View from Canberra: A matter of timing | ADM May 2012

So Australia is set to withdraw from Afghanistan a year earlier than planned. Actually we're not, though the government's artful spin sure left a lot of people thinking precisely that.

The real story was conveyed by both Defence Minister Stephen Smith and Foreign Minister Bob Carr is various meetings with foreign officials in the aftermath of the prime minister’s bugging-out-of- Afghanistan speech delivered to an Australian Strategic Policy Institute luncheon on April 17.

Two days later, both Smith and Carr were in Brussels for the NATO International Security Assistance Force minister’s meeting and having to explain that Australia wasn’t really planning to get out ahead of what everyone thought was a schedule agreed at the Lisbon conference in November 2010.

“Australia is committed to seeing through our mission in support of transition as set out in the Lisbon strategy and to providing support to Afghanistan beyond 2014,” Carr and Smith said in their joint statement to the meeting.

They said there was progress on the ground in Oruzgan Province and that showed that transition was achievable by the end of 2014, possibly earlier. Smith has said much the same.

“Australian and ISAF Commanders are confident that we are on track to transition to Afghan-led security in Oruzgan by 2014, possibly earlier,” he said during a visit to Afghanistan five days before Gillard’s speech.

That seems to suggest withdrawal could conceivably occur some time between late 2013 and the end of 2014 – precisely in line with what Smith has been saying for the last year.

The line that Australia was departing a year earlier than planned emerged from media reports after the PMs’ media minders selectively leaked sections of her speech to Fairfax and News Ltd newspapers the night before it was delivered.

Your correspondent was not one of these lucky recipients but has sighted speech excerpts provided to one who was. They’re clearly headed “no third parties” which means it can’t be passed on to anyone else, and “no reaction” which means no talking to academics or analysts who might actually have known what was going on.

There’s little in the Gillard speech to substantiate the “get out a year early” line. She pointed to progress in Oruzgan training the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the expected announcement by Afghan President Hamid Karzai on transition of Oruzgan and other provinces to Afghan security responsibility.

Just when that crucial announcement will be made isn’t known but the expectation is some time in the next few months. It may have occurred by the time this article appears.

“Once started, this should take 12-18 months,” she said. “And when this is complete, Australia’s commitment in Afghanistan will look very different to that which we have today.”

Gillard said Australia would have completed training and mentoring of the ANA 4th Brigade, would no longer be conducting routine frontline operations with the Afghan National Security Forces and the Australian-led Provincial Reconstruction Team would have completed its work. “And the majority of our troops will have returned home,” she said.

On the best possible fall of the dice, that could conceivably happen around mid-2013 which is certainly a year earlier than something. But the reality is that the withdrawal timeline remains highly qualified and dependent on a whole range of factors, including the Karzai decision on Oruzgan transition and the conference in Chicago in May. That will be attended by a stack of world leaders headed by US President Barack Obama and including Gillard and Karzai.

Clearly an unpopular government, sinking in the polls and engaged in an unpopular conflict, has a political interest in fudging the issue of just when the troops come home. Plenty remains to be explained, such as how many troops stay. There’ll certainly be some, with the government suggesting an ongoing presence of special forces in an over watch role.

Then there’s ongoing aid and development assistance and support for the Afghan National Army, now far bigger than anything Afghanistan could ever afford without vast international assistance.

One issue that has surfaced recently how is Australia actually decides the ANA 4th Brigade has been sufficiently trained and is able to operate on its own, an achievement fundamental to Australian disengagement. But the former commander of Australian forces in the Middle East now retired Major General John Cantwell observed that this judgment of “operational viability” was extremely elastic.

“I suspect that the 4th Brigade will be judged by our government to be at the level of `Afghan OK’ when the planned withdrawal of the Australian mentoring force draws near, no matter what. They’ll go sooner if they think they can get away with it. Watch this space come election time,” he said in an article in Fairfax newspapers.

Maybe this means the 4th Brigade will crumble when the going gets tough but not necessarily.

Australian forces have a long history of training other countries’ armies, working with material considerably less promising than the ANA. Much of the final period of Australia’s war in Vietnam was devoted to training South Vietnamese forces in the process called “Vietnamisation” which has been likened to precisely what is now occurring in Afghanistan.

The South Vietnamese forces were poorly motivated, mostly badly led and seldom highly regarded by those seeking to improve their performance. Among the more dismal of units was the 18th Infantry Division.

Australian soldiers had worked hard to lift the standard of some of its battalions, with seemingly little to show for their efforts. Australia’s official historian of the Vietnam war Ashley Ekins describes the 18th Division as of notoriously low standard and displaying most of the problems endemic to South Vietnamese army units including lamentable combat performance and low morale, with nepotism, corruption and incompetence rife among the senior officers.

Yet, long after Australian troops withdrew and for once properly led, this unit shone at Xuan Loc in April 1975, the final apocalyptic battle of the Vietnam war, fighting with a tenacity which stunned their hardened North Vietnamese opponents.

Vastly outnumbered, the unit stood firm and was virtually annihilated in a fortnight of savage fighting. Historians view this as the best performance of any South Vietnamese unit in the entire conflict. Alas it still didn’t prevent a communist victory.