ON THE surface, military efforts by the Indonesian government and the arrests of 300 militants seem to have weakened and splintered Jemaah Islamiyah -- the Southeast Asian arm of Al-Qaeda responsible for the infamous Bali bombings in the not too distant past While U.S. intelligence reports this week suggesting that JI might be expanding its operations outside Southeast Asia have been dismissed by experts as "nonsense," a deeper analysis does seems to suggest that Jakarta will have to overcome several obstacles before it can mount a more efficient counterterrorism effort against JI.
The Indonesian government's counterterrorism strategies thus far have had an insignificant impact in reducing the JI threat, simply because they have misunderstood the very nature of the movement. Even Indonesia's top anti-terror official, Major General Ansyaad Mbai, has noted that Jakarta's heavy-handed approach has yielded little. "Our efforts have shown that arrest, detention, trials and death sentences do nothing to stop terrorism," Mbai was quoted by the Jakarta Post.
According to Sarlito Sarwono, terrorist expert at the University of Indonesia, who was cited in the same publication, this failure has occurred because intelligence officials have tended to deal with JI as an offshoot of Middle Eastern terrorism, when it is actually something entirely different. Sarwono noted that community support for terrorism was much more muted in Indonesia than it was in the Middle East. He also noted a psychological difference, diagnosing JI leaders as "psychopaths" -- referring to their indiscriminate, irrational methods of violence, such as "using suicide bombers even when they are not needed," viewing suicide terrorism as "a mere sensational factor that gives the attack a higher profile," and "indiscriminately targeting civilians" unlike their Middle Eastern counterparts, who use violence and spectacle to illustrate a specific point.
In addition to a lack of emphasis on identifying the actual nature of the threat, several domestic concerns have hampered Indonesian officials from carrying out a successful counter-terrorist effort. Firstly, internal rivalry between the Indonesian military intelligence and the police force have undermined intelligence-sharing, resulting in delayed responses and flawed operation plans, according to Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group. The army is in charge of information analysis and threat assessment, and it has marked resent for the newly formed, inexperienced police force which has been in charge of overall counterterrorism operations. A CNN article cited several instances of miscommunication between the two bodies -- including the police force's failure to share information about the interceptions it received ahead of the Marriot bombings and intelligence it had on the entire cell makeup of the JI faction that carried out the Bali bombings, before they occurred.
Indonesia's political situation also remains quite vulnerable and as a result, Jakarta will have to tread carefully in its efforts to fight terrorism. The head of the United Development Party (PPP) and former Vice President Hamzah Haz, in particular, has been undermining the Indonesian government's attempts to arrest terrorists. Since the PPP is the third largest and dominant Islamic party in Indonesia, a secular state that has always lived under the threat of radical Islamist tendencies, the government has tended to appease rather than take on Hamzah. For instance, the recent release of Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, a JI leader, was believed to be due to Hamzah's actions. Crucially, the Indonesian government has also been reluctant to officially ban JI as a terrorist group for fear of angering Islamic parties.
Endemic corruption also remains a key obstacle to combating terrorism in Indonesia. It has been the primary factor stymieing efforts in various areas from cracking down on terrorist financing to imprisoning suspects. For instance, on Oct. 11, the Sydney Morning Herald ran an article detailing how imprisoned JI leaders were using Indonesian prisons as a "recruiting ground and publishing house." Evidently, terrorists were maximizing their sentences by translating Arabic jihadist manuals and shipping them off via corrupt officials across the country to indoctrinate future terrorists. Tighter prison controls must be enforced to counter this gaping counterterrorism hole. In addition, Indonesian authorities must regulate Islamic banks which lack oversight and have been corrupted into channeling terrorist funding through loopholes of "religious charity" or "zakat." Cutting terrorist financing remains the largest, albeit most important, blind spot in Indonesian counterterrorism efforts thus far.
In addition to the obstacles mentioned above, Indonesian authorities must learn from counterterrorism efforts of the past. The French failed against the FLN in Algeria because they did not address socioeconomic concerns and lost the battle of hearts and minds. The Indonesian government has slowly begun to realize this and craft a political, not military response to terrorism through soft power strategies like wider education programs to counter recruitment efforts, promoting moderate Islamic clerics via television programs, and most interesting of all, co-opting dissenters within factionalized JI to help intelligence efforts. Eventually, as Sarwono says, JI is above all "an ideology," and the Indonesian government must win the battle of ideas to declare victory against this threat.
Prashanth Parameswaran's column appears Mondays in the Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at pparamewswran@cavalierdaily.com.
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