Far from being 'eccentric positions', the Greens are vocal on the issues that concern Australians, and many of our policies concur with the majority of public opinion. We can see this reflected in the Lowy Institute’s own public opinion poll published in 2010. Our focus on raising concern about practices of the Chinese Government meets the desire of the 'sixty-six per cent who disagreed Australia was doing enough to pressure China to improve human rights'. Similarly, our concerns about Australian involvement in Afghanistan are shared by the 'fifty-four per cent of those who say we should not continue to be involved militarily in Afghanistan'.

During the last Parliament, Senator Bob Brown proposed 30 motions for the Australian Senate to debate and vote on a range of foreign affairs issues. These motions covered a wide range of issues including the blockade of Gaza, the civil war in Sri Lanka, Australia's involvement in the war in Afghanistan, and the actions of the Chinese Government in suppressing human rights of people in East Turkestan, Tibet, as well as the use of the death penalty.

In contrast, the Minister representing Foreign Affairs in the Senate was less willing to bring new issues and debates to the Chamber. Indeed, most of the words spoken by the Minister representing Foreign Affairs in the Senate over the past three years were in response to questions or motions placed on the agenda by Greens Senators.

Other Greens senators are similarly active in taking a leadership role in considering and discussing foreign affairs.

In the last session of Parliament, Senator Hanson-Young moved 11 motions and asked many questions on issues including West Papua, the death penalty in Iran and Vietnam, human rights abuses in Western Sahara, and AusAID funding for women's health services. She is also the Deputy Chair of the Parliamentary Group on Population and Development and the co-deputy chair of the Australian Parliamentary Association for UNICEF. 

Senator Scott Ludlum is an active member of both Joint House and Senate Foreign Affairs committees and he established a new cross-party Parliamentary Group for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. In the last parliament, Scott moved 13 motions, made 12 speeches and asked countless questions on issues including the UN Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, selling uranium to Russia, Iran's nuclear program, defence spending, human rights abuses in Burma and the need for an independent reviewer on terrorism laws. He also organised a special public hearing into the War Powers Bill that heard from a range of defence experts to explore the issues around getting parliamentary approval to send Australian troops to war. 

The Greens’ record in Parliament demonstrates the party is a credible champion for dialogue on foreign affairs. Surely this is a role that a body such as Lowy should welcome and not deride if it truly wants to promote wider discussion of international issues and Australia's role in the world.

Photo by Flickr user publik16, used under a Creative Commons license.

The change from direct to indirect rule will mark an important shift in the way the armed forces approach the business of government. Some allowance must be made, therefore, for the possibility that not everything will proceed quite as the regime envisages. As the ANU's Morten Pedersen has observed, Burma's generals would not be the first to underestimate the processes set in train by what began as closely managed reforms from above.

After 2010, there will be many more centres of formal decision-making. In addition to the national parliament in Naypyidaw, there will be seven regional assemblies, seven state assemblies, five self-administered ethnically-designated zones and one self-administered ethnically designated division.

The relationships between all these entities are unclear. Despite its length, Burma's new constitution is either incomplete or ambiguous on many matters. Naypyidaw will always be able to exercise its over-riding authority, but practical arrangements for interaction between the assemblies and the boundaries of their respective areas of responsibility are still to be worked out.

Similarly, it is not clear how the provincial assemblies and ethnic zones will co-exist with the country's 13 Regional Military Commanders. While due to relinquish their civil responsibilities after 7 November, these senior officers will retain considerable independence and power. 

Also, with 21 new governing bodies, there will be many more participants in the formal political process, representing a much wider range of interests. Twenty-five percent of seats at all levels are reserved for military personnel, but there is still scope for the election of a large number of genuine candidates. The bicameral national parliament, for example, has 498 popularly elected seats, with another 665 allocated to the provincial assemblies.

The voting patterns of the personnel occupying the reserved seats will be managed by the government, but there will be others who could act more independently. Some former military officers and even members of the regime's own party may not be quite as pliant as everyone now imagines. Also, there are bound to be some MPs, including representatives of the ethnic communities, who will make a real effort to represent their constituents.

