Mali must keep us on our toes

      "Islamist terrorism is not defeated and is here to stay for a long time."
      "No religion has such a big, powerful and dedicated extremist element as Islam."

THE French military intervention in Mali is one of those signal events that reveals, or at least confirms, several key new features of how the world works. But first the story in brief. After the operation in Libya to get rid of Muammar Gaddafi, a great flow of weapons and people found its way into neighbouring countries across North Africa.
One of these was Mali, a blighted, chronically misgoverned, impoverished West African state whose chief claim to fame is its evocatively named northern city, Timbuktu.

About a year ago, a flood of jihadists, in alliance with a disaffected ethnic group and under the leadership of al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb, took control of northern Mali. What moved the French to swift and decisive military intervention was the prospect that the jihadists would take southern Mali as well.

The French intervention has been successful. The jihadists have been forced out of almost all the cities and towns they had captured. The French had originally hoped a force of West African troops would do the job for them. But the West African armies are ill-equipped and poorly trained. At best they will help the Malian army hold what the French have taken.

The Mali story holds at least three important lessons about the geo-strategic shape of the world we live in. These lessons have big implications for Australia.

First, the Americans are determined that their allies will do more of the heavy lifting when it comes to counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency. The Americans will help, politically, with intelligence, and logistically with material support, as they are doing in Mali. But there has to be an immediate threat to the US for American military forces to engage in combat.

This was the lesson of Libya, too. If rich, European NATO members feel threatened by North African terrorism, they have to take action themselves.

All American allies should take note of this. It is not an American retreat from the world, but the Americans are no longer going to do everyone else's job. This is in great contrast to the Balkan conflicts of 15 years ago. Then the Europeans were paralysed by ethnic conflict in their immediate region and the Americans had to do all the military heavy lifting. Ten or 15 years ago, the Americans would have done the Mali operation. No longer.

The second big lesson is just the continuing, sinewy, protean, unkillable nature of Islamist jihadi terrorism. It is an understandable, even praiseworthy, instinct of the liberal mind to assume that all religions are sociologically the same, with their fringe of extremists and mainstream of moderates. But this liberal reflex no longer describes reality. No religion has such a big, powerful and dedicated extremist element as Islam.

The jihadists represent a small minority of Islamic opinion, even in Mali, but it is a substantial, virulent and dedicated minority. Any conflict involving Muslims in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and parts of Southeast Asia can reliably attract hundreds, often thousands, of dedicated jihadist fighters with an explicitly religious program.

The jihadists who controlled northern Mali implemented a savage version of sharia law, full of amputations, floggings and the rest. Islamist terrorism is not defeated and is here to stay for a long time.

The third lesson of Mali is that it remains of the highest priority to Western leaders to stop terrorists, especially if they are allied to one of the al-Qa'ida franchises, from taking control of an entire nation and its infrastructure, even a nation as ramshackle as Mali.

What does all this mean for Australia?

In her recent national security statement, Julia Gillard said she thought the main security challenges for Australia in coming years would arise from the actions of states, not non-state actors such as terrorists. Tony Abbott disagreed and said he thought the main danger facing Australia was terrorism.

On this, Gillard is correct. States can threaten Australia existentially. Terrorists possibly could do so if they got nuclear weapons, but that is much less likely. This is, however, emphatically not an argument for underestimating the strategic importance of terrorism. One of the most complex and important aspects of terrorism is the way it relates to states. It is easy to imagine, for example, terrorists causing military conflict between India and Pakistan, two nuclear weapons nations.

All of this has profound implications for the size and structure of the Australian Defence Force. There is a serious debate under way about what the army is for in the approaching post-Afghanistan era, with other deployments in East Timor and the South Pacific also coming to an end.

It would be the height of folly to cut the size of the army and abandon hard won capabilities in counter-insurgency. This would repeat almost precisely the calamitous mistakes Australian governments made after Vietnam. No one wanted to repeat Vietnam so they wantonly threw away all the skill and expertise accumulated from that conflict.

Similarly, today there is no taste for repeating Afghanistan or Iraq. But that is no reason to assume we will never need counter-insurgency capabilities again, as Mali demonstrates, and as you could easily imagine in our region.

The Australian Army needs to be able to wage high-intensity war against other modern armies, to prosecute medium-intensity counter-insurgency operations as it has done in Afghanistan, to carry out low-intensity pacification and police functions as in East Timor and Solomon Islands, and to respond to natural disasters.

Defence Minister Stephen Smith has recently made perplexing statements that seem to imply a restructuring, or even a reduction, of the army as it "comes home" from Afghanistan and the South Pacific. Given how very tiny our army already is, and the extreme difficulty it would have in fighting another modern army, this is an extremely disturbing line of thought.

Mali shows us how complex and unpredictable the security environment remains. Remove a dictator in Libya, entirely a good thing in itself, and you empower terrorists to take over Mali. Don't think these dynamics are restricted to North Africa. Terrorism, counter-insurgency and the giant actions of increasingly powerful state militaries in the Asia Pacific - they are all part of the spectrum of our security challenges.

We need options to respond to all of them.