Map of the
Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines triborder, annotated by former JI commander Abu
Tholut
Small
islands, sharply divided, give a conflict a certain focus and intensity—think
Northern Ireland, Cyprus, East Timor. Sebatik Island, located off the northeast
coast of Borneo, does not typically come to mind. But it is one of the few
islands in the world cleaved in two by an international border. An unnaturally
straight line, drawn by the Netherlands and Great Britain in 1891, now
separates rivals Indonesia and Malaysia.
As a
result, Sebatik’s inhabitants live a quaint transboundary existence. Some wake
in an Indonesian bedroom and breakfast in a Malaysian kitchen. Citizens of both
countries use the Malaysian Ringgit to trade at the nearest market town, Tawau,
on the mainland of the Malaysian state of Sabah. Both are caught in the middle
of an international conflict that has played out in minor local disputes and in
litigation at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague.
It was on
the basis of the Sebatik border that Indonesia made its claim to the small
islands to the east, Ligitan and Sipadan. Malaysia’s claim to those islands
relied on its guardianship of local turtles, in accordance with its Turtle
Preservation Ordinance of 1917. In a 2002
ruling that had implications for the rights to nearby oil and gas
reserves, the ICJ accepted the turtle argument, awarding sovereignty of the
islands to Malaysia. But far from resolving tensions, the ruling fed into
Indonesian narratives of perfidious Malaysia: a neighbour that conspires to
take for itself Indonesia’s national heritage.
Further
complicating matters, the Philippines also has a claim to Sebatik and its
hinterlands. It had sought to intervene in the Sebatik case on the grounds that
North Borneo is a region historically ruled by the Sultan of Sulu. An unwelcome
reminder of this history came in February 2013 when a group of armed men from
the Philippines—the “Royal Security Forces of the Sultanate of Sulu and North
Borneo”—sailed out of the 19th century and into the Malaysian palm oil town of
Lahad Datu, on the Sabah coast. The raid was swiftly repelled by the Malaysian
armed forces, but the incident brought new light to a curious fact: Malaysia,
since a 1963 agreement, has quietly paid the heirs to the Sulu
Sultanate in the Philippines RM5,300 every year for its continued possession of
Sabah—a payment the Malaysian government refuses to call “rent”.
These
echoes of the colonial past, like so many footnotes to James Warren’s
definitive history of the region, The Sulu Zone, are not mere academic
distractions. They speak to an enduring geopolitical reality that renders the
Indonesia–Malaysia–Philippines triborder a uniquely permissive environment for
terrorists and other actors who, in alliance with ISIS or Darul Islam, are unlikely to call
themselves “non-state”. It’s an environment that makes the border zone ground
zero for what I would describe as terrorist arbitrage in Southeast Asia.
In economics,
arbitrage at its simplest refers to the practice of buying a good in one market
in order to sell it for a higher price in another. Although the strategy
entails a transaction cost, it is one of little risk so long as the arbitrageur
understands the prices in both markets—an informational edge. Theoretically, in
a model that assumes arbitrage, discrepant prices should converge as
arbitrageurs exploit the discrepancy for easy financial gain.
In
Southeast Asia transnational terrorists engage in a type of triangular
arbitrage to exploit the geopolitical differences between Indonesia, Malaysia,
and the Philippines. Instead of being motivated by profits, they seek to
marshal scarce resources for attacks against their ideological enemies. In so
doing, they rely upon their knowledge of the different costs of mobilising
resources across a diverse region, the fragmented archipelagic geography of
maritime Southeast Asia, and the failure of the three major states of the
archipelago to cooperate in order to shut down arbitrage opportunities.
Most
members of militant groups are not nimble arbitrageurs or entrepreneurs. But
I’ve found in my research on the history of cross-border jihadism in the region
that key transnational militants possess specialist knowledge of “market
conditions” across the archipelago and the regional linkages they need to
access them. Like the former senior Jemaah Islamiyah figure Abu Tholut—the
Mantiqi III chief responsible for the triborder area in the 1990s—such highly
mobile operatives know the byways and backwaters connecting Malaysia,
Indonesia, and the Philippines better than almost anyone.
Terrorists
attempt two main types of arbitrage: input factor and regulatory. Input factor
arbitrage occurs when terrorists leverage geographical differences in the
distribution of factors needed to produce an attack. Due to the diversity of
archipelagic Southeast Asia, island-hopping arbitrageurs might find, for
example, that the cost of acquiring weapons is lower in the Southern
Philippines (but higher in Indonesia), the cost of international travel is
lower in peninsular Malaysia (but higher elsewhere), and access to high-value
targets (foreign and local) is lower in Indonesia (but typically higher
elsewhere).
These
basic examples can also describe a form of regulatory arbitrage, in which
terrorists exploit the differences between regulations and laws across states.
The cost of international travel is low in Malaysia due both to its status as a
hub for low-cost airlines and to the country’s lax immigration regime. The cost
of weapons is high in Indonesia compared to the Philippines due both to the
absence of a large armed insurgency in Indonesia and to Indonesia’s relatively
strict gun control regime.
To return
to Sebatik Island: the territorial tensions between Indonesia, Malaysia, and
the Philippines neatly play into the arbitrage strategies of terrorists. But
not just because those tensions frustrate the ability of the three governments
to cooperate against terrorists on the triborder—a fluid space at the centre of
the Malay Archipelago that allows international travel in 360 degrees. To the
extent that they reduce the ability of the major parties to cooperate more
generally, regional tensions promise terrorists ongoing discrepancies across a
fragmented geopolitical seascape, presenting myriad opportunities for arbitrage
that seldom escape their notice. Such opportunities will remain open so long as
states are unable to work together to even out discrepancies or to raise
barriers to arbitrage.
