Throw troops at Pacific failures

The Australian ^ | 3rd June 2006 | Greg Sheridan

[naturalman1975]

AEONS ago, in another life, I undertook a course in counselling people who were considering suicide. We were told that a suicide attempt represents a peak of experience. Even for someone perennially depressed, to get to the point of attempting suicide is a rare and unusually intense experience.

Therefore, one of the central strategies in avoiding suicides is to get people past the peak. If you do, another peak may not arise again for a long time, perhaps ever.

What is true of depressed people is also true of depressed nations. The moment just before they pass from being merely difficult, poorly run and impoverished to being actual failed states, where anarchy reigns and no coherent government functions, represents a peak of intensity.

It also represents multiple, simultaneous systems failures.

Such was the case in East Timor and Solomon Islands, the two South Pacific failed states in which Canberra has had to intervene with decisive military force to restore a semblance of order.

We were also told in our counselling course that it was much better to get people before their suicide attempt. The attempt itself, even if unsuccessful, was likely to be immensely damaging and make recovery much harder. So it is with East Timor and the Solomons.

The question for Australia is: could we have intervened before the suicide attempts and got them through the peaks?

The answer is probably yes. The total lack of situational awareness by the Australians in the Solomons, which saw the Australian soldiers far away from Honiara on the day that Snyder Rini was announced as prime minister, the failure to pick up any verbal cues from the crowd of the devastating riot that followed, has to be chalked up as a failure of intelligence and execution.

Similarly in East Timor, that the Government of Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri could sack one-third of its armed forces, a move custom-made to provoke a crisis, shows the limit of Australia's influence, despite being the largest aid donor to, and chief international sponsor of, East Timor.

Australian policy in the South Pacific has been undergoing an agonising and profound revolution, from hands-off respect for South Pacific sovereignty to deepening involvement.

But it may be that we still have not conceived of our involvement in the most useful strategic terms.

Certainly if Alkatiri remains Prime Minister of East Timor, this is a shocking indictment of Australian impotence. If you cannot translate the leverage of 1300 troops, 50 policemen, hundreds of support personnel, buckets of aid and a critical international rescue mission into enough influence to get rid of a disastrous Marxist Prime Minister, then you are just not very skilled in the arts of influence, tutelage, sponsorship and, ultimately, promoting the national interest.

It is perhaps time that Australia conceived of itself as the "US of the South Pacific". I don't mean that we absorb the states of the South Pacific into Australia. Quite the reverse.

Rather, I mean that we take on the role that the US took on in East Asia after World War II, mentoring and tutoring devastated societies into economic and political modernisation and, crucially, providing for their security in the meantime. And like the US in Asia, we should do this in part through a system of military deployments, though naturally we would not call them Australian bases. According to the head of the Solomon Islands central bank, the riots that destroyed Honiara's Chinatown did more economic damage than the entire decade of ethnic conflict in the 1990s. In the end, the Australian taxpayer will pay for that damage. It would have been much cheaper, and much better for the people of the Solomons, if 500 Australian soldiers had been there to prevent this destruction.

Similarly, East Timor today is poorer than it was under the Indonesians.

As Malaysia's Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak has commented, its political structure is falling apart. Indonesia has played no part in East Timor's latest troubles. But if there ever is real difficulty on the East Timor-Indonesia border, it is not the fatally riven East Timorese military that will have to hold the line. It will be Australian soldiers.

Given that Australia is going to pick up the bill and that it will certainly bear the full political responsibility for East Timor, a more activist and ongoing intervention would probably be a better course.

What I am arguing is that, as part of a wider program of assistance involving lots of Australian personnel operating in South Pacific government agencies, deployments of Australian soldiers should be semi-permanently stationed in East Timor, Solomon Islands and, if necessary, other regional basket cases.

The opposition to such a scheme would be substantial. Canberra would hate its budgetary implications and it would expose our grievous lack of soldiers, the most important security resource today. Unless it was handled well it could provoke a backlash in some South Pacific societies. But these societies have been increasingly asking for Australian soldiers, not the reverse.

The South Pacific governments could see these deployments as enhancing their capacities, not abridging their sovereignty.

The other suggestion, of a blanket guest-worker scheme for South Pacific islanders in Australia, is a bad idea that the Government is right to reject.

Don't get me wrong. I want South Pacific islanders to continue to come to Australia as they have been doing.

But it is critically important that they come in an orderly way and that those who come are the ones most likely to succeed here. Thus they should come under normal immigration criteria: as skilled immigrants, or through family reunion or the New Zealand route.

There are more than 10 million islanders and a mad rush could destroy the pro-immigration consensus in Australia. On the other hand, international labour hire might help impoverished Pacific island societies just as it has helped Filipinos, who work in the Middle East and support their families, and their nation, back home.

The bottom line is: if we are going to pay the costs anyway, we need to intervene coherently and clearly in the way that offers the best chance of success. Inevitably, this involves soldiers.