is the war with "radical militant Islam" still the single most important overarching framework for Australia's relationship with the world?

Peter Hartcher, political editor of the Sydney Morning Herald travelled to Afghanistan last week with Tony Abbott. He writes:

[...]Firing blindly will never defeat an enemy hiding in the midst of a civilian population. It will only infuriate the civilians. And if you lose the support of the population, you lose the war. The enemy will always have a place to hide.

That's why the current strategy is much more intelligent. It's not counter-terrorism but counter-insurgent. And the best way to counter an insurgent is to have the local people do it for you.

This is the new mission, but the Australian commander in Afghanistan is frustrated that it's not properly understood. Major-General John Cantwell said: "Our mission is not to defeat the insurgency in Oruzgan. That's not our mission. It's not our mission to hunt down and kill or capture every Taliban or insurgent in this province.

"Our mission is very clear - train the Afghans to manage security around the key population areas of Oruzgan. That's a limited scope . . . Our mission is to train those guys. And we need, I think, to make that clearer to the public and in some case to our own soldiers."

Is it working? Speaking of the 400 to 500 combat troops in the Australian-trained 4th Brigade of the Afghanistan National Army, Cantwell says that at last month's parliamentary election "they organised and ran the day. When there was a couple of blues, and bit of an upset, they took charge and ran it and we sat back and let them run it. It's a good look.

"There was a riot here about three weeks ago at Tarin Kowt. They trotted out the old story about someone burning the Koran. The insurgents do that every time we start to have some sort of success . . .

"So everyone gets excited and they riot. These guys took charge and ran it and made it go away without our intervention. It doesn't look like it," says Cantwell, gesturing at the rather desultory looking local forces, "but this is the future for Afghanistan."

The US officer who leads the eight-nation force in Oruzgan of which the Australians are part, Colonel Jim Creighton, says that the establishment of the local forces has had a powerful social effect: "The most important thing that's happening here is that the senior leaders - the elders and the government within Oruzgan - are bringing the young kids on side. It's the leader in the village that's telling his nephew, his son to come back in and be with the tribe and the government."[...]

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/hope-for-afghans--and-for-us-20101011-16fwp.html

According Bob Woodward in his new book --Obama's Wars --- the CIA has now established its own 3000-member covert army, roaming Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal regions to conduct secret assassinations.

Now, that might make immediate sense as a counter-insurgency strategy but it is long way from all the political guff about Australia’s "moral duty" to stay in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban barbarians and defend civilization.

The politics is that if the Americans hadn’t invaded, Australia wouldn’t be in Afghanistan -- and that Australia won’t remain for an instant after the US leaves.

Re Hartcher's article:
[...]Firing blindly will never defeat an enemy hiding in the midst of a civilian population. It will only infuriate the civilians. And if you lose the support of the population, you lose the war...

It's crucial to understand that, in some areas, the Taliban enemy are not "hiding in the midst" of the civilians. They ARE the civilian population. This has long been their tribal area and their society. So how are we supposed to weed them out?

Those living in Iraq and Afghanistan dislike it when foreign militaries bomb, invade and occupy their countries. Glenn Greenward puts the paradox of the war on terror well:

the solution to Terrorism is to interfere more in their countries by continuing to occupy, bomb, invade, assassinate, lawlessly imprison and control them, because that's the only way we can Stay Safe. There are people over there who are angry at us for what we're doing in their world, so we need to do much more of it to eradicate the anger. That's the core logic of the War on Terror.

This war manufacture the very dangers it is ostensibly designed to combat. Bombing Muslims more and more causes more and more Muslims to want to bomb the countries responsible.

Fancy that!. Ye the core premise (at least the stated one) of our foreign policy for the last decade is we're going to stop Terrorism by doing more and more of exactly the things that cause it.

I think the "core premise" to be found in Greenward's articles is the we should be allowed to interfere -where and when we like- with impunity. Use violence, always with impunity.

Now, I know it's politically incorrect to say this, but the events of Sept 11 did not spring from a vacuum. The people responsible didn't do it out of boredom or on a whim. There WAS some basis for their actions. But I don't seek to justify what they did any more than I accept what we've done in return.