Bear in mind too that the armed forces will be going through a number of major changes. Regime leader Than Shwe is reportedly unwell and preparing to retire, possibly to become President, or an 'advisor' to the new government. Over the next few years, several more senior generals will pass from the scene. Also, thousands of other officers are due to 'retire', to provide a cadre of loyal 'civilian' candidates for the new national and regional assemblies.

In such a fluid environment, one cannot rule out a gradual diffusion of power between members of the armed forces and civilians, and between the central government and provincial assemblies. While powerless at first, some ceremonial and administrative positions may slowly accrete some real influence. To have any credibility, the provincial assemblies will need to be seen to exercise a degree of sovereign authority, if only over parochial issues.

A few analysts have gone so far as to suggest that such trends could slowly open up political space that will permit the evolution of a more effective and democratic government. Others, like David Steinberg of Georgetown University, have raised the possibility that there may eventually develop greater scope for debate and compromise, and even some independent decision-making.

There is unlikely to be much movement in that direction while Than Shwe and senior officers of that ilk remain influential — whether or not these older generals remain in uniform, retire or assume new civilian positions. They are too hard line and set in their ways to allow any weakening of the current controls. It is conceivable, however, that after they pass from the scene a new generation of military leaders may gradually relax their grip.

These younger officers are still unlikely to permit a truly representative civilian government to emerge in Burma, but they may allow the national and provincial assemblies a little more latitude. If there is the prospect of increased national prosperity and less civil unrest, they may be more open to arguments for the introduction of economic reforms, and possibly even the gradual development of civil society.

If this occurs, however, it is likely to be a very slow process, and one that will be carefully monitored. There is no chance that the military leadership would knowingly allow control of the government, or the armed forces, to slip from its grasp. In the event of any challenges to these institutions, or perceived threats to Burma's unity, stability and independence, there is little doubt that the generals would swiftly reassert their domination of Burmese society.

Photo by Flickr user yeowatzup, used under a CreativeCommons license.

Some said they had nothing to worry about because their identity cards indicated that they were not Muslim, or not from Aceh. One Muslim Acehnese aid worker told me the WH never bother her because she looks as though she might not be Acehnese. And of course, contrary to the assertions made by one young correspondent last month in the Sydney Morning Herald, there is no expectation that foreign women will comply with requirements for religious dress.

But Banda, as the provincial capital, is perhaps the most progressive of the province's jurisdictions (and, perhaps not coincidentally, home of the province's most senior female official, Banda's vice mayor).

Some women in other parts of the province have decided that it is better to be safe than sorry, halfheartedly donning a loose cloth around their heads which can be pulled tight should the need arise. The sight of women wearing the headscarf so loosely is unique within Indonesia, where women in other provinces are free to cover or not as a matter of personal preference, and thus either wear it tightly or not at all.

The rules are most vigorously enforced in West Aceh, which was devastated by the 2004 tsunami. The district has made news over the past year as its extremely conservative elected head, Ramli MS, has authorised several extraordinary shariah bylaws, including one forbidding women from wearing tight pants. But such restrictions are the exception, not the norm.

Photo by Flickr user bonbongirl, used under a Creative Commons license.

Given that we have agreed with the US view that we are participating in a counter-insurgency (COIN), and have publicly stated that we support a key tenet of COIN as being population protection, can we provide even a basic level of population protection? Can we protect all the Uruzgan population all the time, some of the population some of the time, or a bit of the population every now and again? Can we establish an enduring presence among the population that protects them against the Taliban, but also against the excesses of their own police, army and government?

While we are doing these things, in order to exercise our duty of care to our soldiers and deployed civilians, can we protect our personnel as they go about their business? Is their personal and vehicle protection adequate? Are the tactics that they use appropriate? Are there quickly deployable tactical reserves available to back up their actions if they get in to trouble? Do we have a reconnaissance capacity that can lessen the chance of surprise?

