Posted on 08/01/2002 5:42:08 PM PDT by Conagher
The second front in America's war on terror is yielding limited results
THE arrival in January of 1,200 American soldiers in sleepy Basilan island in the southern Philippines drew attention to a wider threat of international terrorism in South-East Asia. Abu Sayyaf, a militant group the Americans have been helping to fight, is just one of many in the region, after all. Its founder, Abubakar Janjalani, trained with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Two of the September 11th hijackers had spent time in Malaysia. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first bombing of the World Trade Centre, in 1993, used the Philippines as a base. It has been suggested that al-Qaeda might try to regroup in South-East Asia after the destruction of its headquarters in Afghanistan.
Hence the speedy dispatch of American troops. Hence too the current South-East Asian tour of Colin Powell, the American secretary of state. On August 1st, he signed an agreement to co-operate against terror at the ASEAN Regional Forum, a South-East Asian security grouping.
But fighting terror in South-East Asia, as everywhere, is a complicated task. Distinguishing between local and international terrorist outfits, or between formal organisations and bands of like-minded individuals, is next to impossible. Finding the people involved is even harder. Regional governments have proved as quick as their counterparts around the world to use the label “terrorist” for their own political purposes, and as prickly about doing America's bidding. That said, however, the evidence uncovered so far suggests that, although al-Qaeda's influence stretches far and wide through South-East Asia, the region makes no better a base for terrorism than Hamburg or Boca Raton.
Take Basilan, where American and Philippine troops formally concluded six months of joint exercises on July 31st. A few American soldiers will remain to supervise the completion of humanitarian projects on the island. But American special forces, who came to “train, advise and assist” their Philippine counterparts hunting for Abu Sayyaf, have all gone home—without achieving any clear result.
To be fair, the Filipinos do seem to have made some headway under American tutelage. They regularly manage to track down and kill small bands of Abu Sayyaf fighters, a relative rarity before the Americans arrived. They also managed to locate the three hostages (two of them American) whom Abu Sayyaf had been holding for over a year, though two of them died in the rescue operation.
Nonetheless, Abu Sayyaf remains a going concern. The Philippine army says the number of its active members has fallen from 2,000 to 200 over the past year. But deserters, rather than captives or casualties, account for most of the difference. Although they have gone to ground for the time being, they may well live to fight another day. Four of the group's five most senior leaders remain at large.
Besides, it was never really clear what the campaign against Abu Sayyaf had to do with the broader war on terror. It is true that in the early 1990s, some members of the group are believed to have met Mr bin Laden and Mr Yousef. But Donald Wurster, the commander of the American troops on Basilan, admits that there is no evidence of any recent contacts with al-Qaeda.
This is not to suggest that international terrorism does not present a threat in the Philippines, or indeed in South-East Asia as a whole. On the contrary, recent bombings in the Philippines and Indonesia, and a thwarted one in Singapore, vividly demonstrate the danger. They also provide grounds for optimism, insofar as they prove that terrorism is a local, as well as an American, problem, and therefore give local authorities a powerful incentive to co-operate in the war on terror. What the example of Basilan does illustrate, however, is that even with local co-operation, identifying and striking at terrorist targets is no more straightforward in South-East Asia than anywhere else.
The biggest breakthroughs in the fight against terror in the region have come by chance, or the would-be terrorists' incompetence. Philippine policemen stumbled on to schemes to assassinate the pope and bomb 12 American aircraft thanks to a fire in Mr Yousef's flat in Manila in 1995. Last year, Indonesian police caught a Malaysian militant after the bomb he was carrying exploded, blowing off his own leg.
But authorities in the region have been assiduous in following up what few leads they have. Singapore foiled a plot to bomb the American embassy, among other targets, on the basis of a videotape and notes found by American forces in the rubble of an al-Qaeda leader's house in Afghanistan. Malaysian investigators cracked a local cell using documents found in America in the flat of Zacarias Moussaoui, a suspected accomplice in the September 11th attacks. One of the Malaysians arrested as a result, it turns out, had played host on different occasions to two of the hijackers, as well as to Mr Moussaoui and the suspected mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000.
The information garnered from these arrests has helped to build a picture of the terrorist network in the region. As elsewhere, local terrorists seem to have drawn inspiration, and perhaps also money, from Mr bin Laden. But they did not build a rigid hierarchy. Instead, a mysterious figure nicknamed Hambali seems to have acted as a point-man, travelling from country to country, encouraging local militants, setting up cells and helping fellow terrorists who passed through his territory.
