote, “there can be no government without an army,
no army without money, no money without prosperity, and no prosperity without justice and good
administration”. This sounds terrific; a joint planning and co-ordination framework among key
stakeholders has been developed in order to achieve a combined and concerted security in critical
districts, in the provincial teams and in ISAF headquarters development experts have been
dispatched to help implement this integrated approach. In this respect, the provincial reconstruction
teams as they are called [PRTs] are a key feature of the NATO ISAF operation and they play a
pivotal role in support the implementation of this development strategy, these provincial
reconstruction teams provide support to ministries, NGOs, and they carry out their respective
endeavours for the promotion of stability, economic development, and good governance, at present
there are 26 PRTs active in Afghanistan, however, I don’t want to hide the problem led by several
different nations with different priorities there is no real co-ordinated strategy of the PRTs and I
recall a debate of the Armed Services Committee of the US recently where Ambassador Dobbins,
who is now with the RAND corporation, argued that there has to be a complied and clear strategy of
all participating nations in these PRTs, and I couldn’t agree more with this assessment.

Now NATO, of course I must mention this, is fully aware that civilian casualties arising from action
by ISAF do have a very detrimental effect on the reputation of foreign troops in Afghanistan and
this is well known by all 44 contributing nations, ISAF makes every possible effort to minimise the
risk of any damage to property, injury, or loss of life to civilians, the soldiers operate under agreed
rules of engagement, to minimise these risks, and ISAF is constantly reviewing its tactics, its
techniques, and its procedures to prevent casualties and demonstrate respect to Afghan culture
without undermining the operational effectiveness or diminishing the right to self-defence. When
ISAF does cause civilian casualties or property damage NATO accepts responsibility, but the
problem of course, is militants deliberately target innocent civilians for suicide attacks and militants
launch attacks from civilian areas using civilians as human shields. Learning lessons from every
investigation into incidents, commander ISAF have revised its tactical directive. ISAF is to partner
with Afghan forces in all operations, it does so already with 80% of them and will increase this
participation, and there will be no uninvited entry into Afghan houses, mosques, historical or
religious sites, unless there is a clear danger.

Now some words on lines of communications. Recent attacks on convoys transporting equipment
through Pakistan in support of NATO ISAF missions have been highlighted in the media, and they
are indeed of concern to NATO, but as I learned, they do not present a strategic threat to the
mission, there are a number of other means available to re-supply ISAF forces in Afghanistan and at
present NATO are negotiating with other nations, namely Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to get
additional transit arrangements. Now some words on force generation, I think it is very interesting
to state that in the last two years the combined joint statement on requirements for the ISAF mission
has been updated four times to meet the evolving and changing operational demands, at present,
projection stands at a requirement of 74,000 troops in 2009, with a peak increase during the election
timeframe, and with the dispatch of additional 17,000 American troops and a number of additional
European forces I think this requirement will be meet.

Now a word on Pakistan; in the strategic vision statement for ISAF mission as agreed at the summit
in 2008, one of the guiding principle was the increased co-operation and engagement in the
neighbours of Afghanistan, especially Pakistan. There exists, which I learned only by going into the

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internet, a tripartite commission comprising military representatives from Pakistan, Afghanistan and
NATO ISAF to share information, to exchange intelligence with respect to border security. In
addition, there is a joint-intelligence operation centre in Kabul, in ISAF headquarters, staffed jointly
by officers from the Afghanistan national army, from the Pakistan army, and from ISAF. At the
moment, several joint border co-ordination centres are being established, and at present, ISAF
forces are frequently fired upon from inside Pakistan. In some cases ISAF employs defensive fire in
self-defence but ISAF forces do not enter Pakistan territory. The efforts of the new Obama, not to
confound with Osama, the new Obama administration in intensifying this co-operation between the
two countries in every respect can only be beneficial to both, the US, in my view, will have to play
a crucial role in this endeavour.

So I’d like to sum up now, and say that NATO’s engagement in Afghanistan is the alliances single
most important operation, this operation demonstrates the transformation of the alliance from a
relatively static cold-war orientation to an organisation capable of dynamic and flexible response
and geared to meet modern security challenges, all 26 allies participate with troops on the ground,
in addition, ten partner counties plus three contact nations, among them Australia and two Arab
nations, provide support. As I mentioned before, there is no pre-defined end date for the mission,
only an end state, when the Afghan national security forces will be able to provide security and
sustainability without ISAF support. Thank you very much.

Andrew Shearer: Thanks Graeme, well as the third speaker on a panel there are advantages and
disadvantages, among the disadvantages are that following two very good speakers you have to
scramble to think of new interesting things to say. What I’ve been asked to talk about is Australia
Afghanistan and our alliance with the United States, and I think it’s interesting in that when we get
together this morning to start talking about Afghanistan we actually start talking about Washington,
our conversation starts with Washington, and that tells you something obvious it tells you that the
alliance has been at the forefront of our involvement in Afghanistan since October 2001 when the
former Prime Minister announced our commitment and when historically Australia invoked the
ANZUS treaty, the first time that has ever happened, and it was invoked in circumstances its fair to
say its drafters would never have contemplated. I think it’s also fair to say that the unprecedented
closeness, breadth and depth of the alliance today owes much to our involvement in Afghanistan
and Iraq, and I think that’s the fascinating backdrop that faces Prime Minister Rudd as he packs his
bags to go to Washington on the 24th of March because it seems to me that the Prime Minister faces
a rather exquisite dilemma, and what I want to do today is just take you through some of the things I
think he’ll have on his mind as he navigates that dilemma.

Going back to the quality of the alliance, my starting point is that Australia’s alliance with the US
survived the withdrawal of our combat forces from Iraq and it would survive the withdrawal of our
combat forces from Afghanistan, but the whole point of the alliance is not whether it survives or not,
the point of the alliance is what’s the quality, what’s the enduring value of it to both sides, how does
it adapt to contemporary circumstance, and that’s where I think the dilemma comes in. I think there
a quite a few factors pointing to an increased Australian contribution in Afghanistan and I would
expect to see announcements come from that meeting in Washington later this month front and
centre US expectations I think we all know that the Obama administration has many suitors, I think
getting the attention of the Obama administration is going to be a huge challenge for Australia and
its other allies for all the reasons that Geoff outlined so eloquently and I think that will be front and
centre for the Prime Minister when he is there.

The demand for coalition forces I think is another factor we’re hearing about the increase in US
forces in Afghanistan as a surge, I actually think that’s an error, I don’t think it’s a surge, I don’t
think this is a temporary increase of the type that we saw in Iraq, and I think that the US military

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planners, if you read carefully what they’re saying in testimony and so on are talking about a
sustained increase in US force levels so if we are to increase our forces it seems to me we need to
do so planning that it will be a long term commitment. I think strategic consistency is a factor, and
Geoff touched on this, but if I could be a little bit controversial both the Obama administration and
the Rudd government when they were in opposition chose to benefit politically from the
unpopularity of the war in Iraq and the way they did that was to highlight the importance of the war
in Afghanistan that’s an acceptable political strategy but it means that once you get in to
government you have to live with the reality you’ve created.

I think another factor for Australia in this is that we have capacity. The excuse that we might have
had four or five years ago of concurrency pressure elsewhere in our own region; in East Timor and
Solomon Islands and of course in Iraq is pretty much gone, so the argument that the cupboard’s bare
we’d love to step up and send more troops but we can’t really won’t fly and I think people know
that. Another key decision point is military necessity, now I’m not right up to date with this, but it
seems to me the Dutch are pretty much set on departing Orūzgān which is the province we’re pretty
much operating in 2010, that’s next year in military planning terms that’s kind of like tomorrow. I
guess it is possible the US is going to step in to that role, but I’m also guessing that the US
preference would be that another country do that, an the obvious country is the country that has
been operating there for some time now, and that’s a very sizable commitment if we do take it on,
and I’ll leave much more expert military commentators to talk about what it would mean. I think
there is another couple of factors driving a bigger Australian contribution, one is – and Geoff
touched on this – credibility is key to this whole Afghan operation it seems to me and wider
international credibility is a factor here, seems to me we can’t really keep flaying Europe’s NATO
members for not doing more while saying that we’re very comfortable, thank you very much, with
our existing commitment even though it is a reasonable one. And I think that’s particularly the case
given the inadequacy of Australia’s civilian response in Afghanistan. Klaus talked about the need
for an integrated civil-military approach in the country and the government has talked about that but
around the time I finished working in the government we had, I think, two diplomats in Kabul
operating on a fly-in fly-out basis in a temporary embassy accommodation, we’ve got, I think,
twelve AFP officers in the whole of Afghanistan, and we have – as far as I’m aware – no aid
workers operation on the ground in Afghanistan, we have people going in and out reasons for that
are obvious, it’s to do with security, it’s to do with complicated conditions of service issues,
insurance issues, et cetera which make it very hard for Australia to deploy civilians but frankly it’s
not a very strong effort.

What are the factors on the other side, because that would seem to be a pretty strong argument for
Australia stepping-up. The most obvious one is that the wars not going well, Geoff mentioned it, the
Obama team is talking down expectations, we’re seeing an increasingly sophisticated and lethal
range of methods employed by the enemy in Afghanistan we’re seeing a government palpably
struggling at the national level unable to deliver services, unable to provide basic security for its
people, including in Kabul the capital, there is a lot of evidence, I think, that we’re – as a coalition –
starting to lose the battle for hearts-and-minds, we’re being outplayed in information warfare, and to
make matters worse the situation in Pakistan, which for a long time I think we thought was kind of
the secondary front to the war in Afghanistan maybe turns out the be the primary front, and as we
saw in the attack on the cricket team the other day, that situation just gets worse and worse. I think
too there is an open question as to whether this new coalition strategy will work, it may help the
causation is contested by the experts but I think there is broad agreement that the surge worked in
Iraq but circumstances in Afghanistan it seems to me, are very very different, it’s not clear to me
that there is a viable political accommodation to be had in the war in Afghanistan and the way that
perhaps there is now emerging one in Iraq.

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I think it’s pretty clear that despite a couple of increased European contributions announced recently,
we’re not going to see a major stepping up of European forces to help with this sustained increase
of coalition forces. It seems to me that the traffic is rather going to be the other way over the next
couple of years I think as the nature of the war has changed coalition government have really failed
to develop a compelling strategic rationale for being there, why are we there, what are we trying to
do, how are we going to measure progress is the cost worth it? And I think a lot of our societies are
struggling with casualties which might be acceptable and worn by the public if they had a clearer
sense of what the end point was and that we were moving toward it, and again I think that Iraq is a
salient example there. Once there was a sense that the security situation there was improving and
that it was worthwhile a lot of the heat went out of the debate, and I think related to that has been a
collapse of public support for the war in Afghanistan; our polling at the Lowy Institute last year
showed, for the first time, a majority of Australian’s opposed to being in Afghanistan and I found
that a bit surprising I mean I thought the debate on Iraq would have sated the public’s desire to see
forces come home but it seems that once that trajectory was resolved they just moved on to the next
thing and that polling was done in July last year and I find it very hard to believe that that has not
got worse, that picture.

Two more things that I think militate against stepping up are military concerns, and again I’ll defer
to the experts in the room but I’ve never detected a big appetite in defence or in the ADF for a large
brigade sized ongoing contribution in Orūzgān, it’s a very very large undertaking there are lots of
enablers required to do it and as I’ve said the duration is completely uncertain. Lastly, we’re very
constrained in terms of what we can do in terms of stepping up with civilian assets, so I think it’s a
genuinely very difficult situation we are it seems to me approach something like a moment of truth
in our national commitment in Afghanistan and what’s needed I think is a serious cold eye strategic
appraisal of our national interests and our goals, we’ve got a lot of interests invested there and I’ve
talked about the alliance I personally believe that the global security paradigm has shifted and an
example I like to use is the attacks on the British, American, and Australian missions in Singapore
that were disrupted off the back of intelligence gained in caves in Afghanistan from coalition
military operations I think the point that the reach of these networks is global is genuine and for that
reason I think the threat has changed and that we do need to take a more geographically and
thematically expansive view of Australia’s security.

We’ve invested blood and treasure in Afghanistan as a nation and I think it’s important not to lose
sight of that, particularly in terms of the very real commitment of the military and their families.
Western failure in Afghanistan would be a major symbolic victory for terrorists and a major
strategic defeat for the West and lastly the nature of the conflict has changed so that it’s a very
difficult set of decisions, the rest of today is really about the solutions, but I might take the
advantage of having the floor to throw a few out there, seems to me on the military side the key
question is whether we step-up in Orūzgān or not, and that’s very difficult, who would partner us,
where would be get the helicopters, the artillery, the life to stay there how long could we keep a
force like that there, what arr ether implications for our reserve capabilities if something else
happens unexpectedly, what would the objective be, does the coalition really have a strategy that
can succeed at the national level in Afghanistan, how would we measure progress, can we really
win? And it’s not clear to me that government’s really preparing the Australian people to wrestle
with those questions right now.

Either way I think we need to step up our commitment to training both of the military and police,
Klaus talked about the sort of targets that NATO has for training, I personally think that the size of
the military that’s envisaged is probably too small, and I think Australia can do more on training,
we can send a larger army training team there and we can do more on the police. I think it’s
imperative that we make a serious civilian contribution there’s not been much scrutiny of it but our

10
level of civilian involvement really is pretty inadequate, we really should have a proper embassy in
Kabul and it should be properly staffed and we should be able to – after now nearly two decades of
deploying people on stabilisation operations – it shouldn’t be beyond our wit to find ways to deploy
civilians, even where security is a problem, I think we need to refocus our efforts and the provincial
level and get more of those diplomats and aid workers into Orūzgān, and I think that lastly we need
to develop a clearer regional strategy, we need to take the problem in Pakistan more seriously than
we have and above all the government needs to develop, I think, a clear public case for our
commitment there, what we’re doing and a way of keeping the Australian public better informed
than they are. Thank you.

Graeme Dobell: Alright now, the moment of truth is not coming for the rest of you in the room just
yet. What I’d like to do now, you’ve had three really excellent presentations laying out the terrain,
you’ve got a chance now to throw some darts and ask some questions; so I’ll throw the floor open
and let’s put these guys through their paces for a while. Who wants to go first?

Richard Brabin-Smith: Could I pick up Andrew’s final point. You talked about the need for a
regional strategy including a contribution with respect to Pakistan. Do you have any views on how
Australia might interact more and more profitably, as is the saying with more benefit, with Pakistan?

Andrew Shearer: It’s a good question Brab, I mean the first thing to say is that my view is that – and
I’ve said this to a table of Indians a couple of months ago and it didn’t go down very well – but it’s
Pakistan’s weakness which is the threat to us all, and it seems to me that in a way what is required is
almost a kind of Marshall Plan for Pakistan, you have to start building institutions that are credible,
you have to start building an economy, you have to start getting the grass roots level issues that are
driving this alienation fixed, because at the moment it seems to me, what we’re doing in
Afghanistan is kind of swatting flies as these guys come over the border for $20 a day, give them an
AK-47 and a few grenades and they’re just going to keep coming, and we hear a lot about
addressing the root causes of terrorism but it seems to me until we all take those causes in Pakistan
more seriously then we have a problem.

Now I don’t want to exaggerate Australia’s role, we’ve got limited resources – and indeed now
everyone’s got fewer resources than the had six months ago – but we don’t do a huge amount in
terms of aid in Pakistan, we don’t do a huge amount in terms of help for their security forces
training, and so forth and I think there are probably some niche areas there where we could target
fruitfully in a well co-ordinated way with other donors.

Graeme Dobell: Dr. Klaiber, have you any thoughts on NATO and Pakistan?

Klaus-Peter Klaiber: I think NATO and Pakistan is not so much the issue apart from these specific
regional efforts to stabilise the frontier as such, but in reality I would personally agree with what
Andrew said, that the key issue of stabilisation of Afghanistan lies today within Pakistan, but there I
feel that the strategic efforts of the United States is of crucial importance and it has to be led by the
United States to convince the Pakistani government to change their tact to maybe accept much more
foreign assistance, also military assistance, but this is going to be very difficult indeed, but it’s
essential and I feel if the international community and especially the United States and maybe some
of the coalition partners cannot put enormous pressure on Pakistan it will be very difficult as well to
stabilise Afghanistan if you had listened to a report by an Australian journalist who recently visited
these remote areas in Pakistan, I think he came to the conclusion that at the end of the transmit that
he fears that if things go on unchanged the Pakistan state could fall apart, and very soon. I think this
is a frightening, very frightening, prospect for any involvement in Afghanistan.

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Tom Gregg: Thanks, just to the panel generally, we’ve seen the appointment of Karl Eikenberry as
US ambassador to Kabul – which I think is a good appointment – but we now have Holbrooke as
the Special Envoy. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on these appointments by Washington. You
now have Holbrooke with a direct link to Obama, to work in Kabul and he has been very outspoken
on Karzai, and you have Eikenberry, who has one of the closest relationships to Karzai of any of the
ambassador’s, I’m just interested in how you see that playing out?

Geoffrey Garrett: On this one I don’t know. This is a bigger question about the Obama
administration, isn’t it? You’ve got a lot of power in the Whitehouse, you’ve got a lot of power out
in the departments, you’ve got a lot of overlapping jurisdictions all over the place. My sense about
Obama’s overall view on how this should work is ‘I want lots of robust discussion behind closed
doors, but as soon as we decide I want the iron clad discipline to obtain in terms of message and
execution’. So turning on Karzai must have been a thought through position on the Obama side, and
that begs the question what were they thinking about, what’s the end game there? I don’t know if
anyone in this room has a view on this end game; maybe Bill Maley does.

William Maley: Just on that particular point, I think one of the little-noticed features of internal
politics within Afghanistan in the moment is how many of the potential contestants for the
approaching presidential election actually have power bases in Washington rather than in
Afghanistan alone. People like Ali Jalali, Ashraf Ghani, (and even Zalmay Khalilzad’s name been
mentioned although that seems unlikely to me). Some of these are émigrés who have been living
away from Afghanistan for many years but are excellently connected to various circles in
Washington. And it may well be the case that a number have come to the conclusion that a way in
which to position themselves optimally as competitors in the Afghan election is to try to trash
Karzai and his immediate associates in Washington, because if the view then spreads in
Afghanistan that Karzai is on the nose with the new US administration that may be to his
disadvantage. So there is that complexity which comes into play here as well, and Karzai, of course,
doesn’t have that kind of base, because he is dependent of the Afghan embassy in Washington,
which is not just representing him individually but the state of Afghanistan, and is an exceptionally
weak embassy anyway.

Andrew Shearer: Just an observation about Karzai, I mean I’m not here with a brief for him today,
but I think it’s salutary to remind ourselves that around about seven or eight months ago there was a
big public push to get rid of Maliki in Iraq and the bloke staged a kind of what everyone thought
was a clumsy kind of sortie down in Basra which, in hindsight, turns out to have been one of the
political and military turning points of the situation in Iraq, so I’m always a little cautious about
ditching people who we know and throwing our fortunes on the breeze.

William Maley: Just on that point, obviously of course it is for the Afghans to determine who their
president will be, and David Kilcullen, an Australian, in congressional testimony the week before
last, pointed rather effectively to the case of Diem in South Vietnam in 1963 as a negative example
of what can happen if outside powers begin to become excessively entangled in trying to pick
winners. I think there is, however, a deeper question with which the US administration is yet to
come to terms, which is that the Afghan constitution, by creating a strong presidential system, has
actually set up the state for failure.

The office of President of Afghanistan is actually one which is too exacting in its job description for
anyone to do well. Symbolic head of state, executive head of government, mediator between
multiple competing interests, many of which have international backers to promote them, it’s very
naive I think to think that changing the person at the top of the Afghan government is going to make
much difference at all if these structural problems are not addressed.

12
Klaus-Peter Klaiber: Well just one other reflection in this respect, I mean everybody knows that
within Afghanistan nowadays the Karzai administration is not considered to be very effective, it’s
corrupt, it’s not doing the job properly and it’s considered to be a puppet of the United States, and
that is the danger if the American government in the forthcoming election would take sides for one
or the other candidates, so if I would have to give advice to the American administration I would
not take sides in this election campaign at all.

Graeme Dobell: I suppose I’d only say having been around a lot of politicians that I wouldn’t
necessarily expect that Richard Holbrooke knew what the message of the day was, and even if he
did you wouldn’t necessarily be relying upon him to, so yes, there is always a danger to ascribed
well planned strategies to governments on the go, I find.

Peter Leahy: Thanks Graeme, I was taught a long time ago that the task of a General, and I’d say in
this state it’s the task of the statesman, is to define the nature of the conflict, what I’ve heard this
morning from the panel – and I apologise I was a little bit late – I see as mission confusion, the
confusion between the political change and policy change, the confusion between what we went out
to achieve in 2001 and then again in later events, it was about Al-Qaeda, it was about the Taliban
and the nexus that was there and I think there was tacked on to it ‘we better have some stability and
security because that’s a wonderful thing to achieve’.

If you look at Afghanistan largely Al-Qaeda has gone, the Taliban have a different task they have a
different approach, but they may have gone to Pakistan which presents a real problem; is that where
the task is now? And the security and stability seems to be there, but this mission confusion is, to
my mind, statements like ‘we’re not looking for a Switzerland’, ‘we’re not looking for a democracy
like ours’ and Angus Houston said last week I think he’d prefer to form planning documents and he
talked about something that is more akin to the tribal origins, I wonder if the panel, because as a
General I like to have a mission, I wonder if the panel have a clear view of what our strategy and
our mission should be, because I’m not seeing it at the moment.

Graeme Dobell: Well, you’re just about throwing us to the next session, but given that these guys
have done all the hard work they get two bites at the cherry, so let’s do ‘what is our mission’ very
shortly now, then we’ll go coffee, then we might really get into it next session; so, final words
please.

Geoffrey Garrett: I actually won’t go with what the mission is, but I’ll just underscore what you said
in terms of my sense of the American political and policy debate. There has been no discussion
Afghanistan for a long time. Iraq was the only question. Everything in the US was about Iraq, even
when the rest of the world didn’t care about Iraq any more. Then you flipped to the financial crisis,
so there hasn’t been, in my judgement, a serious discussion yet of Afghanistan. And of course
mission confusion and mission creep are a consequence of that.

Andrew Shearer: Peter you’re absolutely right I think, while I was putting my remarks together I
was trying to conceive what is the mission, I mean it keeps shifting, it seems to me we need to go
back to why we went there, we know why we went, Al-Qaeda were there, the Taliban were there,
we needed to get rid of the Taliban so we could get rid of the Al-Qaeda presence, it seems to me the
mission now has to be partly grounded in that and that is to present, it’s kind of a negative mission
in a way, but it’s to prevent Afghanistan again becoming that sort of safe-haven, and it seems to me
that to do that you need to achieve some other things and they are Klaus’s thought about credible
security forces that can stop people coming over the border and so forth, reasonable delivery of
services and so forth, so that there is legitimacy of the operation of those security forces.

13
But what we’re seeing so far in Washington is a very rapid back-peddling on what the end state
looks like and it just seems to me this looks more and more like, this seems very unfashionable to
say but, it seems more like a border policing operation that previous empires have conducted and
the problem of course is they conducted them in a world that wasn’t about the 24/7 instantaneous
media cycle and you know guys with mobile phones photographing civilian casualties and so forth,
it’s hard, and it’s going to be very hard for our societies to sustain casualties for that sort of very
opaque objective.

Klaus-Peter Klaiber: Well thank you very much, I would like to be an advocate of the devil and
argue that Australia is part of a NATO operation and NATO has a clear vision and strategy and it
has been developed in 2008 so I sometimes ask myself whether the solution of our problems is
really to develop a completely new strategy there is not much we can really do to change but there
is one clear objective of course and I think we all agree with that, if we leave the Afghanistan what
will happen then we will have a terrorist sanctuary in this part of the world and that would be
terrible for all of us. Therefore I think the vision statement which had been developed last year by
the NATO alliance and all member countries plus other participating nations including Australia
were in agreement with that, so I’m personally very surprised if something extraordinarily new will
come out of the strategic discussion in Washington.

Graeme Dobell: That is an excellent spot to lead us into the next session, and we’re now going to
have coffee.

INTERMISSION

Graeme Dobell: Just to give you the rules of engagement for this session. As Dante said, the inner
circle of hell is reserved for prophets and seers, and so the inner circle of hell today I am urging to
enjoy life on this Earth because the next life will be much more difficult, so we’re going to urge you
to enjoy yourself this morning. And the way it’s going to work is Frank is going to kick it off, and
when he is finished we’re then going to descend to the seventh ring of hell starting on my right with
Hugh White and we’re going to work around the inner circle and each of you is going to be given
about 90 seconds to answer a question that Frank is going to set up for us, and that question is:
“What is Australia trying to achieve in Afghanistan; what is our strategic objective?” A simple
question I’m sure you’ll agree, which you can all deal with in 90 seconds.

Frank Lewincamp: That question was a surprise to me too; I’ve just heard that for the first time. As
I understand my role in leading this discussion it is to be a bit of a spruiker or provocateur. I suspect
not much will be needed on this particular subject. Can I just take a slight exception to where we
ended the last session, where we said the issue now for discussion was the mission. No, the issue
firstly for discussion is policy - mission presumes a particular policy outcome so let’s just go back
to the policy questions first. I like Graeme’s formulation about talking about what Australia’s
strategic interests are, with the afternoon session about the mission itself and its implementation.
But I could say that if we do our job well this morning and we clarify the policies such that
Australia should depart from Afghanistan, then we can all take an early mark and take the afternoon
off.

I’ll make a few comments and they’ll be largely declaratory or assertive because I don’t have the
time to justify all that I might say to you now. Three brief observations about how we’ve got to
where we are now. Firstly, I think the initial decision to invade Afghanistan in 2001 merited much
more careful consideration at that time. You’ll recall that Bush’s speech to Congress in 2001 issued
an ultimatum to the Taliban as harbourers of Al-Qaeda. That was a unilateralist approach which

14
committed everybody else without any consultation. Now it may well be that in the end we would
have had no other option but I think that certainly merited further consideration at that stage.
Secondly, I don’t think the cause of Afghanistan was assisted at all by the diversion of effort into
Iraq in pursuit of the furtherance of the so-called war on terror. Thirdly, I was interested in the
discussion in the end of the period before - the effort in Afghanistan has not been aided by the
handling of Pakistan. We’ve consistently failed to deal with urgent issues in that country.

But we are where we are, so we must move forward from there. I was heartened to hear in Obama’s
speech to Congress last week, and I’ll just quote it, that he said “a new and comprehensive strategy
for Afghanistan and Pakistan to defeat Al-Qaeda and combat terrorism”. I don’t think the
combination of those two was accidental in the speech. Let me pose a tough question - is co-
operation with Pakistan still the answer, or is a more forceful strategy required in relation to that
country?

I was a little surprised in the outline of the conference today that there was no mention of Afghani
national interests. There has been no discussion of that, nor has there been any of Pakistan’s and
that may warrant a little bit of consideration during the discussion.

The focus of this conference is to clarify Australia’s interests and therefore our future policy
operational strategy. I’ll make the first obvious point about Australia’s policy options - there are no
clear, compelling or appealing policy choices available. What is the real issue for Australia? I don’t
think it is terrorism or the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan. The real issue is the US alliance
relationship, which Andrew covered. I don’t think the humanitarian or terrorism issues by
themselves are sufficient to justify Australia’s engagement in Afghanistan. Australia, I don’t think,
has a separate policy position; it certainly doesn’t have a clear, coherent exposition of Australia’s
strategic interests in Afghanistan, or at least not that I’m aware of. If there is a classified version
around in government, it’s been written after I left. What are the options for the US alliance in
Afghanistan? There are three, I think; firstly, the status quo; secondly, a revised military strategy,
including a surge or increased forces; and thirdly, withdrawal, partial or complete. The key issues
about the revised military strategy are what are the prospects, what is the achievability of the end
state, and what would success look like? I’ll have a shot here at defining four things where minimal
levels are required on an ongoing basis; firstly, internal political stability; secondly internal security;
thirdly, cross-border security; and fourthly, some sort of reconstruction and economic restoration.
These constitute broadly the end state that we’re looking for. We might quibble about the extent to
which these are achieved, but minimal levels in those four, I think, need to be achieved.

