Fraser jumped to conclusions on Afghanistan

AS a senior intelligence officer, Paul Dibb recalls Malcolm Fraser as inclined to accept the US view of the Soviet threat in Afghanistan

AS a senior intelligence officer, Paul Dibb recalls Malcolm Fraser as inclined to accept the US view of the Soviet threat in Afghanistan

He says the Cold war warrior even jumped to an overhasty conclusion on one set of US data.

The former prime minister's hurried examination of US intelligence data turned new drainage ditches in Afghanistan into a Soviet strategic bomber base, Professor Dibb said, reflecting on the weekend release by the National Archives of cabinet documents from 1980.

When he briefed Mr Fraser on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Professor Dibb was Joint Intelligence Organisation deputy director and Soviet expert.

By the time the Soviets withdrew from Kabul, nine years later, he was the organisation's director. He is now emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University.

"You must remember the horror and shock with which this invasion was greeted," he said.

"The Soviet Union was on a roll. Henry Kissinger commented that communism was on the move everywhere. It came soon after the fall of South Vietnam in 1975.

"We saw growing Soviet confidence that what they used to call the 'correlation of world forces' was in their favour: they were building a big new naval base in Somalia; they were helping deploy Cuban troops to Angola.

"They were on the move all around the place, and then along came this invasion."

US president Jimmy Carter warned that this could be the beginning of World War III, Professor Dibb said. "Effectively, detente was over."

"In those days, Malcolm Fraser was a Cold War warrior and he identified with everything the Americans said about the Soviet Union's power," he said.

"The view was that this was a forward strategic move that was not so much about Afghanistan but to give the Soviets a forward strategic base from which to threaten, with long-range strategic bombers, the oil lines of communication in the Persian Gulf."

He said it went back to the ambition of Russian tsar Peter the Great to have a warm-water port in the Indian Ocean.

US intelligence had leaked information to the US media that indicated the Soviets were building a large airport in Afghanistan with very long runways from which their strategic bombers could threaten Persian Gulf oil supplies.

"Fraser called us in and said he wanted to go public," Professor Dibb said.

"I said I'd had my people look at the same intelligence and they could not confirm that this was the building of a strategic bomber airfield. He demanded that we take the evidence over to show him."

Professor Dibb went to see the PM accompanied by a brigadier with the information in a case manacled to his wrist, and told Mr Fraser his team needed more time.

"We said we had insufficient evidence and could he please wait. But he took no notice and went public. He supported the American view that the Soviets were building an airfield with very long runways for a long-range bomber force capable of threatening the Persian Gulf oil fields."

When more detailed information was collected, the runways turned out to be irrigation ditches.

"He was a high Tory in those days and he wouldn't listen," Professor Dibb said. "He made his mind up and accepted what the Americans were saying."

Cabinet documents show Mr Fraser and foreign minister Andrew Peacock told cabinet the Soviet invasion was to be condemned as totally without justification, a violation of everything the UN stood for and a mode of behaviour that made normal relationships between nations totally impossible.

Professor Dibb said Moscow had sent troops into Afghanistan to pacify an unstable country on its border and prevent rebellion spreading to its own Central Asian republics.

Although the Soviets thought the US would not be particularly concerned about an operation so far away, there was widespread belief in Washington that it was the start of a grand Soviet strategic plan aimed against the US and going far beyond Afghanistan.

Moscow seriously misjudged the scope for victory.

Its plan was to stabilise the situation in Afghanistan, strengthen the Afghan army, and then withdraw the bulk of Soviet forces within three years. But the Soviet army was cast into a bloody war that would last nine years.

A Soviet commander lamented at the time that "there's not a single piece of land in that country that hasn't been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nevertheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of the rebels."

After reviewing Soviet material, Professor Dibb said the Kremlin's official estimate of the number of its soldiers killed in Afghanistan was 13,833, but the real total was probably about 26,000.

The intervention killed 1.3 million Afghans and forced 5.5 million, a third of the pre-war population, to flee their country.

At the height of the war the Soviets had 108,000 personnel in Afghanistan. In December 1989, the Soviet parliament condemned the invasion, declaring "the decade of tragedy left a deep scar in the hearts of our people, ended in ignominious failure, and shook the whole Soviet regime".

"The fact is, as America and its allies are currently discovering to their cost, Afghan culture and society are not easily dealt with," Professor Dibb said.

"'Washington needs to learn the lessons of what happened to the Soviet Union and accept that there is a limit on what it can do in Afghanistan; otherwise it runs the risk of replicating the fate of the Soviet Union in that country."

Professor Dibb said one of the most telling admissions about new US intentions came from President Barack Obama's speech at West Point in December 2009, when he said the US's responsibility to the Afghan people was one responsibility among many.

"The nation that I'm most interested in building is our own," Mr Obama said.

"If ever there was an admission of the limits to American power in the modern era, this is it," Professor Dibb said.