By Helen Clark
While Australia’s PM was embroiled in controversy, his foreign minister was visiting Afghanistan.
While Tony Abbott was making world headlines for another screaming misstep, his foreign minister Julie Bishop was in Afghanistan renewing Australia’s commitment there on a surprise Australia Day visit.
Bishop met with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and celebrated the holiday with Australian servicemen and women stationed there, who number some 400. The president apparently asked Western forces to stay in the country, giving what Bishop termed a “compelling case.”
The Australian foreign minister said of her hour-long discussion with the president: “If Afghanistan is able to create a functioning nation … then that will be a significant breakthrough in the fight against global terrorism.” Bishop has made the fight against global terrorism and homegrown terrorism one of her platforms as foreign minister. Last November she used her address at the United Nations Security Council, which Australia then headed, to speak on terror threats and the need for international cooperation. “Terrorists are younger, more violent, more innovative and highly interconnected. They are masters of social media – to terrorize and to recruit – and are very tech savvy. They incite each other. They communicate their propaganda and violence directly into our homes to recruit disaffected young men and women.”
Last year Australia began again to worry about its domestic security after a large anti-terror raid (which led to one conviction) in September in Sydney that seemed a fine piece of security theater, reports of many Australians travelling to Syria to join the Islamic State – including one man who brought his young sons – and a hostage situation in Sydney that left three, including the gunman, dead.
Read the full story at The Diplomat