What are the implications or the options then for Australia? I think there are only two, each of them
broken into two further options. The first is continued participation; the second is withdrawal. So
on the first, ‘continued participation’, we can do that in two ways: one is the status quo levels, and
that’s tolerable from our point of view but trying to adopt a General’s perspective this doesn’t meet
the stated criteria for our military engagement elsewhere - there are no clear strategy or objectives,
no clear end point and it’ll be very difficult to decide when such an engagement would end. The
second option under continued participation is to participate in the surge. I think for Australia that
will be challenging – both militarily and politically. The second option is withdrawal. We could do
that in one of two ways; firstly, without the US; and secondly, with the US. Firstly, without the US,
the Australian dilemma then, as Andrew put so clearly, is at what cost to the strength and the
breadth of the alliance. Secondly, with the US - I think it would be a very welcome outcome. But
what is our capacity to persuade the US to go down that path?

15
I’ll make a final point. Withdrawal may be a strategic defeat - I think a number of people spoke
about that - but it may be far better to accept that defeat now than do it in two or three years’ time. I
trust that is sufficiently provocative.

Graeme Dobell: Well I Think that sets it up perfectly, and for a man who didn’t know what his brief
was I think he did that extremely well. No wonder you did so well in defence. Alright well, you
know the question, and to give you an example of how this is going to work, Hugh White your 90
seconds starts now.

Hugh White: Thanks mate, okay there are three ways you can approach Australia’s objectives: that
we care about the Afghans, forget about that; that we care about terrorism; and we care about the
alliance. On terrorism there are two questions, first of all, is the kind of strategic approach which we
have seen before – and whatever it might evolve into – credible, that is, if you succeed to you fix
the problem? If we succeed, for example, in Klaus-Peter’s account of the NATO definition, if we
succeed in building viable Afghan security forces do we succeed in limiting significantly the risk
that Afghanistan will become a haven for terrorism? I think the answer is almost certainly no. Even
if it wasn’t for the problem of Pakistan, and the people who somehow seem to see the linkage
between Afghanistan and Pakistan as good news, ‘oh that’s a relief, now we understand the problem
we’ve discovered we can’t do anything with a state of 30 million people, and we’re starting to think
we’re going to do something with a state of 180 million people, and nukes’. That makes it harder,
not easier. The second question about terrorism is, ‘is it achievable?’, even if I thought that first
objective was credible, ones chances oh achieving, even in Afghanistan, the level of security forces
adequate to deliver the kind of outcome we’re after is very low and I just make this observation,
there has never been in history an armed force or security force that was better than the government
it served, and the idea that we can build a stable Afghanistan by building a strong security force is I
think to put it precisely the cart before the horse. You have to have a strong government before the
security forces can do anything for you, so that takes us to the alliance. I agree that what we decide
in response to the kind of request we’re likely to get from Barack Obama is not in itself an alliance
buster. We can say no to increased forces without destroying the alliance, what it will do is affect
the way the alliance works, and I, like others, think the alliance has always been the question.

If our aim, and I use that plural pronoun a bit loosely, if our aim is to build with Barack Obama the
kind of relationship which John Howard had with George Bush then saying yes is extremely
important, this will be the most important question Barack Obama puts to Kevin Rudd in his first
term and if Rudd wants that kind of intimacy he’d better say yes and say yes in a pretty big way.
But that’s Rudd’s interest, not ours. We don’t need to have that kind of intimacy with a President,
Bob Hawke didn’t have it with Ronald Reagan for example, and the alliance flourished very nicely
under Hawke, so I think we need to ask ourselves a deeper question, where – more broadly – do we
want the alliance to go? And in my opinion, the most important issue in the future of the alliance is
how we can discuss with the United States the evolution of strategic issues in Asia, so the question
is how does our position on Afghanistan affect that, which is a really big question for Australia, and
my argument would tend to be that pulling out would do damage to our credentials in discussing the
future of Asia with the United States but surging is not necessary so my answer is we’ll stick with a
thousand.

Graeme Dobell: Patrick Walters what is Australia’s strategic objective in Afghanistan; your time
starts now.

Patrick Walters: I think it’ll be very difficult for Kevin Rudd to contemplate any kind of drawdown
in our forces in Afghanistan. You’ve only got to look at what he’s said in the year or so before he
took government, and what he’s said since, I don’t think that while there has been some stepping

16
back from the notion that Afghanistan is terror central, the way the PM views the alliance will mean
that we will be there, we will be there for a long time. I think we can talk about later on the
prospects in terms of our military involvement, what that might mean, but just in terms of the
alliance I think there really is an expectation on the American side that we will do more. That is
certainly based on my discussions I’ve had with senior American officers recently. Now of course it
is a political question, but I think there really is an issue of alliance management here. Should we
seek to limit our involvement or indeed draw down our involvement. I think that is not something
that Rudd can contemplate with any degree of confidence in terms of the way that would be viewed
in Washington. But in terms of Orūzgān, there are some real issues there; perhaps we could talk
about those later

Andrew Shearer: Thanks, I don’t think I’ve got a whole lot to add to what I said before. Hugh’s
comment about what sort of alliance we want, what is the quality of the alliance that we want, I
think is key here. The benefits of intimacy that was present in the alliance over the last ten years or
so Hugh and I might differ on slightly, but I think you can point to very substantive set of
institutional gains from that, seems to me, Rudd faces a choice, are we happy with banking those
institutional gains and then dropping to the second tier, back to where we were – frankly, the second
tier of US allies. I think the problem for Rudd in choosing to do that is that he has got a very
ambitious declaratory foreign policy; he wants to influence post-Kyoto climate-change framework
for the world, he wants to influence the post-September 15 financial institutions for the world, I
don’t see how he does that without having a pretty intimate relationship with Barack Obama, unless
you make a different judgement that is, that Obama really not going to deliver so as I said before I
think Rudd’s dilemma is exquisite, if I had to guess I’d say he’d do something bigger than stick
with the status quo.

Lesley Seebeck: Thank you. I tend to agree with Andrew that this is a difficult problem it’s getting
worse and it’s going to challenge the government. We’ve had it fairly easy so far. I don’t think our
interests in the region have changed; I think they have adapted and morphed as one would expect
when you confronting an adaptive intelligent enemy. We still have a clear interest in stability in
that region, not least because we’re dealing with the imminent collapse of a state that has nuclear
weapons and we’re seeing a revitalised Jihadist insurgency and one which is proving that it can pull
apart established nation-states. Therefore, I think we have an ongoing strategic interest in
participating in that area, we share interests with the United States in that, and we act in
Afghanistan within the alliance in that framework. Therefore, in terms of the specific policy
question about do we do more do we do less, I agree with Andrew. I think we’re going to be doing
more, but I also think we’re going to have to be smarter about how we do more. At the moment
we’re still utilising what are essentially conventional state forces and putting them into a situation
where we then attempt to engage in counter insurgency operations. We don’t have sufficient
civilian capacity, we haven’t adapted to many of the new innovations that are evident in the British
and US forces, and we therefore are also confronted with a transformation issue of our own as well.

In terms of how we operate with the US I think that we’re going to operate more closely. If we
don’t we’re not actually going to be able to fulfil even the tactical measures of success we set
ourselves. I have to admit one of the things that struck me in the discussion this morning was that
we kept talking about how we’re going to ‘win’ this war. We have to get away from that sort of
language: this is a long war—and even simply labelling this as a ‘long war’ provides the
psychological understanding that you looking at a new future, you have to adapt, and you have to
change. Simply attempting to continually measure success invariably lends itself to a tactical and
operational level of understanding and doing so risks continually ‘failing’ because conditions
change. Thank you.

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Jim Molan: I think there are four reasons why Australia should do something, and they’ve all been
mentioned before; humanitarian, self interest, and the alliance in any way that you want to put a
weighting on those. The last one I would add is political integrity, and that’s just a cheap shot,
really, if you say you’re going to do something then you ought to do something. But there is
absolutely no point in getting the strategy right, even generally right, unless you match it and alight
it down so that you have an operational outcome that matches your strategy, we have got our
strategic guidance in Australia right for many many years, but we’ve never done anything to
actually realise it at the level, so at the moment we have a declared strategy which I think is as Dr.
Klaiber described it, we’ve got an actual strategy, which I believe is a holding strategy in Iraq and
this is not Australia, this is the big broad picture, it’s a holding strategy until we can figure out what
our strategy is and until we can get some resources together, then somewhere in there, and we might
discover it here, is a best strategy, and I believe that that is a strategy to win, and I understand what
Lesley says, but it just depends how you define win, and I’d love to define win later on, that would
be matched by an operation strategy or plan which is really to achieve security and then to get into
the clever parts of counterinsurgency, and then to hand over to the Afghans and the tactics is all
about the kind of sayings people have like clear, hold, build, all those clever tactical things that you
do at the bottom level, but the mission, really in – in my view, regardless of how we want to put it,
regardless of whether its declared – is control of Afghanistan, who in the end, controls Afghanistan,
is it the warlords, is it going to be the Taliban, is it going to be some form of imperfect democratic
government and therefore the people?

Daniel Marston: I’m just going to talk quickly I put in quickly because I’m going to be touching
upon quite a few of these issues later in the afternoon, the first point I’d raise is yes, it is an alliance
issue. I’m an American who works with the Brits as well, we do look at Australia and I can see that
it is an alliance issue. It is a question I think that Australian has to figure out if its going be a team A
or team B alliance partner, and some of the European partners are definitely team B now, but quite a
few Australian officers and senior politicians have stated that they want to be on team A with us.
This was the good war for Rudd, this was the good war for Gordon Brown, this was the good war
for Obama. Now people are saying we have to see it through and try to change the strategy, there is
a changing strategy and I’ll cover some of this later this afternoon. It has been a holding action,
exactly what General Molan has said but it is developing a strategy bottom-up and Australia needs
to figure out whether it wants to be team A or team B.

William Maley: Thank you, I think the ‘holding action’ line is a useful one because it drives home
the point that looking for an immediate route to a particularly-defined notion of victory is not
always fruitful. This was the fatal mistake that Basil Liddell Hart made in the first half of 1940,
when he could not see any way of defeating Germany and therefore advocated that one should try to
cut a deal, whereas Churchill had a wider vision, which was that the wider political situation might
reconfigure in such a way as would change the relevant balances. Here I think the equivalent is
dealing with the problem of sanctuaries in Pakistan: the further one gets from the border between
Pakistan and Afghanistan the quieter the country becomes.

There is bad governance and corruption in the north of Afghanistan but there is not an insurgency,
and part of the problem here is that very few governments have been able to work out how to deal
with a particularly difficult elephant in the room, namely a failing, roguish, nuclear armed state,
which will eat alive the civilian politicians who make up the weak part of the Pakistani state, but not
necessarily address the problem of the strong part of the Pakistani state, namely the Inter-Services
Intelligence Directorate which is not a weak organisation at all, and which is up to no good. David
Sanger in his recent book, recounts from an American intercept the army chief in Pakistan in
conversation with President Musharraf in May 2008 referring to the Haqqani network as a ‘strategic
asset’. That’s the kind of thing that needs to be confronted. In terms of Australian forces, very

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briefly, Frank has outline a sort of continuation scenario and a withdrawal scenario, I think we
should also put a reconfiguration scenario on the table, namely, asking the question of whether we
should be putting all our resources into Uruzgan, or whether it might actually be possible to achieve
greater political capital by investing in some activities in some of the areas of Afghanistan which
are less threatened - because at the moment in Afghanistan there is a great deal of anger on the part
of people in the quieter parts of the country who see that although they have made an effort to get
their act together and deliver better governance, all the resources are flowing to the rougher areas,
which is not a good signal to send in the long run.

Rod Lyon: I’d like to go back to grand strategy just for a second to ask why was it that we went into
Afghanistan at all. And it seems to me that the reason we did was that we agreed with the
assessment that was being made in Washington that said we have a direct strategic interest in
stopping global range strategic threats emanating from the ungoverned spaces of southwest Asia.
Now I think that’s the problem we have to focus on, and conflating it with the possible collapse of a
nuclear armed Pakistan and a whole set of other problems in the region, we have to beware of
rolling too much together here. The US still judges that interest as being amongst its vital interests,
so our key ally judges that grand strategic problem as still being a very important one for it. How do
Australians think about it? I don’t think we’ve honestly had the debate much, we tend to focus
naturally a little bit on our region and on the shifting power balance in Asia, but it’s wrong to think
that all strategic problems boil down to classic Napoleonic great power balance ones. I think we do
share with the US that strategic interest at the grand strategy level about handling a new class of
strategic threat, and I think we ought to prepare ourselves for the long haul of finding mechanisms
for dealing with it.

Peter Leahy: The quandary here is that as a middle power, or an aspiring middle power, it is
difficult to maintain an independent strategy or mission. In some ways our strategy is do we
participate or not, in someone else’s conflict, and that is really what Australia has done, I think, in
much of our history, so to me the issue is, do we like what somebody else has said we’re going to
be doing, if we don’t how do we influence it to get it to a stage where we can accept it, or do we not
participate? Well, what would we like to see that broader strategy, I think the first thing is deny
Afghanistan to the terrorists, that was the original mission and I think that has to stand, to do that
needs to be the development of the Afghan security forces, but I don’t think that to have a nation
you have to have an army and that prescription we heard out of the Afghan constitution, I’m not
sure I agree with that, so the sequence isn’t quite have a nation have an army, but you need security
forces because that’s part of the exit strategy. But it’s then, very importantly, the humanitarian
mission that Jim has mentioned, people there need help, we are a country who are generous, we’re
open, and I think we can help people, but it’s to provide a platform for development, then we need
to figure out what are the metrics for development, and therefore when can we decide when it’s
time to leave?

But before we do all of that, I think we’ve got to do a few things; firstly, understand what is the
Afghan nation, I don’t know that, I’m not sure they do; we need to understand what will work for
them as a government; we need to decided whether the Taliban are part of the government, or
whether they’re part of the solution; I think the issue of the Taliban perhaps in 2001 that bit was
solved but aren’t we distracted by the Taliban now, and I agree entirely with some of the earlier
comments, we need to get civil agencies involved in this, it is a civil problem as much as it is a
security problem. So first point; we don’t control the strategy, we have to be able to influence it,
and my conclusion is we should be helping, we should partcicpate.

Klaus-Peter Klaiber: Well, as a non-Australian I’d want to make two comments in addition to what
I said already, I just wanted to state the fact that there are only, apart from the United States, there

19
are only seven other countries who are putting in more forces into Afghanistan than Australia, and
therefore, I think the Australian military presence is quite respectable; secondly, I would totally
agree with previous speaker who said that if we accept a kind of comprehensive civil-military
approach to possibly getting closer to a solution of our problem then it would be advisable, in my
humble view, that Kevin Rudd is travelling to Washington and proposes some additional assistance
providing economic help, human rights issues, and these are the issues where Australia has been
very strong in the past, and why not put the emphasis on this, and by the way there was one retired
American General, who in the committee meeting of the Armed Services Committee recently
mentioned, ‘well if the other nations cannot put more troops on the ground then I think they could
help financially or with development assistance’, and I think this is the message I would leave with
you Australians here.

David Johnston: Whatever our strategic regional objectives were when we undertook this operation,
we all accepted them as legitimate, valid, and worthy; and accordingly we committed to them, and I
think that is a very important point, that we are now committed. As I see it the three principal
motivators were; firstly, Afghanistan itself, but more broadly Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Iran
– a region that potentially is a very problematic for all of the players on our side; we also saw it as
vitally important to be a part of the ANZUS team, if you like, and to maintain our standing with the
United States; and lastly, I think we also saw some potential standing positives in our local region
here in Asia. The question that now confronts us is, ‘what will the end result look like?’, and I think
this is a very important question, and I venture the proposition that it will look something like Iraq
is starting to look like, there are massive differences between the two countries, but I think t here
will be, over some long time, much probably longer than Iraq, a governance issue, and we better set
about looking at governance issues in a much bigger way than we do, a governance, propriety, and
integrity that states to emerge flowing from the level of security that we can all provide.

Neil James: I suppose I begin with an advertisement, I mean the ADA first started talking about
what Australia should do when the Dutch go 18 months ago, so our normal lead on public debate is
well ahead. People are forgetting the wider moral vision here, we’ve been bludging on the
Americans for too long and we’re going to have to soon starting to deliver, but you’ve also go to
look at it from the point of view of the Afghans and I actually reject the argument that the Afghans
don’t come into this, and I’ve lived for a fairly long time in Pakistan and I know Afghanistan fairly
well, it’s in Australia’s interest to take over from the Dutch in Orūzgān, for the simple reason that
we don’t want the American’s to be the senior partners in the province: we’re better at
counterinsurgency than they are, it’ll help the Afghans better if we’re the senior partner, not the
Yanks. It will also mean that we will finally start to deliver more than rhetoric to the Americans, we
will no longer have a niche force or a token contribution, we’ll have an actually contribution;
because you don’t fight wars unless you intent to win them, all wars are a contest of will, and all
wars end when one side gives up, and this is why I’d reject Frank’s broad assumption that it was a
unilateralist operation in Afghanistan, this was a United Nations endorsed operation, the front page
of Liberation the communist-newspaper in Paris said “we are all Americans now”, after 9/11, the
wider political and moral vision here is that if we don’t tackle the problem in Afghanistan it will
eventually bite us on the bum as it already has to an extent in Bali and in Jakarta and Singapore, and
to some extent in southern Thailand and the southern Philippines.

We live next door to the largest Muslim country on Earth, luck they’re not all Islamists, however, if
the problem of Islamist terrorism isn’t tackled in its nest it will eventually come and affect us here,
or the risk of it affecting us here. You can’t be unilateralist and regard the Arafura Sea as a mote,
globalisation is total, you can’t have economic globalisation and communications globalisation
without looking at the globalisation of strategy, we can’t hide in Australia any more and we have to
get in there and win this war, and continuing to talk about ‘aw gees we might not win’ is not the

20
answer, because the people watching us, the enemy watching us, know that our Achilles heel is our
will, and it’s our will we have to strengthen. You know the counterinsurgency war in Northern
Ireland took 30 years to defeat the IRA but they were convincingly beaten in the end because the
will of the British never faltered and why our will should not, must not, falter in Afghanistan and
we should increase the contingent with a re-enforced battalion group with artillery and tanks, and
we’ll have to borrow some attack helicopters off the Americans because ours won’t be ready yet.

Tom Gregg: Thankyou, if Australia’s strategic objective in Afghanistan is the US alliance, then for
the sustainability of Australia’s effort I think we need to be pretty sure that the US has a coherent
strategy and clear objectives. And I think that right now they’re trying to define what their strategic
objectives are. If our strategic objective is more closely aligned with the Afghan national interest,
which would be stabilisation, economic development, reduced narcotics, this kind of thing, the only
way we’re going to achieve that is by the strengthening of the Afghan state. Right now – as we’ve
heard this morning – the Karzai government lacks capacity, it’s not just capacity however, it’s an
issue of political will, which is lacking greatly. Afghanistan needs to define itself, or address its
relationship, not just with Pakistan but in the region more generally, on counter-narcotics and
refugees with Iran, on counter-narcotics again and energy and other issues with its northern
neighbours, after three decades of war, Afghanistan needs to establish itself in the region again and
it hasn’t done so, so I think I’d agree with Bill and Andrew that in order to achieve stability it’s not
really going to be a military effort alone, it will be a military effort as part of a much greater
political strategy which will require an enormous civilian effort.

Geoffrey Garrett: What a fascinating discussion, I’m really glad to be here to be listening to it. I’ve
been struck, since I’ve been back in Australia, by the slogan of alliance management, as an end in
and of itself for Australian foreign policy. I guess my conclusion it is that it would make sense for
Australia to think about Afghanistan on its own terms, rather than about alliance management.
There was talk about slipping from the A team to the B team, and I wonder if that’s just about
prestige or about things Australia might want to get done. If it’s about what Australia might want to
get done, my sense about what most of the things that Prime Minister Rudd wants to get done with
Barack Obama’s help are probably not going to get done anyway. So what are those things? G20,
Doha, Copenhagen are all ones I think where the broad Australian strategy would be ‘we need some
global solutions and we need the US to take a leadership role’.

I think it’s unlikely that that will happen this year on any of those things. Can Prime Minister Rudd
and Australia be the China go-between for the US? The Chinese want to have bilateral relations
with the US, as does the US with China. Can Australia convince the US and Asian countries that the
US should be part of the East Asian Summit? I don’t see that. Is Australia positioned to become the
new Japan for Asia? I don’t see that either in the short term. So, if the reason you want to be on the
A team is because it’ll get the US to do heavy lifting for Australia based on the objectives that
Prime Minister Rudd has stated, I don’t see that that’s a good reason to be on the A team.

Stephan Frühling: I have a lot of sympathy for the plight of the Afghan people; but I think that if the
prime motivation is humanitarian and you want to improve the lot of mankind, Afghanistan is not
the place to start. The second point is that terrorism was a good reason to go into Afghanistan in
2001, but I don’t think it was a good reason to stay. I think certainly we’re now in a much better
position in terms of domestic counter-terrorism and in terms of international counter-terrorism
capabilities that we could manage the problem - and I guess that’s all that we’re trying to achieve
anyway - even if we’re not in Afghanistan. So I think that the main Australian objective in
Afghanistan doesn’t actually lie in Afghanistan, but it lies in the US once the war is over. I think
Australia’s main objective is for Washington to find a way of getting out of Afghanistan, whether it
is now or in the future, in a way that is not going to be followed by another two decades of self-

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introspection similar to the post-Vietnam period, and a retreat from external commitments. Vietnam
was primarily just a US operation, but certainly all allies have pledged that they will participate in
Afghanistan, and if the US gets out of Afghanistan we have to make sure it doesn’t get out with a
sense of betrayal by its allies. I don’t think Australia can afford to have a US who feels betrayed by
its allies and is reluctant to take up external commitments over the next few decades. That can mean
withdrawing from Afghanistan with the US now, or it can mean participating in the surge, but that
depends on events in Washington and not in Kabul.

Michael Evans: Well, all things are possible in strategy with the exceptions of incest and Morris
dancing. I think this is a very very tough one, this is a failed state threat, it’s a war of international
necessity, it’ll take a generation to resolve, if it’s resolved at all, and we should see our role there as
a security contributor, rather than a security leader – part of an international mandate, part of a
multilateral push. Our aim should be reasonably simple, we want to try and end, or help end, the
cycle of under-development and insecurity, that’s produced a terrorist state. You cannot leave this
place to fester because it will simply metastasise and spread. How should we proceed?

I think we should have a more focused regional strategy, I think we need to work more closely with
the Pakistani’s, particularly in training their forces in counterinsurgency, that’s one thing we can do
rather modestly. I think we also need to work very hard on local capacity building, because in the
end the Afghans need to own this problem. So for Australia we should put a great deal of effort into
police training, which is something which is often neglected in this kind of nation building, and
army training too, I mean we trained 16,500 Iraqis – there is no reason why we can’t train 16,500 or
even 20,000 Afghans. As for raising forces in Orūzgān I think we should be very cautious here, I
think we should proceed incrementally, I’d like to be convinced the strategy that’s going to be
developed over the next 18 months has a good prospect of delivering area control, reconstruction,
human security, and governance. If we have to contribute some small increase in combat troops for
that; so be it.

Richard Brabin-Smith: I find myself thinking that a bit more context would be useful; and I ask
myself what does the history of Afghanistan tell us, what does it tell us about what might be
possible? I don’t find this a particularly encouraging line of thought to go down; you can argue that
Afghanistan never has been a modern trouble-free state. Peter referred to it’s not going to be a
Switzerland; Kabul isn’t going to be a khaki-coloured version of Canberra. It’s a very artificial
country in many ways, something that we often lose sight of. There was, arguably, a period of
about 100 years of relative stability when Afghanistan was not much of a problem to its neighbours,
and not much of a problem to itself; that was achieved through, yes, military force, but more
importantly, political negotiation. This gets to the heart of the matter: one way or another, where
Afghanistan gets to is going to be through negotiation, negotiation with the disaffected tribal groups
in the eastern part of the country in particular. I don’t think it’s helpful to use the term ‘winning’
because I don’t know what ‘winning’ would look like. If you want to regard this as a civil war in
Afghanistan, which is tempting to some extent, again we need to ask ourselves, well, what does a
realistic end-state look like, I don’t even like the term ‘end-state’, but some kind of modus vivendi
between the various components of today’s Afghanistan.

So we need to be realistic, it seems to me, about what some kind of equilibrium state would look
like, one which would then allow responsibly-minded nations to decide they can take their troops
away. This is the context in which I conclude, yes, on the one hand, there are good reasons for us to
continue having elements of the defence force there; I’m happy for Australia to play its part as a (I
always used to choke on the phrase, but I’ll use it now) good international citizen. It is important
that we do this to the extent that we can, to the extent that our priorities allow. Yes, we should be
there with at least half an eye on the alliance with the United States. But let me emphasise that

22
there is much more to the alliance and its management than sending troops to central Asia. It seems
to me that my particular conclusion is, once we have a clarification of the context, you’ll be able to
decide with much more confidence whether our contribution is more guns, or rather to focus – as
many others have said around this table – on a greater civil effort. For example, which is one of the
areas in which we lead the world? Dry-climate farming. What’s Afghanistan like? It’s a bloody
dry country; maybe we should send a few more farmers there.

Chris Barrie: I’ve just got a few remarks to make. I guess in hindsight and reflecting on where
we’ve been, I think we should adhere to first principle of any military operation: you should never
start anything unless you’re prepared to finish it. And my look at what we’ve been through in
Afghanistan is because we took our eye off the ball when Iraq came along very seriously, and we
actually gave our opponents and adversaries an opportunity to regroup, reorganise, and rearm;
which has made the job we set out to do way back when a lot more difficult.

My second comment, I’d just like to talk about what it means to go from team A to team B, in terms
of the alliance. Those of us that have been around long enough know that when you slip from team
A to team B there are very serious consequences for dealing across a whole range of issues with the
US.

I think we have long regarded ourselves as being in team A, but nonetheless about two years ago
Prime Minister Howard had to ring President Bush in order to clear up a little security matter of
getting certain security access – and we’re in team A. And if you ask the sugar farmers of Australia
if the FTA has delivered to them you would also weep, so people from countries like New Zealand
who slip from being on team A to team B will tell you what it means not to be taken seriously in
Washington.

My first point, it’s going to take a generation to solve this problem; now either the problem we’re
confronting is intractable or impossible, and if we’re prepared to admit to that in these tough times
then maybe it’s time to get out, but if we decide that’s not the case then I think there are a few
things that follow. The first one is that we shouldn’t try to cherry-pick what it is we do. That is very
damaging to our reputation and I think most of us that have worn uniforms or wear uniforms know
that it just crops up that we are pretty good at being cherry-pickers. Years ago I had the wonderful
opportunity of accusing the United States of being cherry-pickers when we were going to East
Timor, so that was the only time I’ve had the chance to lecture my US colleagues on that.

