East Timorese children watch an Australian soldier stand guard in Dili. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
With the imminent arrival of 1,400 diggers in East Timor to join the 150 soldiers already in the country, Australia will briefly have more soldiers deployed in its backyard than in its controversial missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, writes David Fickling.
A few hundred miles to the east in the Solomon Islands, 400 troops were deployed after disputed prime ministerial elections last month resulted in riots and the looting of Chinese-run shops.
It's understandable at a time like this that fears in Canberra turn towards the emergence of an "arc of instability (pdf)" off Australia's northern coasts.
Even Fiji, the tourist capital of the region, has been looking sickly. There has been no repeat of the coups that result whenever the Indo-Fijian minority gets a taste of power, and fears of unrest were averted this month when general elections returned a Melanesian-dominated government.
But disputes still simmer around army chief Frank Bainimarama, whose laudable opposition to the 2000 coup plotters has tilted towards outright insurrection in recent months.
The nightmare scenario is that one of these countries could become a failed state and a breeding ground for either terrorism, or transnational crime, or both, but it's unlikely that any of them will descend into a state of Iraq-style disorder soon. Melanesia's tribal culture may encourage endlessly complex factional splits, but it also tends to discourage the sort of ideological dispute that sustains unrest in other parts of the world.
Most societies in the region are village-based, agricultural and highly decentralised. Central government has little effect on most people's lives, and if it broke down a lot of places would probably barely notice. And though governments naturally have to exercise a precautionary principle, it's unlikely that terrorists or crime gangs would ever see Australia's backyard as an attractive operations base.
For terrorists, there are much better opportunities in the Middle East, east Africa and the suburbs of developed cities. Criminals, for their part, can find all the support they need in the opaque business cultures and weak police forces of the Pacific's more genteel tax havens.
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