Australia needs to reassess its view of extremism in south-east Asia

In the aftermath of the Bali explosion on 12 October 2002, ex-foreign minister Gareth Evans argued that Australia should prosecute the war against terrorism intelligently, by being "sensitive" to Indonesian concerns. This raises the paradox that Australian tertiary and bureaucratic institutions had for 20 years nurtured a generation of Indonesia watchers who often exhibited profound sensitivity to Indonesian interests, yet failed to perceive the evolving threat developing on Australia's doorstep. Why was this the case?

The question is even more curious because it has been relatively straightforward for Western analysts and Australian policy-makers in particular to gain an appreciation of the world view capturing hearts and minds among young, educated and increasingly militant Indonesian males. Nevertheless, Australian security analysts and media commentators tended to ignore or downplay the rising tide of Islamism. Indeed, when US sources revealed new evidence of an al Qa'ida threat to Western interests in Indonesia, and the region more generally, Australian and Indonesian commentators, the regional press and journals like the Far Eastern Economic Review believed the US was "rushing things".

Yet, in downtown Jakarta bookstores it is possible to pick up for approximately $Aus1.80 a slim volume entitled Saya Teroris? Sebuah Pleidoi by Fauzan al-Anshari, an account of the life, times and beliefs of self-styled sheikh Abu Bakar Ba'asyir. Ba'asyir has been identified as the spiritual guru of the Jemaah Islamayah network alleged to be behind the Bali bombing. From Ba'asyir's perspective the United States and Zionism plotted to destroy Islam to secure global domination. Ba'asyir maintains that US agencies engineered the World Trade Centre attacks to justify a global assault on its enemies, notably the Palestinians and the Taliban. More recently, the sheikh has argued that "infidels" perpetrated the outrage at Kuta Beach to discredit the variety of purified Islam that he and his ilk purvey.

The sheikh is, of course, a conspiracy theorist. Accordingly, the world is engaged in a war between forces serving the will of Allah and the US Great Satan and its allies.

On his return to Solo, Central Java, in 1999 from regional exile in Malaysia (where he established religious schools and the lineaments of the Jemaah Islamayah network) Ba'asyir immediately invited his fellow Muslim clerics to prepare "for jihad against America". To this end he constituted the Majlis Mujahideen Indonesia to coordinate those Indonesians committed to the purified creed that has gained popularity among young Muslim males globally.

This doctrine, initially articulated in the 1950s Middle East by those radically opposed to post-colonial secular nationalist regimes, holds that only a pure Islam could address the "hideous schizophrenia" of the modern condition. The Egyptian Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb maintained that this "ideological ideal" system alone could "rescue humanity" from "the barbarism of technocratic culture", the vice of nationalism imposed by a Nasser or a Suharto and "the stifling trap of communism".

This Islamist ideocracy has proved remarkably resilient, extending its global appeal over the past two decades. Paradoxically, the Islamist ideal of faith and virtue founded on a pre-industrial scripturalism has benefitted from the technological revolution and the transformation of communications. Identification with this scripturalist high culture becomes the hallmark of Islamic urban sophistication. In south-east Asia, the Middle East and Pakistan, urban male graduates find in the formalism of austere salafist teaching the simplicity and certitude that serves as a fitting accompaniment to their education in science and technology. Jihads groups, like those in Indonesia, have their own websites and mobile phones, provided they don't emit a degenerate musical dial tone.

This increasingly attractive Islamism imported into Indonesia since the late 1980s promotes a traditionalist and illiberal arrangement in which society is governed by networks, quasi-tribes, family alliances and services rendered, rather than on formal relations in a defined bureaucratic manner. Mafia activities and terror franchises sustain this arrangement, which is how al Qa'ida operates.

It is in this context that, since the fall of Suharto in 1998, a bewildering array of groups have sprung up which aim to uphold the integrity of Indonesia and establish sharia discipline with a Koran in one hand and a Kalshnikov in the other.

In Jakarta, Front Pembela Islamaya trashes tourist areas frequented by decadent Westerners. Meanwhile, Hizb-ut Tahrir, a movement begun in Jordan in 1953 but proscribed across the Middle East, seeks to unite the Muslim world as a superpower or Daulah Khalifah governed according to the Koran. Consequently, when Colin Powell visited Indonesia in August in an attempt to strengthen the government's anti-terrorist resolve, one of its leading lights, Rahmat Hassan, pronounced that "America is the biggest terrorist in the world, they have stomped on Muslims too many times".

Since the early 1990s Islamic opinion across the region has become increasingly radicalised and an Islamist internationale has permeated south-east Asia, establishing pan-regional networks using the devices of modernity for its anti-secularisation purposes. After the 1991 Gulf War, increasing numbers of younger Muslim students went on extended sabbaticals in Afghan or Pakistani training camps to learn the art of the Mujahideen, bringing back its training in faith, community service and bomb making, often with the tacit approval of disaffected elements in parliament and in the military.

Nor is this increasing radicalism a minority vocation. In December 2001 a poll conducted by a sociologist at the moderate State University of Islamic Studies (IAIN) and published in Tempo (December 2001) found that 61.4 per cent of the population supported the implementation of sharia law in Indonesia.