Secondly, I think Australia does have a record of being a great exemplar, and it does seem to me
that there ought to be a lot more we can do, if we want to. And in this connection I was very
interested to read Kevin Rudd’s speech in October last year, where he talked about Orūzgān
province and demonstrating the importance of having a coherent military and civilian strategy,
something Australia has pushed for in discussions with NATO. It’s not a matter of either/or, nor a
matter of first and then the other: the civilian and the military effort are two parts of one strategy.
Well, Prime Minister where the hell are we on this civilian and military strategy because I don’t see
it. So we’ve got a lot of work to do if we’re going to be taken seriously.

Thirdly, it does mean to me if we’re serious about the work we think we want to do in Afghanistan
we’ve got to bring our resources to bear; and finally, work in the Australian community. I don’t
think we should underestimate the job that needs to be undertaken to sell a generational war to the
Australian community, after all, we’re going to need young Australians to help us solve this
problem, and if over time this becomes yet another political football we’re embarked on a very bad
strategy. It needs to make sense in the Australian community, so the cost – it seems to me – is not
about our treasure; it is about our will and our ideas.

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Frank Lewincamp: Just one concluding comment. I’ve tried to score that discussion as we went
around the table. I count that as unanimous for continued participation: one for the status-quo –
Hugh, on your own; one for re-configuration – Bill, I’m not quite sure whether that meant an
increase in our military presence or not; quite a bit of discussion about an increased civil effort, but
scored six for an increase in military effort and nine for staying with the level of military effort
undefined. So it seems to me unanimous around this table that we’re in this for the long haul.
Although there are quite different views expressed around the table about what precisely Australian
strategic interests and objectives might be, there seems to be unanimity that we stay there - only one
person status quo but a number of you actually not defining the level of military presence that you’d
commit to, but seemingly in agreement that there ought to be more effort expressed in civil terms,
increased civil effort.

Graeme Dobell: I think what we’ll do now is open it up a bit more so that we’ll bring in the outer-
circle of hell as well as the inner-circle, but Patrick wants to have a go first.

Patrick Walters: One quick comment about Orūzgān, where I’ve been twice in the last six months, it
really strikes me – we’ve been there for three-and-a-half-years – with a slight increment over the
last year or so. But when you go to Tarin Kowt what you notice is that really we aren’t actually
advancing the mission. Three-and-a-half-years since we’ve been there we still have no NGOs in the
town, we have no Australian Federal Police in the town, we have no real civil presence at all. It’s
our military who are doing some rebuilding, but as a military operation – and as a
counterinsurgency operation – I think frankly we’re just treading water. And when everyone talks
about upping the civil effort, I couldn’t agree more. But when your AusAID person is reluctant to
go outside the military camp, we really have to think about our foot-print on the ground from a
military perspective and we have to get that right. Because there is no way that AusAID or the AFP
or any NGOs are going to go in there, and stay there, and work there, feeling that one night they’re
going to end up with a bullet in the head.

William Maley: Just one point I’d like to make in light of Frank’s summation, which was very
useful, I think. We shouldn’t underestimate the significance in Afghanistan of the symbolism of
deployments and statements about them. Afghanistan is not like the 19th century: it is a very
connected society, seven-million people own mobile phones, 70% of the population listen to
international short-wave radio on a daily basis, and they are watching all the time for indications
about the directions from which the wind is blowing. It’s not at all implausible that reports of what
is being discussed today will be heard in a couple of day’s time within Afghanistan itself.

One of the implications of this is that it is imperative that Western government, when they are
discussing the Afghan issue, be extremely alert to ways in which what they have to say will be
received, because you can lose momentum very easily. One of the reasons we’re in trouble in
Afghanistan is not recent problems with the government but the loss of momentum back in March
2002 when the expansion beyond Kabul was blocked by the Bush administrations, very publically
with a news headline in the Washington Post which said, “Peacekeepers won’t go beyond Kabul:
Cheney says”. That was immediately picked up and read in Afghanistan as a signal that the
international commitment was not what it cracked up to be, and of course in neighbouring countries
that it would not be a bad idea to keep some power dry. So, as much as thinking about the numbers
of troops and the role of troops, we also need to think about what kind of signal our discussion of
troop deployments will send to ordinary people, who will then decide whether to throw their weight
behind the government, or do what many people think is wise and sit on the fence.

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Graeme Dobell: Call on John McFarlane, he doesn’t speak for the AFP but he is even more
dangerous than that, he actually knows how they think, John.

John McFarlane: Thankyou, the focal of this morning’s discussion has been on the military aspects
of Afghanistan, and I think that I just need to make the point that this is also the focal point of two
coincident, what the American’s call, ‘wars’, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, and we
certainly can’t ignore the narcotics problem. There are far more deaths globally from narcotics than
there are from terrorism, and the diversion of resources and the impact on society of almost every
country globally is substantially effected by the global narcotics problem. So I thought it might be
useful to make four brief points, based not on my own experience or that of the AFP, but based on
the UN office of drugs and crime annual formal report. In Afghanistan the opium population covers
193,000 hectares and in addition to that 70,000 hectares accounted for cannabis, the potential
production per annum at the moment is about 8,200 tonnes, which refines downs to 800 tonnes of
pure heroin, if you divide that by the amount of heroin and speed that you need for one shot, you
can see that the enormity of the…just under 2,000 tonnes, this represents, as far as the global
production of heroin is concerned 92% of the world’s problem, and on the cannabis side, which is
the more dangerous, about 32% of the world’s. The export value of opiates from Afghanistan is
approximately four-billion dollars which potentially represents, and I don’t quite understand the
economics of this, but it represents 53% of the Afghan GDP. So we’re talking about an issue which
is, from an economic point of view, is very substantial.

The number of households involved in Afghanistan in opiate production is 508,000, so the number
of people directly involved is 3.3million, which makes the problem of crop destruction and crop
diversion a substantial problem without an answer to which you can’t answer the opium threat. To
pick up, loosely, my second point, if approximately 100-200million dollars of profits of opiate
production each year go to the Taliban, this represents the biggest single…to the capacity of the
Taliban to operate. We have a government, in the Karzai government, with all respect to them,
which suffers from endemic corruption at all levels, and many of Karzai’s allies are involved in this
problem. We have a resurgence of the Taliban, facilitated by poppy employment, which is at least
40%. So if you take the simplistic view of ‘get the army, get the police, to go and destroy these
crops’ all you’re doing to pushing more people into the arms of the Taliban. So, to get to my third
point, this question that has come up today about police training is absolutely critical.

In any civil society going right the way back to Hedley Bull’s kind of most basic philosophy, in any
civilised society you’ve got the right not to be killed or injured, you’ve got the right to expect that
your property will be respected and you’ve got the right to expect that any agreements entered into
will be carried out. Now that the fundamental nature of any state or civilised community and in
order to provide the underpinnings of that, or the enforcement of that, it’s essential to have a good
quality criminal justice system; which means not only the police but the courts and the whole
canopy of law enforcement. So training policy is a critical element, but one of the problems of
police training is that they’re often trained by the military, in fact, I think the US Marine core – for
which I’ve got a huge respect – is actually spending considerable amount of resources to train the
Afghan police; but what are they going to train them in? Are they going to train them to become
proficient soldiers, or are they going to train them on how to be efficient when enforcing the law, in
an impartial and professional way in Afghanistan (without which there is no hope of a sustainable
government in Afghanistan)?

The last point I want to make is the confusion between two strategies, a former mayor of Kandahar
and before 9/11 under the Taliban, following 9/11 he switched sides and in 2002 he handed over
something like 15tonnes of weapons including 400 ‘Stinger’ missiles to the US, so as far as they
were concerned he was regarded not only as a supported of great value, but he also provided

25
valuable intelligence. In 2004 another element of the United States government, the Drug
Enforcement Agency, convinced the White House that this character was one of the ten most
prominent king-pins in international narcotics industry, he is regarded as the Pablo Escobar of
Afghanistan, so we get the complication in 2005, he was brought to the Pentagon for a de-briefing,
and as soon as he left he was arrested by the DEA and is not languishing, and will do for a long
time, in a federal prison, because of the lack of consistency in the application of two completely
different policies, the war on drugs on one side, and the war on terror on the other. And the
implication of this, of course, when you get back to the Afghan people, what sort of confidence can
an Afghan leader have of support for a military regime that can’t get their act together, and is
confused over what the mission is in Afghanistan, is it terrorism? Is it the global drug problem?
How do they coincide and what is the best strategy to deal with it.

High Commissioner H.E. Mr. Jalil Abbas Jilani: Thank you very much; I am the High
Commissioner for Pakistan. This was a fascinating discussion that I am glad that I was a part of that.
Since we are talking on the surge, I thought I should also share Pakistan’s perspective as regards a
number of issues regarding Pakistan. Surge in our view is important because it would create an
effective deterrence in Afghanistan which is of paramount importance but we feel that unless surge
is accompanied by a comprehensive strategy, a strategy which also includes development and
dialogue, I’m basically talking about three D’s: deterrence, dialogue, and development; because
these are very important factors. One thing which is of paramount importance is that along with the
surge we’ll have to educate the people of Afghanistan, Bill Maley already mentioned about Afghans
being a very well informed society, to be very honest we don’t share this perspective because in our
view most of the Afghans are ignorant about what is going on in most of the areas of Afghanistan it
is the Taliban and Al-Qaeda propaganda that is working more rapidly. When I say that the surge
strategy in Afghanistan should be accompanied by another strategy to educate people, it is
important because at the moment most of the people in Afghanistan will feel the outside forces,
NATO and ISAF forces, as the occupying forces, and this is a perception which needs to be
addressed at the beginning.

The other facts which are also very very important is that along with this surge we have to break
this nexus which has been developing between the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and the drug barons, and also
the warlords, and many elements involved in this nexus are also involved in the government in
Afghanistan, across border terrorism and movement of Taliban and Al-Qaeda elements,
reconstruction activity, and Taliban and Al-Qaeda propaganda are all very important issues; another
important issue that we thought that we should be discussing at some stage is the foreign
interference in Afghanistan, because Afghanistan in 2003 there was an agreement between the
neighbouring counties along with the other counties involved in Afghanistan, whereby all the
counties had agreed that they would not go beyond their mandate in Afghanistan but over the year
we’ve witnessed that a number of neighbouring countries of Afghanistan have began to go beyond
their mandate unless we begin to address these issues perhaps a surge only strategy will not have
the desired effects. One last observation that I would like to make with regard to the remarks made
by Bill Maley regarding David Sanger’s article in the Ney York Times, in which he claimed to have
heard the conversation of General Kayani, the Army Chief of Pakistan, I would like to quote a more
credible source, which is the former director of CIA George Tennant, in his famous book ‘In the
Eye of the Storm’, he mentioned that whatever successes the US was able to achieve in Afghanistan
were because of the comprehensive and fullest cooperation extended by the government of Pakistan,
and Pakistan security. Thank you.

William Maley: Just a couple of quick points following from that; I think that may tell us more
about George Tenet than about Pakistan, but I thought I would actually share some evidence about
opinion within Afghanistan because a lot gets said about what the Afghans think and some of it is

26
without any evidence to support it and some of it is based on Vox Pops in the street. However, there
is a certain about of serious polling that is done in Afghanistan, by the Asia Foundation which has
conducted surveys regularly since 2004, and also by the BBC. The BBC released on the 17th of
February this year its latest poll which involves sampling in all 34 provinces in Afghanistan, and
some elements were quite instructive. It was quite clear that the bulk of the population found air-
strikes used by the US and NATO to be unacceptable because of the civilian costs, 77% of people
holding that opinion. On the other hand, when people were asked about their attitudes to the United
States and to other countries which were involved the attitude was somewhat different; a clear
majority of the population supported the ongoing presence of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan:
59% of respondents supported the presence of NATO forces, 63% supported the presence of US
forces. Alas, the actor which was most negatively viewed by the respondents was Pakistan. They
were asked whether they thought Pakistan was playing a positive, neutral, or negative role in
Afghanistan and 86% said negative; this compared with 36% saying the United States was playing a
negative role in Afghanistan.

The lesson here, I think, is that Afghans have much more nuanced opinions about the situation
which confronts them than some of the popular reporting would often suggest. They are quite
capable of, on the one hand, being very wary of the negative effects of aerial bombing, and yet at
the same time recognising that the withdrawal of foreign forces would simply leave them lethally
exposed to their neighbours, in a way which they experienced very negatively between 1992 and
1996; and perhaps some would say from 1996 to 2001 as well.

Graeme Dobell: Clive.

Clive Williams: I just wanted to make the point that I don’t think that necessarily its natural
terrorism will flourish in Afghanistan if there is a reduced military presence there. We have to
remember that Al-Qaeda flourished under the old Taliban because of the old Taliban’s isolation
from the world and because, of course, Al-Qaeda was providing what the Taliban needed at that
point. So just generally speaking the old Taliban won’t reach the scope, the new Taliban is a
different institute, but after all there are significant differences between the elements in the Taliban;
for example, there are reported to be tensions between the Taliban in some areas and the Warlords,
and of course, between the Taliban and Pakistan. I think that we could actually adopt an approach
where we exploit some of those differences. Also I think that the … [inaudible] approach that
worked quite well in Iraq could also be utilised to a much greater extent in both Afghanistan and
Pakistan. Finally, I think we to adopt a coherent and integrated approach, I think that in particular
the aid issued, from what I see happening is that the civilian aid side of things is letting down the
military. I think importantly also we do need to sell our policies at home; as was mentioned, we can
be seen as an occupying force we need to bear in mind that the possibility of some blowback in
Australia of group identity becoming alienated from the mainstream and posing a danger of terrorist
attack.

Klaus-Peter Klaiber: I would like to strengthen the argument which Bill Maley put forward about
the media presence, let’s face it, there are now – you mentioned the five million of mobile phones –
there are (and these are statistics I almost forgot) there are 300 newspapers in the country, 90 radio
stations, and 14 TV stations country wide, I think that is quite impressive, this would not be
possible without international forces. 83% of the Afghans have basic health care, up from 8% in
2002, and then one of the most important things, and there I refer to what the Pakistani ambassador
said, how much education and things is relevant; I mean there are over 2,000 schools in the country
that have been built or refurbished, there are three state universities, eight other state institutions of
higher-learning, and a dozen private universities with altogether eight thousand students
countrywide, and 20% of the students are female; during the Taliban no female was allowed to go

27
to school or to go to university, and sort of, the school year 2008 started with roughly 44,000
trained personnel teaching 6.2 million children, I think this is a kind of success story which nobody
talks about, and we also don’t talk about the fact that Afghanistan, since 2002, had an economic
growth of almost 100%, I mean it came from a very low level but still there is progress in the
country, and therefore the international efforts are not in vein.

Stephan Frühling: I’d like to get back to what other people have mentioned, the element of
perceptions. I personally think that it is possible to put Afghanistan on a much improved footing,
but it’s going to require a lot of time, a lot more effort, and a lot more casualties. It can be done but
it’s going to require a lot more commitment than we’ve shown in the last few years. But, to be
honest, no one can really say now when it’s going to end, or under what conditions it’s going to end
and I think that presents a very challenging problem of selling the policy to the wider population,
but selling this effort to the wider population is going to be central. So we have the problems in
Afghanistan and Pakistan which are serious enough, but selling any solution, even if we perceive
one, to the Western population is going to be a very significant problem in its own right, and I don’t
see a lot of focus on this. The US is starting to prepare the ground, but I don’t see a coherent
strategy coming out for that problem yet, and I think that is quite significant problem for Australia
as well, because Australia doesn’t only deal with failed states in Afghanistan but also on its
doorstep which are in a lot of ways even more important to Australia than Afghanistan.

But if you look at the generational cohort that is now becoming the main recruiting focus for the
ADF for example, we’re soon going to have a generation that probably doesn’t consciously
remember a world where the US and Australia were not fighting in Afghanistan, and I think how
Australia and the US, but especially Australia gets out of that long term effort, whether it is seen as
a success by the people in that generation or not, is going to have a lot of influence for the way that
people in Australia are going to be willing to engage in other open-ended commitments in Timor
and the Solomons. How Australia is going to deal with that could have quite important
repercussions for the perception of what Australia can do closer to come as well, even without the
US. So I think that managing the perception of the population about what is achievable, what
Australia is trying to do is going to require a lot more honesty and a lot more upfront discussion,
and in a sense education, and a much broader approach because otherwise we might end up with a
very different approach to foreign policy in general than we have been used to in the last ten years.

Tom Gregg: First of all, on this idea of civilians letting down the military; I think this is a bit of a
misnomer, wherever civilians (the NGOs or the UN) can go, I think they’re basically there. By way
of background, five years ago when I arrived in Afghanistan in the Southeast of the country we had
95% access to that Southeast region, along the border of Pakistan to the border of Orūzgān, which
was my region; today we’re limited to helicopter transport within that region, five years ago we had
full access to Orūzgān and Zabul, today we don’t have access there. Where the civilians can go, and
the NGOs, can go they generally do. A problem with this idea of civ-mil co-ordination or an
integrated approach is somehow the military can plan an operation with its strategy of Shape, Clear,
Hold and when it comes to the build section they say ‘where are the NGOs where is the UN’, it’s
not quite as neat as that. And furthermore, if you’re not aware – in the coming weeks UNAMA is
opening a provincial office in Orūzgān, which is good news for everyone.

The second comment on the surge, the bulk of the discussion has been on the surge. In my mind
there is only three areas where the military surge should be utilised; one, is to secure the upcoming
elections and for the logistics of those elections; two, would be training the ANA, and we’ve heard
that today; and three, is a greater deployment, but only on the border areas where they are required.
And I think it’s a real mistake, and I’ve heard and read that some of these additional troops will be
going into Logar, Wardak, the areas around Kabul and elsewhere, one of the most striking things I

28
think about the increase in troops in the east of the country and the south, is that the military alone
despite their billions of dollars of investment have failed to provide a peace dividend, and I think
that’s why we need to be looking at a much broader political strategy and the military surge is an
element of that strategy. The High Commissioner also mentioned that deterrence is an element of
the surge, and the other two that you mentioned: dialogue and development; have to be left up to the
civilian side, you can’t leave that up to the military.

Finally, just to make a comment on this ‘bush-telegraph’ as we’d call it here, or the ‘tribal-
telegraph’ there, one of the most striking things for me was you can go to provinces where the
majority of the people are illiterate and have no formal education, but the level of information flow
is great and one quick anecdote. I was in my office one day and on the internet came this latest US
National Intelligence Estimate, with some interesting information, and within three hours there were
tribal councils that were referring to this intelligence estimate. So I don’t think the newspapers are
particularly relevant outside of Kabul, and Herat but radio and the way the tribal systems works, it’s
an oral culture and very strong.

Graeme Dobell: Neil James first, then Michael Evans, and then Bill Maley third, and then Jim,
don’t worry Jim.

Neil James: Just to take up something Stephan said, we’ve had some very long wars in the past, we
were in the Malay emergency for twelve years, we were in Vietnam for ten, you know the idea that
the Australian population isn’t accustomed to fighting long wars is a bit of a misnomer, and in fact
culturally until recently, was one of the main differences between Australia and the United States,
we were accustomed to fighting long wars and they weren’t – and I mean that in all honesty, I’m
not having a go at the Americans. We’ve been pretty critical of the Howard government, and we’ve
continued to be pretty critical of the Rudd government for not selling the war in Afghanistan better,
but when you’re fighting people who spurt battery acid into the faces of schoolgirls to stop them
going to school, I don’t think you’ll have too much of a problem selling that to the Australian
people in the long run.

Michael Evans: I think the problem we are facing to a large extent is that we are suffering from the
unbearable consequences of lightness, a light footprint. There are a lot of numbers of troops and aid
organisations in Afghanistan, but a much depends on what you do with them, and this is part of the
problem. We need a comprehensive approach so I think the surge, when it comes, will be very
different from Iraq, it’ll have to be: it’s a completely different set of circumstances. So that’s the
first point, I think on the idea of perceptions, we need to sell the commitment to the Australian
public as part of a nation-building exercise, this is not a ‘shock-and-awe’ operation, this is a ‘time,
space, and will’ conflict in which vital interests are engaged, and therefore we need to send the
message that we will be as ‘civilian as possible, but as military as necessary’. It’s got to be done in a
sophisticated way, we cannot talk in simple terms of winning, losing, fighting and so on, we must
avoid, I think, a lot of the military language, start using the language of engagement, nation-
building, failed-states, these are the new threats, we haven’t disseminated this level of education it’s
limited now to specialised organisations like the military, like the intelligence agencies, it’s not part
of the discourse in the press, in the media, on TV, it needs to become, and therefore I think the
defence force and the defence department, and the strategic studies community have an obligation
to educate in these areas, we seem to be too fixated on the rise of the great Asian powers, sure that’s
a major effect, however, we have another compelling problem, which is causing us to deploy and
that is something we have to educate in.

Finally, I think everybody in this room has to get use to one thing, as the British put it, we’re going
to have to campaign without timelines, exit strategies are a thing of the past, we have to think now

29
in terms of end-states which was said earlier, and force can only shape, and therefore politics will
be an absolute key, and everything you do in stability operations and counterinsurgency in the
future. So the challenge is both political, it is a media challenge, it is a psychological challenge, it’s
an educational challenge, and I wonder about the strategic studies community in this country, seems
to me that it’s ten years behind that of the United States and parts of Europe.

William Maley: Given that it took Afghanistan about 25 years to get into the rut in which it found
itself in 2001, it is utterly naive to think that in a period of six to seven years one would be able to
rectify the extraordinarily severe problems of state collapse which that country confronted, and a
great deal of Afghanistan’s problems at the moment don’t relate to the legitimacy of the Afghan
state, or its supporters, but simply to its capacities. Afghanistan’s supporters bear some
responsibility there, because some 75% of the state expenditure has been carried out by agents other
than the state through direct transfer of funds from the donors to NGOs, the UN system, or private
commercial contractors, so there has been relatively little done that has actually put the state’s
banner up on walls around the country to suggest that it is meeting people’s needs. There is a lesson
there politically, I think, for people involved in these sorts of exercises, but I wanted to make one
comment about access, because again there tends to be an impression that Afghanistan has become
a black-hole. The UN compiles statistics which are updated every three months on the access within
individual Afghan districts to unarmed officers of the Afghan bureaucracy: there was a negative
trend between March 2007 when it was 79% and December 2008 when it was 73%. On the other
hand, this figure has been dragged down by poor performance in what are seen to be a limited
number of Taliban strongholds, either near the border with Pakistan or in a couple of cases amongst
Pashtun communities in the north, where the Taliban have been able to tap into the concerns of
groups whose ancestors were relocated in the north of Afghanistan by Abdur Rahman Khan in the
late nineteenth century; but in fact the majority of districts in Afghanistan actually enjoy access
between 81% and 100% to unarmed officials of the Afghan government, and I think it is important
to put that on the record in order to dispel the sense that sometimes prevails that the country is just
sliding from all directions down a hopeless whirlpool; it’s not like that.

Jim Molan: Thank you. I absolutely agree with that; Afghanistan is not a disaster, but it may
become a disaster. It’s not a disaster in terms of the levels of violence that we overcame ultimately
in Iraq; but it could get to that position very very quickly, and if a momentum is built up in the few
provinces that do have good access, and where there is a stable situation it can spread very fast, and
we’ve seen that in other wars, the trends are certainly negative, but we’re not going to lose
tomorrow, there are no two ways about it. I just wonder how more difficult it is to sell to the
Australian population, because I don’t think we’re going to withdraw, I wonder how much more
difficult it is to sell to the Australian population the maintenance of the status quo where seven
soldiers get killed per one of two years, and that goes on inevitably for all the good reasons we’ve
mentioned here, or whether we increase to a level of troop commitment which is somehow
meaningful, now we can talk after lunch about what is meaningful, I believe that that can be
described and it can be ultimately solved.

The deterioration in the situation, I think Tom mentioned an example of it where you had good
access immediately then it went very much down hill, and we’ve knocked the civilians but it’s not
the civilians job to go into areas where they’re going to get killed, it’s the military’s job to do that,
and to me, the single most important lesson from the statement Tom made about civilians ability to
get in there and build is that you’ve got to create the security; the way to create the security is by
military and police forces, I’m not asking for more, I’m just asking for the right number, 99.9% of
the times in the wars we’ve been in in the past, it’s more – because societies never like to send
adequate troops in any of these situations. So if we’re talking about only putting in the right number
of troops for the elections, it took 175,000 24 hours a day for six months to create the first

30
successful Iraqi election; if we’re going to train the ANA we’ve said we’ve got 42
mentoring/training team and we need 90, I think we’re going to need 150-200 ultimately, that’s a lot
more troops, if we’re only going to put them in the border area that’s an incredible number of troops,
and I think it follows that if you’re going to do something, do something that’s meaningful, to do
something that’s meaningful to allow to do the clever parts of counterinsurgency, which ultimately
we’re going to have to do, we need to establish security which requires police and military forces,
in the initial case it’s going to have to be non-ANA forces; and at the moment we are no where near
anything like adequacy, people can talk about police training, they can talk about farmers, they can
talk about reconstruction, they can talk about a criminal justice system, and aid; but you cannot to
any of that until you establish security, and the only way build an Afghan national army or policy is
with, in the first instance, foreign troops, and we ain’t got anything like enough foreign troops in
Afghanistan at the moment.

Graeme Dobell: Hugh.

Hugh White: Thanks. I just wanted to make an observation that was prompted by Michael Evens’
point but I just can’t help also saying how important the point that Jim has just made is; that is,
those who thing Afghanistan is critical to our security and think that there are objectives which we
must achieve there, they do have to weigh that against what genuinely would be required, and what
Jim’s just said is, we’re talking about a military effort which is not just quantitatively but
qualitatively different from what we’ve done before.

So those people who think this is really important have got to ask themselves whether they still
think it’s important at a scale of military effort world-wide that we haven’t seen recently except in
Iraq, and a scale of military effort for Australia, if we’re really serious about this, which is not
comparable with anything we’ve done probably since the Second World War. I just want to come
back to Michael’s point, because it’s a terribly important issue, and that is that Afghanistan does not
exist in a strategic vacuum, from an Australian point of view it must be assessed with our broader
strategic situation, I think you’re absolutely right to put this on the table, because I disagree with
you – at least with the implication of what you said – about how Australians should view our
strategic situation.

Those of us who think we can continue to view our strategic situation on the basis of the order of
Asia which fundamentally shapes our environment, is cast in reinforced concrete which will never
change, I think are themselves – if I can use your noun – in need of some education; that’s simply
not a proposition, to me, that look sustainable and one of the reasons why I think it’s so important
that we be very careful about the extent to which we commit to operations like Afghanistan, is I
think there are bigger strategic risks, possibilities not certainties, possibilities out there which pose
much more substantive risks to Australia’s future security than even quite bad outcomes in
Afghanistan, and we have to at least measure the priority we give to that against the priority we give
to situations like Afghanistan, particularly bearing in mind the point that Jim has made.

Brigadier Babar Mansoor Virk:

[due to the poor sound recording, elements of this comment have been paraphrased]

Hello, my name is Babar Mansoor Virk, Defence Advisor at the High Commission for Pakistan. I
am not an academic so please forgive me if I do not follow the norms. I have a few observations on
the strategy which I hope you will take on board. First thing it is good that Pakistan has come to the
primary focus of the new strategy but it should have a different perception of the new focus. What I
would like to highlight operations which the Pakistani Government has conducted in the last 6-7

31
years, especially last year. In the last year we conducted operations in North and South Waziristan,
last year in Swot Valley and Bajaur. In this last operation in Bajaur, there were 1600 militants killed,
200 of them from foreign militants…

… what I’m highlighting is that is there is no will to conduct these operations in the army, then how
come these militants are being killed and their strongholds destroyed, and the Al-Qaeda network in
FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] has been destroyed? Similarly the only operations in
FATA are the self-evidence of the will of our population. The capacity of the armed forces is there,
we can undertake such counterinsurgency operations, we are well trained; where we are lacking is
the modern technology, so if you want to support Pakistan give us more technologies to monitor
these militants, give us night-fighting capabilities if you want to support Pakistan policy, give us the
ability to look beyond the human eye during night, so these are the kind of problems which we are
facing; but let me assure you, being from the army, there is no confusion, there is nothing like that,
you cannot find a division in opinion to fight against the Taliban; this is our war we are fighting it,
and we will continue to fight and for this we are looking for the international support to build up our
technology.