The overwhelming majority of the attacks his network sponsored were local, or at most regional, in nature. In the Philippines, his subordinates bombed a bus, a train, a petrol station and a cargo warehouse in Manila, and may also have been involved in a series of explosions in the southern city of General Santos—all in revenge for the government's campaign against Muslim separatists. In Indonesia, they bombed churches, a shopping mall and the residence of the Philippine ambassador. Even in Malaysia, police say local militants were hoping to overthrow the government, not launch terrorist attacks against Americans, despite their connections to al-Qaeda. Only in Singapore is there any evidence of plots against western targets.
This focus on strictly domestic concerns has done much more to spur the local authorities into action than American prodding ever could have done. Security is one of the most pressing issues in the Philippines, and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has made a campaign to restore it the centrepiece of her presidency. Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's prime minister, is keen to expose Islamic militancy in the hope of frightening voters away from PAS, an Islamic opposition party.
Megawati too
Even in Indonesia, where Megawati Sukarnoputri, the president, seems insecure about her support among devout Muslims, the authorities have been co-operating with America behind the scenes. The leader of Indonesia's intelligence service is detested by Muslim radicals as “the butcher of Lampung”, a nickname he earned when a unit he commanded launched a bloody raid on the headquarters of a Muslim sect in 1989. In January, the Indonesian authorities secretly bundled a Pakistani suspect on to an American aircraft, which took him to Egypt for interrogation. Something similar seems to have happened in June, when a Kuwaiti arrested in Indonesia is said to have turned up at America's detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba. When asked if there have been other such incidents, western diplomats smile mutely, not wishing to embarrass their hosts.
If anything, local governments have been over-zealous in their pursuit of terrorists. The Indonesian deportations, although doubtless helpful to America, are of dubious legality. Malaysia, for its part, has used a repressive colonial-era law to lock up suspects indefinitely without trial. Although some of those imprisoned have clear ties to al-Qaeda, others are prominent members of the political opposition. In February, the Philippines announced with great fanfare the detention of a terrorist holding no fewer than 104 passports, only to discover that he was a travel agent collecting visas for Muslim pilgrims.
Security officials all over South-East Asia are trying to pass off local militants as international terrorists. The assassination of several policemen in southern Thailand, to take the most improbable example, has been blamed on al-Qaeda.
In reaction, the Free Aceh Movement, an Indonesian separatist group, is anxious to avoid association with international terrorism, for fear of losing the degree of international sympathy it enjoys. Even Laskar Jihad, Indonesia's most violent Muslim group, has taken pains to denounce Mr bin Laden as a misguided renegade. The campaign against Abu Sayyaf has impressed on militant groups throughout the region that even distant ties with al-Qaeda are a ticket to extinction.
But perhaps for that reason, and alarmingly, South-East Asian terrorists seem to consider non-Muslim countries just as good a refuge as Muslim ones. Local al-Qaeda operatives appear to have moved as freely through non-Muslim countries such as Thailand and Australia as they did through Malaysia and Indonesia. They plotted their most elaborate attack in Singapore, where Muslims are a small minority. In the 1990s, Mr Yousef—one of the world's most wanted men—hid in Catholic Manila, not in the Muslim islands of the southern Philippines.
A combination of inefficient—and underfunded—security forces, porous borders and lawless sea-lanes throughout the region make it relatively easy for terrorists to slip back and forth undetected. The Indonesians, for instance, claim they did not even know that militants were running a training camp, since abandoned, on Sulawesi. No wonder, then, that the pact Mr Powell and his counterparts signed concentrated on intelligence co-operation and border surveillance, while avoiding the subject of further troop deployments.
He has yet to say how hard it is going to be, we are talking a world wide commitment coupled with a real Nation building commitment, Iraq and Saddam is just the beginning.
The Balkans was a walk in the park compared to what is waiting after saddam is removed
Tony
Which speech talked about long term nation building in Iraq, about the long term commitment America will face in supplying troops to maintain stability in the Middle East.
If you mean the perpetual war speech, how many Americans really know what that means.
Looking at your handle you know what I mean.
Vietnam wasnt just huey helicopters and SD Ops, it involed building up amd maintaining the infrastructure of an entire country for a long time.
With Saddam gone there is a chance Iraq will fragment, in fact i would say a very good chance.
First America will have to decide to either maintain Iraq as a single entity or support all three states. Then there is the question of Turky with its own Kurdish problem, can they afford to allow America to have a seperate Kurdish state.
Iran could also collapse as the fragmentation of Iraq may encourage the ethnic groupings to pull away from Tehran.
Too much of the world econemy relies on that regin.
Once in there is no pulling out until the job is done, and we both have experience with that type of job. It is very long very thankless job, with no glory but plenty of guts, usually your mates
Tony
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