"Admiral Keating told a seminar at the East-West Center in Honolulu in July that Asia wanted the US to maintain a strong and visible presence throughout the region. 'It is certainly in the minds of all our friends, partners and colleagues that the US should maintain military superiority in the theatre.'" [12]
Australia has more troops serving with its US counterparts and under NATO command in Afghanistan, over 1,000, with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announcing a few days ago that 400 more (including some to serve with the Special Operations Task Group elite combat group) on the way, than any other non-NATO member.
Australian troops, along with those from New Zealand, are among the foreign forces scheduled to be evicted from the Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan where US and NATO personnel have been stationed for several years in pursuit of the war in Afghanistan.
Last June the nation's Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, was already calling for an expansion of the Afghan War theater to include neighboring Pakistan, saying: "I think we've got to start looking at the border between Afghanistan not just as a bilateral issue between those two nations, but a regional issue in which the international community has to play a role." [13]
In the same month the head of Australia's Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said of the US and NATO war in South Asia: "I would say it's an endeavour that will last at least 10 years." [14] If so Australia has no plans to leave.
As it will not leave Iraq. Australia's troops were among the first to enter Iraq after the March 2003 invasion and are among the few national contingents that are remaining there. At the end of 2008 the Iraqi parliament, not without dissension, passed a resolution authorizing individual agreements on the only non-US troops there: Those from Australia, Britain, Estonia, Romania and NATO.
In January of this year when the head of the US Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, announced plans for aggressive naval moves in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia, Australia was one of the first nations to offer support.
A month earlier Australian Prime Minister Rudd traveled to the United Arab Emirates "where Australia is in the process of consolidating its air crews and Middle East command headquarters in a single secret base." [15]
This April Australia completed its first command of the Combined Task Force 152, a permanent naval surveillance and interdiction operation in the Persian Gulf run by the US Naval Forces Central Command. "The Royal Australian Navy's command rotation also saw the integration of representatives from Australia, the U.S., Bahrain and other Gulf Cooperation Council nations into the CTF 152 staff." [16]
Australia also participates in Combined Task Force 150, a sister operation in the Gulf of Oman and the Horn of Africa.
Last summer the commander of the US Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, Admiral James Winnefeld, referred to Iran as an "unpredictable adversary" that "demands our immediate attention in the event of a need for Australia or NATO response." [17]
Like the secret consolidated Australian base in the United Arab Emirates, Winnefeld was evidently speaking of matters not known to the general public or ordinarily divulged by Western military officials.
In February Canberra announced that it was quadrupling the amount of Pakistani military officers to be trained in Australia for the expanding war in South Asia, the same month that Australian troops killed five Afghan children while engaged in a combat mission.
Foreshadowing what would become this month's defense white paper, in September of last year Prime Minister Rudd stated that his nation needed "an enhanced naval capability that can protect our sea lanes of communication and support our land forces. We need an air force that can fill support and combat roles.'' [18]
The press wire service from which the above is quoted reminded its readers that "Australia still has 1,000 personnel in and around Iraq, about 1,000 soldiers under NATO command in southern Afghanistan and about 750 peacekeepers in East Timor and 140 in the Solomon Islands."
In the case of the last two nations, Australia's role is indeed that of a subimperialist regional policeman, with its nearly nine-year deployment in East Timor (Timor Este) as much a matter of protecting preferential oil and natural gas concessions in the Timor Gap and defying its major regional rival Indonesia as it is one of peacekeeping.
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