The
terrorist attack in Jakarta last week achieved little but foretells much.
It signifies the renewal of an implacable religious insurgency that could
cost Indonesia and the rest of the region dearly.
From the
point of view of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has
claimed responsibility for the assault, there is hardly anything to boast
of. Very few civilians were killed.
Thus, the
attack failed the mathematics of terror, which revels in mass casualties.
Almost 3,000 people died in the September 2001 attacks in the United
States. More than 200 lives were lost in the Bali bombings of October 2002;
more than 165 people were killed in the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai;
and 130 perished in the Paris attacks of last November. Even those numbers
are overshadowed by the toll of death and suffering inflicted by sectarian
attacks that occur habitually in the geometry of terror stretching from
Africa and West Asia to South Asia.
The Jakarta
strike was not only low-scale by comparison, it was botched.
The
terrorists involved might have tried to emulate the actions of the Paris
attackers, but they failed miserably. Unlike trained militants who behave with
military discipline and precision, knowing when and where to strike, how
to retreat, how to re-emerge, and how to kill again in the countdown to
the imminent arrival of the security forces, the Jakarta terrorists
appeared to be on an excursion. Their exertions were over, and they were
dead, in an almost anti-climatic denouement.
The police
performed much better than them. Arguably, they could have done even
better since the State Intelligence Agency (BIN) had tipped them off,
enabling them to be on high alert five days before the attack took place.
However, it is difficult to be prepared sufficiently since the eventual
location and time of a strike are not known. The cryptic ISIS warning of
an impending event spoke only of holding a "concert"
in Indonesia that would make international news. Jakarta need not have
been the only surprise venue chosen for the infernal concert;
Bali, Indonesia's tourism capital, would have been attractive as well.
In the circumstances,
the Indonesian police responded promptly and decisively, displaying
professional competence and confidence in handling terror attacks in
populated areas, where one crucial consideration is the need to avoid or
minimize civilian casualties.
The
responsive agility of the police outpaced whatever planning had gone into
the attack. For ISIS, clearly, this was a failed mission, no matter how
hard it tries to cover that fact by passing it off as a
religious expedition.
Ominous sign
However,
there are several reasons for treating this outrage as an important
passage in Indonesia's litany of terror.
One is the
agency of time. Terrorism is war played out in slow motion forever. No
battle is decisive but every battle contributes, in the twisted teleological
imagination of terror, to eventually assured victory. Unlike secular wars,
whose outcome is settled on the battlefield, at least for the time being,
only the afterlife and eternity are the final terrorist battlefield. A
senior Indonesian official grasped this aspect of the Jakarta terrorists'
pathology when he observed that they were motivated by nothing more than a
consuming desire to die and go to Heaven. That is very different from
wanting to live in a way that enables one to go to Heaven.
This psychology
is what has not changed since the Jakarta hotel attacks of 2009, the last
major terrorist outrage. Operationally since then, intensive and consistent
intelligence work and occasional security raids on terrorist hideouts have
paid dividends.
On the
religious front, Indonesia demonstrated consensual ability to act against
terror. It disproved worries that its Muslim-majority population - the
largest in the world -- would not support military action against a group
of co-religionists: They did. Politically, Indonesia refuted concerns that the
unseemly jockeying for power among parties and factions, including
Islamically-minded groups, in the post-Suharto era would restrict its
ability to fight terror. It proved that political pluralism and security
imperatives can go together.
However,
what occurred in Jakarta last week shows that secular time is not the same
as religious time. In the secular world, events have a beginning and an
end. Many Indonesians thought that peace had largely returned to their country.
In the terrorist world, however, there is merely a continuum of warfare,
punctuated by periods of peace dictated by tactical necessity. Beyond the
tactical lies the strategic: the fundamental use of violent means to seek
ultimate ends, the signature faith of all terrorists, whatever their
religion. This illustrates the existential difficulty of dealing with
people driven by the death-wish and nothing more.
Now that the
interlude since 2009 is over, Indonesia will have to display similar
toughness of approach to terror. This may well require amending the law to
allow for the preventive detention of suspected terrorists. Civil
libertarians, who rightly welcomed political liberalization in the
post-autocratic era, will have to balance their fear of the misuse of
draconian laws against the need to protect the body politic from fanatics
whose methods of political persuasion include videographed beheadings.
ISIS in
Indonesia, if anything, is a bigger threat than Jemaah Islamiyah, the Al-Qaeda
offshoot that terrorized the country. It is a truism that JI was an idea
in search of territory; even Al-Qaeda, operating from the pre-modern
terrain of war-torn Afghanistan, was more an idea than territory. ISIS is
territory -- its geographical remit in Iraq and Syria equals that of a
medium-sized European country -- in search of the global idea of a
Caliphate.
The
Malay-speaking parts of Southeast Asia are an intrinsic part of
its universal reach. In August 2014, ISIS officially established
Katibah Nusantara, or the Malay Archipelago Combat Unit, a group
of Bahasa Idonesia-speaking fighters located in Al Shadadi, Hassakeh,
Syria. Its ultimate goal is to train in Syria, return to Southeast Asia,
and then establish an archipelagic Islamic State in the region.
Regional dimension
Almost a
year ago, I wrote that Southeast Asia was likely to become the second
front of the war on terror again as ISIS destabilizes West Asia, the first
front. That warning is borne out by the Jakarta attack, which enacts the
initial stages of the jihadi strategy of turning Indonesia into the center of
war in Southeast Asia, which itself will serve as a microcosmic terrain
for global jihad. The region will serve a gathering place for
international jihadis.
The
implications are truly onerous for Malaysia, the southern Philippines and
Singapore, Indonesia's neighbors which are firmly on the map of terrorist
incorporation into the distant Caliphate planned for Southeast Asia from
Iraq and Syria.
Regional
cooperation is becoming a do-or- die game. These countries must be aware
critically of their common stake in resisting an enemy to
which international borders are a secular fiction. Just as the terrorists
see maritime Southeast Asia as a single confessional landscape,
those involved in counter-terrorism must view it as a single security
domain.
Cooperation
involves intelligence-sharing among agencies, such as Singapore's
effective Internal Security Department, that are nationally-separate but
are regionally-connected entities which have a vested interest in one
another's success.
The Jakarta
attack failed. The next one may not.
Derwin
Pereira heads a Singapore-based political consulting company. He
is also a member of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science
and International Affairs.
This article
was first published in the Business Times (Singapore).
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