Peter Cosgrove lauds history of ADF in Timor

Peter Cosgrove, who commanded the international peacekeeping mission in East Timor, has welcomed the official history of Australian operations in the former Indonesian province.

Then chief of army Peter Cosgrove, centre, on a tour of strategic locations in Balibo, East Timor in 2001.

Peter Cosgrove, who commanded the international peacekeeping mission in East Timor, has welcomed the official history of Australian operations in the former Indonesian province and said it accurately reflected the challenging role and operations of the Australian Defence Force.

As revealed by The Weekend Australian, the 921-page book by historian Craig Stockings has been highly controversial within government and took three years to be cleared for publication by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which asked for many redactions.

The first of two volumes on East Timor, Born of Fire and Ash (UNSW Press), finds the Howard government resisted deploying troops at the time of the 1999 vote on independence and the ADF was not adequately prepared for its largest operation since the Vietnam War.

In an interview with The Australian, Sir Peter said he welcomed publication of the official history, which had access to classified documents and includes hundreds of interviews, and said the reporting of the book accurately reflected how the deployment came as an unexpected and challenging mission for the ADF.

“We were not expecting on the horizon, before our prime minister (John Howard) wrote to ­president Habibie, that less than a year later there would be a major international operation offshore from Australia into an undeveloped operating environment with high political sensitivity,” Sir Peter said.

“(And) with Australia as the lead group, which required very significant commitment from maritime, land and air forces, and with Australia being the supply base in some way or another for the entire force.”

Sir Peter led the 22-nation International Force East Timor (INTERFET) and was later ADF chief. Professor Stockings argues that the ADF in 1998-99 was “unsuited to a large-scale overseas operation” and there were considerable institutional weaknesses that had to be overcome for the mission to succeed.

“Our previous experience had been as, to a high degree, a partial client of our powerful friends and neighbours such as the US,” Sir Peter said. “If you look at the history since World War II, in every case while striving to be a foreign force, we nonetheless expected and obtained high levels of logistics support from our allies.”

At the time of the rapid build-up in East Timor, the official history finds deployment exposed “shortcomings” with the ADF and “preparedness and force structures were found wanting”, even though the overall mission was a success due to flexibility, responsiveness and leadership.

“Preparedness is the first casualty of crisis,” Sir Peter noted. “At what point can anybody say, ‘I was very happy about our preparedness?’. So, I’m not disagreeing with Craig, I’m offering the qualifier that we will strive unsuccessfully always to be fully prepared. And it is the way in which you remediate your shortcomings and still present a mission-ready force.”

The book further argues these “shortcomings” were partly a function of “efficiency” cutbacks to reduce government expenditure in the drive to return the budget to surplus. The result was that the Department of Defence had become somewhat “hollow”, Professor Stockings writes.

“It is timeless,” Sir Peter said. “Governments exist to conduct the dynamic governance of the nation. It is a balancing act … It would be lovely to say that the Defence Force will be top priority for any nation and therefore the investment should be boundless and any aspiration we have should immediately be met. That is not reality; that is not even reasonable.”

Born of Fire and Ash is the first official volume in a six-volume series that also chronicles Australian operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. “I’m glad Craig and his cohorts are telling it like it was,” Sir Peter said.