Clive Williams (''Troop deployment should focus on volatile Pakistan'', March 23, p9) appears to recommend more Australian troops be sent to both Afghanistan and to Pakistan, though in his informative article he also comments that the international effort should focus on improving governance, the economy, public education and security forces, and on countering extremist ideologies.
This is common sense, but such a program does not need troops.
Indeed, many think that troops make the situation in both countries worse.
Top military brass have said that the shooting war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, and instance the failure of Soviet troops there.
Williams says the United States is understandably committed to the task [of winning the war in Afghanistan] because of 9/11, but a growing number are convinced that declaring war on an entire country was not the best way of bringing bin Laden and his fellow terrorists to justice.
As John Pilger has commented, going to war in Afghanistan to deal with al Qaeda was equivalent to bombing Sicily to get rid of the mafia.
Harry Davis, Braddon
Clive Williams argues for an increased Australian engagement in Pakistan, ''focusing on improving governance, the economy, public education and security forces and on countering extremist ideologies'' .
If through those measures, we can make life better for Pakistan's beleaguered women, let's do it.
I am still traumatised from reading Virginia Haussegger's column (''Two wrongs, no rights'', Forum, March 21, p16) about Mukhtar Mai who was gang-raped by order of a tribal council in southern Punjab on the trumped up charge that her 12-year-old brother had had an affair with a woman of another tribe.
What century are these people living in?
Juxtaposed with Williams, however, was George Monbiot's frightening account of where we are heading with climate change (''Opportunity for 2 degrees lost, March 23, p9'').
According to Monbiot, the United Nations suggests rich countries should be transferring between $72 billion and $109billion per year to poor countries to help them cope with climate change.
Pakistan will need a lot of aid once the snows of the Himalayas have melted and the Indus runs dry.
It is already ninth on the index of failed states?
Where will it be when it can no longer feed its own people?
Jenny Goldie, Michelago, NSW
Radicalised Israel
This week the UN's Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, Richard Falk, has concluded that there is reason to believe that Israel's recent offensive into the Gaza Strip was a war crime.
This comes on top of candid revelations by Israel Defense Force soldiers in recent days that there was a culture, of sorts, during the engagement that Palestinians were of lesser value, and were sometimes killed in highly questionable situations where the IDF could see some factor of minimising risk to their soldiers.
This is well and truly borne out by the 100-to-one ratio of deaths.
It does seem, to this observer at least, that Israel has radicalised to some extent; and that recent events have seen them broadly losing support because of the extremity of their actions.
They have been sorely provoked, of course, by Hamas rockets but the Israelis have also played the provocation game vigorously over time.
The Israeli version runs to leadership assassinations, bulldozers, expanding settlements, and state-sponsored deprivations.
And now we may even be seeing a shift in Israeli politics further in a hawkish direction.
In figuring how Israel long supported in view of the history of persecution comes now to be singled-out by the UN (and others) as very possibly perpetrating war crimes, we perhaps need to review the work of noted psychologist Irving Janis, who in 1972 described a phenomenon he called ''groupthink''.
This is a process which can lead a ''cohesive in-group'' to become intemperate and risky in decision making, due to an excessively self-referent focus and a desire to avoid criticising one another.
Sound familiar?
Two new factors, however, are coming into play: Intemperate action by Israel has undoubtedly cost it some international support; and secondly, one suspects that the Obama Administration, although pledged to back Israel, has entered the meeting rooms fresh, and may already have found it impossible to avoid critiquing any such groupthink.
Ross Kelly, Monash
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