Are there strike aircraft based locally that can be overhead within the generally accepted reaction time of ten minutes? Are there sufficient uncommitted troops available so that if there is a clash between forces, we can deploy more troops or aircraft quickly to win the engagement so that our soldiers are not killed by the same enemy force when they meet them again the next day?

If our soldiers are injured while fighting, do we have sufficient resources to stabilise an area so that the casualty can be evacuated and treated in world-class medical facilities?

When our tactical task involves training local troops (which involves both small groups of Australian 'mentors' or advisers moving with the Afghans and larger bodies of Australian combat units 'partnering' the Afghans as they look for the enemy), are there enough partnering units to back up the Afghans at the accepted ratio of one Australian element to three Afghan elements?

If our major tactical task is to train the Afghan army in Uruzgan, and given that we have refused to lead in the province and we are only 'part of a team', who is actually doing all the other things across Uruzgan that a counter-insurgency demands?

If we have now taken over the role of mentoring all elements of the Afghan 4th Brigade in Uruzgan province (at the very least a three-fold increase in tasking) and we have not increased our troops numbers, what activities have we given up to man this large, new and dangerous commitment?

Do we have enough special forces troops to conduct the intelligence-led attacks on the leadership of the Taliban in our province (so important to our own troops' safety), at the same time as we support our allies in neighbouring provinces like north Kandahar?

With the population being so important to success in this war, is our aid proportional to the needs of the province? Can our aid personnel be effectively and safely deployed to direct, assess and monitor? Do they have enough resources to significantly impact on the people's attitude?

These are but a few of the questions we need answers to conduct some form of debate. The CDF has stressed that our troops are doing a 'magnificent job'. No one denies that, least of all me, who in a previous life was the Commanding Officer of 6 RAR, the unit suffering the casualties. The question is: Are they doing that magnificent job across enough of the province to make a real difference in Uruzgan, and are they or someone in Uruzgan able to do all the things that counter-insurgency requires, or are we trying to do counter-insurgency on the cheap?

Photo by Flickr user jamuraa, used under a Creative Commons license.

The new Government's agenda might also work against RAMSI. At a media forum, the Prime Minister-elect neatly ducked a question posed by local media about corruption, and has spoken of promoting 'constitutional reform', as well as giving resource-owners their due. Solomon Islanders have heard all this before. He didn't talk at all about promoting the role of women or public sector reform, two key goals for RAMSI. We'll find out his specific focus next month, when Philip has promised to produce a policy framework.

The Prime Minister-elect also said on Wednesday that he won't be 'kicking RAMSI out'. If RAMSI were to leave, many of the problems facing Solomon Islands would become significantly worse. The courts would be less effective, the police less trusted. Large scale events, such as this month's elections, would be much harder to execute successfully. Property prices in Honiara might decrease as RAMSI civilian advisers leave, but the country, and individual Solomon Islanders, would be much the poorer.

RAMSI has taken a minor beating in the public eye for the Titinge incident. A new Government is going to pose some challenges, though the Prime Minister has promised business as usual when it comes to foreign policy, and we can expect the Australian Government, whatever its shape, to maintain its commitment to the Mission. We can expect the same from diplomatic circles. No matter what happens, nobody sees RAMSI leaving any time soon.

Photo courtesy of RAMSI.

For any readers interested in the detail on our activities on Foreign Affairs during the last parliament I would be happy to put together some materials for you or indeed post them on this site if the editor would be interested.

The Greens Party will be undertaking a comprehensive policy review in 2011 which will include looking at our current International Policies. I would be happy to hear from any of your readers who would like to submit ideas or papers for consideration in this process: anna.reynolds@aph.gov.au

I would also note that the major parties have not been leading by example in presenting clear foreign policy directions to the world. Australia has staggered and back-flipped over issues like climate change and asylum seekers over the last three years, and this has caused some damage to our credibility as a regional leader. The Greens at least have clear and principled policies on these issues.

