Australian troops and police in Honiara, Solomon Islands, April 2006.
In a recent speech on Australia's national security policy, Australian Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd made several interesting observations about Australia's strategic situation in the 'Arc of Instability'. This is the island chain to Australia's north - its 'immediate neighbourhood' - stretching from Indonesia through New Guinea to the islands of Melanesia.
Rudd painted a bleak future for the Arc - a zone of failed or failing states, corrupt governments, political and ethnic violence, poverty and pandemics. He identified the situations in East Timor, Solomon Islands and Fiji as precarious:
Fiji is of major concern given unresolved political tensions, the disposition of the police and the armed forces, and the relative density of the urban population.
In Rudd's view, Australia's strategic interests in the Arc have "deteriorated sharply over the last decade", with the prospect of more failed states and a strategic vacuum filled by outside powers. Unless something is done urgently, the cost to Australia will be high - in dollars (the cost of military interventions and humanitarian assistance), public health risks, and waves of refugees.
This is an attempt by Rudd to paint the Coalition government as crisis-driven - responding to Pacific instability with a 'send in the troops' knee-jerk reaction. But it also reflects a view that unrest is a symptom of a deep-seated malaise in Pacific societies. States 'fail' because they are poorly governed by corrupt politicians. Disorder occurs because there is no 'economic growth' that provides people with jobs and prospects.
Seen from this perspective, sending in troops is like sticking a band-aid on a weeping wound. In a crisis, soldiers temporarily restore order but cannot address the underlying problems. As Professor High White, head of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University, recently commented:
Australia hasn't yet found what else you send apart from the army to try and address those deeper political, social, economic problems that are the real root of the issue.
Rudd's answer, announced in the speech, is a 'Pacific Partnership for Development and Security'. This is a genuinely big idea, which would involve a large and long-term Australian commitment to rebuild the "economic and social infrastructure" of Pacific countries and address the root causes of instability.
It's also an interesting idea, because it echoes the findings of a recent British study of the Northern Ireland conflict. As I noted in 'Counterinsurgency lessons from Northern Ireland', the study suggests that there
is a need to identify situations which could lead to insurgency or civil war, and take "early, substantive, visible" action to address root political, social, economic and religious problems.
Would the 'Pacific Partnership for Development and Security' work? I'll analyse this question in a subsequent post.
