Page 2 of 2 Fighting the global
insurgency By Alan Boyd
improvements in human rights and in
much of East Asia has a strategic objective.
Researcher Dana Dillon said in the
Heritage Foundation's study of the aid breakdown
that anti-terrorist funding should be redirected
to the security organizations that are actually
fighting terrorism.
"Military aid to
Southeast Asia may have political or operational
objectives, but as long as
the primary objective is combating terrorists,
security assistance to Southeast Asia should focus
on law enforcement development."
It wasn't
always that lopsided. In the late 1960s and 1970s,
the US was spending $60 million a year training
police in 34 countries. In those days the emphasis
was more on the prevention of narcotics
trafficking and other international crimes. The
rules were tightened after Congress became worried
that some of the cash was being used to prop up
repressive regimes.
Some Western
anti-terrorism experts say the picture has
improved since 2003, as intelligence agencies and
global bodies such as Interpol have taken a more
active role in providing specialist training.
Yet there is still a military
preoccupation that fails to recognize a
fundamental element of the terrorism threat: it is
mostly being waged in urban areas, where police
and civilian intelligence operations have the
greatest access.
Of the leading terrorist
organizations active on Asia, only the
Philippines-based Abu Sayyaf uses jungle hideouts.
Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), the most deadly, operates
out of rural religious schools, city offices and
private homes.
The State Department
acknowledges that these obstacles have made
"regional capacity-building" a priority and that
it now shares equal billing with the upgrading of
national and bilateral contacts.
But
fallout from the aid vacuum in the 1980s and
1990s, when such organizations as al-Qaeda were
mobilizing, can be seen in the poor levels of
coordination between the US and its allies and the
law-enforcement agencies that are on the front
line of terrorism.
When Indonesian and
Australian police raided JI safe houses in Jakarta
and Semarang in 2004, arresting nine terrorism
suspects and seizing a haul of explosives, the
Indonesians neglected to mention they had also
found a huge pile of documents naming politicians
targeted for assassination and areas to be bombed.
Included on the list was the Marriott
Hotel in Jakarta, which was bombed a month later,
killing 12 people. US and Australian security
officers only became aware of the documents from
press reports after the bombing.
"It takes
a long time to build a rapport with the local
police - decades, really. We thought we were
getting somewhere until the Semarang raids, but
obviously we have to earn their trust," said a
Western police officer who worked in the region.
"There is sometimes resentment at
outsiders getting involved, turf battles. The way
forward is joint training, intelligence sharing,
but the resources have to be there first."
Thai and US personnel cooperated in the
arrest of top al-Qaeda leader Riduan Isamuddin
outside Bangkok in 2003. The cleric, better known
as Hambali, was the suspected mastermind of
al-Qaeda's Asian operations.
But in the
same year JI explosives expert Farthur Rahman
Ghozi was able to walk out of his top-security
jail cell in the Philippines with two cellmates
because of lax policing. He was killed by police
three months later.
US officials are also
concerned at inconsistent treatment of suspects by
judiciaries when they are apprehended, often
because of corruption or because the legal systems
simply aren't in place.
Indonesia's
alleged JI leader, Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, received a
jail term of only four years in 2003 for his role
in the first Bali terrorist bombing. The sentence
was cut to three years on appeal and he has since
been freed.
The State Department report
lists failings in the legal systems of most Asian
jurisdictions, including Indonesia, Malaysia,
India, Afghanistan, Thailand, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Cambodia
and Macau.
It also records some successes.
JI's capability has been diminished by regional
counter-terrorism measures, including the death of
Abu Sayyaf Group's nominal leader Khaddafy
Janjalani and spokesman Abu Solaiman in the
Philippines. Another leader, Ismin Sahiron, was
also killed.
"Serious challenges do
remain, there's no question about that,'' said
acting counter-terrorism coordinator Frank
Urbancic.
"This is not the kind of war
where you can measure success with conventional
numbers. We cannot aspire to a single decisive
battle that will break the enemy's back, nor can
we hope for a signed peace accord to mark
victory."
Alan Boyd, now based
in Sydney, has reported on Asia for more than two
decades.
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