Afghanistan: our secret fears


AUSTRALIA is deeply pessimistic about its engagement in Afghanistan, and senior officials have described as hopeless the key task of training the Afghan national police.

Despite repeated public assurances by the federal government that gains are being made and that long-term success is possible, secret United States embassy cables reveal that some of our top diplomats and officials hold grave concerns about the nine-year war that has claimed the lives of 21 Australian soldiers.

The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available exclusively to The Age, also include more embarrassing revelations about the conduct of Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd.
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Mr Rudd derides the contribution of France and Germany to the fight against the Taliban as ''organising folk dancing festivals'' and confides that the outlook in Afghanistan ''scares the hell'' out of him.

Another cable sent to Washington last November by the US embassy in Canberra records Australia's special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ric Smith - a former secretary of the Defence Department - delivering a bleak assessment of the international community's Afghan strategy.

"Smith had just returned from a visit to Oruzgan and described the … mission in Afghanistan and Afghan government presence as a 'wobbly three-legged stool'," the cable says.

Referring to Australia's plan to increase funds for training Afghan police - a task currently undertaken by more than two dozen AFP officers - Mr Smith warned it might involve "putting good money into a bad situation".

Another cable, from December last year, says ''Smith questioned what the AFP would be able to accomplish given the 'train wreck' that they had to be given to work with in the Afghan National Police".

The cables give a stark insight into the private views of Australian and American officials on the war, including frustration about Canberra stalling on promises to boost Australia's civilian contribution beyond the 1550 troops deployed.

An October 2008 cable, which records what Mr Rudd told a group of visiting US congressmen, says he ''concluded by noting that the national security establishment in Australia was very pessimistic about the long-term prognosis for Afghanistan".

Mr Rudd also told US politicians that "he supported the Afghan war 'from day one' but confided that 'Afghanistan scares the hell out of me'."

Mr Rudd is also critical of Australia's European allies, accusing them of having "no common strategy for winning the war or winning the peace".

"In the south-east, the US, Canada, British, Australia and Dutch were doing the 'hard stuff', while in the relatively peaceful north-west, the Germans and French were organising folk dancing festivals,'' Mr Rudd was reported as saying.

That same month, Mr Rudd publicly praised France and Germany for boosting their military commitment to Afghanistan.

Other cables detail repeated criticism from officials about Australia's plan to boost its non-military contribution in Afghanistan by sending federal police to train Afghan police and by providing greater aid assistance.

The civilian boost was announced by Mr Rudd in late 2009, around the time US President Barrack Obama released his revised Afghan strategy.

A December 2009 cable says: "Rudd, who is loath to increase troop levels, had hoped to offer the increased civilian effort to the United States as a substitute. The Australians began preparing for the president's announcement months in advance and the lack of progress is surprising.

"Coupled with [Ric] Smith's increasingly pessimistic attitude, this may be a sign of friction within the government over the proper role for civilians in Afghanistan."

Another cable describes how the internal government debate over the civilian strategy had "dragged on much longer than anyone predicted".

The cables reveal that the head of the AFP's International Deployment Group, Assistant Commissioner Frank Prendergast, had also raised concerns about what federal police officers could feasibly achieve in Afghanistan. "Even Prendergast, who was generally optimistic about AFP efforts in Afghanistan, noted that the odds were stacked against success,'' it says.

''Current training programs are hampered by illiteracy, corruption, drug addiction and insurgent penetration within the pool of trainees … He believes that a successful police training program will take 20 years to be effective in Afghanistan."

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said last month that Australia's Afghan efforts may last for a decade.

Other Australian officials who briefed the US embassy expressed frustration "at the slow pace" of the civilian boost and "hinted" at clashes between bureaucrats and ministers over its "apparent lack of progress".

The cables also detail tensions between Holland and Australia over their respective roles in Afghanistan's south before the Dutch withdrew this year.