Kien Choong:

I wonder if Mr Cook and Mr Shearer might share their thoughts on the extent to which the new role that the Green party has acquired from the recent election might cause the Green party to reconsider some or all of their policy positions.  Perhaps the Green party leaders might have good reason to soften some of their policy positions in order to achieve outcomes that they have good prospects of influencing?

The first thing you notice when you arrive in the largest city, Yangon, is just how modern the airport is, thanks to an upgrade three years ago. It's cozy, but comparable to those in developed and democratic countries. 

The airport is just one example of a wider government effort to open up its borders and project a sense of order. In May this year it implemented a Visa On Arrival (VOA) system, which after a quick cross-check with a 'black list', easily grants you access. Despite some travel warnings, gone are the days when your laptop could be confiscated and your luggage would be thoroughly searched, if you even got in at all.

The small number of Western hotels dotted throughout the city are among the best I have encountered. They are clearly driven by a new push towards comforting the business traveler by providing easy internet access, cable news and so forth. Watching CNN in my room that evening, a headline that referred to the government as a 'military junta' even popped up, unfiltered. However, online, YouTube and the ABC were blocked absolutely, with Twitter and Gmail restricted to some degree.

The domestic media could not be any more different.

The day after my arrival, the front page of The New Light of Myanmar proudly announced the 'democratic' elections, but without any analysis of candidates or issues. Dotted throughout were banners proclaiming the newspaper's four political, economic and social objectives as well as what they termed the 'People's Desire'. The back page each day referred to the internationally broadcast Radio of America and BBC as 'sowing hatred among the people'. The groups Democracy for Burma (DVB) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) were also cast daily as 'generating public outrage'.

The November elections are unlikely to change much.

The last national poll was held to endorse a military-drafted constitution during the chaos that followed Cyclone Nargis in 2008. The cyclone left 200,000 people dead and crippled the economy. Yet apparently, a staggering 99 percent of the 22 million voters turned out, with over 92 percent endorsing a document that mandated a quarter of seats be reserved for the military regime in any future elections.

The circuit breaker to democracy remains Aung San Suu Kyi. Her National League for Democracy won over 60 percent of the vote and 80 percent of the seats in the 1990 elections before they were annulled by the military leadership. She won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize and the support of the global community. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown described her arrest last year as 'a purely political sentence designed to prevent her from taking part in the regime's planned elections next year', and penned his last letter in office to her.

As evidenced by the bustle outside the passport office in Yangon on a Saturday afternoon, the regime has not closed its borders to citizens wanting to travel. The problem is that a generation of talent which could help bring about democracy is fleeing the place. This makes it harder for democracy to come from within, placing heightened importance on the need for the international community to act cohesively and constructively in helping bring about democracy.

But governments around the world remain divided on just how to deal with the military junta. Countries such as Canada, the UK, US and France press for further sanctions, while neighbors like China and India argue that sanctions won't help. With a government in place that already spends the least on health-care worldwide, many also argue that further sanctions are just going to hurt those they are ultimately designed to help.

The country remains the untouched gem of Southeast Asia. Walking through the streets of Yangon you cannot help but notice three things. First, that for every story about the military regime there is a peaceful beauty reflected in the hordes of monks walking the streets. Second, almost every street corner is blessed with a book shop, a hallmark of the traditionally high literacy rate – around 90 percent. And third, you hardly see a Westerner, highlighting that too much of our knowledge continues to be gained from secondary sources rather than real experiences.

Everybody seems to find excuses. Everybody has other priorities (as Stephen Smith has noted, here in Australia the media is focused on the election), and anyway, a favourite response from international aid agencies and governments is that 'we are waiting for a detailed assessment of needs from the field.' They might, one feels, try watching a TV screen, for a start. Certain needs, such as fast guarantees of firm financing for urgent supplies, are pretty obvious.

The welcome news is that, on this occasion, the UN has acted quickly. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has already issued a useful Initial Floods Emergency Relief Plan.

