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Blown apart
Behind the horror of the latest, seemingly inevitable, radical jihad suicide attacks in Bali lurks an increasingly unmanageable political dilemma for Australia as it remains in the front-line bunker in the war on terror. In Canberra a brazen anti-al Qaeda rhetoric post-September 11 has always far outweighed the actual military muscle committed to Afghanistan and Iraq. The Howard government’s quandary has deepened with each catastrophe from New York and Bali, Jakarta and Madrid, from London and back to Bali, and with each murdered Australian. Contrary to the federal government’s contention, Australians are specific targets, both here and abroad - and ever more so since Australia committed troops alongside the Americans and British. Al Qaeda leaders and functionaries of its subsidiaries like Jemaah Islamiyah, the home-grown Indonesian terror group believed responsible for last Saturday’s Bali blasts, have repeatedly said so. And so, the federal government must perform a deft balancing act to more stridently protect Australians here and abroad while obfuscating on the reasons why groups such as JI want to kill us. Prime Minister John Howard swiftly declared the latest bombings to be "an attack on democratic Indonesia". "Terrorists target westerners, including Australians, but we should not diminish the significance of democratic Indonesia, moderate Islamic Indonesia, as a target," he said.
Howard, on one hand, was trying to broaden the target. Ruddock, meanwhile, was honing the threat in on you. It is deft politics of the type that Howard, a leader who suits - and is eminently suited by - the times, excels. Of course it is no coincidence that Ruddock’s reiteration of the homeland threat here comes as the government moves to introduce more (as yet undrafted and what can only be described as draconian) anti-terrorism laws that would allow, among other things, the involuntary detention of suspects, without charge, for two weeks Ignoring the growing dissent on his own back bench and ever-mindful of the cost, post-Tampa, of oscillating on matters of national security, Labor leader Kim Beazley stridently supports the new measures. However, in publicly responding to the latest terror attack, Beazley made a constructive comment that he’d have been well advised to offer as a qualification to Labour's support for the domestic terror laws. It’s one that hones in on Australia’s - and the region’s - weakness in dealing with the jihad threat. Australia, he said, should concentrate more on developing a regional intelligence network to properly combat the menace. "We really do have to have a consistent build-up of collaboration in this region in which we are prepared to commit ourselves," he said. Australian intelligence and security sources are more explicit. They told The Bulletin that aside from the close cooperation between the Australian Federal Police and its Indonesian counterpart (which had dramatically enhanced forensic responses to, rather than prevented, terrorism in Indonesia), collaboration between Indonesian and Australian intelligence agencies was nowhere close to ideal. This stems in part from the lingering suspicions and animosities forged during the East Timor crisis of late 1999, when Australian military intelligence agencies so successfully infiltrated the Indonesian armed forces. But an added problem lies in the incapacity of Australia’s own foreign intelligence service, ASIS - which operates a significant core of agents across the Indonesian archipelago - to infiltrate JI. This aligns with the marked inability of our domestic spy agency, ASIO, to infiltrate home-grown would-be jihadist. The problem is not unique to Australia. Indeed, sources maintain there is a growing realisation in Britain and America that too little, too late, has been done to counter the threat of radical Islamic groups in Indonesia despite an abundance of evidence over the past decade that they would become a threat to western security interests. Perhaps, one security source says, the most daunting problem facing Australia is Indonesia’s stubborn unwillingness to proscribe Jemaah Islamiyah, its supporters and fundraisers, lest it marginalise Indonesians - including many in the military and political elite - who privately defend the group as a benign, benevolent organisation. This looms as a fraught diplomatic sticking point between Canberra and Jakarta. So, too, does the Department of Foreign Affairs travel warning, which urges Australians to defer non-essential visits to Indonesia. Jakarta loathes the implications of the current warning. Yet it seems a matter of time until Canberra makes it more foreboding still. |
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Australians
are directly in the line of terrorist fire - whatever the spin Canberra puts on
it. Paul Daley reports.
His comments coincided with those
of his Attorney-General Philip Ruddock who reiterated that a terrorist attack on
Australia was "highly probable", although he could - or would - not cite
specific intelligence to support this claim.