Frank Lewincamp: Just a couple of concluding comments. We haven’t added much to the
definition of Australia’s strategic interests that we got from the roundtable before. I counted five
elements: a moral obligation - political integrity I think Jim called it – we broke it we must fix it’;
second was humanitarian; third, terrorism; fourth, regional stability; and fifth, alliance relationships.
But there endured, throughout that discussion, a consensus here that we should maintain ongoing
engagement in military terms but also in terms of a civil effort, and that’s despite some strong
differences around the group about exits, end-states, and whether a war there is winnable – in fact
whether it’s even meaningful to talk about ‘winning’ – and also despite some concerns about the
overall strategy and its effectiveness. So I guess the bad news from that is you’re now committed to
the afternoon and you have to return after lunch, when we’ll look at the operational strategy for the
military.

Can I just pose some questions to help focus that; first, how best to make a contribution, and at what
levels; how to influence the coalition strategy, and perhaps to make it more effective; a clear
consensus which emerged this morning about a civil effort needing to complement the military
effort, and whilst the structure of the conference today didn’t focus so much on the civil effort I
guess that will come up again this afternoon and there may be options to enhance the Australian
contribution there rather than in a military side. And from a personal point of view I still don’t think
we’ve dealt effectively with the issue of Pakistan, because the nexus with Pakistan remains and I
think some of the discussion about military strategies and civil strategies ought to encompass
Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. I can’t resist one final extension of Neil’s analogy about acid -
what do we do about the treatment of woman and girls in the Swat Valley?

Graeme Dobell: And on that note I want to call lunch; where I’ll talk to one of our panellists about
why Morris dances can’t do strategic studies, thank you.

INTERMISSION

Afternoon Session: Coalition Operations in Afghanistan

Graeme Dobell: Okay, we’re up and away, now, Daniel is going to explain to you the joys and
choices involved in being on the A team or the B team, and to explain why Daniel can do this for
you and to you, he is going to be introduced by Hugh White.

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Hugh White: Thanks Graeme, most of us in this room know each other pretty well, so to speak, but
Daniel is a little bit of a new comer. Daniel has recently joined us as a research fellow, courtesy, I
should say, of the Department of Defence by way of funding, and he is – as you’ll notice – an
American, and in fact a Bostonian, studied in England with Bob O’Neill, who, of course, known to
many people in this room and has been studying primarily from a historian’s perspective a set of
issues about how counterinsurgency operations work, particularly in that part of the world, for quite
a long time; but recently he’s put quite a lot of work into studying both what the British and the
Americans have been doing by way of developing counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan and evolving them, learning some of the lessons which have become clear since the
initial interventions in those two countries and has been working quite closely with both of those
militaries about where their future thinking is going. So we’re very fortunate to have him with us in
SDSC to contribute to the way these debates evolve in Australia. Thanks.

Daniel Marston: Right, I’d like to just say one quick point; I do think that the narrative of counter-
insurgency is something that needs to be discussed. I’m talking about the US and UK approaches
since 2001 in Afghanistan, but also the way we might refocus ourselves, at no time are any
American or British commanders thinking just in military terms. They do understand counter-
insurgency to a much higher level than they did previously, they’re looking for all the other civilian
enablers to be part of the team, the way that we brief division down to battalions we constantly have
outsiders with different viewpoints come in to try to explain the conditions on the ground, in some
ways – sadly – I would say that the militaries probably had a better reform effort in the last eight
years than the civilian agencies; this is something civilian agencies are trying to catch up with. A
few points: the following presentation stems from research, interviews, visits and debates with
members of the US, UK and Afghan militaries and governments both inside and outside
Afghanistan over the last eight years. I’m a historian by trade, as Hugh stated, but I’m speaking as
an individual today – outside of SDSC I guess – but I do not represent any military or government
agency, just for any media in the room; I’ve been sadly misquoted at times.

Many themes will be covered and are currently being debated inside and outside Afghanistan to
develop a more coherent strategy, and we have to be clear about that. The war itself is entering a
key phase, as Jim quite rightly said, and I completely agree, this has been a holding action in
Afghanistan, this has not been a true counter-insurgency campaign; this has not been a true effort
for a variety of reasons. One that has been highlighted quite heavily of course is Iraq; that was our
main effort, and until the Yanks came to Afghanistan in more numbers and resources nothing was
going to change. Doesn’t matter what you do in Orūzgān, it doesn’t matter what the Brits were
doing in Helmand, until the Americans refocused nothing was going to change in Afghanistan,
sadly. Many mistakes have been made by the coalition and the northern hemisphere; we know we
made mistakes, going way back to 2001 and 2002, and there is a whole re-evaluation of those issues
that have been raised since. Lack of historical understanding has been key to some major problems
that we have in Afghanistan; even today you still, sometimes, hear about the issues of the British
and the Soviets in Afghanistan, without a real description of what actually happened to these
individuals, and I’d like to put it out there that the second and third Afghan wars were not defeats
for the British: draws maybe, but not defeats. Lack of understanding regarding the ethnic
dimensions; lots of work still needs to be done; but we failed in 2001-2002 to look at the ethnic
dimensions of the previous ten years in Afghanistan. There had been a civil war and sadly it was
drawn along ethnic lines. We as Americans, some people have pointed it out, like quick, fast wars
sometimes; I think that mindset has changed, just so you’re aware. But in 2001-2002 we did want a
quick and decisive war; hence we made some decisions on the day, you could say, with the
Northern Alliance, to look for those quick solutions and we’re now reaping the ‘rewards’ of that
strategy. Western metrics were applied, top-down government, not just by us but by the UN, NATO,
and everybody else; everybody signed up to this. We all thought it’d be a great experience if

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Afghanistan could have a strong central government, all will be well. Forgetting our own history:
no country – as far as I know – was ever done top-down, everybody else was done bottom-up, and
even in this room Americans, British, Canadians and Australians have differing views on this role
of central power in its own government. So to try to have a cookie-cutter solution for Afghanistan
was a bit of a mistake, and some of us have been saying that since 2001. It’s starting to percolate to
the higher levels of the Obama administration and I’d say potentially even into the UK
administration.

There are also issues with top-down security, there’s a major debate that we’re looking at, just as
we speak about potential issues between the Afghan National Army, possible auxiliaries, and the
Afghan National Police. New thinking, I’ll go into these in greater detail later, but just to give you
an approach, we’re talking about population-centric national security, and it must be remembered
that this war is pretty much only occurring in one section of the country, regional command east,
and south: the Pashtun belt. It is not occurring in the north or the west, and we have to remember
that this is not a full-blown insurgency as we saw in Iraq; this is a limited insurgency inside a region
that tends to be 95% ethnically based, so there are issues within that ethnic group that need to be
dealt with. COIN education and training have been reformed, first in US and UK militaries, and to
some extent even with the Canadians, I remember [at] a conference in 2004 we were having huge
debates between the Americans and the Brits about what the term counter-insurgency meant. The
Americans didn’t want to talk about it, the Brits were pushing COIN, and the Canadians looked
across the table and said (bad language), ‘What the fuck is COIN?’ The Canadians have come a
long way forward in trying to understand the impact of that, but it’s not just a military approach.

We have to be serious, and some of us have been pushing this heavily, we do need NATO. NATO
is a very important element to this war, we do need the UN in this campaign, but let’s be
straightforward about what the campaign looks like, and our regional command east and south, and
to some extent central.; it is a counter-insurgency campaign. It’s not a military only campaign, it is
trying to join up all the elements to be a true counter-insurgency campaign. Our north and west,
where the Germans, the Spanish, and the Italians, and other European partners are engaged, is a
stability operation, and that’s equally important to the fight, because [inaudible] move towards
reconciliation amongst the Pashtuns, and then the Pashtuns with the Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras
we’re going to need the people who have been working with these groups to give us intelligence on
who the players are, and everything else. There is a need for more forces, but it’s not just coalition,
it’s Afghan forces as well. But as I said, there is a debate about ‘is it more Afghan National Army,
or is local auxiliaries, who are potentially trained by us and led by us, or is it going to be tribal
militias?’ There is a huge debate going on about that, but in some ways the fact, most commanders
are thinking that we’re going to embed ourselves with either Afghan National Army or Afghan
auxiliaries to have better cultural awareness in working in those populations centres. There are still
questions about the ethnic dynamic of the ANA. The other controversial thing, and this is a point
the UN individual mentioned that, ‘don’t leave it up to military commanders—I think, I might be
paraphrasing him here—with this sort of political process of understanding these dimensions; I’d
actually disagree strongly with that. There are many military commanders in both Iraq and
Afghanistan who actually have figured out the tribal structures in their area, they’ve figured out
who the players are, what the tension is, they’ve been pushing for different mindset. They say ‘this
is the individual we should be working with, and the future of this province, or district, or even
village’, but sadly top-down metrics from our State Department, at times FCO, your DFAT I’m sure
– if the two-and-a-half guys out there – will potentially contradict that because they’re looking for
Karzai’s legitimacy and Karzai’s appointments of provincial leaders and others. That has been
causing many issues within the Pashtun belt. So quite a few commanders actually feel that they
have to work with the Pashtunwali, the Pashtun sense of [honour] which is very different than what
we were talking about in 2001-2002.

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In trying to understand how the Pashtuns work with each other and deal with these very violent
situations in their society, that’s something that has to be debated at the highest levels. The
indigenous view and customs will probably be best suited to the area, Western mindsets and metrics
don’t work – it’s been proven. I’m going to give you a few quotes from some key people, from
practitioners as well as some historical people; why? Because there is a lot of lip-service out there
to counter-insurgency theory and history. Some of the most important writers, Frank Kitson, David
Galula, Sir Robert Thompson, were dismissed by many in the Pentagon from 2001-2005, saying
that they wrote 30-40 years ago and they don’t apply anymore; guess what, they do apply, because
that’s what commanders are taking with them to the field along with other materials, and they have
adapted them. At no time were they textbooks to be used as A+B=C, wars are not [like that], you
need a building block to work from, these theorists still apply. We’re trying to get the other
government departments and even some of the presidents and prime ministers to read them – but we
know they’re quite busy.

“The first thing that must be apparent when contemplating the sort of action a government facing
insurgency should take is there can be no such thing as a purely military solution, because
insurgency is not primarily a military activity, at the same time there is no such thing as a wholly
political solution either, short of surrender, because the very fact that a state of insurgency exists
implies that violence in involved, which will have to be countered, by some extent at least, with the
use of force.” This is an ongoing debate; certain countries had the mission of stability and
reconstruction and trying to steer clear of combat. Then there are accusations, of course the
Americans – and it’s true, for the early years – were too kinetically orientated; that issue has
changed quite dramatically in the last few years. David Galula, a French specialist who served in
Algeria, the big tenet within the US military, explained the population in insurgency and I think it’s
very apt to think about this, and Bill Maley mentioned it, people are sitting on the fence in
Afghanistan waiting to see what happens, quote: “The population’s attitude is dictated, not so much
by the relative popularity [inaudible] more primitive concern for safety, which sides gives the best
protection, which side is more likely to win, these are the criteria [inaudible] stand, in any situation,
whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral majority, and an active
minority against the cause, to find the favourable minority, to organise it in order to mobilise the
population against the unfavourable minority, every operation – within the military field, or the
political, social, or economic, or psychological fields must be geared to that end.”

We estimate that 80-90% of the people we are fighting in RC East and South are ‘small T’ [tier 2 or
3], small Taliban, people who are fighting for time-honoured issues: blood feuds; we killed their
brother, we killed their sister; two, economic issues; wrongdoing, lack of stake within the
government, the fact that the Taliban come into a family [inaudible] a father who has five children
and they’re starving and says ‘I will give you $50 a day to drop a mortar round and hit the British
base’, very simple things. But it’s about separating those individuals and trying to convince the
community that you’re there for the long haul, and you’re there to protect them, and try to change
the environment. When the US and allied forces invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban
regime in 2001-2002, they fundamentally misunderstood the implications of occupying a war-torn
and partially governed country; in particular they failed to recognise the scope of local support for
the Taliban, especially within the Pashtun areas, and the root causes for that support. The desire for
quick solutions led to actions that encouraged an insurgency in southern and eastern Afghanistan;
ignoring the lessons of history the US and to a lesser extent Great Britain and other NATO allies did
nothing to create a viable counter-insurgency strategy or to train, educate, and equip soldiers and
civilian advisors for a number of years.

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So I’ll go quickly through the three or four phases of the ‘muddling through’ period, then I’ll leave
you with what has been happening since. 2001-2002, we as Americans were there to do counter-
terrorism; track down Al-Qaeda, track down the Taliban; nation building is not for us: this caused
problems in the Pashtun belt, and a lot of our special forces, even some of our Special Forces were
not trained in counter-insurgency. It’s something that doesn’t come overnight, it’s not about waking
up one day thinking that you can be a counter-insurgency expert, and we created many problems,
we killed quite a few innocent people, we dishonoured people; honour is incredibly important in
this society as it was in Iraq, and we dishonoured many people, and many people flocked to the
colours of the Taliban; if you want to call them that, [inaudible] because they had been dishonoured.
What is the campaign? The Bonn agreement of course, was to bring stability and governance to
Afghanistan, try to create stability in a war-torn country, but again, we’re all looking for quick
solutions, we weren’t trying to really figure out the metrics of that situation, and why there had been
a civil war, why ethnic divisions had occurred in the 1990s. So lack of understanding again, of the
local communities, lack of security in the Pashtun belt, that’s where the enemy was, and you’re not
going to send any civilians there to help with development unless that area is pacified, but our
number of forces in that area were quite small. But this is key, perceived wrongdoing by many
Pashtuns, in lack of aid, role within the government and the security forces, and that is still a
grievance that exists today, but now people feel that that grievance is on the other side of the border
as well, within Pakistan, and the Pashtun belt of the FATA. The other problem is that the Pashtuns
were seen as the enemy by some within the coalition as well as within the interim government, and
it’s only acceptable that some within the Afghan government, especially from the Northern Alliance
would see, potentially, the Pastuns as the enemy – since they had been fighting a civil war against
them.

Lack of COIN training and education for the coalition was throughout. Issues post-2001, quote:
“The destruction of the Taliban generated instability and insecurity; Hamid Karzai, the interim
leader, was to maintain law and order in Kabul, however, at the periphery local thugs and private
armies were able to dominate local politics; many of these had fought along side the US to defeat
the Taliban, many were also appointed by Karzai to govern various provinces, for some Afghans
the harshness of the Taliban was preferred over the lawlessness that resulted from their fall from
power.” General Barno was commander in 2003-2005, but I’m going to give you what he actually
saw when he arrived in the beginning of 2003. He commanded the OEF, the Operation Enduring
Freedom, which is still a separate operation to ISAF: “At the beginning of 2003, the US military
had not published COIN doctrine since Vietnam, and units had relatively little training in COIN
before their arrival in country. There was much learning by doing, and even disagreement as to
whether the fight in Afghanistan was a COIN campaign at all; in fact, unit commanders were
forbidden from using the word ‘COIN’ in describing their missions, they were executing a ‘counter-
terrorist’ mission in keeping with US strategic guidance and an operational focus on the enemy,
hence many mistakes were made”. But that is true of the Americans, that was true of the British, of
the Australians and others; there was a lack of understanding of counter-insurgency and the role of
the population-centric solutions and long-term planning, and sadly at the highest levels there
weren’t any strategies being developed for what that meant.

2003-2005 is a different phase, COIN reform does begin within Operation Enduring Freedom, a lot
of it was down to British staff officers as well as American commanders, looking at the old books,
Galula, Kitson and others, ‘what did doctrine say?’ Haven’t read it yet, but let me get back to you
on that. Insurgency grew as well though, the Pashtuns were still feeling more and more
disenfranchised, they felt that somebody on the ground – somebody mentioned the ‘bush-telegram’
– felt that even though Karzai was a Pashtun that he was a sell-out. There were tensions between the
Durrani tribe, where Karzai comes from, the Ghilzai in RC East, time-honoured issues with the
Pashtuns that have been going on for hundreds of years, and their identity issues and crisis were

36
coming to the fore at that time. Iraq, that was our main effort; we pulled the eyes off Afghanistan,
the Brits did as well, and we all focused on Iraq, and that was a major mistake we all know. There is
still top-down government, we’re looking for Western metrics. Let’s look at the elections: this is
how we actually see if democracy is expanding, forgetting, of course, looking at their own local
traditions, potentially, a lot of local traditions are quite democratic, but we dispel them and said
‘they’re not quite exactly what we like’, so we can’t really figure out the metrics if we’re
succeeding. A lot of that happened within the Pashtun belt, ISAF is taking [inaudible] I won’t go
into too much detail as it was stated earlier, but they started to take over RC north and west, because
those areas with the Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara areas which were a lot quieter than the Pashtun belt so
it was easier for the Germans to take over in the north and later the Italians in the west. General
Barno, though, tried to create a counter-insurgency plan for OEF in RC East. All his will and effort
were commendable, the problem was he had one brigade combat team to impose a population
centric approach which was never going to work because the main effort was Iraq.

The advisory mission, everybody goes on about the ANA and the need for a national identity. The
Americans pushed the need to create the army according to the ethnic dimensions of Afghanistan,
not that we do that back home, or anybody else for that matter, but we were set on that course, but
even our advisory mission was second and third rate, we did not provide the regular forces that were
needed. We brought in our National Guard, we put in contractors and other things, the focus of
effort, even the advisory mission is still to this day a work in progress.

2006-2008. It gets even more difficult, ISAF moves to RC South in 2006, this is where the British
go into Helmand and the Canadians move to Kandahar, everybody is now focusing on the Pashtun
belt, that is the focus of effort, well it’s 2006 now, but we’re trying to get there. Lack of unity, the
command and control arrangements multiplied, you had Americans in the OEF you had ISAF
forces serving all over the country but only certain countries can serve in the South and later in RC
East, unity of effort in any war is very important, but if you actually look at a chain of command
structure for 2006, how anybody even moved in Afghanistan is a big question, it was pretty odd that
all these caveats were brought in and red-cards and other things.

Complexity of the mission itself, sadly, just as George Bush hasn’t helped the cause at different
times, for Helmand, the British were going into Helmand to do reconstruction and counter-narcotics,
that is not what actually happened. The commanders on the ground knew they were going to do a
counterinsurgency mission, there was going to be a lot of clearing, and a lot of fighting, and
potentially a lot of dying. But until the mission is actually worked out and stated to the people,
people will question the war. Lots of people in Britain in the summer of 2006 were wondering why
the Paras [3 PARA] were fighting quite heavily in Sangin and Nawsad and Musa Qala. We talk
about lack of strategy, there were plans, but Karzai got involved with that deployment as well, and
the district centres became the focus of effort; so the British spread one-and-a-half battalions
throughout the district centres of Helmand and they sustained some of the worst combat since
Korea. Lack of unity and balanced approach with development and reconstruction within NATO
was another issue. If you look at RC South it’s a bit interesting to watch, Helmandshire, the
province of Kandahar they’re all Canadian, Orūzgān, Dutch and Australian, but the actual south
divisional headquarters, at times, has to negotiate with task force commanders from each sector
instead of giving orders, as a two-star divisional headquarters, that is not unity of effort. It’s getting
better, the British 6th division will go out later this year and task force Helmand will have to report
to a British two-star, but there is talk the Americans might be needed to unify strategy for RC East
and South that is completely linked and speaking the same language. The Brits appear to be on side
with that, the Canadians are a little bit hesitant, and I’m not sure what the Dutch will do but may be
gone by then, and we’re waiting to see if Australia is going to speak the same language, and do the
same thing.

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A population centric approach, not due to the lack of what the commanders on the ground wanted,
the commanders understood the population was the centre of gravity, but they didn’t have the force
ratio to do it. Iraq continued to be the main effort, [inaudible] too many air-strikes, yes too many
air-strikes. The problem was we didn’t have the density, number of clearing operations, clearing the
same valley over and over again, yes those are the orders, clear the valley. It is very difficult that
civilians die, and that’s true, but a lot of military commanders didn’t want to see a British platoon or
a Canadian platoon, or an American platoon wiped out, for the world to see; there is a balance of
course, and it’s a difficult balance. There have been attempts to deal with the air-strikes in the sense
that military commanders have tried to approach the locals to say ‘we’re going to pay you the blood
money for the death of your son, the death of your child. But due to lack of funding and other
government department interaction, except in the American sector and some efforts in the UK
sector, things have been stalling. Military commanders in the south don’t have the money the
Americans have, to be able to pay off the blood feud right away. So that’s being looked into, to be
fair to the British that’s changing dramatically, they’re recognising they need to get money to the
commanders a lot faster.

Advisory mission is still a work in progress; we’re looking at a 22% shortfall with ETTS and
OMLTs but as I said major problems with quality with some of those advisors. Some forces such as
the French have provided first-class advisors because they’re not stretched. The Americans are
stretched, the Brits are stretched to some extent, so a lot of people looking into that advisory
mission; is it about ETT’s, is it about OMLTS. Or is it about just embedding battalions when they
arrive, with the ANA or local security forces, to spread the ability to deploy properly.

As I said, lots of commanders since 2006 were looking at the Pashtunwali, were looking at this as a
Pashtun issue were looking at grievances within the Pashtun belt. We need to deal with these
grievances. We need to deal with reconciliation. We need to renegotiate potentially with Karzai,
that his top-down government is not having an impact, that maybe we need to develop different
ways. Bottom up has finally percolated to the Obama administration and you’ll hear statements
from Gates and others on this issue.

But to give you some quotes from that period, General Richards who was ISAF commander in 2006,
quote: “Our force levels in 2006 were just sufficient to contain the insurgency, significant capability
gaps remain, that restricted my ability to reinforce where the situation dictated, as a result of too
few forces we have found it difficult to maintain security where we had gained it, and we’re using
the Afghan national security forces more than is idea, for development and growth. Given the
nature of the insurgency we’re not fighting, we should look again at force requirements and adjust
as necessary.” So all the discussions here about more troop numbers, these have been going on for a
long time, especially within the military community. General Barno – putting the knife in a bit – in
a 2007, quote: “Continued turnover of US senior leaders has made continuity of effort a recurrent
challenge in this very complex fight. Since 2005 the comprehensive US counterinsurgency strategy
has been significantly altered by subsequent military and civilian leaders who held different views
with the advent of NATO military leadership there stay no single comprehensive strategy to guide
the US, NATO, or international effort. Unity of purpose, both interagency and international has
suffered.” Unity of command is more fragmented, and although – to be fair – there have been many
statements going back to NATO meetings in Bucharest in places, even Riga, that talk about the
need for unity of effort in approach; it is seen by many commanders as still lip-service. That’s why
there has been a push to regionalise the fight in RC East and south with an American lead,
potentially. Everybody is doing a job in Afghanistan; we have to understand who has assets for
what kind of campaign and place them in that area to carry out the campaign.”

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So where do we stand at the end of 2008, as of 2008 it appeared that the principle members, the US,
the UK, and Canada, and Afghanistan, had developed a better understanding of counterinsurgency
theory, but applying many of its key practices; unity of effort, understanding of the locals,
protection of the populations, and the training of a viable indigenous security force remains a
challenge. So that’s the ‘muddling through’ bit, and that’s where we stood at the end of 2008, but as
Afghanistan became a major focus in the American elections a lot of people began to refocus on
Afghanistan. There is a changing narrative in the northern hemisphere, it is more realistic – I feel –
fewer Western metrics are being imposed. Coming back to the statements made earlier about
Holbrooke’s attack potentially on Karzai, I think it has less to do with President Diem in Vietnam;
we’re not looking to replace Karzai as far as I can tell, what we’re looking to do is look back on
2001-2002 and realise that wasn’t the best approach. To take some power away from Karzai to
work with the local village, district, provincial, and start working up the food chain, and try and
renegotiate the power of the central government with the local areas, and that’s just not for the
Pashtun belt, but also for the Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara areas as well. That, I think, was the aim; so
it’s looking back, and if you want to use the Vietnam analogy, President Thiệu, when the CORDS
program finally came in; we forced Thiệu to give up some of his power from Saigon, to force it
down to the most basic village level. We lost the war, yes, but we didn’t lose the village war
everywhere in Vietnam. That is what we’re looking for, we’re not looking to topple Karzai, but
Karzai I think, and some of his ministers need to recognise that the way that they’ve been holding
power might have the be devolved to others.

The command arrangements are getting better. McKiernan commands all American forces in OEF
and ISAF, but there are still issues with ISAF itself. Many of us are pushing the fact that RC East,
and South is a COIN campaign and support for that herein, less red-cards, let’s go on with the
COIN mission, we all speak the same language. RC West and North, equally important, that’s a
stability front, so stability will be the lead there. US and UK appear to be thinking along the same
lines as far as COIN, this is not Iraq of 2003 or 2004. There were difficult issues for both countries
about what has happened in Iraq, but lets just say that the military commanders have come to an
agreement that mistakes have been made, and that we’re all moving forward together in the same
way.

Need for more troops, yes, but there is also talk of redistribution of those bases, we do have a lot of
combat outposts, but they’re not necessarily embedded in the community, and we have to figure out
if it makes sense to embed them with every single community. Every valley will be different, the
metrics within any given area, the intelligence and what the tribal elders might want, could be very
different. So there is no cookie-cutter solution here, so the idea is we might need to redeploy
ourselves to focus on certain places like Kandahar. If Kandahar falls tomorrow it doesn’t matter
what we’re doing in Helmand, Orūzgān and RC East. Kandahar is a centre of gravity for many
people.

Bottom-up government initiatives, all politics are local, it’s true in the United States, it’s true almost
everywhere else in the world. Local security is key. Major debate about ANA expansion versus
what these auxiliary forces might look like. Some of us are not looking for the ‘Sons of Iraq’, that
was okay, but there were problems with it, we’re looking for a true auxiliary force that can be seen
as legitimate in the eyes of many people. It brings izzat, honour, or nang, honour to the community
and brings economic benefits to the community as well. For a potential period of time we may have
to lead and fight alongside these people in battle and we’ll hand them over to the Afghanistan
national security forces later. This need has always been true in counterinsurgency. At no time have
you only had a regular indigenous force winning the war on its own, it always had auxiliaries. Even
in the great Malayan experience, the Chinese didn’t join the Malaya regiment, they joined their
home guards. Even in Vietnam, the ‘Ruffs and Puffs’, the regional popular forces, did more damage

39
to the NVA in 1972 Easter Offensive then ARVN did. So these are key things that are coming back
to the discussion points, for these discussions on regular versus auxiliary forces.

Embedded across many lines and this isn’t just the military this is civilian, but it’s getting those
numbers. To give you an example about how bad we are with numbers, we had more USAID
people deployed to Vietnam, than we have in the whole world today. We have a shortfall in the
civilian service that is needs to be addressed. One possible solution, retired military officers and
others, who know how to take care of themselves and employ them in those other government
departments and give them the same rank that they had, potentially, in the military. This is a
discussion that is going on in the northern hemisphere. It doesn’t matter that you have an inter-
agency counterinsurgency manual, but if you don’t apply it and you don’t have the numbers, it’s not
going to go anywhere.