But too often, when the international community finally gets around to focusing on needs, the promises of financial support are slow in coming and meagre in amount. Bill Clinton, co-chair of the international commission overseeing assistance for Haiti, recently pointed out that, of the monies pledged by the international community to help in Haiti, fully six months after the disaster only 10% had been disbursed. And of the $US1.15 billion of aid promised by the US, only $30 million (about 3%) has actually been paid into the donor fund. The rest is 'tied up in Congress.'

An important part of the answer to the problem of supplying aid quickly after megadisasters is to provide more help in the form of cash. Donors are often reluctant to provide cash aid because they worry about corruption and how disaster victims will use the funds. But there are problems with all kinds of aid. Aid provided in kind (food, shelter, medical supplies) can be stolen, takes time to move, and often ends up in the wrong hands. 

But cash aid, at least in the short term, may be of very limited help in the Pakistan disaster. 

An unusual feature of the Pakistan megadisaster is that, while the initial loss of life has been relatively low, huge economic damage has been caused by the floods across widespread areas, especially in the agriculture sector. Food is already in short supply and in some places food prices have already doubled. It will be some time before a full assessment of the economic damage is available. However, reports suggest that the floods will deliver a heavy blow to the entire economy. For the millions of Pakistanis who live outside of the immediate flood zones, the worst may yet be to come.

Photo by Flickr user Jacob Freeze, used under a Creative Commons license. 

Only a few weeks later, the Pacific Islands Forum Ministerial Contact Group chairman, Tonga Prime Minister Feleti Sevele, said that, as the situation in Fiji had not changed, the Forum leaders had decided to maintain Fiji’s suspension. He went onto state that Forum will be fully committed to engage in dialogue with Fiji and will encourage and support Fiji's early return to parliamentary democracy.

The Leaders meeting attracted a large and colourful array of development partners and observers. China sent a large delegation and was not backward on the gift-giving front. China provided a large number of fancy black sedans and buses to transport delegates around Port Vila, plus truck-loads of fireworks. The Chinese were unimpressed with the Forum communiqué, which made a very minor reference to Taiwan, and in a heavy-handed way sought to have the reference removed.

Indonesia sent fifteen delegates, and publicly announced it would provide the Vanuatu police force with uniforms and training. Coincidentally, Vanuatu is now the Chair of the Forum and Chair of the Melanesian Spearhead group and supportive of West Papuan independence. Despite rumblings ahead of the meeting that Vanuatu would raise the issue of West Papua, it was not mentioned.

Surprisingly, a sizable US delegation attended the post-Forum dialogue, presumably to show the US is serious about increasing its engagement in the Pacific, despite Hillary Clinton having cancelled two or possibly three trips to the region.

Disappointingly, the Forum got little profile in the press in Australia, with a few exceptions. The Australian press just don't seem to care much about Australia's nearest neighbours in the Pacific, unless of course there are domestic policy concerns over into the need for offshore offshore processing of asylum seekers.

As outsiders attempting to peer in, the Forum's biggest problem seems obvious. To get anything done, governments need partners, and this means civil society and the private sector need to be brought into the fold to ensure the promotion of pro-poor growth across the region.

Photo by Flickr user Alicakes, used under a Creative Commons license.

Smith made no reference in his speech to Fiji; instead he focused on regional stability, the supposed success of RAMSI, and the need to improve development coordination efforts through the Cairns Compact. He stated Australia was united with the Pacific, and our futures are closely linked. He concluded by saying Australia, in its chairing capacity, had made great progress on PACER-Plus, the Cairns Compact and Climate Change.

Few journalists seem to share the Minister's view, with many commentators claiming Australia did 'zip' in its role as Forum Chair. Rudd certainly started off well – he had a vision for a Pacific community and made lots of promises, at the last Leaders meeting in Cairns, of great things to come. But these have led to little in the way of tangible outcomes, and Australian Government interest in the Pacific appears to have diminished of late (except, of course, on the issue of asylum seekers) .   

A hot topic of discussion in the margins of the meeting was the big question of whether the Forum had lost its relevance as the premier high level meeting for the region. More on that in a follow-up post.

