SPEAKING
FREEELY Taming terror the Southeast Asian
way By Jonathan Ross Harrington
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
In the wake of
recent attacks in London, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan and
now once again the Philippines, it is difficult to
find current evidence of strategic success in the
"war on terrorism". Countries, particularly those
in the West, have yet to develop (or at least
articulate) a plausible strategy for undermining
the capabilities and ideological appeal of
Salafist jihadi organizations (brands of extreme
Islam such as al-Qaeda). Hopefully, recent
developments in Southeast Asia will reemphasize a
globally parsimonious strategy that, considering
its theoretical simplicity, has received
insufficient attention.
The Moro Islamic
Liberation Front (MILF) based in Mindanao,
Philippines and its neighboring islands and the
Free Aceh Movement (GAM) in north Sumatra in
Indonesia are on the brink
of achieving peace
with their respective governments, putting an end
to more than 60 years of combined insurgent
activity. The resolution of these conflicts is an
important end-goal in and of itself; however, this
eventuality will aid the US and its allies when
attempting to dismantle Jemaah Islamiyah (JI)and
the Salafist jihadi network in Southeast Asia by
disentangling the agendas of local
ethno-nationalist separatist groups from that of
the Salafist jihad.
Following the July
bombing in Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair
called for a global conference on the threat posed
by radical Islam - an overwhelming problem to
address and an impossible issue to resolve. The
networks/ideas that represent the sharp end of
that spear are in many ways irreconcilable.
Granted, even al-Qaeda has a series of political
demands, but if secular states attempted to meet
such demands the "criminal optimism" [1] of their
loftier goals would require the reversal of
decades of progress, global integration and
structural shift.
When developing a more
robust counter-terrorism strategy against radical
Islam it must incorporate political strategies -
driven by nation-states - to address local
grievances rooted in issues such as
nationalist-separatist, socio-economic, minority
representation, etc. Unfortunately, the more
"democratically challenged" states may naturally
be reluctant to engage decades-old separatists in
an effort to make headway against a blurred, yet
interconnected Salafist jihadi threat straddling
their borders.
GAM, whose ties to JI are
virtually non-existent (and are certainly not
ideologically cemented), have signed a peace
accord with the government. The organization
relinquished its claim to absolute sovereignty and
had been met in kind by Jakarta with a troop
withdrawal already underway.
In the
Philippines, the MILF, which historically teases
the government with sentiments of peace, looks as
though it may be serious this time. The
organization's strategic agenda had certainly been
hijacked in past years by Salafist forces outside
the organization, but considering that the Moro's
real grievances rest with the Philippine
government and not the wider enemy of Muslim
apostates and "Western colonialists", there is no
long-term basis for alignment with JI. April
witnessed a resolution to the critical issue of
ancestral lands [2]; meanwhile, the MILF has
recently denounced JI - some believe as a
prerequisite for achieving an equitable peace and
ensuring Western aid to the region in years to
come.
So what does this mean for an
already disjointed Jemaah Islamiyah? As
International Crisis Group Asia Director and JI
expert Sidney Jones observes, internal fracturing
due to disagreements over strategic intent and the
utility of Bali-style terrorist attacks against
Western interests is dividing the organization.
[3]
On the one hand a lethal, but greatly
diminished core of operatives still embraces
al-Qaeda's ideology and seeks the creation of a
Southeast Asian Islamic super-state. On the other,
the core of JI's Indonesia cell - ideological
inheritors of the Indonesian Islamic separatist
movement (the Darul Islam) - want to focus on
developing a pure Islamic community in Indonesia
and believe that international terrorism
undermines their long-term goals. Regardless of
direct ties between JI and the two organizations,
the secession of conflict will diminish JI's
recruiting capabilities as the "oppression" of
regional Muslim populations is slowly perceived to
have lifted.
The bathwater in which JI
once floated in slowly starting to drain. Local
conflicts, particularly those in the southern
Philippines, provided JI with a seemingly endless
supply of weapons, safe haven, training facilities
and (most importantly) aggrieved Muslims. The
localized conflicts that JI so skillfully wove
into a tapestry of temporary-Salafist jihadism may
be starting to unravel and return to their
origins.
Organizational disarray, key
arrests and opportunistic intent are all
converging to force this disintegration that could
be further catalyzed if governments effectively
engage their political detractors. As conflict
zones become peaceful and organizations revert
back to their more tangible goals of domestic,
political change, JI becomes diffused into
smaller, ad-hoc networks. It will no longer be
able to rely upon uniform instability in order to
operate with impunity.
A conceptually
simple strategy emerges from this situation:
resolving the political grievances of
"traditional" insurgents will aid states in
attacking the irreconcilable agents of the global
Salafist jihad.
The current situation in
Thailand underscores the importance of finding
such solutions to these autonomy/identity/economic
grievances. In the southern Thai province of
Pattani one is witnessing a decades-old insurgency
turn slowly away from its ethno-nationalist
separatist roots and toward the rhetoric of JI and
al-Qaeda.
Anti-Western images are being
invoked to an unprecedented degree, local
populations are beginning to claim a bond to their
oppressed brothers of the global ulema
(community of Islamic scholars, eg Palestine,
Chechnya, etc), yet historically these
organizations have been only concerned with local
issues.
The Thai government must not let
another Mindanao or Aceh surface just as a trend
of peace seems to be taking hold. If Thailand is
serious about being a partner in the "war on
terror" its first actions should not be the
repression of Malay-Muslims in the hopes of
locating isolated (yet dangerous) Salafist
militants that may or may not be operating in
Pattani, it should be the initiation of a peace
process with those willing to seek political
solutions. Such a strategy will drain the
bathwater and expose those who cannot be
politically appeased.
We have not yet
found a coherent strategy to fight the ideology of
hate that epitomizes the global jihad, yet over
the decades Western/secular countries have refined
the political peace process. The campaigns of
organizations such as the Moro Islamic Liberation
Front and the Free Aceh Movement have in the past
provided the requisite operating environment for a
Salafist jihadi network dedicated to attacking
Western targets.
The current peace
processes are positive signs that such an
environment is waning. What the West can do is to
exert political pressure on other states - in this
case the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN) - to strategically and
cooperatively engage all of the nations' aggrieved
Muslim groups that seek political, rather than
existential ends. This is the region's best chance
to counter JI and the West's best chance to
achieve tangible, strategic results in the "war on
terrorism".
