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Jakarta
blast a sign of what's to come
By Alan Boyd
Terrorism thrives on symbolism, and investigators did not
need to look hard for signposts after Thursday's bombing
outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta.
It was almost three years to the day since the September
11, 2001, attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the
Pentagon near Washington; about two years since car bombs
ripped through several nightclubs at Kuta Beach in Bali;
and a mere 12 months after Jakarta's JW Marriott Hotel was
blasted, probably by the same extended network of extremists.
Then there is the political imagery. Indonesia and Australia,
shared targets of the latest outrage, are both preparing
for national elections that have been overshadowed by the
security debate, including their own hesitant efforts to
cooperate in the hunt for Asia's bombers.
Canberra is under pressure from a reluctant electorate to
pull its remaining 850 troops out of the US-led coalition
in Iraq. Jakarta has infuriated Islamic hardliners by turning
the screws on fundamentalist cells in Sulawesi and western
Java.
Yet the greatest symbol of Southeast Asia's impotency in
the war against terrorism - its failure to put together
a cohesive response at the regional level - was paraded
for all to see in a meeting room just down the street from
the ill-fated embassy two days before the attack.
Military chiefs, who have led the stuttering offensive against
an enemy that recognizes no national boundaries and can
draw on a scattered army of thousands of sympathizers, refused
to establish a joint task force that could work within the
same abstract set of rules. Perhaps fittingly, the initiative
had come from Indonesia, which knows lots about the futility
of empty diplomatic gestures.
"To anticipate [terrorism] we have to hold military
exercises and exchange information. If the terrorists use
weapons of war such as bombs or missiles, or make or steal
nuclear weapons, the military must get involved," said
army chief General Ryamizard Ryacudu, adding that other
countries saw "no need to form" a standby force.
It should be pointed out that Jakarta's partners in the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have probably
been much quicker to recognize that confronting terrorists
with brute force merely invites more of the same.
Moreover, there is an inevitable element of domestic point-scoring
in the countdown to the second round of Indonesia's presidential
poll on September 20, which has seen much maneuvering by
the armed forces as they seek to regain some of their lost
political clout.
But Ryamizard's strategy might at least coerce the various
security services into setting aside national interests
and pooling their intelligence resources. It might have
allowed a common appraisal of the scale of the problem,
permitted cross-border pursuits and established a consistent
legal framework for sentencing and extradition.
"It is not commitment that is lacking, but rather the
way they prioritize their resources. We are very happy with
the security element of Indonesia's [anti-terrorism] cooperation,
but not with information-sharing and intelligence capabilities
in general," said an Australian security attache who
was previously based in Southeast Asia.
"The same goes for other ASEAN countries, with the
Singaporeans excepted, who I would say have shown the greatest
openness and the best overall commitment to what we have
always maintained should be an equally shared burden of
responsibility."
Most specific intelligence input comes not from Jakarta
or Kuala Lumpur but Washington and Canberra. Significantly,
the US State Department issued a high-level warning just
last week, on September 3, that an attack might be imminent
in Jakarta, though the target was believed to be "identifiably
Western hotels" rather than an embassy.
Security experts in Jakarta had been convinced since June
that Jemaah Islamiya (JI) terrorists, who were blamed for
the subsequent bombing as well as the earlier Bali and Marriott
Hotel incidents, were preparing to strike again in Indonesia.
Ironically, Australian diplomats responded several days
ago by moving their annual embassy ball, one of the social
events of the year for the expatriate community, from the
Marriott to the grounds of the fortified consular building.
Australian security analysts said the JI warnings were based
on intelligence reports that the organization still had
part of a stockpile of explosives that was acquired shortly
before the Bali bombings. Some of that stockpile was later
used in the Marriott attack.
The United States has also been upgrading its assessment
of JI's resources, amid concern in the security fraternity
that some of the ASEAN states may have become complacent
following an impressive, but probably deceptive, rate of
success in hunting down its operatives.
While more than 200 JI suspects have been rounded up in
Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines since
the 2001 attacks in the US, the grouping is believed to
operate with a compartmentalized system of dispersed cells
that provides a buffer against isolated setbacks.
"The information emerging from the interrogation of
JI suspects indicates that this is a bigger organization
than previously thought, with a depth of leadership that
gives it a regenerative capacity," the International
Crisis Group (ICG), a research agency, concluded after the
Marriott bombing. "It has communication with and has
received funding from al-Qaeda, but it is very much independent
and takes most if not all operational decisions locally."
Much of the uncertainty in intelligence circles is due to
the paucity of detail on JI's relationship with al-Qaeda,
which originally fulfilled a training function for the Asians
but is now undoubtedly more deeply involved.
One assessment, by the International Institute of Strategic
Studies (ISS), contends that despite the US offensive in
Afghanistan, al-Qaeda may still have two-thirds of its core
leadership and most of the estimated 20,000 activists who
have been trained in its Afghan camps since 1996.
Another, from British-based terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna,
calculated in 2002 that 20% of al-Qaeda's organizational
strength was in Asia, including volunteers from Central
Asian, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Singapore and the Philippines.
Indonesian police and Australian authorities believe that
two Malaysians trained by al-Qaeda in bomb-making and terrorism
planning, identified as Azahari Husin, 45, and Noordin Mohammed
Top, 33, were responsible for the Jakarta attacks.
Both have been hunted for more than a year through fundamentalist
havens, with Indonesian investigators on one occasion entering
a village just as Azahari was leaving.
This week's ASEAN summit made a vague commitment to pool
more intelligence and "improve cooperation" so
that terrorists have fewer safe areas where they can hide.
A regional center for counter-terrorism in Malaysia, which
recently held its first training session, will attempt to
coordinate operational skills.
But Western security analysts worry that regional efforts
are too piecemeal, and usually reflexive rather than proactive.
Border controls are porous, especially in maritime zones,
and specialist training is not made available to the localized
customs and security personnel who are most likely to have
contact with terrorists.
One of the most telling statistics is that despite their
generally ambivalent stance on US counter-terrorism policies,
most Southeast Asian states often have a closer security
relationship with Washington than with one another. This
reflects long-standing territorial conflicts, diplomatic
suspicions and a belief that some security services, notably
in Indonesia and northern Malaysian provinces, have probably
been infiltrated by fundamentalists sympathetic to extremist
aims.
ASEAN cooperation "is typically characterized by bilateral
efforts, mostly with the United States", analyst Dana
Robert Dillon wrote in a 2003 study for the US-based Heritage
Foundation. "Participation in anti-terrorist coalitions
is frequently circumscribed by an individual country's commitment
to America as an alliance partner and that country's individual
perception of terrorism as a threat to its national security."
The ICG believes that JI's biggest threat may not be from
the region's disjointed security offensive but its own internal
cohesion, which has been severely put to the test since
the Marriott bombing.
Some of the JI leadership is known to be unhappy with the
most recent choices of targets, which have generally killed
Indonesian workers. All of the victims of Thursday's attack
were Indonesians. Australian diplomatic personnel, the presumed
targets, were shielded by their fortified embassy perimeter.
"There is disagreement about the appropriate focus
for jihad and over the practice [of using] non-Muslims to
support Islamic struggle. Internal dissent has destroyed
more than one radical group, but in the short term, we are
likely to see more JI attacks," the researchers concluded.
M (AB/ATO/IM)
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