Photo by Flickr user Jade Rowland, used under a Creative Commons license.

Jakarta has not yet implemented many of its obligations under the MoU. To do so, the central government needed to push a Law on the Governing of Aceh (LoGA) through a sceptical national legislature. Many doubted it would succeed, with the president and vice president's parties holding only a third of the seats in the body.

But in August 2006, four months late, the legislature approved the LoGA, though with some of the MoU's promises watered down in the process. For example, the LoGA orders a Human Rights Court for Aceh to be set up, just as the MoU required, but does not give it retroactive terms of reference, thus ruling out an examination of the crimes of the conflict.

It would not have mattered. Indonesian laws cannot be enforced without an implementing regulation issued by relevant ministries. In the case of the LoGA, most of these regulations have still not been issued, four years later. Yet remarkably, many Acehnese leaders with whom we spoke have resigned themselves to this state of affairs.

'I don't see even thirty percent of the LoGA being implemented', says Humam Hamid, the head of the local think tank Aceh Recovery Forum and the runner-up in the 2006 gubernatorial election. 'I'm afraid now if you are trying to propose a revised fashion of the law, the moment you go in, everything will then be rejected, or even revised for the worse.'

Humam's running mate in the 2006 election was Hasbi Abdullah, now the head of the provincial legislature. Hasbi seems more frustrated with the status of implementation. Unlike Humam, Hasbi says that the central government must eventually meet its obligations, particularly regarding the human rights court, if there is to be a comprehensive settlement of Acehnese problems.

The last five years of reconstruction have remade not only the physical infrastructure of Banda Aceh, but also its social infrastructure. The daily needs of the aid agencies gave rise to a middle class meritocracy, led by the province's most cosmopolitan residents. But most of those aid agencies have now left, and they have taken with them many of the middle class jobs once on offer.

As the economic situation dims, the smart young people in Banda's new cafés wonder where the lack of progress on the terms of the MoU, combined with high unemployment of educated Acehnese, will send the province's politics next. A return to conflict is hard to imagine these days — all the Acehnese we met, including former GAM fighters, passionately declared their preference for peace over 'the time of conflict', as the period of insurgency is often called. But frustration is quietly mounting.

'From last year until now, the tension of discussion on Facebook and other internet community rooms is high', says Jeliteng Pribadi of the Aceh Recovery Forum. 'The educated unemployed', Jeliteng says, 'can easily go extreme if their idea, their skill and possibly their stomach cannot be fulfilled by the government.'

It is the role of our armed forces to accept political direction once that direction is decided and promulgated. It is not the role of the military or other officials to accept the extant 'political context' as immutable, nor to assume what the political context is likely to be and so structure advice to politicians accordingly. Political leadership is an important factor in deciding the political context at any point in time, and political leadership on any issue can change dramatically, and can be changed.

I am reminded of my first tour as an attaché in Indonesia. I was confronted by people in Defence, in DFAT, in other bureaucracies and in the embassy who lived by the saying: 'The relationship between Australia and Indonesia will proceed at a pace comfortable to both sides'. As a result, nothing occurred. This was another way of advising me, as the new boy, not to rock the boat because it involves risk and effort, neither of which was welcomed by the bureaucracy.

It was pathetic to see how quickly the same bureaucrats changed when the Foreign Minister and then the Prime Minister recognised what could be achieved, and how the relationship could actually go 'gangbusters'. Leadership involves risk and effort but leadership is pretty well everything.

I thank Stephan and Benjamin for saying that I continue 'to do great service to the Australian debate by highlighting the tactical and operational aspects and limits of Australian coalition contributions'. Hugh White has previously damned me with similar faint praise, and I objected to it here. If Stephan and Benjamin's comment assumes that I, or the military in general, am only good at the tactical and operational level of war and should leave the strategic level to the 'strategists', then I once again thank them for this faint praise and reject the implication.

Photo by Flickr user tallpomlin, used under a Creative Commons license.

