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

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.