It’s great we build these schools in Afghanistan, and it’s great we build these hospitals, but do we
have those school-teachers and do we have those doctors? I think there is a huge shortfall there. So
the reconstruction, and this is what many commanders have said, the reconstruction isn’t about
spending money and about having that metric. I mean, we build 15 schools, are they functioning?
Isn’t it better to build one school that’s functioning instead of having 14 that are now burnt to the
ground? Those sorts of metrics and debate [inaudible] discussed, because money has been thrown at
the problem in Afghanistan, we have thrown more money in Afghanistan than we have in Iraq, and
there is something to show for it, but there are lots of question marks being made right now about
actual progress.

I’m throwing up CORDS, the civil operations revolutionary development strategy, you know we
didn’t do a lot of good things in Vietnam but we did do that well. That was a unified pacification
program where we had a four-star civilian general under the command of Westmorland and later
Abrams and they worked side-by-side. They smashed the rice-bowls of all the other government
departments but it took a Presidential decree to do that, and many of us are waiting for Obama to
appoint somebody higher than Holbrooke. Holbrooke still reports to Clinton, so he is State
Department. We’re looking for someone who has the power to tell State Department, USAID as
well as the military, ‘we are not achieving success’.

Reconciliation within the Pashtun areas; there are major grievances in that area, we don’t quite
understand all of them, we have to find out what they are, and it’s more complicated than human
terrain teams. It’s actually getting the right people on the ground – who will serve a lot of years
there – to build up those personal relationships.

There is also reconciliation needed at the higher level. If you start reconciling with the Pashtuns
you’re going to have to start reconciling with the Uzbeks, Tajiks and the Hazaras. This is where my
cynical side comes in. I do think that potentially we can start reconciling within the Pashtun belt,
because the lengths of tours need to be revaluated for most countries. There is talk now of British
forces being deployed longer. They can build those relationships up, but I’m not sure we have the
capability, at the higher civilian levels yet, to negotiate across all those other areas; so, that is
something in terms of long term thinking we need to deal with. There are going to be knock-on
effects to building up local governance, local security and other things that’ll have an impact even
in Mazār-e Sharīf and Herāt. Working within Pashtunwali customs and laws is key. I was in the
FATA in 2000 and I’ve been back to Afghanistan, and that’s the way they are, that’s the way they
live, there is nothing wrong with it, that’s their life; stop imposing our own metrics on it. We in the
United States have the death penalty, you don’t. We all operate differently. We all feel that we
have righteousness on our side at some times but to go into a country and try to tell what is best for
the Afghan is a bit presumptuous. Especially for a group of people such as the Pashtuns who are

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extremely xenophobic at times, and very proud of themselves. We were a bit presumptuous to think
we could tell all is well within our own society. We learnt that lesson in Iraq quite heavily, we paid
4,500 lives to get there, I don’t want to see us lose another 4,500 lives this time.

Things are going to get worse before they get better. We’re going to have to accept it, we’re going
to take casualties. The Brits know they’re going to take casualties, and this is a debate for the
Australians if they want to take casualties. Let’s get some thoughts on current thinking. Petraeus’
thoughts last month, quote: “First and foremost our forces and those of our Afghan partners have to
strive to secure and serve the population. We have to recognise that the Afghan people are the
decisive terrain, and together with our Afghan partners we have to work to provide the people
security, to give them respect, (and I’d say honour,) to gain their support and to facilitate the
provision of basic services. The development of the Afghan national security forces in the area,
promotion of local economic development and governance that provides links to the traditional
leaders in society, and is viewed as legitimate in the eyes of the people.” The point about
embedding within the community was stated quite heavily by a British General from a number of
years ago, and something that the British learned very hard in the ‘Charge of the Knights’, quote:
“It is crucial to have a base in a city, town, or village, right in the middle of it; and you patrol it so
you could interact with the population, only with that interaction could you really tell who was
ruling the roost, when you put out small bases they attract enormous destructive aggression from the
insurgents, because the last thing the insurgents want is someone who operates in the vicinity of,
and can deprive them of their own bases. This is sometimes very difficult to implement, because in
terms of force protection and risk this is huge, it therefore requires a risk-taking organisation to
undertake it, not only the military hierarchy, but the political hierarchy as well.”

Risk is a very necessary part of winning in warfare, and that has been something that has been
missing, in terms of the way we have deployed our forces and our civilian agencies. The current
thinking of the US is in some ways summarised by Kitson; this is a great quote that has been
bantered around by American as well as British Generals in MND SE, and I think it’s very apt,
quote: “We have seen that it’s only by close combination of civil and military measures that
insurgency can be fought so its logical to expect soldiers, who business it is to know how to fight, to
know also how to use civil measures in this way. Not only should the army officers know about this
subject, they must also be prepared to pass on their knowledge to politicians, civil servants,
economists, members of the local government, and policemen where necessary. The additional
function of the army at these critical moments is most important. Amongst senior officers in
particular, ignorance or excessive diffidence in passing along such knowledge can be disastrous”.
That started to happen in Iraq and is stating to happen in Afghanistan, especially within the northern
hemisphere. So the potential current thinking within ISAF. To give you some background, this
article just came out in ‘Joint-Forces Quarterly’ by an incredibly intelligent US Marine Colonel
called Colonel Alford who did excellent work in Al-Qa’im; a town on the border of Syria. Where in
2005 after clearing the city of Al-Qa’im of Al-Qaeda, working with tribes, embedded his 3/6
Marines across an Iraqi brigade to pacify and try to control that area. We all talk about the Al-Anbar
awakening, there are many reasons why the Al-Anbar awakening began, and where it came from.
What Colonel Alford did in Al-Qa’im is one of the pieces to the recent success, so what he has to
say about his role now in ISAF is very important, because he’s putting out some interesting
concepts there. One, Pashtunwali, we need to work with it – would have been unheard of within the
American military four or five years ago, but that’s how basic the change of mindset has occurred in
the US. I want to put some framework, when dealing with ‘clear, hold, build’. It is constantly being
discussed in different places, a lot of times even some military commanders can’t really get the
points across; what it actually means. It’s been around for a little over a hundred years. It’s not an
American thing, it’s a French thing, it’s a British thing, and now it is an American thing. Let me just
give you the concept that he’s working with, and this appears to be ISAF thinking as well.

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Operational design framework is as follows: ‘understand, shape, secure, hold, build’. Clear is being
debated because there is a propensity and fear sometimes with commanders, that clearing is too
kinetically orientated. So ‘clear’ may be dropped. ‘Understand’, we must understand the family,
clan, tribe, or community organisation; and ‘hold’, ‘hold’ power in that area, we will never
understand what it means to be an Afghan, but can gain a critical appreciation of their values,
obviously take off your Western mindset and glasses, this is not the way it’s going to be done in the
Pashtun belt. ‘Shaping’, the ability to influence and inform the perceptions, allegiance, attitudes,
actions and behaviours of all players in the operations before we move in to secure it; ‘securing’,
means to gain possession of a key terrain in order to deny its use to the enemy, and also to provide
security to the population, killing insurgents is often not main objective. You never would have
thought you’d hear an American officer say that after what we saw in 2001-2002, but it came down
to reform and change in mindset.

The American military, and the British military are going through it as well, have fundamentally
relooked at themselves to try to win these wars. They don’t even use win anymore, they use
‘succeed’; win is too dangerous a term. ‘Holding, we [Coalition] and the Afghan national security
forces are present and intend to remain until a legitimate local government is ready to provide
security and governance. This means we must eat, and sleep, in the villages and towns without
displacing a single family. ‘Build’, an area of operation means maintaining a safe environment for
the people and the local government so both can pursue their social, political and economic goals.
At the tactical and operational levels, ISAF building efforts must be focused on facilitating popular
support for the district, provincial government, through the clans and tribes and/or village leader
providing an atmosphere for political reconciliation, bottom-up. Bottom-up reform occurred in the
military, bottom-up in development, bottom up in terms of government has always occurred in
western states, this is the way it worked in different areas, this is the way which many Pashtuns
have stated to military commanders, is what they want.

So, the last points I’ll raise are these, and as an American who has only been here [in Australia] for
six months I might be presumptuous in what I might say here, but where does Australia go from
here? The Rudd government needs to decide if the narrative for Afghanistan needs to change, but
he’s going to be intelligent, he’s going to wait for Obama to change the narrative first; just like
Gordon Brown, and then they’re either going to join up or have their own interpretations. Points we
discussed this morning, we had the alliance debate, national interests, security, terrorism. I’ll also
add, if Rudd embarks on this, and embarks potentially on an increase in troops, he had better
explain to the Australian people, ‘what is counterinsurgency’, and counterinsurgency isn’t ‘hearts
and minds’. That was COIN in the 1950s, [hearts and minds] was fundamentally different from
what it is today. ‘Hearts and minds’ has been ripped out of the doctrine and other things in the
northern hemisphere, because it’s caused a lot of problems. When boys are dying and fighting for
their lives in villages, the people back home have questioned the mission, “I thought we were doing
‘hearts and minds’”, so there needs to be a broader understanding as to what counterinsurgency is.
The narratives are changing in the northern hemisphere and we’ll probably all be intelligent and
wait until Obama changes the narrative first before we sign up. Population centric COIN I think,
and I’m not speaking for the new strategy that’ll be released in a month’s time, but the writing is on
the wall. The train has left the station, its population centric within the Pashtun belt. Australia needs
to decide if you’re going to get on the train or get off the train. COIN is the way forward for RC
East and South. So the three potential options for Australia if it remains in RC South are as follows,
I feel; one, a true, ‘understand, hold, shape, and build’ strategy in Orūzgān, the problem with that,
coming back to points which Jim Molan has stated many times over, the Dutch and the Australians
– if the Dutch remain – will need to provide more battalions and have the risk-taking issues dealt
with at the highest levels, there will be more casualties, I have to say, I was told by somebody not to
say that, but I think we have to be open about it, that there will be more casualties. I think you need

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to accept it as well, if you go that route. Two, the Australians remain in the south at current troop
levels, to come back to Hugh’s point, but we might want you to be fighting somewhere else, we
might ask you not to have Orūzgān, because you can’t really control Orūzgān if the Dutch leave
with 1,000 troops. You might need to come down and help the Canadians, if the Canadians stay on,
you might need to go to Helmand, might even have to help the Marines, and that’s a bone of
contention potentially for your Chiefs of Army and Chief of Defence Forces as well as your
government to decide. We’d be more than happy to have you. We’d love to see more RAR as long
as everybody’s speaking the same language, and that’s counterinsurgency, which I’ll get to at the
end here. Three, an advisory mission, that is very important, we all know that the, in theory if you
want to be simplistic, that the route home is a secure Pashtun belt that is reconciled with the larger
community and has a security force, either local or at the national level, that is able to provide
security, and support the government of the area. But it takes a lot of effort to build a security force
up to that level. The Afghan National Army isn’t a counterinsurgency force yet, still have a lot of
work to do, so what you might want to do is send out and Australian army training team to
Afghanistan. But not what you sent to Iraq, that was not the training team from Vietnam. The
training team from Vietnam served everywhere in the country, so it would serve in RC East and RC
South, and it didn’t have many red-cards. It fought and died with American Special Forces, with the
Montagnards, with Ruffs and Puffs, with ARVN, there was a lot of risk in that. We’d love to see
another training team on the same level as the training team in Vietnam, but Iraq was not the
training team we are probably looking for. The embedding with the Iraqis for both the British and
the Australians turned out to be very controversial, the embedding for the British for 14 DIV was a
better success story, lots of lessons have been learned from Iraq.

The need for an Australian civilian surge, this is a COIN fight. We need civilians who are actually
trained and educated in understanding local conditions, understanding that what works in Sydney
isn’t going to work potentially in Tarin Kowt. That you need to work with people potentially who
have blood on their hands. The fact that US Marines who sit down with people they know have
killed fellow marines and recognised that that’s the way forward, anyone can move forwards if the
Marines can do it, and I’m not slighting the marines. That vital transformation of a mentality is
something the British have come to terms with as well. The British were better in the past, they’ve
come back to it. So a discussion needs to occur with the government and the people of Australia if
these options are right. We’re not just talking about money, we’re potentially talking about more
funerals, and how the government deals with those funerals is something that will be seen by the
public and be very close to home for some communities in this country. It needs to change if you
want to go that route, not everybody’s son is coming home.

The Australian soldier prides himself on COIN training and tactics, however, the US and UK
militaries have now recognised the importance of education for officers and commanders to
implement a COIN strategy that is properly researched and focused. I’m not throwing a grenade
here, but to the Australians in the audience from the military, you may have been the best in
counterinsurgency in 2001 maybe, 2002, but I think we have to recognise that the US and now the
Brits have come a long way in their understanding of counterinsurgency and in some ways even the
British admit that the Americans are leading. I think that some humility in the fact that you might
need to learn from your fellow allies is important in this kind of fight because it came home for the
Brits very harshly in MND SE, but the relationship has been mended, but I do think it’s going to
wear very thin. Within any RC South command structure, an Australian officer telling a Brit or
American officer ‘this is COIN, this is what we do’ that’s not the common language anymore, there
is a common language but we all need to be professional in understanding what we’ve done and
what we haven’t done, in the past campaign in Iraq, and I’ll just leave it at that.

Graeme Dobell: Jim, do you want to have a go?

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Jim Molan: Only to the extent that I agree with what Daniel is saying, particularly about some
aspects of our own self-delusion but I still don’t think that’s the big issue, the big issue for us, when
we decide what we’re going to do is to do something meaningful. I have no argument with Daniel
on the tactics, absolutely agree, the US is now the best counterinsurgency operator in the world, has
been since 2006-7, because they stared defeat in the face, and it’s the greatest way to learn is to
think that you’re going to lose if you don’t change absolutely everything you think you’re going to
lose, and it would be arrogant in the extreme for us to think we could do it. The beauty of Australia
and Australian troops is that we can learn and we can change and we can adapt, we are intelligent,
we’re smart soldiers, we’re culturally sensitive soldiers, and I think there is a lot of potential in
there; for example, I would love to see Australia in an Australian way, learning from our allies, but
with our own culture behind us, running Orūzgān province, regardless of whether we’ve put the
total number of troops needed in that province for success, but I think we could make a significant
contribution to overall success and it’d be nice to know what overall success is going to be, and
we’ll know that hopefully in a month or two what the overall strategy is going to be, and within that
Australia plays a small but significant part in that we are in Orūzgān in order to win, or as Daniel
says, to succeed.

Graeme Dobell: Hugh, and then Bill.

Hugh White: Thanks Daniel that was terrific, I just want to ask two difficult questions, and they’re
both about numbers; the first is, do you think – looking at the coalition effort in Afghanistan as a
whole – to implement the kind of strategy that you see emerging, is it anything like an additional
17,000 troops going to be enough, and, if not, give me a number; and secondly, to take over
Orūzgān, for Australia to take over Orūzgān what would be needed, how big a contribution would
be needed.

Daniel Marston: First of all, no 17,000 troops isn’t enough, but we’re also not talking about 150,000
US troops, as we had in Iraq. We do need – I don’t want to speak out of turn here – but the marines
are sending in a brigade in the south, but there is talk of more troops in the future potentially if the
south doesn’t go the right way. I think it’s what kind of troops we send in there as well, and we will
probably send in brigade combat teams but we’ll be partnered so closely to the ANA that the force
multiplication goes out. They are looking at where best to do have the footprint, where should we
be refocusing our efforts, and Kandahar is one, that’s why the marines are reinforcing Kandahar,
and other locations to start the hold process. If this is the way we go forward. But at no time are we
talking more than 80,000 troops, probably, you’ve have to be careful with numbers too. let’s face it
the Brits deployed 3,330 troops in Helmand for the summer of 2006 but they had about a thousand
bayonets. So those numbers are a bit skewed and that’s where some commanders are saying we
need the right forces, and make sure the logistical chain is there to support them. But we need to
make sure the right forces are there to embed with the Afghan national security forces, or even the
auxiliaries if they go that route, and I can’t possibly comment on how many troops we do need, but
we’re not talking, I think, more than 80,000 US troops, because the Brits are sending another battle-
group, you know, Gordon Brown said it the other day, they’re sending another 1,800. I know that
there is a huge debate within Britain that they should be sending more than that, a whole another
brigade. Two brigades in Helmand would probably do quite well, if you embed the Afghan Kandak
in the area and the issue of local security forces, there have already been local security forces that
are working well, that have not been reported on, and we’ve embedded the right kind of people.

Coming back to the training team mission, training teams are very important, but you’ve got to
make sure you put the right advisors in those teams, it can’t just be second and third rate individuals.
It has to be the best and people who will work for longer periods of time, so there are discussions on

44
about the fact that some of these training teams should be out there for two years, but then you pay
them back, with promotion, with the fact you move their family to Qatar or UAE, so there are a lot
of debates going on right now. I’m sure it’s no different here, but a lot of things are being looked
into. Orūzgān itself, I think if we’re dealing with the fact the Dutch will pull out, I think for you to
hold Tarin Kowt and try to spread out with the Afghan national security forces as they are slowly
right now, would see these small COPS being built up outside of Tarin Kowt, [inaudible]. I think
you’ll need at least a brigade to have any hope of trying to explain to RC South that you can
actually control Tarin Kowt. We have to be realistic with the metrics, we’re not going to pacify
every valley in the next 18 months. We have been doing to many clearing operations, this is a long
term process, and we would want to see, I think, and again I’m not speaking for anybody at
CENTCOM or DoD, I think we’d like to see the Australians commit a brigade, potentially, that can
be properly resourced too. Not just for the next 18 months but potentially for the next five years.
That’s a political and military debate, which has to occur, but the British are looking long term as
well about potentially reinforcing with a whole brigade by the end of the year. I’m not saying
they’ll do it. The Canadians are stretched too, but we feel the Canadians have been trying to put in
as much as they can, they know they need help, so they’ve been looking to the Marines to help them
with Kandahar.

Graeme Dobell: Bill?

William Maley: Just a reflection. Part of the problem, I think, that also needs to be factored into this
discussion is the increasing sense of disappointment, or even anger, on the part of the Afghan
government, and people in Afghan political circles, about the way in which they have been
positioned in this kind of narrative; for years, they feel that they’ve been told that the international
forces have just discovered the Holy Grail and that if they shut up and let the internationals handle
things all will be well. This is particularly the case in terms of relations with Pakistan, where the
line that was explicitly put to President Karzai was, ‘We will handle Pakistan’. You could make a
similar point about the situation in Helmand, where, against the wishes of the Afghan government,
there was a change in local leadership and everything went to custard. As a result there is not a great
deal of confidence that things have now dropped into place, and I think finding ways of overcoming
the distrust that has build up because of the accumulated burden of past failure is going to be one of
the significant challenges that is required to make new doctrine of this sort work. And I had two
more specific questions about these new doctrinal developments. The first is how does one
overcome the gap that has often been discussed with US operations in the field between the officer
corps and the people at the ground level: I can remember a former senior Australian officer
remarking that the US military were no good for more than a three month insurgency environment
because of the difficulty of getting the low-[level troops actually to join up to the good strategic or
tactical ideas that were being generated at the doctrinal level; and flowing from that, do you have
any data on the number of people in the US military who actually have any language capacity in
Pashto?

Daniel Marston: The first point is, I’d be interested to find out which General was saying that about
the three months. The American military – as any military – has recognised that 100% of all these
forces to work in these kinds of conditions, they can’t get everybody to do the right jobs. It’s putting
the right brigade commanders, battalion commanders, setting the tone in these areas that understand
potentially the long term consequences of their actions. The Americans have overreacted, the
Americans have made mistakes, and so have the Brits, and so have the Canadians, but it’s getting
the right people trained and educated across many lines into this. the efforts in Iraq, and again I
don’t want to draw to much from Iraq, but just to give an example of how the training program
reformed for Iraq, and it was changing all the time. As a BCT brigade team was ripping into the
country they had spent eight months out, training for their mission, BCTs with their opposite

45
numbers and everything else, but by 2007 those BCTs also had Iraqi police, Iraqi Generals and Iraqi
sheiks talking to them, saying these are the people you’re going to meet, they started to build up this
whole concept of looking through these different metrics and different mindsets from eight months
out. Then they arrived at Taji, at the COIN training center, and that’s where they met the sheiks and
local power-brokers and others, and started to build that relationship about how do we embed our
people with your people, and to start the process.

Now it wasn’t always 100% successful, we have had still some issues on the ground, there will
never be any force, including the Australians, will never be 100% perfect at this kind of warfare, but
the thing is, the mindset and the training packages and other things are starting to change some of
these mindsets within commanders. We have outside academics as well as former insurgents come
and saying [inaudible] ‘I fight you because you killed my brother’, you know, there is a very large
openness going on within the military and the mistakes that have occurred. Now in the training
mission that is seen as one of the most important bits, not everybody can be a trainer, not everybody
can work with an Afghan, a Tajik, a Uzbek or a Pashtun and see eye-to-eye. It’s finding the right
people to do that mission, and that is being looked into heavily, we – contrary to what some people
might say in this room – the Marines did a great job with their Combined Action Platoons in
Vietnam. They did psychological assessments of people who are attached to those villages and
worked with the popular forces. They did not want the guy who talks about Vietnamese in a
derogatory way. Those systems are being looked into, how do they set these metrics for these guys
and try to figure out who will be best to be that negotiator.

Pashtun and Dari language capability has been debated for a long time. There was a big push in the
British army to get as many intelligence officers and others to become either Dari or Pashtun
speakers so they can interact. It has come down to budgets, lots of times I believe that the language
course were dropped because of deployment issues and other things. The Americans have ebbed
and flowed, the marines have ebbed and flowed too, they wanted a lot of people to speak Arabic
they’ve fallen back on it, they’re now going to Afghanistan and they have too many Arabic
speakers. So there is always going to be catch-up, but it’s always about who are the interpreters and
who can you trust on the ground, because as we know in Afghanistan there are many times when a
tribal elder will speak to someone and say ‘I want a school’ and the interpreter ‘he wants a hospital’
and the guy goes away and builds the hospital, not knowing that the interpreter has lied because
he’s a doctor and he wants a job.

Those things are ongoing issues, but it also came to – well I don’t want to put too much on
historical experience – there are lots of interesting lessons from the British administration of the
FATA pre-1947, that many people are looking into. It was a light footprint and the right people.
They were people who were willing to not ‘go native’ but were willing to be respectful and
honourable to those individuals in their area. To bring some sense of security and stability to a
region, never to pacify them, you need to remember that many of the present day commanders are
not talking about control of the Pashtun belt, it’s about having some semblance of security in the
Pashtun belt, so we can go home. So they feel secure, it’s not about imposing our metrics; the
problem though has been, and we had an administration that was definitely, as we all know, ‘in your
face’ about the way that we were supposed to be better. I don’t think that’s necessarily true of the
Obama administration any longer and I think the military and I think some people in State
Department have woken up, that that rhetoric doesn’t work any more.

Graeme Dobell: We’re going to have to lie down five quick mortar rounds, you’re only getting $10
a round, and then Daniel will take those five, so it’s going to be Lesley, Jim, Nick Stewart, Neil
James, and John, so Lesley you get first round.

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Lesley Seebeck: I’m interested in what you have to say Daniel, and that was an excellent
presentation by the way, about civilians. Whenever we talk about ‘numbers’ we immediately talk
about military solutions, and we’re asking for the military numbers. Jim [Molan] says, ‘give me a
brigade and we’ll have Orūzgān done’, but I notice there is no mention of any civilians, So what do
you mean about the sort of things that are needed, the sort of capabilities are we after, the sort of
people and numbers, and timeframes. I’ve got my own ideas, I’m interested in yours, because at the
moment part of the problem is we go straight to the military again and we haven’t built other
aspects in.

Graeme Dobell: No I think that’s a really interesting point, and Lesley you’ll get your chance at that
next session. Jim?

Jim Molan: Certainly in the articles that I’ve written in relation to specifying that, I’ve
acknowledged that is just so important Lesley and it’ll be great to get to it, but I think we’ve got to
keep in mind that this war is winnable, we shouldn’t see it as an absolutely impossible task that
we’re taking on, there are no guarantees of course, but it is winnable, the lower the number of
troops that we deploy the longer it will take us to achieve some sort of result, we’re not going to
lose tomorrow if we change the troop numbers, if we increase them a little bit it’ll just go on and on
and on and what we then do is a expose our own will to our enemies and therefore we defeat
ourselves and we will go at a certain stage.

How we do it is really that we don’t do it by demanding certainty and no risk at the start, so, it’s
unrealistic to think that if this job is worth doing, we’re not going to go in until we’ve got enough
Pashtun speakers, until we’ve got enough troops, until we’re all totally resources and we know
perfectly what’s going to go on in the world; it’ll be a strange situation if we don’t commit until
after we hear the US plan 100% because the plan will last 15minutes, when the US comes out with
the strategy it’ll last 15minutes and then it’ll change, the commitment by a country such as
Australia into the war and the alliance, we get into the war and as soon as we get into it it’ll change,
but that’s not a reason for not getting into it. I’ve got to say that what Daniel said about the way of
leading into the war with smart commanders who then educate their organisations; we’ve seen that
in Al-Qi’im, in Tal Afar, in Baghdad, in North Babil, and innovative commanders are the answer,
Australia can produce them and we could produce them there, it’s interesting when we’re talking
about counterinsurgency or stability, and this is exactly what’s needed, the one thing that did strike
me and that I tried to bring back with me from Iraq is that half way through a counterinsurgency,
where you have optimised your troops for counterinsurgency, you have to fight a conventional
battle; and the marines found this on a number of occasions and Daniel was just speaking about the
British paras in Helmand, who were fighting fundamentally head-to-head, straight down the line
battles, and so what you’re asking of your military to do is extraordinary.

Nick Stewart: Terrifically energetic speech, but I’m still confused exactly how it’s going to work
tactically on the ground. You’ve told us that the current operational conception from the operation
isn’t actually working, but I don’t understand, do we end up with squads of troops deployed in the
location, (is this what you’re talking about?) from village, district, provincial etc. or are you doing it
concentrated in provincial areas as appears to be the new form of deployment where the troops go
out, how does that actually work on the ground?

Neil James: The only point I’d like to make, and I agree entirely about what Daniel and Jim have
been saying about counterinsurgency, but you have to factor a little bit that the uniformity of
doctrine to the fact that the cross-cultural awareness of the soldiers is very important and that differs
from country to country and it’s one of the reasons why you have the French, British, Russian and
American schools of counterinsurgency, and this is one reason why it’s very important that we take

47
the lead in Orūzgān after the Dutch go, for the simple reason that it’s a win-win-win, the Americans
win because they’re not seen to be leading it, and they gain a lot by that because they’re leading so
much everywhere else, the Australians win, because we’re seen by the Americans as doing the right
thing by them as an ally and we can perhaps manage the counterinsurgency better along the areas
that are slightly different in doctrine, and the Afghans win because it’s not Americans, but it’s all
part of the allied effort. The last thing I’d add is in a previous life I was the army’s linguist manager,
and it’s inevitable that you always train your linguists for the last war, I mean, in the 1980s for
instance, the army was full of Thai linguists for the war that never came, and finance and spending
are an inevitable part of it, and I can remember having enormous fights with international policy
division where they were telling us we couldn’t possibly have any Japanese linguists at all because
there was no job in the military that required you to speak Japanese, and virtually every language
I’d suggest with the exception of Indonesian and Chinese, the bean counters just said, ‘no no no no
no’ and we then had a generation of people we had to train in Bislama and Tetum and languages
that for years our international relations bureaucrats had told us we’d never need.

John McFarlane: Very quickly, let’s assume for the purpose of this exercise that we will have a
build-up in troops, perhaps along the lines Jim was talking about, and the politics of selling that to
the community as you say, is one of the Prime Minister’s biggest challenges, but I see another
related challenge, and that is, every time we’ve had a fatality we’ve had the Governor General, the
Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the Minister, the Chief of the Defence Force, and a
host of other people that have thought it personally necessary to attend the funeral. I think from the
relative’s point of view that’s a wonderful point of respect for the person that’s kidded, but if we
have a lot of casualties, if we have a multi-casualty situation, how do we turn that off, and how to
we handle the politics of turning that off.