More recently, during the August 2002 meeting of the National Assembly (the Majlis Perpetuan Rakyat - MPR), Islamists sought to reinstate a clause, omitted from the original Indonesian constitution of August 1945 that made carrying out the sharia obligatory for "all followers of Islam". Although rejected by the MPR, the amendment received support from Vice President Hamzah Haz and speaker Amien Rais in the assembly and on the streets.

In other words, it has been evident since the fall of Quarto that Indonesia has been transforming itself into a Pakistan on Australia's doorstep. What is surprising is that the official scholar-bureaucratic orthodoxy in Australia and south-east Asia studiously maintained this was not the case and that, unlike its Middle Eastern equivalent, Indonesian "civil" Islam is more tolerant, capital friendly and democratic. In Australian academe and the media, any attempt to contest this Pnglossian understanding was to commit the sin of constructing" Indonesia as an alien enemy to the north and thus add fuel to Australia's unwarranted and deep-seated dread of the 'other'.

How did this edifice of denial come about? It can be traced to the attempts of successive governments from the 1980s, particularly during the Keating years, to redefine the country as an Australasian nation. To convince a sceptical public of this required academic and media construction of Indonesia as a benign, cooperative neighbour within a stable and prosperous south-east Asian region; it being Australia's logical and inevitable destiny to enmesh itself in relationships with the attractively diverse and economically booming region to the North.

Maintaining this construct politicised the Australian federal bureaucracy, especially senior advisers working in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Office of National Assessments (ONA). As a consequence, much of the analytical effort in the official bureaucracy, the media and academe was devoted not to the dispassionate analysis of regional affairs but to lending credibility to a debatable political agenda. This evolving bureaucratic-intellectual complex became increasingly convinced of the validity of engagement and as this edifice mistook ideological preferences for sceptical and empirical analysis it lost all ability to reflect upon or test its ruling assumptions. Dissenting viewpoints were either marginalized or ignored.

As a result, much Australian commentary on Indonesia bore little connection to regional realities. This is revealed most obviously in a record of analytical failure that consistently misread regional prospects, from the Asian economic crisis, through the Balkanisation of the Indonesian archipelago to the bombing at Kuta. In this, Australian observers mirrored the wider delusion promoted by the scholar-bureaucracy of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its Western adherents who during the 1990s argued that the region was one of "increased domestic tranquillity and regional order".

By the first years of the new century this flawed thinking pervaded elements of the Australian federal bureaucracy, particularly the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which along with its media fellow-travellers became firm supporters of the Jakarta orthodoxy and who today continue to insist that Australia must at all costs seek to join in the colloquies of "ASEAN Plus 3". Just as disturbingly, the intelligence analysis arm of the Australian government, the ONA, was not immune from the effects of politicisation and was overcome by an ASEAN induced miasma when it peered north of the Timor gap.

Yet, it has been evident to anyone with a semblance of scepticism that ASEAN and the regional economy have been in complete meltdown since the mid-1990s. As analysts were extolling the "Pacific Century", Jemaah Islamaya and its regional affiliates like Abu Sayyaf, Hizb-ut Tahrir and the Kumpulan Mujahideen Malaysia were busily establishing networks and linkages. ASEAN, meanwhile, was blithely maintaining its doctrine of non-interference in the internal affairs of member states and advertising the utility of shared Asian values.

In other words, analytical opinion towards Southeast Asia was highly "sensitive" to Indonesian concerns generally and to elite sensibilities with an interest in minimising awareness of internal instability in particular. Thus, Australian thinking gave credence to commentators in government-sponsored institutes of regional affairs like the Centre of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Jakarta who claimed that: "Attention to such groups as Laskar Jihad has been overblown." These views found their echo in Australian analytical commentary. Indeed, in early October one analyst observed that "the tendency is still to overplay the [terror] threat".

Such deference to official regional opinion is all the more worrying in the case of the CSIS, long suspected by human-rights groups as a front for Indonesian army intelligence. Ironically, the CSIS was involved in the creation of the fundamentalist group Komando Jihad in 1977, where sheikh Ba'asyir first plied his fundamentalist trade, as part of a military inspired dirty tricks operation to discredit moderate Islamic political parties.

It is deeply worrying that Australian analysts for the best part of two decades accepted the opinions emanating from official think-tanks extolling regional harmony and stability when those same think tanks covertly encouraged the extremism disturbing the region today. Even in the immediate aftermath of the Bali bombing, the Jakarta orthodoxy in Australia doubted whether there was any evidence of al Qa'ida involvement in the attack. Received wisdom berated the Canberra government for not acting upon US intelligence whilst simultaneously maintaining that the bombing was the result of Australia's excessively close ties to the American led war on terrorism.

The Howard government has ordered a review of the failure of the Australian intelligence agencies to provide forewarning of the threat. Yet, the Bali bomb was not simply an intelligence failure, it reflects a wider analytical failure to comprehend the growing instability in the south-east Asian region.

What Australia needs is not increased "sensitivity" but more accurate threat perception. This requires a reassessment of the idea of Asian engagement and the forging of stronger bilateral ties with non-Muslim states such as Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines that feel equally threatened by the spread of Islamic extremism. Unfortunately, such a re-evaluation cannot be accommodated in an official climate that disdains the idea that Indonesia might constitute a security problem.