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Terror groups 'broken'


A SECRET Australian intelligence assessment has declared the al-Qaeda terrorist network a failure and claims its regional offshoot, Jemaah Islamiyah, has been broken in Indonesia.

The head of Australia's top intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments, told American diplomats in October 2008 that al-Qaeda “ultimately has failed to achieve the strategic leadership role it sought within the Islamic world".

The assessment undercuts a key argument of the Gillard government to justify Australia's continued commitment to the war in Afghanistan — that al-Qaeda could return to use the country as a terrorist training ground.
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Australian intelligence officers instead blamed Taliban success in Afghanistan on the failings of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government and on the murky involvement of Pakistan's intelligence and security services.

Pressed by the US diplomats for an overall assessment of Islamist terrorist threats, then Office of National Assessments director-general Peter Varghese gave a strongly up-beat view. He told the visiting head of the US State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Randall Fort, that terrorism was “a good news story that is getting better, with the violent Islamist threat receding".

The US embassy in Canberra reported Mr Varghese “commented that in personal meetings and intelligence exchanges with ONA and other Australian services, Pakistani [defence chief] General [Ashfaq] Kayani continually comes across as ambivalent on the issues of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency, reiterating that India remains the core mission and priority of the Pakistan defence and intelligence establishment.

“ONA assesses that Pakistan's military and security elite view this as 'an American war', which, combined with a very hard sense of anti-Americanism, combines into a very dangerous cocktail," Mr Varghese was reported to have told his American colleagues.

Mr Varghese said developments were especially positive in Australia's region, where “the growth of Islamic extremism-based movements is constrained, thanks in part to ongoing successes in combined counter-terrorism efforts, but more because of societal factors in south-east Asia that reject the Middle Eastern jihadist model."

But the secret US embassy cable, leaked to WikiLeaks and provided exclusively to The Age, warned that the southern Philippines was emerging as a new terrorist haven.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard told Parliament on October 19, during the debate on Australia's military deployment, that it was a vital “to make sure that Afghanistan never again becomes a safe haven for al-Qaeda" and that Osama bin Laden's group remained “a resilient and persistent network".

Ms Gillard also warned of past links between al-Qaeda and extremists in Indonesia.

But the US record of the high-level intelligence exchange states: “Varghese and his analysts assessed that Indonesia Islam was 'returning to its main course following a detour' driven by personal linkages to the global jihad that were formed in Afghanistan in the 1980s."

“ONA analysts assess 'the tide has turned' on Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) in Indonesia, noting that its leadership has been devastated — with most seniors killed, captured, or on the run-and that it has lost its local support networks and funding," the US embassy reported to Washington. “ONA judged JI was shifting near-term goals to its local, vice global/anti-western interests while otherwise 'creeping back to the shadows' and focusing on survival."

Australian intelligence analysts proffered the view that JI could “endure and regenerate over the long term", but that it would be “a more localised terrorist threat", one cable said.

This latest disclosure comes after former JI leader Abu Bakar Bashir was yesterday committed for trial in Indonesia on terrorism charges

Bashir, convicted of conspiracy in the 2002 Bali bombing but acquitted on appeal, has been charged as the alleged inspiration of, and fund-raiser for, an Islamic militant training camp in Aceh that was broken up in February.

The leaked US cables also reveal that ONA considered Indonesia's counter-terrorism successes to be “a study in contrast” to “the ongoing downward slide in the Philippines, where the collapse of the peace process in the south threatened to make this area 'the new regional incubator of terrorist jihadis'."

The US embassy reported that “ONA terrorism specialists noted signals and human intelligence that JI 'structuralists' embedded with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front were rethinking plans to return to Indonesia, while JI 'freelancers' were becoming more active and better linked with Abu Sayyaf Group operatives."

According to the US diplomatic reporting, the Office of National Assessments believed the southern Philippines increasingly contained "all the ingredients" of al-Qaeda's "favoured tilling ground".


http://www.theage.com.au/national/terror-groups-broken-20101214-18x05.html