Daniel Marston: It’s always hard; I had 25 questions in a row one day, but this is a little bit easier.
We come back to the point raised about civilians. I’ll try to answer this in a very civil way. There
has been a growing concern from within [US] State [Dept] that potentially the way they’ve been
recruiting people for specific positions, and what qualities they were looking for, are not conducive
to what the mission has become in some of these countries. So we might have to go outside, and
bring people in. But I’ll also add the education side, to be fair to Georgetown, they started a
program in their foreign service school on insurgency and counterinsurgency; they’re trying to
make sure that a lot of guys who will be deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq have some basic ideas of
what the hell is going on. They get a lot of good speakers and others. ANU, SDSC has a course now
on COIN and insurgency. Britain has been slower. There has been a push in Oxbridge and a few
other places. There are terrorism courses, but that’s not the same sort of thing. So governments are
trying to potentially start funding universities to carry out these programs, to start the building
blocks. Now at the operational level, go back to CORDS, and I apologize for beating the CORDS
drum, but in 2001 in November, some of us – myself included – were saying to people ‘there is
going to be a Pashtun insurgency, it’s coming, we need to get our heads around this war. We need
to look at history, we need to not go down the same path we did before. We need to look at CORDS.
There are a lot of programmes in CORDS that we need to look at in terms of getting a unified
comprehensive approach to this future campaign.” Now, of course, Yale – at the time – said thank
you for your application Dan but there is no insurgency. God bless Yale. CORDS had a course for
every single USAID, State Department, agriculture, everybody else, had to go through a six-week
course before they deployed to Vietnam, to understand the environment, to understand what is
COIN and your role in COIN. They also created a training centre at Vung Tau, [one in DC for USA
officials] for the Vietnamese, CORDS was 80-90% Vietnamese. As far as I am aware, we don’t
have a training program in Kabul or other places, to start filling these district centres and other
places for agriculture and other things. This point has been passed along to the State Department

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and other agencies, and they’ve said ‘Oh Christ, we’ve had a course on this before?’ Everybody has
amnesia; it’s not just the military. They are improving.

So, coming back to that, they started to push the idea that they need training courses for civilians.
There are other problems though, in some of these agencies, I wont say which, but some in the UK
there are lots of people who want to go to Afghanistan or Iraq but they’re being poo-poo’d by
London because they’re war-mongers. So there is an institutional problem in a lot of these
departments that need to be worked out. Potentially for six years duty in Afghanistan you don’t
have to do some of these silly job back in D.C or London, but that’s for the institution to figure out.
But it’s getting those other institutions and government departments to figure out there is a need for
these civilian enablers. We’re not talking thousands of civilians, if you have one excellent civilian it
goes far. Again – I don’t want to harp on – but the British had eight civilian officers in the FATA
backed up by a local security force, the Frontier Corps, that was to maintain some semblance of
security. It had a very light footprint. Those who were in the political agency knew the Pashtuns
and respected the Pashtuns and tended to be seen as native by New Delhi, as sell-outs by some, but
they were the ones who negotiated with the tribes all the time, I’m not saying we need an imperial
service, you know we’re not talking colonial civil service anymore, that’s the last thing that you
want to discuss in public, but you can’t dismiss history, and as a historian we have been dismissing
history in many ways and we’re living with that mistake.

Graeme Dobell: Alright I think you’ll all agree with me that class act, thank you, alright, you have
ten minutes to get you coffee, we’re starting bang on at 2:40.

INTERMISSION

Graeme Dobell: They say as Ken Begg once said during our famous election campaign, “Now this
is where it gets interesting.” As the French say ‘to govern is to choose’ and in this session those of
you gathered in the inner circle of hell are going to choose. And I’ll give you your question in a
moment. First though, I want to set the scene by giving you a letter, private and confidential, written
by a senior cabinet minister to the newly elected Prime Minister talking to him about his thinking
on sending several thousand more troops to this war that this new Prime Minister has inherited. The
senior minister in this private and confidential letter says, and I quote:

“He accepts that Australia should make a contribution to the effort. What he refuses to accept is the
notion of Australia needing to make a greater sacrifice. He rejects the argument that America would
abandon their efforts if Australia did not increase its land force. While he acknowledges that a
presence gives comfort and assistance to the United States, the size of the presence so long as it is
not contemptible is simple irrelevant. So as long as it’s not contemptible then the size is irrelevant.
If Australian force levels are not going to affect American decision making it would be better for us
to spend the money in ways which will be of far greater benefit to the progress, safety and stability
of our country. Thus far, no further”

That was actually John Gorton writing to Harold Holt after Holt had just won the famous 1966
Vietnam election. And that brings us to your moment of choosing. The question you are going to be
asked, each and every one of you on the inner table of hell is what military commitment should
Australia make in Afghanistan. You are about to go into the Prime Minister’s office and advise him
on the figure he should use. The figures I’m giving you, you can play with or vote for. You can go
for the cut and run, not quite contemptible figure which would meet the Gorton approach. The not
contemptible figure would be five hundred. The status quo figure 1090. You can go for the Surge
figure and let’s put it at the top end of the figure and we might even, on Lesley’s [Seebeck] figuring
there if you want to you can fudge it by putting in some civilians as well, your surge figure is five

49
thousand. And if you really think that this is the fight, if you think this is the biggest of the big, the
thing that really does make or break both in terms of alliance or the relationship in Afghanistan, at
the very top you can have a go for broke figure of 10,000. Your job when it gets to you is in 90
seconds or less, and remember Kevin Rudd has a very short attention span when he’s not talking, is
to convince him of that. Now having set up the question, you can have some time to cogitate, I’ll
hand you over to Chris Barrie.

Chris Barrie: Thanks Graeme. I’d like to start by first of all saying I’m sure we’re going to read
about this in the white paper when it is delivered by government but I won’t be holding my breath.
Secondly, I think it’s pretty disappointing that no one from the Australian Army is here to take part
in the deliberations because, actually, this is an important function of a conference like this, I would
have said. I know that Peter Leahy, was formerly the Chief of the Army and Jim of course a serving
General and I’m a former CDF [Chief of the Defence Force] but having the young people here who
can listen in and hear what we have to say I think is pretty important. So, Graeme has offered us
four options and I guess there’s a fifth which is to do nothing at all and get out.

Of course, all military operations get a life of their own and it’s a very brave general who tries to
predict when things are going to end. So when you are thinking about the sorts of figures that you
want to commit, I think you ought to be thinking in terms of the generational war and what that
might actually mean over how long, and to pick up Jim Molan’s point of course, the more you do
now, then may be the less long it’s going to take, so there is a quite a neat balancing act required in
all of this. But where I stand says it’s really nice to be able to support your effort, your national
effort, not just your military effort, your national effort comprehensively. It’s nice to be able to put
people in to do the developmental work, to be talked about and to be able to provide for them the
sort of security they expect.

You certainly cannot expect your aid workers to go out there and get shot. Furthermore, in
providing aid and development support, it is good if you’re also in charge of the security part of the
operation. So, you can probably guess that I’m going to head for Graeme’s surge figure and
notwithstanding that it will be very demanding and notwithstanding that if it’s a composite military
force and a civilian force of 5000 it will be quite difficult to meet that obligation. So without any
further ado, now that you’ve all had time to think this matter through, off we go. And this time we’ll
start with Brab [Richard Brabin-Smith] and go around the other way.

Richard Brabin-Smith: Thank you, I feared that might happen. Well, Prime Minister Dobell it’s
been government policy for a very large number, not just of years but of decades, to draw a
differentiation between a “contribution and greater sacrifice” and “size if not contemptible”: this is
reasonably well documented. I cannot claim, Prime Minister, that Australia’s vital interests are so
high in this particular case for it to justify a significant greater contribution than that which we are
already making, especially in the presence of significant uncertainty over contribution of other like-
minded nations. My 90 seconds is almost up. My position therefore is to defer making a decision.
(Yes, Prime Minister, before becoming Minister of Defence, I was a civil servant in the Department
of Defence.)

Graeme Dobell: Now, Brab, as Dick Woolcott used to say sometimes not making a decision is a
decision. But you’re here as my expert advisor, do I put you down as a status quo man or would you
rather cut to 500.

Richard Brabin-Smith: I think status quo with the expectation that at some stage we will try and do
something with our civilian elements as well, to give the small-T Taliban something to look forward
to when they grow more wheat on their otherwise arid and infertile land.

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Graeme Dobell: Status quo it is. Michael?

Michael Evans: I think I would have to go for the Surge figure. That would be my advice but I
would do this with some hesitation for the simple reason that I would worry about our rotation
capacity, with that number of troops. So therefore I would be a little bit more inclined to try and
graduate that, if that’s possible, perhaps going to a figure of 2000 to begin with. I would tie this, I
would tie everything, I would tie our security presence to a Counterinsurgency strategy that
promotes stability, governance and development. Therefore, I would fit it very closely to what can
actually be achieved on the ground, a StabOps type approach. COIN leading to StabsOps and what
you would have is a sequence of activity here. An increased security presence is probably inevitable.
The concern I would have in giving this kind of action is how would the Prime Minister actually
sell this to the electorate and as I said before, I think in some ways one approach is to be, to use the
mantra as ‘civilian as possible, as military as necessary’. It’s got a nice ring of inter-agency and
StabOps and COIN, it’s a blended approach.

The end state has got to be that the Afghan people have got to own this mission and therefore
although I’d favour a 5000 figure I’d also like to think within that figure I could put a proper
Australian Army training team and I would certainly like to put an Australian Police training team
in there. What that would do with our figures is probably boost them to well up over the 2000 mark.
I would also give some thought to a combat policing concept for Counterinsurgency to improve the
Afghan police. As I said, tie the commitment to security, governance and development and also tie
it to a better regional diplomacy, certainly towards Pakistan and perhaps under our DCP, some
education of Pakistani offices in Australian facilities and also AusAID. So I am, what I am saying
really is that when you talk about a military commitment it’s hard to isolate that military
commitment because in a counterinsurgency, stability operation, nation-building mission there’s
going to civilians, diplomat, there’s going to be soldiers, police there’s going to be a whole batch of
people, so really your commitment should be governed by the amount of troops you need to provide
security for them to do their job in giving the problem back to the Afghans, in other words, building
a local capacity. There’s enough in that, I think, for the Prime Minister to play around with.

Stephan Frühling: I think I would also go for something like the surge figure. Probably not as high
as 5000, because the 5000 figure implies that we send a Brigade, and although I would reinforce
Orūzgān to some extent, I would not make any move that might be interpreted as Australia letting
the Dutch go. I think putting some pressure on the Dutch to stay is not a bad idea. So I would avoid
giving the impression that we are ready to replace the Dutch, and instead keep the presence in
Orūzgān, maybe reinforce it slightly, but otherwise then concentrate on a training team that is not
necessarily geographically focused, but that can be shifted wherever it is needed in the overall
campaign plan.

Graeme Dobell: So you’re a status quo with surge capacity?

Stephan Frühling: Well, status quo plus.

Graeme Dobell: Okay, well. Alright I think putting the pressure on the Dutch is a good political
point. Neil?

Neil James: Look I think the question is a difficult one for the simple reason that by setting arbitrary
figures you’re artificially constricted. We’re in a coalition war and I’m not convinced that you need
to have such a huge gap between the status quo figure and the surge figure. I think we could easily
maintain a force of somewhere between 2500 and 3500, total. So it would be about 2500 at its

51
maximum on top of the 1100 odd we’ve got there now but it really depends what you’ve got in the
force and what you want them to do. On a strategic level I think we need to send a training team in
very similar to the one we had in Vietnam where they would operate outside of Orūzgān across the
whole country because I think the strategic benefit of that and the diplomatic benefit far greater than
just confining it to the province. But you’ve got to remember the old rule of three. For every digger,
every bayonet you’ve got in Afghanistan you’ve got to have two back here in Australia and a force
of 5000 would just about eat the entire field force of the Army so I think we’re really looking at a
slightly smaller force to be sustainable in the long run and for the time needed of about 3500-3800
and not the 5000 but if you’re asking me to commit to a figure than I’d definitely commit to the
5000 rather than the status quo.

Senator David Johnston: Given that the buck stops with the Prime Minister’s decision, my
discussion points would be as follows. I’d want to know the assumptions we are making with
respect to proceeding with this change in policy, the troops would need to be quality combat troops.
If we were to take charge of Orūzgān province that province has a 23,400 square kilometre area
with 630,000 people living in it. RAND Corporation tells us that something like 6000-12000 troops
would be sufficient to retain and maintain order over an insurgency there. We’d need to remember
that whatever we put into the field we need to rotate by three, that is one standing down, one
working up and one in the field. Are we talking bayonets, lets presume that we are. Any such action
would require at least a 6 month workup I would have thought to go away if we’re talking ordinary
infantry. So I’m adding a further 1090 troops to what we have there presuming that that 1000
converts to 3300 plus support which would take us somewhere around the 3500-4500 mark and I
would then want to see the Chief of the Defence Force that we can do that.

Graeme Dobell: This is the NATO view now.

Klaus Peter Klaiber: Thank you. What I’ve learned today already is that we must realise and
everybody realises and especially after the presentation of Daniel [Marston], that this is not a
military operation alone in Afghanistan it’s a combined civilian-military effort of all parties
concerned and of all nations involved and therefore I believe that the advice to the Australian Prime
Minister could be something like: We’ve put in already 1000 combat troops in the country, they are
doing a very good job. I will support them with another kind of security level team which make sure
they are well-equipped but our main support; our main additional support will be sort of some larger
training facilities for the Afghan Armed Forces, maybe some specific training effort also for the
Police which is still lacking a lot and where the Australians have a lot of expertise and I would say
that what else we would do as Australians is we would do some training efforts in Pakistan as well
to help the Pakistan government and especially their Armed Forces and their Police to do a better
job to contain the insurgency.

Graeme Dobell: I’ll put that down as a not contemptible status quo.

Peter Leahy: Prime Minister can I start by saying I’m disappointed with the simplistic approach
you’ve taken and that approach has been taken, I might say… [inaudible].

Graeme Dobell: Welcome to the other side of Kings Avenue.

Peter Leahy: You’re following in the grand tradition of other Prime Ministers who have seen
deployments in terms of numbers and I think that is one of the real problems that we have, it is
about troops to task, what do you want us to achieve and then it’s a matter of finding if we have
those troops so just saying I’ll have a number. I don’t recommend the 10000 figure although if you
do choose that number, there’s an ex-journalist that I think should be drafted in amongst that lot and

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we’ll send him off there straight away. The figures going to be, any figure is going to hard to
achieve and you’ve heard some of the design comments and I would only make some broad
comment on these, having a view to my recent position but it is about rotation. If we’re there for an
extended period of time, that rule of three does apply and you might even consider that if you’re
there for ten years or more the fact that some of the people we say I know I’m going back three or
four times, it’s going to be even harder so the rotation requirement.

There is a requirement to maintain high order skills, it’s an argument that the Navy and the Air
Force have been using a lot and there are military skills that you won’t be using up in Orūzgān
province in a COIN campaign so there’s another element of the Army that would need to be
devoted to doing that. Hugh talked earlier about some of those concurrency pressures, instability in
the region. Can we be sure that this is the main game or the only game? So do we need to keep
something back here in reserve. With regard to more than numbers, that sort of force just isn’t
simple just go and make some more infantry, it’s enabling elements and these things that are in
chronic short supply and they are not only in short supply within the military, they’re in chronic
short supply around the community. Medical support, in particular, intelligence capability, our
logistics capability, our signals capability and this is not only in the trained people but in the
hardware you need to be able to do these things, helicopters, the other elements of combat support,
artillery. Neil was kind enough to mention tanks; I would remind some in this room that we have a
beautiful tank that we would be able to send should you choose to send it, Prime Minister. The other
thing I would say is that also the technical capability of many of the platforms, we’ve done
something in Australia equip for but not with and the difficulty of moving some of our helicopters
there at the moment, they’re not in the right shape and as we’ve seen with the Blackhawk and the
Chinook helicopter, the Blackhawk is more a low-altitude helicopter. Hot, dry, high-altitude
climates are not going to do that terribly well, you can’t get the payload out of it. Status quo plus a
bit but give me some tasks.

Graeme Dobell: Sure.

Frank Lewincamp: Graeme, just one small difficulty with the analogy as you’ve set it for us. You
said size is not relevant if it has no effect on US decision making, unfortunately in this instance it
does have some effect because the US has to make a decision about the province. My position
would be to maintain the status quo, for several reasons. One, I don’t think our interests are
sufficiently engaged to contribute more and as Peter has just said we have significant interests
elsewhere against which we deploy and use forces. I’d like to enter into discussions with the
Coalition, particularly with the US, about the strategy and the desired end state and the means to
achieve that, particularly if a new strategy is to be released imminently. I’m still not convinced that
the strategy that I’ve heard so far encompasses all of the factors in that region, we’ve only been
talking about Afghanistan. I’ve not yet heard a coherent strategy on how to fix the problems with
Pakistan. Prime Minister, you should be prepared to consider greater civil effort, if asked and in the
meantime maintain the status quo.

Rod Lyon: Well bearing in mind the cautionary note of the generational war and sustainability, I
think we have to pick a force number that not only suits our missions but is going to be sustainable
over a prolonged period of time, a decade or perhaps two decades. On that basis, I’m sort of opting
for low surge but like Neil, maybe 3500 on a military number and about 1500 on a civilian
emergency corps, that civilian emergency corps to concentrate on engineering, agriculture,
education, medicine and language skills and that civilian corps to be the basis of our reach out into
the Afghan population, 50% of whom live in villages of 300 or less. I think we actually have to get
out among the population if we are going to have any effect here. As I’ve said, it’s not just a
number and as other people have said, it’s not just a number it’s what you do with it. I know that

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sounds like something that the actress said to the bishop but in this case I think we have to think
about what it is we’re going to do with the number. And in particular, I want to see a greater effort
put in on the political side, that helps prepare the ground for what we do and that is that we reach
out more to the local security architecture, that governance becomes something that relies more
heavily on the local political basis of power distribution. And I suppose that we even look at local
development architecture: where is it that we can most effectively pour money in Afghanistan that
gives us the results that we want? And on top of that we actually have to solve the regional problem,
which means we need some sort of Paris Accord from Cambodia; we need to get some regional
players round a table, and when we did this at Bonn we did it after the Taliban had already lost two-
thirds of the country and we just helped enshrine the northern warlords. We need to bring a lot more
players to a table, probably outside the region and just let them talk for a while. Thanks.

William Maley: I think there are several crucial points that the Prime Minister needs to take on
board. The first is that strategically, if Afghanistan seems to have gone under, then the prospect for
saving Pakistan will be fairly bleak with all the awesome consequences that could flow from that,
not just for South Asia but for South-east Asia and our region. Having said that, we need to listen to
what the Afghans want. If we are actually going to secure the environment, we need to focus not so
much attacking terrorists with global reach but providing a more secure environment in which
ordinary Afghans can lead their daily lives, and there we need to think carefully about aerial
bombing because it’s not likely that the Afghans will want to let us know that the Taliban are
beginning to infiltrate their villages if the likely consequence is that the village will be bombed from
the air.

Having said that, it’s almost certain that to provide some ambient security for people on the ground,
it will be necessary to put in more troops than are presently there, where at the moment there is only
a holding operation which is not meeting a lot of opposition but is not particularly meeting the
wishes of the ordinary people for a more secure environment in which they can reconstruct. There’s
one other element which is very important here: the Afghan people are looking for some kind of
indication that Western powers are actually serious about addressing the problems of the regional
environment which they see as central to their concerns. It’s important that there be signals that we
are adopting realistic views about the sanctuaries in neighbouring territory rather than simply
ignoring the problem or hoping that it will go away. This is not something that the Prime Minister
should find difficult to address because in fact in August 2007 the then President of Pakistan said
the following and I quote: “There is no doubt that Afghan militants are supported from Pakistan soil.
The problem that you have in your region is because support is provided from our side.” Now, the if
President of Pakistan can say it, then there’s no reason that the Prime Minister cannot say it too, in
exactly those words, and we need to drive home the point that if a neighbouring state claims to be a
sovereign state, then that involves duties as well as rights and one duty is to prevent its territory
being used in that way. To start with, it would be perfectly legitimate diplomatically for Australia
and its allies to augment troop-number discussions with pressure on Pakistan to arrest the Taliban
leadership, which, as Seth Jones noted in last week’s Washington Post, is comfortably sitting in
Quetta unmolested by any of the security authorities of the Pakistan state and running an insurgency
in which our own troops are dying.

Graeme Dobell: So you’re a surge man?

Bill Maley: Yes.

Graeme Dobell: It’s running neck and neck, Daniel.

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Daniel Marston: I’m going to take a little bit of a different approach based upon the earlier
comments. Send out a true RAR [Royal Australian Regiment] Battle group, instead of a
reconstruction taskforce team, and send it to Kandahar. Send it to support the Canadian efforts there,
then send out another 250 of the best of the Royal Australian Regiment with SAS [Special Air
Service] as a training team in RC East and South. That will have more an impact on how the
Americans and Brits view you. I think there’s potentially some issues with the Australians
controlling Orūzgān by itself because even with the brigade team you probably can’t control it all
by yourself, so we’re going have to come and support you anyway. Whereas, if you come down and
support another coalition partner, who’s having an issue with force ratios, you can work together.
We’ll support you there whereas you’re training team mission can help the key enabler and that’s
the Afghan national security forces which are going to be the ones left at the end of the day, either
through the ANA [Afghan National Army], through the ANP [Afghan National Police] or through
local auxiliaries depending upon which route we go. But the experience that the Australians have of
the training team in Vietnam, there are key lessons that the Australians need to really look at and to
deal with the issue of risk. Some of these men will not come back. There may be mutinies, there’ll
be other issues as well. Most American and British commanders are recognising that, but you’d
have a larger impact I think in some ways if you provide 200 of the best training team throughout
RC East and South and send a RAR battle group. Which you could reinforce in terms of rotations
and everything else. I think you need to look at your length of tour, that’s an ongoing debate even in
Britain and within the US Marine Corps. There’s talk of a year still, and so that deals with numbers
of rotations as well.

[Inaudible question]

Sorry? There’s even debates about little bit longer too, that would be nice too.

Jim Molan: Peter is quite right in that it’s a shame that strategy is defined by numbers and we’re
just reinforcing that but I believe if it’s worth doing it’s worth doing well. At the moment we’ve got
a 1700 Dutch, 1100 Australians, a small number of US Special Forces so we’re not winning with
3000 people in Orūzgān I can’t see any reason why we should change it by not doing anything. I’ve
done troops to task to the best of my ability to the best of my knowledge and I do come up with
something between 5000 and 6000 people based on the population centres and the geography of the
province. A few more, my answer succinctly, a few more trainers would be tokenism, a battalion
group that is about adding 800-900 on to our 1100 making it about 2000, would be appropriate as a
first step and I believe we should do a battalion group taking us up to about 2000 in 2009, we
should then be prepared by 2011 to take over the province and run the province with up to 6000
troops, now if the Marines come in give us 3000, fantastic, we don’t have to do it. We only need to
supply 3000 after the Dutch go home but we should be prepared once we get to 2011 to run the
province and run it with Australian troops and in an Australian way as an expression of our
sovereignty.

Lesley Seebeck: I’m also in favour of a surge—and I would prefer the terminology of a ‘greater
sustained effort’ rather than a surge, as a surge only gives the impression that you’re only going to
be there for a short period of time and that defeats the purpose. I’d love to say that the number we
should put in whatever you could afford with $42 billion dollars because that seems to be a magic
number. Taking a long-term view—because we are looking at a long-term commitment—when I
look at the nature of the world today, I see non-traditional threats; the need for stabilisation
missions, flexibility, and sustainability. And this is the sort of mission that better prepares us for
those sorts of contingencies. We need allies and it’s no longer the case that we can say merrily look,
we’re interoperable and we do the right things, or engage in tokenism, and expect to remain of
Team A. We need to be interoperable in terms of doctrine, how and what we do and being on the

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ground experiencing those sorts of conditions with our allies and that will give us knowledge and
experience, know-how and technology interoperability. And as Peter [Leahy] points out we might
even be able to use those tanks, which would be great.

But again, I’m a little wary of just doing more of the same, I don’t think that’s necessarily going to
help All counter-insurgency is local, and therefore those people who say even a commitment of
5000 will not make a big change in the great scheme of things potentially are wrong—so long as
you can target operations. I’ve clearly not sat down and thought through exactly what you would be
targeting, and towards what, with more trainers or a battalion group, for example. I think there’s a
mix of things that you want to do.

You might even look at having a civilian-led operation. I say that because if one of the issues is
civilians then you’re going to have to build up the capability. I know that Jim [Molan] just pointed
out to me that this is never going to happen but you’ve got to have civilians leading it. One of the
issues has been that there is a tendency to see everything through the narrow lens of a military
operation and I think that there is scope to do make it more civilian. There are qualifications and
they’re the same ones that Mike’s [Evans] picked up, again and a number of others around the table.
We need to think how a contribution fits into the grand strategy and regional strategy. The last
point is that you always need to consider the cost of not doing anything. That’s not merely the cost
of not making a decision but of not doing anything—that includes the possible diminishment of
local and regional security, falling back to the Team B scenario, and also the opportunity costs.

Andrew Shearer: It’s getting hard to come up with a new variation but I’ll try. I think I’m probably
a status quo plus kind of guy. I’d like to see us add a serious training team because I think that that
is key and I think that is something we’re good at and I think it’s part of a strategy that we know
from previous experience works. Having said that, to do it properly we would have to address some
very deep-seated, I think, problems in our institutions with embedding. My experience was that
there was neuralgia around embedding in lots of quarters, not least out lawyers but also, to be
honest, in political quarters, it’s a very difficult issue and it would take a significant cultural change,
I think, for our system to deal with that but I still think it’s worth doing. I would announce that
we’re establishing a proper, permanent embassy in Kabul and that we’re going to staff it properly.
I’d announce that we’re establishing a diplomatic presence in Orūzgān. I have to correct the record
here, AusAID does have a presence on the ground in Orūzgān but I think most of us here would
agree that one or two people are not sufficient. Likewise, the Australian Federal Police, I understand,
are ramping up their effort but again I think more can be done there. In parallel with this, I would do
two other things; I’d put together a serious aid package for Pakistan and try to leverage that in the
regional community and in the international community more broadly and I’d also embark on a
major education campaign to sell this thing to the Australian people and I’d make sure it was
sustained and I would have the ADF out explaining what we’re actually doing there a lot more than
we think we do now.

Patrick Walters: Prime Minister, after extensive discussions with military advisors, looking at the
progress in Orūzgān over the last three and a half years, I think you should consider us taking over
the leadership of the province from the Dutch at the end of next year or early 2011. But on this
proviso, that a lot of the enablers would come from the United States which we can’t provide
ourselves. So in terms of numbers, it would be much more modest than some of the others are
talking about, we are thinking around about 1800-2000 in terms of the military and of course that
dictates a lot of US help. But if we do this it would allow us, I think, to make a substantial
difference on the ground in the province in terms of effective counterinsurgency with both training
of the ANA and as Daniel has said, this focus, this new focus in that province of auxiliaries which

56
are locally recruited, we could make a substantial difference. The problem has been that we have
essentially stood still. AusAID, as Andrew says, is there but they are in the base and not in the town.