Jim rightly highlights US and British verbal facades regarding 'conditions on the ground', but he neglects the fact that these 'conditions' will not be objective benchmarks. Instead, they will be evaluated by Western political leaders in the light of their overall narrative on the war, and that narrative has now become one of withdrawal. If the level of Western commitment in Afghanistan was really determined by 'conditions on the ground', we would have seen a much larger force deployed by the US and its allies in the first place.

If it was 'conditions on the ground' that mattered, we would also not see a focus on deadlines, whether they are 2011 or 2014, but an acknowledgment that a Western presence would continue as long as required — just as Western forces are still deployed to the Balkans, 20 years after first deploying there. But the political reality is that, unlike in the Balkans or Australia's East Timor commitment, there are few enduring Western strategic interests in Afghanistan.

Western operational strategy cannot and does not remain independent of this wider context, and we stand by our evaluation that an adjustment of US strategy is already in train. 

Of course, local militias are a part of any population-centric counter-insurgency. But the reality in Afghanistan is that local militias have become a substitute for the political order that the West has been trying to build in recent years, and not a reinforcement of it, nor a way of binding disenfranchised parts of the community into the larger order (as was the case with the Anbar Awakening in Iraq).

Australia's Afghanistan commitment cannot remain isolated from these wider political changes. The size of Australia's military presence was always determined more by alliance considerations than by 'conditions on the ground'. And how could it be otherwise, given the size of the ADF? Even deploying a whole brigade would not have had a decisive impact on the overall campaign.

When other allies begin to draw down forces, what possible political motivation could the new Australian Government have not to follow suit? The real challenge for the Australian Afghanistan strategy is to craft this commitment to have the greatest strategic, operational and tactical efficiency and impact. And it is this question that we tried to introduce into the debate in our original post.

In this context, we are somewhat bewildered by Jim's and Sam's responses to our proposal to send a frigate or F-18s as part of the wider Western presence in the Middle East. There are numerous NATO countries with maritime forces in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf regions. Western naval forces conduct anti-piracy missions off Somalia, conduct escort duties in the Straits of Hormuz, supervise the UN embargo on Iranian weapons exports, track weapons shipments to Lebanon and Gaza, intercept suspicious cargoes as part of the Proliferation Security Initiative, and much more.

Australian Super Hornets could conduct air patrols as part of that wider presence, fly close air support missions in Afghanistan, or simply train with their carrier-based US colleagues. All of these operations are ongoing and valuable, and none of them have anything to do with bombing Iran.

Frühling & Schreer say that 'General Petraeus has scrapped the planned offensive in Kandahar', quoting The Telegraph. The headline of the article indeed says that, as does the teaser, but the rest of the article contradicts it. Petraeus may have scrapped the Kandahar operation for all I know, but the reference that Frühling & Schreer rely on does not support such a proposition; in fact it quotes others who deny it.

Frühling & Schreer tell us that incoming CENTCOM commander Mattis was asked whether the US should not 'begin moving toward a more limited strategy of hunting down insurgents without trying to rebuild Afghanistan' in 2011. Frühling & Schreer take Mattis' rather vague response ('I think that is the approach') to 'signal the end of the current, population-centric COIN approach, which required NATO forces to directly pacify the country'. I suggest it does nothing of the kind. Mattis' answer may merely reflect the US military's view that they are not trying to 'directly pacify' the country, a view that Will Clegg addressed so well here.

Frühling & Schreer say that 'the US will now have to rely on local strongmen and village defence forces to keep the Taliban at bay', implying some total change in the strategy from population-centric to local militias. The premise (the demise of the population-centric approach) has not yet been proven and it is wrong to say that the US will have to now 'rely' on their village militias. I cannot think of a counter insurgency that did not use such local forces, and Petraeus used them to great effect in Iraq.

Frühling & Schreer then try to bring the argument home to Australia. They suggest a scenario in which the precipitous withdrawal of Australian troops (which no one seems to be proposing) has an impact on the alliance and problems on the Korean Peninsula.

