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.
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