http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/NC27Ae03.html
Mar 27, 2012
Defense and dialogue in Southeast Asia
By Donald K Emmerson
JAKARTA - "Diplomacy" and "debate" share the same first letter but they refer
to very different concepts. The same could be said of what "defense" and
"dialogue" turned out to mean in the just-concluded Jakarta International
Defense Dialogue 2012 convened in Indonesia's capital city from March 21 to 23.
JIDD 2012, attended by an estimated 1,500 delegates from 37 different
countries, was the product of collaboration between two sorts of people:
military professionals in Indonesia's armed forces and its defense ministry on
the one hand, and classroom specialists in the Indonesian Defense University
(IDU) on the other. The latter were teachers and students more accustomed to
discussion than deterrence.
As stated by IDU's rector Syarifudin Tippe, the main theme of JIDD 2012 seemed
well suited to a meeting of military and civilian minds. Military Operations
Other Than War (MOOTW) neatly bridged the gap: if the battlefield-savvy
officers knew about military operations, the classroom-trained analysts were
comfortable thinking about activities other than war. But as the officials
spoke at unrestricted length in defense of their respective governments, the
time for dialogue with the analysts ran out.
Presumably delegates took constructive advantage of the opportunity for
bilateral meetings and corridor chats on the margins of the main event. The
booths in an adjacent Asia-Pacific Security and Defense Expo showcased the
weapons and other products of Indonesia's defense industry for would-be buyers
and investors from other countries. JIDD 2012 both illustrated and augmented
Indonesia's rising profile in global affairs. [1]
Yet the effort to achieve creative synergy between soldiers and scholars fell
short as diplomacy pre-empted debate. On the conference program, officials
vastly outnumbered academics, think-tankers and private sector representatives.
While scholars don't always speak truth to power, there were few opportunities
to explore and critique what officials said during their presentations.
Too many official speakers spent too much time abstractly stressing the cliched
need for international cooperation. Too few delved into the granular details of
how such cooperation should be structured and focused to achieve concrete
results. At times it seemed as if "confidence building" had become an end in
itself.
In this dispiriting context, former Philippine president Fidel Ramos woke up
the proceedings by asking the delegates inside the vast plenary hall of the
Jakarta Convention Center to shake their neighbors' hands. This was done,
albeit laughingly to conceal embarrassment. But when Ramos went further to ask
the delegates to kiss one another, delegates kept their distances. The former
defense secretary could have used the joke to explore and exemplify in specific
terms, using actual cases, the real limits of friendly exhortation and the
actual methods of constructive cooperation. Instead he pulled what could have
been his punch.
Singapore's counter-terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna recounted in impressive
detail the recent history of jihadist violence in Southeast Asia, but he did
not go beyond arguing that such violence was still a threat. Nor did he convey
and assess the specifics of what could be done to contain or reduce the threat.
Significantly, there was no time left over between speeches for anyone to
answer that key operational question, despite its location precisely in the
overlap between policy decisions and scholarly analyses that the "defense
dialogue" seemed so clearly designed to explore.
Had the policy question been dealt with, JIDD 2012 might have grappled with an
especially debatable implication of its very theme: that non-traditional
challenges to security such as extremist violence and cyber crime are best
handled through explicitly military operations other than war - the "M" in
MOOTW - rather than by civilian institutions and initiatives involving the
police and the public but not the armed forces.
Striking in this context is the argument made by counter-terrorism analyst
Sidney Jones in the current issue of Indonesia's new world affairs journal
Strategic Review:
Since 2009, there has been a concerted effort by the Indonesian government
to give the country's Armed Forces, or Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI), a
larger role in counter-terrorism. This is not a good idea. However logical it
may seem on the surface, the TNI is now almost 10 years out of date in
understanding the nature of the terrorist threat. It prides itself on
operational readiness, but it is readiness to confront a theoretical enemy.
Without specialized knowledge of how extremist groups function in Indonesia
today, the TNI's involvement will bring no added value to the fight against
terrorism: it is more likely to bring confusion, competition and duplication of
effort.
Without criticizing the TNI, Tito Karnavian, a high official in Indonesia's
National Counter Terrorism Agency, gave a refreshingly prescriptive
presentation at the intersection of public policy and academic analysis. But
the larger issue - specifically what military operations short of warfare might
be appropriate in meeting which specific non-traditional threats to security -
not receive the attention it deserved.
For two reasons, the JIDD 2012 came up short in meeting its stated objectives.
First, the conference was explicitly tasked to consider MOOTW in the context of
a democracy in which the armed forces are meant to be subordinate to civilian
leadership and institutions. Viewed in that context, the issue of military
"mission creep" is not an academic matter. It is a proper concern of analysts
and policy makers alike, precisely the constituencies that the conference was
meant to feature and serve.
Second and finally, the series of annual Defense Dialogues, of which JIDD 2012
was the second, can be interpreted as a bid by Indonesia to indigenize security
policy discourse in Southeast Asia: to develop an attractive supplement, or
even an alternative, to the near-monopoly enjoyed by the Shangri-La Dialogue
that has been organized annually since 2002 in Singapore by the International
Institute for Strategic Studies headquartered in London. A parallel Southeast
Asian initiative to discuss security policy is the Malaysia-based Putrajaya
Forum, an annual event first convened in 2010.
The Shangri-La Dialogue continues to call itself "the key regional forum for
discussing important defense and security concerns." [2] Will the JIDD or the
Putrajaya Forum succeed to the point of challenging that claim? With that
question in mind, observers will be comparing the recent JIDD in Jakarta with
the upcoming Putrajaya Forum in Kuala Lumpur on April 17-19 and the subsequent
Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on June 1-3. [3]
Whether the Shangri-La Dialogue's centrality will be dislodged or not will
depend on many contingencies, including the willingness of China and other
major players to bestow prestige on this or that venue by sending its top
leaders to attend. Its Western provenance and management could prove to be a
liability of the Shangri-La Dialogue as it tries to maintain its reputation in
Southeast Asia.
Yet the Shangri-La formula has much to recommend it: High-ranking officials are
allowed to say whatever they predictably wish to say. But they are also exposed
to direct and lively interrogation from the floor by scholars and journalists
who pose the probing questions that the officials in the audience are thinking
of but do not dare to ask, and are secretly happy that someone else has.
The 2013 JIDD will focus on cyber security. It will be up to the younger
generation of policy scholars from Indonesia and other countries, working with
the Indonesian defense establishment, to make sure that the discussion goes
beyond acknowledging a general need to cooperate in stemming crime and sabotage
in cyberspace.
Rather they will need to propose and debate specific and creative answers to
the question asked by Vladimir Lenin in a different context more than a century
ago: What is to be done? If that happens, a real dialogue about defense will
enable Indonesia's experiment to live up to the D's in its name.
Notes
1. For more on this subject, see the chapters in Anthony Reid, ed, Indonesia
Rising: The Repositioning of Asia's Third Giant (Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, 2012), including my own, "Is Indonesia Rising? It
Depends," pp. 49-76.
2. See here.
3. Other Southeast Asian initiatives, narrower in scope, include the Network of
ASEAN Defense and Security Institutes (NADI), reportedly scheduled to meet in
the third week of April in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
Donald K Emmerson heads the Southeast Asia Forum at Stanford University. His
latest publication is "Southeast Asia: Minding the Gap between Democracy and
Governance," Journal of Democracy (April 2012).
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing )
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