To avoid this strange scenario, Frühling & Schreer advocate that the Australian Government do three even stranger things: (1) reduce (not withdraw) our forces in Afghanistan while making them 'more meaningful', apparently to support a new strategy that has yet to emerge and in contravention of the laws of military physics; (2) more Government honesty about the current situation to justify, apparently, reducing our forces from the current ineffective level that created that situation, to an even more impotent level; and (3) send a ship or some fighters to the Gulf in order, once again apparently, to play an ineffective role in a not-yet defined US strategy.

I fear that I detect in this post an inability to differentiate between what is difficult in military operations and what represents defeat, an inability to learn from previous wars, an inability to understand even the basics of military operations and how tactics are linked to strategy, and a frightening continuation of the extreme minimalist approach to the use of military force that has served us so badly in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Photo by Flickr user isafmedia, used under a Creative Commons license.

Potentially, the growing use of social accountability mechanisms combined with the imaginative use of social networking tools, and the generation of peer-to-peer communications could play a transformative role in developing a new future for aid. Not least because this approach offers the potential to build more effective linkages between civil society organisations and community groups in both 'donor' and 'recipient' countries. 

There are an increasing number of examples, such as the work of Global Voices Online, Witness, and Ushahidi which illustrate the possibilities of providing groups and communities with the ability to tell and communicate their stories, provide feedback on elections, publish evidence of human rights abuses, empower female activists, debate how they might act as part of a diaspora, or monitor the performance of  governments and aid agencies, through participatory processes and on public forums such as the web.

This, in some contexts, can provide men and women who are often the 'objects' of development with the ability to become its subjects and to publicly sanction poor behaviour and performance of aid organisations and their governments. Their story needs to become more prominent in these debates.

The underlying reason for this neglect is that ACH is fundamentally flawed. It has a superficial appeal, but in fact it deeply misconceives the nature of the relationship between evidence and hypotheses. Analysts find the method to be tedious at best, and thoroughly discombobulating at worst.  (For more, see this.)

Further, there is no evidence that ACH actually improves analytical judgements in practice. University of Melbourne philosopher Neil Thomason, who has a deep concern with the quality of intelligence analysis, investigated this and found a shocking lack of any decent evidence supporting such a widely advocated method.

Ironically, the widespread adoption of ACH as the official method for hypothesis evaluation is the result of a failure to consider alternative hypotheses (ie. alternative possible answers to the question, 'What would be the best way to make hypothesis evaluation more rigorous and reliable?') ACH has been falsely assumed to be (a) valid and (b) the only game in town. That is just the kind of 'jumping to conclusions' that ACH would supposedly help us avoid.

So when we hear about software for ACH failing to be adopted by the US intelligence community, we shouldn't assume that it is another case of tragic bungling by massive bureaucracy. In this case, it might in fact be a lucky escape.

Photo by Flickr user alexsnaps, used under a Creative Commons license. 

TNI reform remains an ongoing process, but arguably, constitutional and legislative changes separating the police from the military and mandating TNI responsibility for external defence, combined with a general culture of reform within TNI itself, have largely been successful. This is not to say that TNI does not need further reform, but the systemic corruption and excesses within Polri, evidenced in recent years by a raft of corruption and intimidation incidents, and now the Wayeni video, are cause for real concern.

The specific concern is that Polri now acts with the same impunity as TNI did, and that the incremental scaling back of TNI's internal security functions now means that Polri's paramilitary unit, Brimob, appears to be continuing the past excesses of TNI in Papua.

The general concern is that Polri, an institution pivotal to upholding Indonesia's democratic laws, is shockingly corrupt and undermining Indonesia's democratic consolidation. This is compounded by the nexus between Polri and Indonesia's notoriously corrupt judiciary. Finally, Jakarta's determination to deal with Papua unilaterally, away from the attention of the international community, is also at risk if the government and legislature do not seriously address Polri excesses.

* Ed. note: The Interpreter has decided not to link to the footage, which is extremely distressing and graphic. Readers can search for it at their own risk.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.