CANBERRA
The US justice system has finally established a trial system for captives suspected of international terrorism. Among the first to be confronted will be the Indonesian Hambali, who was seized in 2003. As operations chief of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terrorist organization, Hambali plotted attacks that killed hundreds. More than that, he effectively linked Al Qaeda with diverse Islamic militant groups in Southeast Asia, thereby turning local Muslim fighters into global jihadists. And he did this globalizing task so well that, even should justice demand his death, the evil he created will live long after him.
Hambali shares telltale characteristics with many young Muslim men who turn toward violence in Southeast Asia. His education was religious rather than secular, focusing on Arabic, the Koran and the chanting of holy verses, instead of skills that might lead toward a career in government or industry. Raised in West Java as Riduan Isamuddin, he eagerly attached himself to prominent emirs such as the co-founders of JI, Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir, and Al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden. And he was willing to travel to acquire the religious instruction and the military training he sought, from his home in small-town West Java to most countries in Southeast Asia, as far afield as Pakistan and Afghanistan.
But Hambali also has three traits rare among Southeast Asian militants: First, he is impressively persuasive. As a young man, he was a successful peddler, and the skills of a top salesman have served him well as a terrorist leader, readily attracting new people to his cause. He convinced his emirs that he knew their will and could implement their designs. He gained the trust and cooperation of hardened fighters with much greater experience in jihad than his.
Second, Hambali thinks strategically. His ultimate goal: Muslims ruled only by Muslims, under Islamic law. Despite the solidity of the governments standing between present reality and that goal, he fixed on a strategy of violent confrontation to challenge them. In his mind, successful violence weakens the faith of citizens in the ability of their governments to protect them. Unsuccessful violence creates martyrs whose sacrifice catalyzes recruitment to the cause. Developing flexible tactics, Hambali proved willing to aim at personal, institutional, even random targets; to use single or simultaneous attacks; to involve either short-term or long-term planning; to deploy large or small teams or simply single individuals as perpetrators.
Third, Hambali has vision and keen analytical skills. He has the ability to learn lessons from the past. His area of West Java was practically the heartland of DarulIslam-- an armed movement that was bitterly resentful when the anti-colonial war against the Dutch ended in 1949 with the establishment of a secular state. Darul Islam waged war for more than a decade against the new Indonesian government in an effort to create an Islamic state in that mainly-Muslim country. From the failure of that effort, he saw that challenging the might of a national army head-on would never work.
Hambali looked around and determined what might be done. He gazed with empathy at Al Qaeda, fixated on the so-called Great Satanic alliance between Washington and the House of Saud. He saw the need for the separate struggles waged by minority Moros in the southern Philippines, Malays in southern Thailand and Rohingya in western Burma against governments that oppressed them. He knew well his own JI, with its ultimate goal of establishing a single Caliphate ruling Muslims in Southeast Asia. And, crucially, he embraced and then sold the idea that all were involved in the same common struggle, in which they could and should act as one.
Most striking is Hambali's ability to peer forward. Early on, he discerned that the war he had embarked upon was bound to last for generations. He saw the need to institutionalize means to carry on that war through triumphs and setbacks.
Landmarks in the Southeast Asia terror campaign of Hambali, JI and jihadist colleagues include the near-simultaneous bombings of some 30 churches in Indonesia in late 2000, followed a week later by two blasts in Manila, 41 killed, almost 220 injured; the Bali bombings in October 2002, more than 200 killed and a similar number hurt; the August 2003 bombing of the Jakarta Marriott, 12 killed and 150 injured, the bombing of a ferry in Manila Bay in February 2004, more than 130 killed; more Bali bombings in October 2005, with 20 killed, perhaps 120 hurt, along with a sprinkling of lesser bombings of airports, embassies and police stations.
The setbacks are largely the after-effects of those triumphs. Forensic and detective work following attacks, boosted by information gleaned from subsequent interrogations, has seen a few hundred perpetrators, planners and their protectors taken into custody including Hambali himself in August 2003. Another setback has been the way in which attacks on civilians, including many Muslims, eroded support for full-scale jihad among Islamic communities and even caused moderates within JI to shrink back from full commitment to the cause. And the security agencies of both regional and Western powers have increased mutual assistance to levels that greatly complicate planning for future terrorist operations.
More impressive than JI's triumphs, more lasting than its setbacks, are the institutions and methods that Hambali, his mentors and followers put in place to ensure that their effort would not fade even if they disappeared.
Schooled in Al Qaeda-associated camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan themselves, Hambali and his colleagues oversaw the establishment of similar camps of their own in Southeast Asia, most notably in Mindanao in the southern Philippines. In these camps, more than 1,000 JI students have absorbed radical religious teachings, acquired military and bombing skills and mingled with fellow jihadists from the Middle East and separatist Muslim groups in Southeast Asia. This mingling now underpins cooperation that enables JI to extend its geographical reach while expanding the terrorism repertoires of militant organizations in Southeast Asia.
In a striking vote for the future, JI sent young and promising members to study together in Pakistan, where they learned to identify with Al Qaeda. They attended radical military training camps in Kashmir. And this JI JuniorVarsity-- including Abu Bakar Bashir's son and Hambali's younger brother-- set about preparing themselves to lead the organization when its older personnel no longer could. Dispersed by Pakistan's security forces, these students are now mostly at large in Southeast Asia.
Presciently, JI under Hambali learned how and where to recruit-- within radical Islamic schools and in regions where communal conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims festers. Learned how to build networks and cellular structures that would not crumble under pressure. Learned that Muslims in legal political parties, even those who disapproved of JI operations, would not help authorities move against it. And learned thataction-- anywhere along the spectrum from minor local attack, through strikes on Western targets in Southeast Asia, to participation in global terroristplanning-- is the raison d'être of theorganization. Now, Hamboli's set for an encounter with the evolving US anti-terror legal system. Should formal justice cost him his life, the alliance of terror he forged willendure-- purposeful, adaptable and forward-looking-- a legacy to make any globalizer proud.
So, three years after Hambali's incarceration, but still because of him, the next JI attack is on the way. And the one after that. And the one after that. A true globalizing legacy.
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William O'Malley, formerly an academic and an intelligence officer, is a Canberra-based commentator on Southeast Asia.Rights: © 2007 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, YaleGlobalOnline
