http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/NC23Ae01.html
Mar 23, 2012
Frustrations of an al-Qaeda captive
By Jacob Zenn
Revelations from interrogations of al-Qaeda linked operative Umar Patek have
raised new questions about the status of ties between South and Southeast Asia
terror groups.
Captured in January 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the same town where US
special forces four months later assassinated al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden
in a covert raid, Patek was extradited to his native Indonesia to face charges
of masterminding the 2002 Bali bombing as a leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI)
terror group.
According to information from the interrogations, Patek has confessed to his
role in the Bali bombings but has left unanswered questions about his links to
Osama bin Laden. He has also reportedly provided insights to the recent
foundering of once strong relations between al-Qaeda jihadists in South Asia
and terror groups in Southeast Asia.
To be sure, there will be questions about the reliability of Patek's
revelations since experienced al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) members are
known to be well-trained in counter-interrogation. His admission of assembling
the bombs that exploded at the Bali nightclub that killed over 200 people,
mostly Australian tourists, have been largely consistent with the 86 witness
accounts against him.
However, Patek, who reportedly trained with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan before the
September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States, has also said that he
was in Pakistan not to meet Osama bin Laden but rather was on his way to
Afghanistan to fight American forces and build a new terror network there. In a
30-minute video of Patek's interrogation in September 2011, he said: "It was
pure coincidence that I was in the same town as Osama bin Laden ... It had to
be God's will."
Whether Patek is concealing information about his knowledge of bin Laden's
whereabouts is unclear. The fact that Patek's local facilitator led to Patek's
capture and the tracking down of bin Laden's facilitator led the US to his
whereabouts makes it possible that Patek and bin Laden were arranging to meet
through the same network. There have been no official statements from the
Pakistani or Indonesian governments to affirm that Patek and bin Laden were in
Abbottabad by coincidence.
On the contrary, intelligence officials in the Philippines and Indonesia
believe that only al-Qaeda would have had the resources Patek needed to set up
a training camp in Afghanistan. Furthermore, after having spent more than a
decade engaging in jihad in Indonesia and the Philippines, Patek's shift to
Pakistan would have involved serious motives, such as meeting bin Laden and
gaining access to al-Qaeda funds through him, the intelligence officials
suggest.
Patek's most significant revelation so far is that he felt frustrated by
Southeast Asian jihadists' lack of ties to militants in South Asia. This is
reportedly one reason why he was idle for months in the home of his facilitator
in Abbottabad waiting for a trusted contact to move him to Afghanistan. This
also could explain why he was headed to Afghanistan in the first place-to
rebuild lost ties between the regional networks in South and Southeast Asia.
After two decades of South and Southeast Asian jihadist coordination, the links
between the two regions now appear to be unraveling, if Patek's assessment is
accurate. The terror problems Southeast Asia faced in the 1990s and 2000s were
less the product of jihadis radicalized at home and motivated more by Southeast
Asians who went abroad to fight in Afghanistan against then Soviet Union
occupiers and were inculcated with radical ideology.
With this Afghanistan-influenced crop of jihadi leaders now dying out and
certain indications that once strong links between South and Southeast Asian
terror networks are diminishing, Southeast Asia's terror problem could
conceivably diminish in the decades ahead
Coordinated responses
If so it will take stronger surveillance and cross border coordination among
regional intelligence agencies. Taking advantage of the region's loose border
controls, al-Qaeda held secret meetings in Southeast Asia to coordinate attacks
against Western targets. The 9/11 attacks against the US were plotted from
Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, while the 1993 World Trade Center bombing's
conspirator, Ramzi Yousef, fled to Manila after the attack.
Other plots to assassinate the Pope and to blow up 12 international airplanes
heading from Asia to the US in a two-day period, known as the Bojinka plot,
were also hatched in Southeast Asia during the early 1990s, although the latter
two never came to fruition.
In the mid-1990s Southeast Asian Afghanistan veterans established their own
regional terror networks with funding connected to al-Qaeda. For instance,
Abdurajik Janjalani returned from Afghanistan to found Abu Sayyaf with bin
Laden's financial support in his native Mindanao in the southern Philippines;
Zulkifli bin Hir (Marwan) founded Kumpulan Mujahidin Malaysia (KMM) in his
native Malaysia; and Abu Bakar Bashir and Abdullah Sungkar founded JI while in
exile in Malaysia before the fall of Indonesian dictator Suharto in 1998.
By the 2000s, the key operatives of Southeast Asian terror networks were almost
all former Afghanistan jihadis who were able to maintain financial and
operational links back to al-Qaeda. Bali bombing masterminds Azahari Husin,
Dulmatin, Hambali and Patek, were all Afghanistan jihadi veterans who brought
their terror skills back to Indonesia under the banner of JI.
After 9/11 and the 2002 Bali bombings, the US teamed up with the Armed Forces
of the Philippines (AFP) to fight Abu Sayyaf. The US and Australia also funded
the establishment of Indonesia's counter-terrorism squad Detachment 88, which
by 2005 had received nearly US$100 million from Washington and Canberra. The
results of that counter-terrorism cooperation have been tangible.
Since 2001, Abu Sayyaf's numbers have dwindled from more than 1,000 fighters to
somewhere between 300 and 400 today, while the fighting has been reduced mostly
to the outer edges of Mindanao on Sulu and Jolo islands. Unmanned US drones
have recently helped to locate Abu Sayyaf operatives and reportedly provided
the Philippine Air Force with the coordinates to take out key JI and Abu Sayyaf
leaders in February 2012.
Detachment 88's track record since 2007 is also impressive. In 2007, the unit
captured wanted JI operative Abu Dujana in Central Java with the help of US
satellites operated by Australian police which tracked his cell phone
activities. In 2010, Detachment 88 tracked down JI operative Dulmatin, who had
a $10 million bounty on his head, in an Internet cafe in Jakarta. In May 2011,
Abu Bakr Bashir received a 15-year prison sentence for sponsoring a terrorist
camp in Aceh that Detachment 88 located and raided in 2010.
With the elimination of these core JI and Abu Sayyaf leaders, neither group is
as strong as it was at their height in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Southeast Asia's battle against terrorism is now being fought largely against
its own citizens who were radicalized domestically rather than in Afghanistan
and thus lack the lethal expertise of previous generation terrorists.
As Patek's attempts to build new networks between South and Southeast Asian
terror groups indicate, the battlefields of Afghanistan today lack the
Southeast Asian battalions seen in the 1980s and 1990s. Southeast Asian
governments are thus less likely to face the same imported terror threats after
the planned US withdrawal from Afghanistan as they did in the 1990s when jihadi
veterans returned to their homelands. With the dying of an old generation of
terrorists, Patek's ongoing interrogations will likely be of only limited
insight and value.
Jacob Zenn is a graduate of Georgetown Law's Global Law Scholars program and
was a State Department Critical Language Scholar in Indonesia in 2011. He
writes about regional affairs in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Nigeria.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing)
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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