Recently,
a number of positive attempts have been made to increase regional cooperation,
including trilateral maritime patrols. But such
efforts are in their infancy. One sign of the continued lack of trust between
Malaysia and the Philippines is the failure to work together to ascertain the
identities of dead militants. Malaysian militants—who are important in an
arbitrage scenario because, among other factors, the cost of fundraising is
relatively low in Malaysia—were crucial to the coalition that captured the
Philippine city of Marawi under the banner of ISIS. Yet, to date, the
Philippines authorities have failed to request a DNA sample from the
Malaysians that would allow them to cross the key financier of the Marawi
attack, Dr Mahmud Ahmad, off everyone’s list. The same has occurred in other
cases, so that militants, whose aliases and kunya
are deceptively effective, might ghost through the region unmolested.
Still no
regional structure exists for authorities to map how militants mobilise across
national borders. Jihadists in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines are
each embedded in distinct and dynamic local networks that facilitate
transnational mobilisation. In a July 2017 report, the Institute for Policy
Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) recommended short courses in which counterterrorism
officials from all three countries might learn from “real case studies of
cross-border extremism”. Taking up the idea, in December officials from the
three countries met at a workshop hosted by the Jakarta Centre for Law
Enforcement Cooperation (JCLEC). But due to the failure of officials from all
three to sign off on the case study program, the practical mapping of
transnational linkages was replaced by a series of standard presentations.
It is a
truism that while terrorists slice through international borders,
counterterrorists are “contained” in nation-states. But it is failure to
understand transnational linkages that allows militants to maintain their
critical informational edge. In terrorist attacks, such linkages act as a force
multiplier, allowing processes of arbitrage and collaboration through which key
actors aggregate and deploy resources that they might have otherwise lacked.
The scenario is analogous to that of a corporation seeking to establish a transnational production chain for a new product. The
“product” in this case, a novel attack, has the potential to catch local
authorities by surprise because it is the result of a combination of factors,
some of them from beyond the horizon.
The
January 2016 Jalan Thamrin Starbucks attack in Jakarta, in which four civilians
were killed, might have been a massacre were it not for a chance failure of
arbitrage. A key arbitrageur in the Jamaah Anshorut Daulah network, the weapons
smuggler Suryadi Mas’ud, abandoned his task to bring multiple automatic rifles
into Indonesia from the Philippines via the Sanghie-Talaud island chain. Others
who then attempted to complete the job failed to get the weapons to Java.
But such
a failure shouldn’t make anyone complacent. It is common for terrorists to work
through a process of trial and error, until at some point they succeed. The
prospect of a mass casualty light arms attack in a crowded space remains the
greatest terrorist threat in Indonesia. The risk of such an attack can only be
higher than it was in 2016, with hundreds of militants, now experienced in
urban warfare, returning from former ISIS strongholds in Syria and Marawi.
In
practice, arbitrage is far from frictionless or risk-free, as the case of Suryadi Mas’ud, who was
arrested last year in West Java, illustrates. Transaction costs may pose a
significant barrier. Yet in a globalising world marked by a strong pattern of
regionalisation, the cost of arbitrage will only decrease as general Southeast
Asian integration proceeds. As Pankaj Ghemawat has found in his work for
the logistics company DHL, “East Asia & the Pacific” is second only to
Europe in intraregional connectedness, with Southeast Asian countries receiving
unexpectedly high global connectedness scores.
Increased
connectivity was a factor in last year’s attack on Marawi. While some jihadists
used traditional sea routes through the triborder to get to the Southern
Philippines, perhaps even more took advantage of the growth in low cost
regional air travel. Regional airlines now connect a surprising schedule of
provincial capital cities in the region with domestic or international flights
to other provincial capitals—or to national capitals, like Manila.
Related
Mishandling
the return of civilian evacuees risks creating new pockets of sympathy for
violent extremist groups.
Haironesah Domado 10 November, 2017
Sceptics
of transnational linkages’ importance might say that Marawi and other incidents
indicate quite low numbers of militants travelling across international
borders. One estimate by Indonesia’s counterterrorism police, Densus 88, is
that a total of only forty Indonesian citizens were involved in the fighting in
Marawi. Even as the mujadhidin dug in to make Marawi ISIS’s most successful
urban campaign anywhere in the world outside Syria and Iraq, desperate appeals
via Telegram for Indonesian supporters to join the battle appear to have gone
unanswered.
But low numbers of key transnational actors have always driven the most
serious terrorism in Southeast Asia. The archetype is the former Indonesian
militant Hambali. When Hambali was arrested in 2003, the threat to the region
was much reduced, partly because he was a unique link to al-Qaeda, but also
because he uniquely understood how to exploit geopolitical differences across
Southeast Asia. As the arbitrage model suggests, terrorist “markets” no more
encourage large numbers of arbitrageurs than do traditional markets. An
arbitrage opportunity might only attract a few geographically flexible actors
capable of understanding conditions in more than one country at a time. Southeast
Asia will continue to be vulnerable to transnational terrorism until there are
at least equal numbers of counterterrorism officials who can do the same. (Photo: and storyQuinton
Temby)
No comments:
Post a Comment