Flying blind

Staving off violence … an Australian soldier tries to calm a crowd in Dili on Wednesday. Supporters of Mari Alkatiri poured in to the city yesterday.
Photo: AP

The human disaster bearing down on tiny East Timor really does seem to present a microcosm image of the worlds major conflicts.

At the heart of the issue is poor intelligence, leading to poor planning and resource allocation by the big powers.

Overseeing the birth of the nation of East Timor has largely been Australia’s responsibility. But as we dissect the comparisons here, it is well to remember that, at least militarily; Australia is a client state of the US.

A FORMER senior Australian army officer has slammed Australia's grassroots intelligence networks in Timor and elsewhere in the region, saying they are in poorer shape than during World War II.

Retired Major-General Mike Smith, who was deputy commander of UN forces in East Timor in 2000 and now heads the charity Austcare, said yesterday he found it surprising that Australia "keeps being caught with its pants down" in East Timor, the Solomon Islands, Fiji and Papua New Guinea".

"If we really, really knew this region as well as some people think we do, then why are we constantly surprised by these issues?

As fresh violence broke out in Dili, General Smith said that "human intelligence is not deploying people to an area two weeks before an incident. It's having a network of sources throughout the country that have been established over many, many years.

Now slip over to another zone where Rice abruptly decided to make stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan to her planned trip to a foreign ministers meeting in Moscow.

Rice said the United States had once made the mistake of ignoring Afghanistan -- after the withdrawal of Soviet forces in 1989 and the subsequent fall of their client government, which gave rise to the Taliban. That is one!

But a worse scenario is starting to come out:

A crucial intelligence war is going on in southern Afghanistan, where American, British and Canadian troops are trying to glean better information about the Taliban while attempting to persuade Pakistan to close Taliban command centres and camps.

The efforts follow the failure of the American-led coalition and Nato to predict the ferocity and numbers involved in the Taliban offensive that started in the middle of last month.

Intelligence officers from several western countries said the Taliban preparations took place through the winter in and around Quetta, the capital of Balochistan, in Pakistan.

Much of the blame for the lack of information has been placed on the narrow focus of the US military in the past. Until last year the coalition's intelligence operated only in the provinces of eastern Afghanistan and only as far south as Zabul province.

The critical provinces of Helmand, where 3,000 British troops are now deployed, and Kandahar and adjacent Balochistan were not covered. The Americans were interested only in catching al-Qa'eda leaders, who were believed to be hiding in the eastern provinces or in Pakistan's adjacent North West Frontier Province.

The Taliban presence farther south was ignored and, although Pakistan was helping American intelligence, Islamabad turned a blind eye to Taliban activities in Balochistan.

That full article is in the London Telegraph - Intelligence officers widen the net in hunt for Taliban

The truth is, our leaders and planners, the initiators of aggressive incursions and frantic cleanup operations, are flying blind. They appear to be driven by gut feeling, by domestic political imperatives, by assumptions by not by hard, reliable intelligence.

It’s like putting a Sopwith-Camel pilot into a stealth bomber and expecting basic instincts to conquer the technological complexities of the craft.

Fighting wars ‘by the seat of the pants’ is a dangerous folly, but that is what is happening out there right now. The coalition is flying blind.