So Australia's Labor Party prime minister, the Chinese-speaking Kevin Rudd, has promised Australia will stay the course with the United States in Afghanistan right to the very end. That's interesting. Canberra once also promised the U.S. it would stay in the Vietnam war till the very end. "All the way with LBJ (then U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson)" was the slogan, and we all saw what happened there. Afghanistan will probably go the same way, even if our military/intelligence experts say otherwise.
But first some personal experiences. Back in 1959, I was to precede Rudd as the first postwar Australian diplomat to be sent to Asia to learn Chinese. En route I took a bus across the Mekong delta to Saigon; Canberra's intelligence experts had told me that the area was safe from communist "bandits." Yet my bus was the last to cross the delta; almost the entire area already was under the Viet Cong control. And the Vietnam war had not even started. It was my first lesson in how our experts get it wrong in Asia.
The next lesson came a few years later during a Moscow posting. I had met with famous Australian correspondent Wilfred Burchett, who had virtually been expelled from Australia as a "traitor," partly because his highly accurate reports on Asia based on procommunist sources conflicted with the far less accurate reports by rival journalists relying on Western intelligence sources.