I certainly agree that we should lift the embassy in Kabul onto a proper basis but if we look at the
political risks, Orūzgān is a relatively safe province. We can have confidence that the campaign we
would prosecute there will not involve a big lift in casualties. It is something you can sell to the
Australian public in terms of our US ally. There is an expectation, and as Daniel alluded to earlier,
there is a sense in Washington that we talk the talk but won’t walk the walk. This [deployment] is
something that is sustainable in consultation with Washington and it depends on them to some
extent to meet their share of the bargain. The final point I’d make in terms of sustainment is that I
think I agree we would have to look at one year rotations rather than 8 months.

Hugh White: Of course Peter Leahy is absolutely right, you shouldn’t talk about numbers, you
should talk about tasks and the best way to talk about tasks in this context is to look at it that way, is
Australia serious about making a substantive operational contribution to achieving the strategic
objectives or are we interested in making a symbolic contribution which achieves our alliance
objectives. Now, Australia has a pretty strong record on both sides, no one would call what we did
in World War One symbolic but most of our experience, I would almost say all of experience of
coalition contributions as opposed to coalition leading since Vietnam have been on the symbolic
end of the spectrum. So one way of asking the question, Prime Minister, is are we serious about this?
Making a real contribution or are we just doing our usual symbolic routine. Nothing wrong with
symbolism as a form of alliance management it has been extremely effective but in a sense a lot of
the debate today has been backwards and forwards about that.

Now if you’re going to make a really substantive contribution, you really need to make a
substantive contribution otherwise you find yourself in that territory familiar to all bureaucrats in
offering all support short of actual help and to my mind you then have to make a pretty tough
decision. I couldn’t help but notice how many of us are trying to move backwards and forwards
between symbolism and substance because we either want a bit more or a bit less. On my view,
we’re in there for symbolism because I don’t think our interests are substantive enough and I don’t
think the chance of success is big enough for it to be worth our while to make a substantive
contribution and that’s why I would stick with the status quo and of course the point about what
they do is really critical, I’d stick with the status quo and keep them as safe as possible.

Graeme Dobell: And just because I haven’t given them any notice at all. Clive [Williams], you get a
vote, John [McFarlane] you get a vote.

[inaudible]

That’ll teach you.

Clive Williams: I would go with an intelligence based approach [inaudible].

Graeme Dobell: So we finally got a 500 man. One for five hundred.

Clive Williams: I go for status quo based upon a good understanding of what the enemy’s situation
is.

Graeme Dobell: John?

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John McFarlane: I think I would go for the surge because if we’re going to be in it, we’d better be in
it for real. My only concern about some of the things that have been said about the surge is the idea
of half military and a whole lot of civilians I hope the surge just isn’t a way of avoiding military
casualties by having civilian casualties but I do think we do need to think very carefully through
what AusAID can actually do and how they can do and what the AFP can actually do and how they
can do it so it’s not a single [inaudible] with numbers.

Graeme Dobell: Well it doesn’t give Chris Barrie the deciding vote but at the moment it stands 8 for
the status quo, some muscular status quo but nevertheless 8 for status quo and 10 for the surge, so
Chris Barrie what are you going to tell the Prime Minister?

Chris Barrie: Thanks, Graeme. Well, as with all these very easy problems to solve we’ve got an
almost equally divided room. And I think to just pick up on a couple of points that emerged from
having you do that, I couldn’t agree more with Peter and Hugh that this isn’t actually about numbers
but actually what you really want to do. And in part, I think that’s a very complicated question for
us. Afghanistan’s a long way away; it takes a fair bit of effort to support it from here even with the
help of allies and things. Secondly, we do have other interests and they’re closer to home, some of
them and finally, of course, there is no end in sight at this stage. So, that makes it extraordinarily
complicated. The next part of it is when we start to talk about numbers or as Jim Molan would say
troops to task, what are we really trying to do here? I would begin from the point that says
reconstruction and aid people can do a hell of a lot of good and not anyone of them should get shot
in the execution of their duties.

So the provision of a secure environment in which to do those things is pretty important. Now what
does that take? Well, I’ve never been to the province and say if somebody here could draw us a pen
picture of what we’re really talking about here, that’d be most useful. My only visit to Afghanistan
was in 2002, it reminded me a lot of the northern parts of India and places along those lines, so
that’s in my imagining. And then there is the fact is that it doesn’t all happen at once. The sort of
security tasks that you would have to undertake are not all going to happen at once. It is important
maintain a secure operation. It is also important that when you begin to provide security for local
people that you don’t have to give that up, that it should not be contestable once you provide it. It is
important that the people can go about their daily lives feeling that good is happening to them.
There are also many other complications, such as coalition management. My experience in coalition
management or running a coalition once and being a victim of coalition operations on many other
occasions, is that on day one on any tasks there are always plenty of volunteers, but when it gets to
the end of year five the volunteers are all drying up, they’re all going away because they’ve got
different interests and so one has always got to be cautionary about where this might head and I just
end up with one final point. What did the euphoria of the inauguration in January actually mean for
all of us in the Western World? It was more than just the United States changing its leadership, it
was the Western Alliance changing fundamental leadership and in one sense and why I would
recommend that Australia does a lot more than it has been doing in this coalition, it’s really
important that we get in behind the United States and its leadership of the Western World in trying
to do these things. And I think we can do better.

Graeme Dobell: So are you a surge man or are you status quo man?

Chris Barrie: No, I think I’m with Jim Molan. Look, we’ve been in a holding operation. If we really
want to do something here than we should dig into our overall commitment: as I said to solve this
problem is about our will and ideas. We can do a hell of a lot more than we’re doing and I don’t
want to put real numbers on it but it’s going to look something about five grand and the build-up to
that and how you get there, I think that’s part of the neat trick of management. Secondly, I believe it

58
should be a civilian in charge of the whole commitment because I think the security aspect of the
whole thing is one part of the deal and I think we need somebody in this country appointed to
manage the whole process. The ‘king’ of Afghanistan in Australia.

Graeme Dobell: Alright as you all know, that Prime Minister’s can never confine themselves to one
question. So the Prime Minister has listened to your presentation and a bit like me, the Prime
Minister came of age, well actually a bit later than me, he’s a bit younger than me. Ok, as I came of
age, of conscriptable age, my lens through on Vietnam was always an incredibly personal one but
nevertheless one of the things that my reading about Vietnam has always impressed upon me has
been the need to tell the people about death with sense. Where the Americans lost in a lot of
analyses but I’ve always been attracted to the idea that in the end the American people weren’t
being given a narrative that gave them death with sense, some sense for the death. So your Prime
Minister says to you, you’re telling me that we’re going to be there for a generation and that the
Prime Minister might have to go to a funeral once every two weeks. What is the political narrative,
what is the death with sense narrative that I am going to use to tell the Australian people about why
there sons and daughters are going to go off to Afghanistan, a place that most of them couldn’t find
on a map. Why am I going to send them to die there? So that’s my next question to you, my
advisors. Why? Chris Barrie.

Chris Barrie: Prime Minister.

Graeme Dobell: I could get to enjoy this.

Chris Barrie: I’ve been to a number, a few, military funerals in my time and I wouldn’t want you to
think that they would want you there. Because funerals, like many other things we do in family, are
very personalised affairs and frankly, I think it’s crazy that all but the Archangel Michael goes to
any funeral to any solider who dies overseas. So we do have to walk back on those ideas. Now,
equally it is important that families and other relatives or close friends do understand that anyone
who dies in these operations is dying for something that is worth it. And that does require a
dialogue with the community. You know, I think most Australians at bush level, know that
politicians and Canberra is full of fools but they do understand about doing tough things sometimes
and I think this is a tough thing but frankly, we haven’t seen decent arguments or a narrative that’s
been presented in the public domain that really makes sense of this, once again it’s something we
can do better at.

Graeme Dobell: So some thoughts on the death with sense narrative?

Jim Molan: If I could make a comment on that. If we’re serious about, it’ll led by the Prime
Minister for all the reasons that the Prime Minister has at the back of his mind and he wouldn’t be
asking his military chiefs to be justifying that but I understand the point of the question. I gave four
reasons before why we should do this and certainly for military professionals we accept that in these
occasions part of the contract is that you’ve got to be prepared to die. Now, I would stress, if I were
the Prime Minister, the humanitarian aspect of it. We can do real good. We may be clumsy on
occasions but we can do real good. Second, I’d stress self-interest. Australia has interests whether
you define them as key interests or whatever in relation to terrorism, in relation the world that we
live in, in relation to drugs, we have interests in supporting our allies and the Prime Minister already
indicated when he was in Opposition that he has interests in that particular war. I don’t believe it’s
that big of a problem to sell it in a general sense and as long as there is a good strategy, a good
overall strategy that has a fair chance of delivering success or winning in the end, you can sustain it.
It will become a problem, I think, if we don’t, if we commit to a dumb strategy or if we status quo
and achieving not much and our people are still dying but I think it’s sellable.

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Graeme Dobell: Peter?

Peter Leahy: Funerals first, and then the narrative. Prime Minister, I recognise it’s an imposition to
come to the funerals but I like you coming because you get to realise the impact of your decisions
and I think that’s one of the really important things in all of this. I’ve seen ministers and Prime
Ministers go to the farewell parade and give that narrative and they give it to the soldiers and to the
families. That then is a sense of comfort for soldiers and their families while they’re deployed and
the uncertainty of the deployment but then to bring it home, to have someone senior to government
again it’s a sense of comfort to the families of the soldiers that you’re there at the funerals. I think it
will become quickly unmanageable and I don’t know how you unravel it. We’ve got ourselves into
this situation, I went to all of the funerals and I think that’s appropriate as Adm. Barrie spoke, it’s
family. The families liked the Governor-General and the Prime Minister coming along. We’ve got
ourselves a problem, I don’t know how we get out it but I think it’s a useful thing. In terms of the
narrative, it has to be clear, it has to be consistent and frankly and it’s the mission we were talking
about this morning. If we don’t know what we want to achieve there how can we develop a
narrative and I agree, as I did this morning, largely with Jim. It’s about humanitarianism, it’s about
denial of terrorism, which was one of the original missions we set ourselves and it’s about a secure
and stable nation.

Now, I think the mission has crept, it’s a secure and stable region because Pakistan is very much
part of that and I don’t know how we do that but then, to my mind there’s another element that
comes on top of this. The soldiers hear that from the Prime Minister or the Minister as they leave
and feel very proud that they’re going off to fight for Good. Adm. Barrie would understand a force
for Good. That they’re fighting on behalf of their country, they’ve probably got their shirts all
autographed by the Prime Minister and the flags have been done and those sorts of things that you
would do but then when they get on the ground, there’s another element that comes into this. The
sense of pride of what they’re doing and even on the short trips that I’ve done to Iraq or
Afghanistan, to me it was always about the kids. If you would look outside of the vehicle and others
who have travelled with me might see these sorts of things, I think Patrick we saw one of them on a
patrol down in the south of Iraq. The kids would run up and wave at you, there’d be a sense of, hey,
they’re acknowledging that we’re here; we must be doing something good. In that sense of who we
are as Australians, I think open, egalitarian, inquisitive, there is that sense, alright, I’m proud of
what I’m doing and I think that’s what keeps a lot of the soldiers going, so it’s multidimensional but
it’s about setting the mission.

Graeme Dobell: Neil?

Neil James: Look, this is an area that we’ve talked about for some time and there’s just a few little
points I’d love to chuck in. The first one is just the simple technical point, the more tanks you send,
the less infantry you’ve got to send and the less casualties you’ll take for those of you who are
sceptics about tanks. The second thing is that is that once the Government lays down what it wants
done, the advice on how many troops to take should be given by uniformed people and not by
diplomats or bureaucrats because they are the only people who understand the problem once the
problem is actually set. The third one is the simple problem of the leader’s son. In the 1962-1972
period, over 1000 people sat in the Congress and the House of the Representatives and the
American Senate and only one of them had a son who served in Vietnam. There’s a real, that was
Gore. Gore was the only one. We have a bit of a problem that through the 80s and 90s and early
2000s, in our Parliament, the leaders of both parties were perceived by war veterans and by
members of the military as men who had avoided military service during the Vietnam War and this,
and it was both sides of politics and it doesn’t look good and if you look at how many of them were

60
actually of conscriptable age or military service age and deferred their studies for exceptionally long
periods on both sides of politics, it was quite embarrassing. So what you have to actually say to the
Prime Minister is ‘Prime Minister, are you prepared for your son to die in this war?’ and we
shouldn’t be electing to Parliament anyone who doesn’t, isn’t prepared to send their own children to
something they’re prepared to send other men’s children or other men and women’s children to
fight, remembering that we only have one war veteran in the current Parliament, we only had one in
the last Parliament and only two in the Parliament before that, so it’s really quite an interesting
question.

On the subject of funerals, the ADA [Australian Defence Association] always maintained that they
Going-Away Parade should be officiated by a politically neutral person like the state Governor or a
Governor-General or a local mayor or a local RSL [Returned Services League] president or
someone. The politicians should be there but shouldn’t be the focus of the ceremony. The funerals
are a much more difficult task; obviously the Governor-General should try and get to every one. It’s
handy for the Prime Minister to turn up because they have to confront an aspect that they no longer
confront in the new building up the hill there but n the old building they used to because if look at
the vista from this building, down across the lake it runs directly to the War Memorial so every time
you walk out the front door you’re confronted with it and on the subject of the narrative, I give you
a very quick 30 seconds vignette. When I was serving on the ceasefire line in Kashmir on my first
night, a Norwegian officer and we had two Swedes, a Norwegian and me. I gotta tell you eating the
herring and rye bread was terrible. Didn’t think I’d survive but the Norwegian said to me, he said
‘Neil, he said, how come such a young country as Australia has fought so many wars?” and I
thought about this and I thought well, you know, Australian’s don’t have a great tolerance for big
dictatorships attacking small countries, particularly when they’re democracies and the Norwegian
pulled himself up the table and glared at the two Swedes and said ‘Isn’t it wonderful that Australia
came all the way across the world to help liberate Poland whereas countries who were so close did
nothing’. You know, it was a great way about how the Norwegians have never forgiven the Swedes.

Well, this is what Australians do, we have a very, very, very proud and impressive record of
standing up for the little guy and the little guy in this situation are the people of Afghanistan who
are being buggered around by the Taliban and by the Pakistanis and by you name it and we stand up
for the little guy and it’s the same reason why those people who think if China was ever stupid
enough to attack Taiwan, we could remain neutral, how would you ignore the howls of outrage
from the average Australian who would see a big dictatorship attacking a small democracy. Well
it’s the same in Afghanistan, the Afghans are the little guy and you sell the narrative to the
Australian people of we’re actually going to help the little guy against the bad guy. We gonna
actually shot dead the people who spray battery acid in the faces of schoolchildren, schoolgirls
because they go to school and we’re going to try and give Afghanistan the type of chance that by
sheer good luck and 100 years of British strategic sea power, we had to develop into a first-world
liberal democracy. It’s not a difficult narrative to sell if you sell it properly. The failure of the
Howard government was for political reasons, they failed to sell it properly and I’ve got to say it,
the Rudd government is probably doing a bit better job of it.

Graeme Dobell: Senator, the Prime Minister’s thinking about all of this and he thinks he’d better
find out what things look like on the other side of the chamber, always in that big building it’s
handy to go for a stroll and bump into somebody in the corridor, it’s amazing what you can pick up
just strolling down towards Aussies and as he’s going down to get his coffee, he bumps into you
and he says ‘What do you think of the politics of this, you know? How do you think the politics of
this are going to play? How do the politics look on your side of the chamber?’

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Senator David Johnston: [inaudible]…before the Prime Minister asks that question he’s done all of
the right things that need to be done and that is being inclusive, to discuss in an open and very frank
way with the Leader of the Opposition, not necessarily anybody else but the Leader of the
Opposition, what is in his mind with respect to something that already has bipartisan support. Now,
I think it’s about taking everybody with you and we have been through a circumstance where we
didn’t have that luxury when in Government but the current Government does have that advantage
so I don’t think there’s a particularly big problem confronting the Prime Minister, the politics, I
think, up on the hill are straightforward. There will be issues with minor issues and others but at the
end of the day, in this particular instance and talking about this particular engagement I think the
politics are quite less muddied than we’ve previously had.

William Maley: I think that’s a very important point that Senator Johnston has just made. Issues
tend to become profoundly politicised either when there is partisan division between major parties,
as occurred over Vietnam around 1969 and over Iraq, or when conscription is the principal
mechanism for the selection of people for despatch overseas, which can politicise the issue at the
mass level even if there is an elite consensus. If you use the regular Army and other assets of the
ADF and there is a consensus between the major parties that the mission is worth pursuing, then the
importance of a narrative is not so much a matter of political legitimation: it’s more matter of a duty
ofaccounting to the public, particularly the families of people who are being sent abroad. It’s not
related to the building of mass support or the protecting of mass support for the mission; it’s almost
a moral responsibility of agents of the state to engage in a proper kind of interaction with the
community to provide a rational justification for what’s being attempted and there, I think, that’s
not just a matter of what’s being attempted militarily, but also the kind of justification that Neil’s
been talking about in terms of the morality of the situation on the ground. If you ask Afghans what
they think of the Taliban, they don’t think the Taliban movement has changed a bit. The Taliban
before 2001 were the world’s least feminist movement, they were unremittingly brutal to anybody
who got in their way. We’ve seen them happily engage in decapitation of state officials, of
schoolteachers, of people who are utterly innocent, by any stretch of the imagination and I have
sufficient respect for the community that I think that documenting those kinds of patterns of
behaviour actually suffice to provide an underpinning of a moral kind for the sort of action in which
the ADF may be involved.

Graeme Dobell: Hugh. [inaudible] Yep, sure.

Senator David Johnston: That’s prompted me to say that one of the reasons why I think the former
Government was most fortunate in not having bipartisan support in Iraq but came through relatively
unscathed to some extent was because we didn’t suffer any casualties. I think that was the crucial
point of pressure that was never brought to bear on that decision, we were involved and we were not
necessarily wearing any of the pain that other players were.

Graeme Dobell: Hugh?

Hugh White: Yes, just to, in fact, pick up on that last very interesting point that the Senator
Johnston made. It always seemed to me that the politics of casualties in societies like ours are
always quite complicated. I think societies like ours will take casualties; they will always take them
if two very important conditions are satisfied. The first is that it is very clear why the operation is
important to us and the secondly, it’s very clear the operation is succeeding. If both of those
conditions are satisfied, then actually I think the idea that this is a society that won’t take casualties
is, at least, unproven but I think actually it’s more than that, I think the evidence is to the contrary
and there’s a little bit of data, although, superficially the data in Canada points the other way, the

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fact that the Canadians are still there with 108 killed in action to me is a remarkable statistic but that
brings me to the point about how you answer Graeme’s question of the Prime Minister.

The first point to note is that because so many of our military operations in recent decades have
been undertaken primarily to support our allies there has crept into Australian strategic discourse a
kind of systematic dissimulation because in order to achieve your strategic objectives of supporting
your allies you can’t say you’re going to do it just to support your allies, you’ve got to say you’re
going to do it because you agree with whatever it is they’re trying to do, that’s part of the deal. The
honest politicians and I include both John Howard and Bob Hawke under this category
acknowledge that duality of motive, you look at the arguments that Hawke put on the table before
he went to Iraq, to Kuwait in 1990-1, if you look at the way John Howard presented the arguments
on Iraq in 2003, they both went to a great deal of trouble to say we, are worried about WMD
[Weapons of Mass Destruction] or we’re worried about what’s going happen at the UN but we’re
also very focussed on the US alliance but the fact remains is that Australian politicians have always
found it, partly because of some elements of the Gallipoli myth, if I can put it that way, hard to say
that we’re going to fight an odd war in a distant place because it’s good for our alliances. Now, and
so any Prime Minister facing up to the problem of how he expresses this is going to have to wrestle
with this. One way of getting around this of course is to use the language of values rather than
interests and Neil gave us a powerful presentation on that line and there are almost two philosophies
of military operations that they’re undertaken for values or they’re undertaken for interests, I’m
personally an interests guy myself. I tend to think people talk about values when they find that
military operations they’ve undertaken are no longer serving their interests. We didn’t go to support
the British against Poland because we cared about the Poles, we went because we though that Nazi
aggression was bad for us strategically and it was bad for strategically as was demonstrated in 1941
and 1942 pretty clearly. Now, the impact of that for us in particular is that you can get away with
the values narrative for a little while but as the years drag on, people have got to know what’s this
really doing for Australia so to base your narrative in interests in the end provides a more robust,
long-term basis for a commitment which, as we’re saying in this case if we decide that’s what we’re
going to do, could be with us for a very long time.

Graeme Dobell: I think what Hugh’s saying is very, very true. It’s very useful to go back and re-
read the speech that John Howard gave to the House of Representatives on March the 18th, 2003.

Hugh White: And the speech to the press club.

Graeme Dobell: And the speech to the club but particularly the speech on the floor of the House
because that’s where Howard was speaking to the record and all the other pillars fall away, out of
that speech, you still get this one pillar of the US alliance which Howard had put right in the centre
of the speech.

Hugh White: But at the risk of appearing self-interested, if you look at the Hawke’s equivalent
speech in the House of Representatives for the Iraq commitment in 1991, a very strong formulation
of the US alliance.

Graeme Dobell: My understanding from someone, not too far from that Prime Ministers office is
that they had a look at the speech too but that’s a story for another day. Brab, and then John.

Richard Brabin-Smith: While the people were talking I was trying to recall how many casualties
Australia has taken in peacekeeping operations. Tthere have been some; I think there was a doctor
who died in MINURSO [Mission des Nations Unies pour un Referendum au Sahara Occidental], I
think, was it?

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Neil James: Eleven.

Richard Brabin-Smith: Eleven.

Neil James: Well, if you don’t count Korea it’s eleven.

Richard Brabin-Smith: I was thinking of those more recently, I think we lost someone in what used
to be called the Spanish Sahara.

Neil James: Plane crash; female doctor.

Richard Brabin-Smith: Thank you. So, I think that the community took that in its stride, but it does
lead to the issue of numbers: that is to say it seems to me that a small number of casualties in any
one operation will not get the electorate or the Government seriously reviewing its position on a
specific operation. It really comes down to whether you can put together a convincing argument for
why you’re there. It gets very close to the point that Hugh has just made. Where you have, for
example, small numbers of casualties in remote peacekeeping operations like MINURSO, then you
can run strongly with the values argument. But I suspect that as the casualties mount, you do have
to make it abundantly clear, governments have to make it abundantly clear to themselves and then
to the electorate, that the interests, the national interests really are commensurate with the casualties
that are being taken.

With specific reference to Afghanistan, yes we can run the humanitarian argument: they are a poor
country that has been subjected to an odious regime, and that’s a very strong argument. But I doubt
it would be sufficient in the event of large numbers of casualties. You can run the interests
argument with counter-terrorism and, as Bill has said a few times today, we do have the issue of
instability in Afghanistan spilling over into what some people remind us from time to time is a
nuclear-armed Pakistan. Then there’s another factor, how do our casualties compare to what other
nations are taking. I don’t know where the argument on numbers lies: you can say that below a
particular number it’s easy to take, and beyond some number it’s difficult to take, but it does put the
onus very much on the government to be clear as to why it’s taking part in a particular operation
and to make these reasons particularly clear to the electorate.

Graeme Dobell: John?

John McFarlane: Thank you Graeme. I think that before I get to the point I particularly wanted to
make, if I could just enhance a little a little bit of what Brabs said there, the number of military
fatalities over the years in peacekeeping, are of the order of six or seven or something like that. It
might interest you to know that in the forty plus years of peacekeeping that police have undertaken,
they have also taken six or seven casualties, the latest one being…[inaudible]…and Cyprus. You
won’t find any of these names on the Australian War Memorial which is one of the differences but
you will find them on the National Police Memorial so let’s recognise…[inaudible]. Now, perhaps I
put a red herring into this conference by raising this whole question of funerals and representation
and in one way I’m sorry for doing that but in another way I think it’s a good way to get to the
politics of this whole question of support for a military campaign but I think it’s inevitable but I
think I’d like to go back to what is a military funeral actually for, the objective is to bury a solider
who has given the ultimate sacrifice, the people who are immediately concerned with it are the
soldier’s families, wife and kids, parents. The soldier’s military family, his unit and ultimately his
service and it’s not and shouldn’t be seen as a political event so I’m actually opposed to the long-

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term idea of having senior politicians there; I think different ways have been thought about dealing
with these sort of issues.

I think Peter raised the idea of having the Prime Minister realise the seriousness of the commitment
he’s making by, at least occasionally attending such a service is probably a very good one from a
psychological point of view and also a commitment point of view but in the United States President
Bush didn’t allow photographs of coffins coming in, which almost seems to deny that people are
dying, real people, on how to handle it here, I don’t know. I presume this is the case that President
Obama actually signs a letter going off to each family that would be my preference. I think the
Prime Minister representing the head of government could write to the families a personal letter
which could be framed and kept in memory of the person who died without having to go through
the process of having just about the entire senior level of government attend. As for the Governor-
General or a state Governor, they are non political people and I think it’s quite appropriate that they
might attend.

Graeme Dobell: Daniel? [inaudible]

Peter Leahy: I don’t think it’s political. It’s personal from the Prime Minister and the Governor-
General. We just seem to get ourselves in this situation and I’m just trying to remember properly
that Dave Nary was the first of the funerals, he was killed training. Well I’ll get to Kovco as well
but Nary, the Governor-General went to that because he was the Colonel-Commandant of the
Special Air Service Regiment. Kovco, after the telephone call that Shelley Kovco had with the
Prime Minister at about 11:30 that night that the family were notified that the wrong body was
coming back, there was an emotional relationship between the two and I think the Prime Minister
felt that because of that relationship he was going. The Governor-General was away, we just seem
to have got ourselves into this situation. I don’t think they’ve done it in any calculated sense but the
problem now is you went to that funeral why didn’t you come to this funeral. We are going to find
it very hard to extricate ourselves and I would applaud who can find a way out of it. We’re stuck
but John, I wouldn’t call it political, I think its genuine wanting to share in the grief.

Daniel Marston: I just wanted to add a little bit to what, a point that Hugh raised at the beginning
and has mentioned a minute ago. Historically, if you look at 2007, in Iraq, there are a lot of
excellent lessons for Prime Ministers and future Presidents to look at in terms of the media. We
were staring defeat in the face and you can say George Bush finally made a correct decision and he
decided to have reinforcements but also the way we used those forces. There was a lot of anger in
the United States, a lot of anger within Congress, that we looked as if we were just piling in more
blood into a bad campaign. The irony though, was the US military, in some ways became more
open to the media, some might say very open to the media. It got people inside to show that
progress was occurring quite fast and for somebody who’s been there at the time, progress was
happening quite dramatically. That message starting to permeate back to the American people and
by the time that Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus would come back to the Congress to
report on the surge there were fewer and fewer skeptics about what was actually happening on the
ground. People were not viewing it as a Bush campaign but more as a Petraeus and Crocker
campaign which in some ways helped the support for it. By September 07 even the Democrats in
Congress including Obama and Clinton had backed away from the attacks on Petraeus and Crocker
about what was actually happening on the ground. But a lot of the information came through the
media. The issue with ‘fear’ of the media in other countries in terms of its operations, they might
need to look at the lessons. Prime Ministers and Presidents need to look how you might have to take
a very difficult position and realise the narrative needs to change. The narrative did change and it
was about security and that the American people and American soldiers and others recognise the
priority was the security of the Iraqi people. That became the main mission and it wasn’t as if we

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were selling out, on Iraq. It was that we were being more realistic on the narrative and we sustained
more casualties in 2007 but people saw progress and they supported it.

Graeme Dobell: Neil James?

