| 1. INDIA – PAKISTAN |
| How close India and Pakistan came to going to war over Kashmir during the last few weeks we might never know. Equally uncertain is whether the conflict would have escalated into a nuclear exchange. However, if these things were ever to come to pass - and the conflict could flare again at any time - they would significantly impact on Australia's strategic circumstances and thinking and that of the Asia Pacific region generally.
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| For it would mean that the wider Indo-Pacific region now had a potentially 'strategic' nation not only with a nuclear capability, but with a willingness to use it in its own interests or defence. That nation is, of course, India which has naval bases and facilities in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, at the mouth of the Straits of Malacca and contiguous to some of the other strategic waterways connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Some analysts would say that India's commitment to a nuclear weapons future had already changed the strategic balance with other 'strategic' nations being obliged to contemplate a response. Others might argue that even without nuclear weapons India was changing the regional strategic balance simply because of its growing economic strength, expanding military power and desire to play a role in the Asia Pacific region. | |
| In any event, there is little doubt that India's ambitions and slowly growing power have been more than noted by strategic planners around the region, especially in China and Japan. | |
B. THE CONFLICT AND AL QA'IDA |
| When assessing the recent India-Pakistani stand off over Kashmir, some of our sources said we should not overlook the possibility of hidden agendas having to do with the war against al Qa'ida and other terrorist forces. | |
| It is widely known that some al Qa'ida forces, including perhaps Osama bin Laden himself, have fled from Afghanistan into the northern regions of Pakistan and Kashmir to mix with the Pakistani and Kashmiri terrorists who have been attacking the Indians. For various reasons, it is now in the common interests of the US and its allies including Russia and China, as well as India and Pakistan to get rid of these terrorists, whatever their relationships with them in the past for they now threaten everyone including the vast majority of Muslims - in this instance by attempting to provoke a new war over Kashmir. (When Osama bin Laden gave the green light for the September 11 attacks, he could not possibly have imagined the coalition of forces now being mounted against him). | |
| 2. THE WAR ON TERRORISM - AL QA'IDA FACES INFILTRATION |
| The al Qa'ida network should find much more difficult operational conditions in the future than it did in the past. Before September 11 it faced few problems of being infiltrated because few people took it - or even Islamic fundamentalism - seriously enough. | |
| This was largely a consequence of the failures of Western intelligence services, about which we have read so much recently. As we have said before, one of the major reasons for these failures has been the type of people Western intelligence services have been recruiting both as analysts and future operational directors (see APR36, October 5, 2001). That, and many other things, can now be expected to change. | |
| Ironically, one of al Qa'ida's successes might turn out to be one of its most serious weaknesses. That success was to establish branches throughout the world - not only in Muslim nations but in the US, Europe, Britain, Asia, Canada and other places. All of these countries, including moderate Muslim states, can now be expected to infiltrate al Qa'ida through these same branches as they should have been doing before, especially as we now know, from Jose Padilla, how easy it was to join up. | |
| In fighting a terrorist or revolutionary guerilla organisation you want it and its infrastructure or support structure to come close to you - so that you can attack it, exploit it and infiltrate it (and hopefully recruit some of its people - ideally lots of them - to your side). Al Qa'ida has given us that opportunity. | |
| In response to our infiltration threat, al Qa'ida can either close down 'branches' in the West and elsewhere or try to thoroughly screen recruits. In practice, it would probably attempt a balance of both - and probably not very well. Whatever it does, it must from now on live with the possibility of enemy spies, assassins and saboteurs, some of them Mossad trained, coming through the very networks it has painstakingly, but loosely, built up over twenty years. | |
| 3. INDONESIA |
| Like Osama Bin Laden and other al Qa'ida terrorists, Ja'far Umar Thalib, the leader of the Indonesian Muslim terrorist organisation, Laskar Jihad, believes that the idea of a superpower is nothing more than a western media myth, and that just as Muslim guerrillas destroyed the Soviet Union by defeating it in Afghanistan, al Qa'ida and its allies will similarly bring about the destruction of the United States. He cheered the September 11 attacks calling the US "the biggest enemy of the Islamic people". | |
| Ja'far is currently being held in gaol, on charges of inciting a massacre of Christian villagers in the Maluku islands where Laskar Jihad fighters, imported from training camps in Java, were the major factor escalating a local religious and political conflict in which five to six thousands people have so far died. | |
| It is extremely disturbing, therefore, that the Indonesian Vice President, Hamzah Haz, can consider it appropriate to visit Ja'far in gaol and declare that there are simply no terrorists in Indonesia. He has since also visited the radical cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir who Singapore, Malaysian and Filipino authorities believe to be a key figure in a regional al Qa'ida-connected terrorist network called Jemaah Islamiah. Our sources in Jakarta say that while no one is openly calling for Haz's removal from the vice presidency, it is perfectly clear to everyone that he sympathises with, if not supports, the most radical Muslim extremists. | |
| Unfortunately, he sits only a heart beat away from the presidency. | |
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| We have noticed a few similarities in the childhood and youth backgrounds of Ja'far Umar Thalib and Osama bin Laden. They both suffered demanding and abusive treatment from their fathers. They were both academic failures. And they both appear to be erratic intellectual lightweights given to extraordinary international political fantasising. It is interesting, therefore that Ja'far, who met bin Laden in Afghanistan, has been quoted as saying that he found bin Laden to be "a spiritually empty man" with "no serious religious knowledge at all". If this is an accurate assessment, it would fit in with one of the questions we asked when trying to understand bin Laden in APR32 (October 5, 2001). We asked how far he was a genuine radical Muslim fundamentalist and how far "just a nihilistic and capitalist terrorist and gangster obsessed with the accumulation of personal power so that he might become a 'Great Man' with 'Great Power'." We suggested that if he was the latter, he was just using, or rather misusing, the vehicle which happened to be closest to him, namely Islam, to build a global machine and destroy whatever he can, primarily, perhaps, to demonstrate his power and influence to his father, family and the world, while encouraging his misled acolytes to propagandise him as a 'holy' cult figure. Of course, it is not really Islam he is using, but an historically debased version of it - wahhabism - dressed up as True Islam to provide his cadres with a messianic motivation and at the same time a cover for al Qa'ida's international gangster and criminal activities, including drug running and money laundering, which help finance its terrorist and other activities. | |