Neil James: I’d just make the quick point that no American president goes to funerals because
they’d be to busy to going to funerals than to be President and the policy wasn’t a Bush policy, in
fact it came in after Vietnam so Obama has reversed a longstanding American policy that Bush got
for blamed unfairly. Just to answer Hugh, Hugh and I might die for the American alliance because
we understand it on an intellectual level and what you might call a patriotic level, we can’t expect
our diggers to die for that so much. It’s not an either/or proposition, the values and the interests
reinforce each other as arguments, they always have in all our previous wars and I’d suggest they
always will in all our future wars and as the passage of time goes on, people are more likely to
remember the value than the interest and if you’re a bereaved family at the time, the values
probably more comforting to you in your bereavement than the interests and that probably doesn’t
change over time but it’s not an either/or situation and people will die for values and they’ll die for
interests and they’ll particularly die for values if the interests coincide and they’ll particularly die
for interests if the value coincide, it’s not an either/or proposition.

Graeme Dobell: Michael, then Jim, then Bill.

Michael Evans: On the politics of casualties, I must admit to be somewhat befuddled by this,
perhaps it’s because of my background, I come from a country where 30,000 people were killed and
there were funerals every day for seven years so to me the way you address this is that every soldier,
or every airman, or every naval rating, that goes to sea, or goes to air, or goes to the land, in fact
signs an unlimited liability, that’s what it is, that’s the nature of the military contract and I think if
they get killed its tragic, its sad, its wasteful; nonetheless it happens, we can’t turn it into a carnival
of tragedy every time it does happen and while we’ve got ourselves into this situation befuddles me
but that’s the first point. So I think, I guess what I’m saying is go back to basics, go back to the
unlimited liability, go back to the fact that soldiers sign up, they sign up for adventure, part of that
deal is you might get killed, tough luck you live with it. Part of the issue of how do you bring about
this to a narrative, I think we need to start thinking in terms of risk and threat. We’re used to
thinking in terms of threat, we don’t think very often in terms of risk, we have to think much more
in terms of risk, if you’re going to sell deaths, if you’re going to sell casualties to the media and the
public, in the new security environment we face irregular warfare as a major challenge, that’s a new
thing for us, complex irregular warfare that is transnational. It’s not something that we are used to;
we talk about terrorism all the time, the most misleading and over-used and devalued word now in
our media discourse. It tells us nothing, it symbolises everything. So I think we’re really need to
look at the whole issue of irregular warfare and the way people in fact certainly, our serving
members who have to go fight in that cause against that cause because if we don’t go to the crisis,
the crisis will come to us so it’s a matter of societal security and it should not be beyond our ability
to explain to the Australian people that the adversaries that we face in the irregular world are not
interested in fighting us on a state to state basis. They want to damage our societies, they want to
kill civilians they want to arrive on our soil and wage social warfare, therefore it makes good sense
to go to where the problem is, so that would be one of my solutions to approaching this issue and
again it comes down to public education, it comes to media education, it comes down to a change of
mindset and it comes down to issues of responsibility and our public culture.

It’s very interesting in Britain at the moment there is very high support for the British Armed Forces
despite taking large casualties in Afghanistan where there is not high support for Britain is in
Britain’s political establishment which is seen to be a debased public culture, that’s an interesting

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thing for us to consider, whether we are in that situation in Australia and whether if we had had 150
casualties whether we’d be facing that same thing.

Jim Molan: My point follows on in that what should be our expectations of casualties, my memory
and I haven’t done formal research on this, my memory from the year I spent in Iraq where 900 US
servicemen killed in that year from a force of about 140,000 was that a battalion would take, a
battalion would said it had a great tour of a year if it lost 15 killed and the Marine battalions, my
memory of the Marine battalions was that it wasn’t unusual for 40-50 be killed and 100 plus to be
wounded to the extent that they didn’t come back to the unit. For those of us who said 5000-6000
troops, over half in the room, that means our expectations should be in the area of, if it’s like Iraq
and it could get to that extent by 2011, you’re looking at, from our force, 100 killed and maybe 300
wounded above lightly wounded and I think we should think along those lines even if we halved,
even if we halved that number because the level of combat may not be as intense as in the urban
environment in Iraq then they’re bigger numbers than peacekeeping or our traditional rate of
casualties but I’ve got to say I couldn’t agree more with Michael.

Neil James: [inaudible]

Jim Molan: Sorry, yes you’re quite right. They’re annual numbers and some of the heavily hit
battalions stayed 15 months.

William Maley: To go back to the point I raised briefly this morning about reconfiguration, part of
the difficulty we face in terms of sharing with the public what’s going in Afghanistan is that
Uruzgan is a dangerous place. There are lots of places in Afghanistan that are nowhere near as
dangerous as Uruzgan and it might be well be useful if there were some Australian aid money going
into those areas where it’s relatively easy to implement projects that are of great benefit to the local
public, to which people from Australia could then go to get a sense of what positive can be achieved.
That actually leads me to a broader point. We are very much hamstrung by a country-wide ‘defer all
travel’ recommendation in respect to Afghanistan. It doesn’t stop people travelling but it means that
if you’re an academic, your insurance cover evaporates; you then have to go and broker a
hideously-expensive insurance policy to go there. But Kabul is not Baghdad, not at all. You can
walk around Kabul in the street, you can catch taxis. There are private security companies which
have a vested interest in putting the fear of God into people that they are going to be shot or
snatched if they go out on the street, but it’s simply not the case, and there are other parts of the
north in Afghanistan which are quieter still. iIt’s really regrettable that the image which is actually
conveyed by these warnings is one which is grossly exaggerated in a number of cases, not all, but in
some.

In the Smart Traveller site you will find a statement to avoid travel on the airport road in Kabul
because of the ‘very high threat of terrorist attack’. Now, if you’re a Consul and you’re worried that
sometimes you might have to provide consular assistance to someone, that may be the case. The
risk to a given individual of being on the spot when something nasty happens on that road is
infinitesimally small; it’s a manifestation of the same problem that arises when people fear the
Great White Shark much more than the domestic pet, even though statistically you are at greater
risk of being killed by a Pit Bull than a Great White. There’s a discrepancy between what statistics
tell us about risk, and popular conceptions of risk when is then cascading down into these kind of
warnings and configuring an image of the environment which is actually not particularly accurate.
Now, I’m not going to walk in the streets of Tarin Kowt or of Kandahar or Lashkar Gah but not all
of Afghanistan is like that, at all.

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Chris Barrie: Bill. I think that’s a very important point, we’re not talking about something that looks
all the same everywhere and I guess that comes back to my earlier point. I just have a few points to
pick up. One is of course the importance of the mission and what making progress really means and
whether we’ve got the will and the ideas to get there. Secondly, we talked about tour length,
whether the current 8 month tour length was sufficient or whether we should extend that out and of
course under what conditions that would be true, I was struck by the number of times the Pakistan
dimension comes into a discussion of Afghanistan and clearly a lot of people are now saying hang
on, this problem is pertaining to that entire region, irrespective of where the national borders lie and
I guess a question in the air is if we commit to solving problems in Afghanistan what are we going
to do about Pakistan? So there’s a big one and finally, of course, I think we are at a status quo plus.

Graeme Dobell: We went to a surge actually.

Chris Barrie: Or surge minus would be the right way to put it. We’re somewhere between those two
limits, I would say but I think if I could simply summarise, I think the bulk of opinion is that we
should be doing more; and more that makes sense in the context of where we want to go.

Graeme Dobell: Hugh.

Hugh White: Hey, look I just want to wrap up the day very quickly, I’m wise enough to say on the
program I’m not going to try and summarise. We designed this day around the proposition that we
should spend serious, quality time talking about objectives and then some serious, quality time
talking about how they might achieved. We didn’t plan but I must say for myself I am very glad that
we also ended up spending some quality time about costs, particularly not fiscal ones, but the cost
in lives because it’s a pretty important part of our business and you know, the core thing about our
discussion of objectives is that this morning was that it did get on the table the fact that the set of
objectives that drive Australia’s decisions on Afghanistan are pretty complicated. There are
humanitarian issues and issues of political responsibility arising from the fact that we helped invade
the joint a few years ago. There are questions about how what happens in Afghanistan does and its
surrounding neighbours play into global security issues which have relevance to Australia’s security
and there are questions about how it plays into the alliance and different ways in which it might
play into the alliance.

It’s also worth coming back to a point that in different ways Peter Leahy and Jim Molan both
stressed and that is that in the sense that Australia’s objectives are critical to Australia’s decision
making but our objectives will be set within a framework which is set by our allies and others, that
is in the end we’ve got to be careful when we say our objectives, are we talking about our
Australia’s objectives or our objectives that we can genuinely sure we will share with others.
Because if you look at the set of objectives that other people have, they will be as complex, diverse
and conflicting as ours. As we look to the questions this afternoon, I think a very helpful
introduction by Daniel put some very important propositions on the table, which are I think are a bit
new to a lot of the debate in Australia. One is that the approach being taken by our partners to
operations in Afghanistan is moving very fast and in directions which are in some way quite
sobering, the kind of operations that Daniel described will need more troops, thy will be more risky,
they will put very high demands on the kinds of people we put in place, those demands won’t just
be on people in uniform but also on civilians and they’re going to make very important demands on
what you might call cultural questions, that is how we actually operate with the people on the
ground there and that does seem to me to carry a lot of problems, in the end are the coalition
partners are going to get enough troops on the ground for long enough to achieve these objectives,
will we get enough civilian people to do the other parts of the pie with the sort of skills they need,
will there be enough people who can speak the relevant language and there are still very deep

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questions about what we aiming to achieve and what we’re aiming to leave behind, how far do we
need to move Afghanistan’s or Afghanistan’s bits on from where they have been for the last few
decades or the last few centuries before we think we’ve done enough and can get out. These do
seem to me to be very deep questions about the direction in which the operation is going.

For Australia that does mean the choice Rudd faces is very far from being simple. We have to make
questions about numbers but as we discussed in the session just a little while ago it’s not really
about numbers but it is about what we’re trying to do, about how many casualties we’re prepared to
take, about what kind of timeframe we’re prepared to commit ourselves to and what that means for
our broader force structure. To my mind, if we were really serious about achieving that kind of
substantive, strategic contribution in Afghanistan then I don’t see how we can do it within the
present structure of the Army. You’d be going for more battalions and that’s not unthinkable you
know if these objectives are as important as many people in the debate in Australia believe then that
would be a good reason to increase the size of the Army that’s what you would need to do but there
are also, I think, and we came to this at the end, some deeper questions. There are questions about
whether our allies are dinkum, in the end is the Obama administration serious about doing what is
required to implement effectively the kind of strategy that Daniel sketched out and I guess we can
all make our different judgements about that and in the end how dinkum are we about this and I
think in that connection the discussion about casualties and funerals was very useful one, so thanks
all for participating in this. I’d like to thank you all for coming, particularly those on in the inner
circle who had to sing for their supper, particularly, Senator Johnston, it was a privilege for you to
join us for this, we appreciate how bust senior parliamentarians and it’s been a great chance to have
you participating with and I’d also like to thank the many members of the diplomatic community
who have been kind enough to join us and we know how deeply your countries are in many of these
issues and we really appreciate you being with us. Graeme, thanks for doing a terrific job as always
and finally to Stephan Frühling and Daniel, who put the day together – whose entrepreneurship this
was – I’d like you to thank them very much indeed.

And now we can all wait and see what the Prime Minister says when he leaves the Oval Office.

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 ‘Inner Table’ of SDSC Afghanistan Conference
5 March 2009

Graeme Dobell (Moderation)

Previously the ABC’s South-East Asia radio correspondent in Singapore, Graeme is the Canberra-
based Foreign Affairs & Defence Correspondent for Radio Australia. He also reports for ABC radio
news and current affairs programs. Graeme joined the ABC in 1975 and has concentrated mostly
on reporting politics and international affairs, serving as a correspondent in Europe, America and
throughout Asia and the Pacific. Since 1985 Graeme has focussed on reporting the affairs of the
Asia-Pacific region and has covered all the APEC summits and the security dialogue of the ASEAN
Regional Forum. Assignments in his career as a correspondent have included the Falklands War,
coups in Fiji, Thailand and the Philippines, Beijing after the crushing of the pro-democracy
movement in Tiananmen Square, and the return of Hong Kong to China. He is the author of
Australia Finds Home – The Choices and Chances of an Asia Pacific Journey, a survey of the
choices and actions Australia has taken in its relationship with the Asia-Pacific.

ADM Chris Barrie (ret.)

Chris Barrie retired from active service in the RAN, and as CDF Australia in July 2002. As CDF, he
directed and commanded the operation to secure East Timor in 1999-2000, and provided specialized
defence security support for the Sydney Olympic Games (2000) and the Commonwealth Heads of
Government Meeting at Coolum (2002). He also advised the Government about specific roles for
Australia’s armed forces in support of coalition forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere after the 911
tragedy and the invocation of assistance to the U.S. Government offered by the Australian
Government under the ANZUS Treaty. Since retirement, Chris has concentrated his work on
strategic leadership issues with involvement each year in the Oxford Strategic Leadership and
Stimulus Program, the Young Strategic Leaders Forum in Australia, and teaching an elective on
Strategic Leadership to senior U.S. military officers at the National Defense University in
Washington DC. This work is intended to assist the next generation of leaders of complex and
diverse organisations to be successful. In addition he has been working to promote the establishing
of the Asia-Pacific Leaders Circle and institution building throughout the region through the
Australian Crime Prevention Council.

Dr Richard Brabin-Smith

Dr Richard Brabin-Smith AO is a Visiting Fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the
Australian National University, where he follows his interests in matters relating to Australian and
regional security. Before this, he had spent thirty years in the Department of Defence, with some
twenty of these years in a wide range of senior policy and corporate management positions. These
included Deputy Secretary for Strategic Policy, Chief Defence Scientist, First Assistant Secretary
for International Policy, and First Assistant Secretary for Force Development and Analysis.

Dr Michael Evans

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Dr Michael Evans is a Fellow at the Australian Defence College in Canberra. Between 2002 and
2005 he was Head of the Australian Army’s ‘think tank’, the Land Warfare Studies Centre at the
Royal Military College, Duntroon. Dr Evans has also served on the staff of Land Headquarters in
Sydney (1994-95) and in the Directorate of Army Research and Analysis in Army Headquarters in
Canberra (1996-98). Born in Wales, Dr Evans is a graduate in history, politics and war studies of
the University of Rhodesia (BA Hons First Class Honours), the University of London (MA War
Studies) and The University of Western Australia (PhD). He has been a Sir Alfred Beit Fellow in
the Department of War Studies at King's College, University of London and has held Visiting
Fellowships at the University of York in England and the University of New South Wales at the
Australian Defence Force Academy. Dr Evans’ saw military service in Africa as a member of the
Rhodesian security forces during the civil war in that country. He was later a regular officer in the
post-civil war Zimbabwe National Army where he headed the war studies program and was closely
associated with the British Army in the integration of two rival guerrilla armies into a conventional
land force. Dr Evans is a Member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and
serves on the international editorial boards of three leading journals, the Australian Journal of
International Affairs, the Journal of Strategic Studies and Small Wars and Insurgencies. He is a
former editor of the Australian Army Journal and is the only Australian to be a recipient of the US
Naval War College Foundation’s prestigious Hugh G. Nott Award for strategic analysis.

Dr Stephan Frühling

Dr Stephan Frühling is Lecturer in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian
National University (ANU), and Managing Editor of the journal Security Challenges. He was
awarded a PhD from the ANU for a thesis entitled ‘Managing Strategic Risk: Four Ideal Defence
Planning Concepts in Theory and Practice’, and holds a Master of Science in Defense and Strategic
Studies from Missouri State University, and a ‘Diplom’ in Economics from Christian Albrechts
University in Kiel, Germany. His primary areas of research and publication include Australian
defence planning, strategic theory, ballistic missile defence and nuclear strategy.

Prof Geoffrey Garrett

Dr. Geoffrey Garrett is founding CEO of the United States Studies Centre and Professor of Political
Science at the University of Sydney. He was previously President of the Pacific Council on
International Policy in Los Angeles and before that Dean of the UCLA International Institute.
Garrett is a frequent commentator on all aspects of US politics, economics and foreign policy in
Australian media, including The Australian, Australian Financial Review, Sydney Morning Herald,
and ABC radio and television programs. Among the most influential political scientists of his
generation, Garrett is author of Partisan Politics in the Global Economy, editor of The Global
Diffusion of Markets and Democracy, both published by Cambridge University Press, and over fifty
articles in the world’s leading social science journals. Garrett has held academic appointments at
Oxford, Stanford and Yale universities and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
He is a member of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Los Angeles-
based Pacific Council on International Policy. A dual citizen of Australia and the US, Garrett was
born and raised in Canberra and holds a BA (Hons) from the Australian National University. He
earned his MA and PhD at Duke University in North Carolina, where he was a Fulbright Scholar.

Tom Gregg

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Tom Gregg has served with the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan for the past four
years, most recently as Special Assistant to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, and
previously as the Head of UNAMA's operations in the Southeast Region. Prior to UNAMA, he
worked for the Australian Council for International Development on Pacific Policy, and as an
independent researcher based at the Australian National University, Canberra. He has also worked
with an NGO in the Fiji Islands. He is co-author of How Ethical is Australia: An Examination of
Australia's Record as a Global Citizen (2004) and holds a Master of Arts (International Relations)
from the Australian National University.

Neil James

Neil James is a graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon. He served for over 31 years in
the Australian Army. His experiences spanned a wide range of regimental, intelligence, liaison,
teaching, operational planning and operations research positions throughout Australia and overseas,
including Malaysia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Kashmir, Pakistan, India, Canada, Iraq, the
United States and New Zealand. Neil is the author of four ADF and Army operational manuals, has
written numerous articles for professional and specialist journals, has contributed chapters to
several books on defence matters and has authored several entries in the Australian Dictionary of
Biography. He has served with the senior teaching staff at the Army's tertiary-level Command and
Staff College, and at the Australian and Canadian defence intelligence schools. Neil has also taught
on specialist courses with various Australian and allied intelligence and security agencies. After
serving for nearly four years (1997-2000) as foundation director of the Army's 'think-tank', the Land
Warfare Studies Centre at Duntroon, his final posting was as head (J5) of the operational plans
branch at Headquarters Joint Forces New Zealand near Wellington. In 2000 the then Australian
Defence Studies Centre at UNSW published his comprehensive and critical study paper on
reforming the strategic management of Australia's defence. The paper earned him both his trans-
Tasman exile in 2001-02 and his current position as Executive Director of the Association (since
April 2003).

Senator David Johnston

David Johnston is the Shadow Minister for Defence. He was first elected to represent Western
Australia in the Senate in 2001. Prior to entering Parliament, he worked as a solicitor and a
barrister. Born in Perth, he was a member of the University of Western Australia’s Liberal Club
from 1974 until 1979. He went on to become State President of the party from 1997 until 2001.
Parliamentary Service: Elected to the Senate for Western Australia 2001 (term began 1.7.2002) and
2007. Ministerial Appointments include Minister for Justice and Customs from 9.3.07 to 3.12.07.

Dr Klaus-Peter Klaiber

Dr. Klaiber is a distinguished visiting fellow of the National Europe Center and the Asia-Pacific
College of Diplomacy at the ANU. After obtaining a PhD in law from the University of Mainz,
Germany, in 1966 and further postgraduate studies in Politics, Economics and History in Geneva,
Switzerland, Dr. Klaiber entered the German Foreign Service in 1968. Since then he has served in
missions in Kinshasa, Nairobi, Washington DC and London. From 1985 to 1987 he was Deputy
Director of the Private Office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Hans-Dietrich Genscher. After
serving as Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs at NATO headquarters in Brussels

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between 1997 and 2001, Dr. Klaiber was made Special Representative of the European Union for
Afghanistan. Between 2002 and 2005, Dr. Klaiber was German Ambassador to Australia.

LTGEN Peter Leahy (ret.)

Lieutenant General Peter Leahy (ret.), AC, is Director of the National Security Institute at the
University of Canberra. He retired from the Army, as Chief of Army, in July 2008. During his 37
year career he served in a wide variety of command, training, research and strategic appointments in
Australia and overseas. During his 6 year appointment as Chief of Army, the Army had its busiest
operational period since the Vietnam War with multiple, concurrent, large scale, war fighting
deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq and complex stabilization deployments to East Timor and The
Solomon Islands. His formal duties as Chief of Army were to advise the Government and Chief of
the Defence Force on Army matters and to raise, train and sustain the Army. He was involved in the
preparation of defence strategic assessments and plans, the development of Army capabilities and
the maintenance of Army preparedness. He was also responsible for the leadership of the Army and
the maintenance of professional standards within the Army, as well as being Chairman of the
Army’s senior board he was also a member of the Defence Committee, the Chiefs of Service
Committee, the Council of the Australian War Memorial and the Defence Housing Authority.

Frank Lewincamp

Frank Lewincamp retired last year after 25 years' service in the Department of Defence. He worked
in the intelligence, strategic policy, force development, resources, acquisition and management
areas of the Department. His senior positions included Chief Financial Officer (1996-9), Director of
the Defence Intelligence Organisation (1999-2005) and Chief Operating Officer of the Defence
Material Organisation (2005-7). He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Strategic and Defence
Studies Centre, ANU, and principal of frankadvice pty ltd.

Dr Rod Lyon

Rod Lyon is the Program Director, Strategy and International, with ASPI. He has previously
worked at the University of Queensland and the Office of National Assessments. His research
interests focus on a range of problems associated with global security, nuclear strategy and
Australian security. He has authored or co-authored a number of ASPI publications including, most
recently, Global Jigsaw: ASPI’s Strategic Assessment 2008 and The eagle in a turbulent world: US
and its global role.

Prof William Maley

Dr William Maley is Professor and Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy at the
Australian National University, and has served as a Visiting Professor at the Russian Diplomatic
Academy, a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Public Policy at the University of
Strathclyde, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Refugee Studies Programme at Oxford
University. A regular visitor to Afghanistan, he is author of Rescuing Afghanistan (London: Hurst
& Co., 2006), and The Afghanistan Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, 2009); co-
authored Regime Change in Afghanistan: Foreign Intervention and the Politics of Legitimacy
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), and Political Order in Post-Communist Afghanistan (Boulder:

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Lynne Rienner, 1992); edited Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (New York:
New York University Press, 1998, 2001); and co-edited The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); From Civil Strife to Civil Society: Civil and
Military Responsibilities in Disrupted States (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2003); and
and Global Governance and Diplomacy: Worlds Apart? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Dr Daniel Marston

Daniel Marston is a Research Fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian
National University, a Visiting Fellow at the Changing Character of War Program at the University
of Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society He has also served as a Visiting Fellow at
the United States Army and United States Marine Corps COIN Center for Excellence in Taji, Iraq.
He received a BA (Hons), MA from McGill University and was the Beit Senior Research Scholar at
Balliol College, Oxford, where he completed his DPhil in the history of war. He has focused on the
topic of how armies learn and reform as a central theme in his academic research. His first book,
Phoenix from the Ashes, an in-depth examination of how the British/Indian Army turned defeat into
victory in the Burma campaign of the Second World War, won the Templer Medal Book Prize in
2003. His most recent work, co-edited with Carter Malkasian, Counterinsurgency in Modern
Warfare, was published in 2008 and includes discussion of current operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan. He has lectured widely on the principles and historical practices of counterinsurgency
to units and formations of the American, Australian, British and Canadian armed forces in and out
of theatre, as well as serving as an adviser for all of the above. Dr Marston is currently engaged in
research into the lessons of counterinsurgency for the Australian and British armies from the 1960s
to the present.

MAJ GEN Jim Molan (ret.)

Retiring from the Australian Army in July 2008 after 40 years, Jim Molan has seen service across a
broad range of command and staff appointments in operations, training and military diplomacy. An
infantryman, an Indonesian speaker, a helicopter pilot, commander of army units from a thirty man
platoon to a division of 15,000 soldiers, commander of the Australian Defence Colleges, with
service in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, East Timor, Malaysia, Germany and the US, and
commander of the evacuation force from the Solomon Islands in 2000, all provided the necessary
background to his most demanding posting to Iraq. In April 2004, Major General Molan deployed
for a year to Iraq as the Coalition’s chief of operations during a period of continuous and intense
combat. In this position, he controlled all operations of all forces across all of Iraq, including the
security of Iraq’s oil, electricity and rail infrastructure. This period covered the Iraqi elections in
January 2005, and the pre-election shaping battles of Najaf, TalAfar, Samarra, Fallujah, Ramadan
04 and Mosul. For distinguished command and leadership in action in Iraq, Major General Molan
was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by the Australian Government and the Legion of
Merit by the United States Government. Major General Molan has a Bachelor of Arts degree from
the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Economics degree from the University of
Queensland. He maintains an interest in aviation and holds civil commercial licences and
instrument ratings for fixed and rotary wing aircraft. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Institute
of Company Directors (FAICD) and is accredited as a Master Project Director (MPD). In August
2008, Jim published his book “Running the War in Iraq” through Harper Collins, which is about to
go into a second edition.

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Dr Lesley Seebeck

A senior consultant with SMS Management & Technology, Lesley Seebeck has over 10 years
experience in strategic policy, analysis and assessment in Defence, Prime Minister and Cabinet and
ONA. In 2007, she was the main author of the Defence Update 2007, after which she acted as
Assistant Secretary Strategic Policy in Strategic Policy Division in Defence. Lesley received her
PhD from the University of Queensland in June 2006, receiving a Dean’s Commendation for an
Outstanding Thesis. Her work used complex adaptive systems theories to understand how socio-
technical systems, such as organisations, information systems and national security, coped with the
challenges posed by time. Her interests include international security, strategy, Australian strategic
policy and organisation, and warfare as a complex adaptive system. Lesley also has masters in
business administration and defence studies and a degree in applied physics, and has published
articles and delivered papers in the information systems, strategic policy and national security fields.

Andrew Shearer

Andrew Shearer is Director of Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Lowy Institute for
International Policy. Andrew has extensive international experience in the Australian Government,
most recently as foreign policy adviser to former Prime Minister John Howard. Previously he
occupied a senior position in the Australian Embassy in Washington DC and was strategic policy
adviser to former Defence Minister Robert Hill. He occupied various positions in the Department of
Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the Office of
National Assessments. Andrew has honours degrees in Arts and Law from the University of
Melbourne. He was awarded a UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office Chevening Scholarship and
has an MPhil degree in international relations from the University of Cambridge.

Patrick Walters

Patrick Walters is The Australian newspaper’s National Security Editor and the newspaper’s senior
writer on defence issues. He joined The Australian in 1993 establishing the Jakarta bureau for the
newspaper. From 1998 to 2003 he was Canberra bureau chief for The Australian. He started in
journalism with a cadetship with the Sydney Morning Herald where he specialised in defence and
foreign affairs issues. From 1987 to 1988 he was a Fulbright Scholar in Washington DC and is a
member of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. From 1988 to 1993 he
worked as senior advisor to the Hon. Kim Beazley MP across three portfolios including defence.

Prof Hugh White

Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies and Head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre
at the Australian National University. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for
International Policy. His work focuses primarily on Australian strategic and defence policy, Asia-
Pacific security issues, and global strategic affairs especially as they influence Australia and the
Asia-Pacific. He has served as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments, as a
journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, as a senior adviser on the staffs of Defence Minister
Kim Beazley and Prime Minister Bob Hawke, as a senior official in the Department of Defence
(where from 1995 to 2000 he was Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence) and as the first
Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). In the 1970s he studied philosophy at
Melbourne and Oxford Universities. Professor White teaches STST8051 Great and Powerful

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Friends: Strategic Alliances and Australia’s Security and contributes to the GSSD core courses. He
is the author of Beyond the Defence of Australia, Lowy Institute Paper 16, (Sydney: Lowy Institute
for International Policy, 2006).

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