The news that the man shot dead by police in a London station was not connected with the terror attacks is very disturbing to me. It’s too early to draw any conclusions about whether the police acted properly, but there’s no doubt that, however it happened, this was a win for the terrorists, who have claimed another innocent victim. As the name implies, the main point of terrorism is to create fear, and a situation where people are afraid of the police who are supposed to be protecting them is far worse than anything that can be created by the small risk of being in the wrong place when a bomb goes off.

Terrorism is essentially a criminal activity, and the only way to beat it in the long run is through effective police work. The terrorists of the radical left and right who operated in the 1970s and 1980s were beaten in the end, and the same will be true of the jihadists. But so far at least, the response to the London attacks seems to have more failures than successes. Let’s hope there’s better news soon.

If we’re looking for good news from the Islamic world, as most of us are, can I suggest that the best place to look just now is right next door in Indonesia[1]. The Indonesian government has just signed a peace agreement with the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). There’s plenty more to be done, and such agreements have failed before, but the chances this time look better than ever, as GAM has finally abandoned its demand for independence and the central government seems willing, for the first time, to concede real autonomy.

Regardless of whether this agreement holds, Indonesia’s successes since Suharto resigned have been simply amazing. At that time the economy was in a mess, there had been decades of brutal dictatorship, the army was involved mainly in domestic repression and deeply entangled in both politics and business, East Timor was still resisting occupation, Muslims and Christians were engaged in communal fighting, encouraged by sinister interests within the state and terrorist groups like JI and Laskar Jihad operated more or less openly. The odds of coming through this without some sort of crisis, or worse, seemed slim.

In the subsequent seven years, there have been four peaceful changes of government, each of them (in my view) an improvement. The army is out of parliament, and increasingly confined to its appropriate role in national defense, Timor is an independent, and friendly, neighbour, Laskar Jihad has disbanded, and JI has been largely broken up, with many of those involved in terror crimes now facing death or lengthy terms of imprisonment. Communal fighting in places like Ambon has stopped almost completely, and even long-running struggles like that in Aceh seem to be on the brink of peaceful resolution. The economy is still problematic, but it seems to be on the mend.

Things aren’t perfect of course, and in a democratic society that fact can’t be concealed behind a mask of official propaganda as it was in the Suharto years. But if everything in the world was going as well things have gone in Indonesia lately, we wouldn’t have too much to worry about.

fn1. Mark Bahnisch points to more good news here

I’m not a huge fan of scandals, and I haven’t followed the Plame spy scandal very closely. Still, anyone who reads blogs has known for at least a week that Karl Rove, Bush’s closest advisor, leaked the name of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative, as part of a political vendetta against her husband, Joseph Wilson. Bush has presumably known this for many months, the media similarly have known for a long time, and so on. This is a serious offence, at a minimum requiring Rove’s resignation. Yet the average American, reliant on the mass media knows nothing about it, and, as noted at Obsidian Wings there seems to have been no interest in finding out about it.

The NYT has finally woken up to the story, but what took them so long?

If I thought this meant that US journalists were going to give up covering scandal and focus on serious issues, I’d be cheering them on, but there’s no indication of this. Instead, as with the Downing Street memos, the Washington press seems to have been cowed into silence by the Bush machine.

The New Republic has a gloomy but, I think, accurate piece by Spencer Ackerman, focusing on

the disturbing prospect that future attacks against the West will be carried out by those who have gained a wealth of experience fighting U.S. forces in Iraq’s western, Sunni-dominated Anbar province–the premier location for on-the-job terrorist training on the planet. The CIA calls this the “class of ’05 problem.” Such future attacks may very well make yesterday’s carnage seem amateurish in scale.

At this point, I think there’s very little chance that we [in Australia and elsewhere] will escape the attentions of the Class of ’05 indefinitely, whatever policy decisions are taken now with respect to Iraq.

I think the best option is to announce, and adhere to, a timetable for withdrawal of US? Coalition troops from Iraq, and hope that the Iraqis can reach some sort of solution among themselves. But the inevitable short-term consequence of that is that Anbar and other places will be a fairly safe haven for foreign jihadists, until they become more of a liability than an asset for the Sunni nationalists who still appear to dominate the insurgency. The hope is that they won’t get many new recruits, in the absence of US forces to fight.

The alternative is for the US to “stay the course”, and fight the jihadists in Iraq. So far, any successes on this front have been more than offset by the boost to Al Qaeda recruiting provided by the US occupation, and by the stimulus to the domestic insurgency created in part by the mere fact of foreign occupation, and in part by civilian casualties, arbitrary arrests and detention and so on. There’s no reason to think that holding on longer will make things any better – even if the insurgency winds down eventually, the Class of 05 will just disperse aroudn the world.

Either way, there’s every reason to expect more and worse terror attacks. We will endure them, as we must, and we will pursue and bring to justice those responsible. But we have created a rod for own backs in Anbar, as the Russians did in Afghanistan.

As usual, I can’t find much new to say in response to the latest terror attack, this time in London. Our thoughts will be with those killed and injured, and their families and friends.

This NYT report on the Italian case in which a number of CIA agents have been indicted for kidnapping a cleric suspected of involvement in terrorism has one item of particular relevance to Australia.

In addition to their objections to the American rendition policy [sending suspects overseas for torture], European counterterrorism officials also partly blame a lack of access to terrorism suspects and information held by the United States for their failure to convict a number of their own high-profile terrorism suspects.

The acquittal on most serious charges of Abu Bashir, spiritual leader of the Indonesian terrorists responsible for the Bali bombing was due primarily to the fact that the operational chief Hambali was not a witness, since the US Administration which holds him would not hand him over, even temporarily.

The Hambali case completely undermines for the official rationale for the US policy of rendition. In theory, the claim is that terrorists suspects, wanted in their own countries, are transferred there. But here’s a case of a leading Indonesian terrorist, wanted by Indonesia for crimes committed in Indonesia, and the US Administration won’t hand him over.

The demands of justice in relation to the Australian victims of the Bali bombing were similarly ignored.

It seems likely that Bashir will be released soon, and the operation of the rendition policy is largely to blame for this travesty of justice.

A piece by Noam Scheiber in The New Republic , prompted me to get to work on a piece I’ve been meaning to write for ages, not so much because I have new and original ideas, but because I’d like to clarify my thoughts, with the help of discussion. The piece is subscription only, but the relevant quote is a point that’s been made before

The problem with [criticism of Bush’s handling of the Iraq war] is that there’s a difference between expecting the administration to fight a war competently and expecting it to fight an entirely different kind of war than the one you signed onto.

My starting point, then, is the observation that, in the leadup to the Iraq war there were numerous different cases for war, some publicly avowed at different times, and some not. These included WMDs, the War on Terror, humanitarian intervention, democracy promotion, the strategic importance of Iraq’s oil and simple vendetta. It might seem that the more reasons for war, the stronger the case, but the problem is that different cases for war imply different strategies for the war, and especially for the postwar period.

The ostensible basis for the war, WMDs, implied the need to act fast, since Saddam might use his weapons at any time, and implied a simple success condition: once the WMDs and the supporting infrastructure were found and destroyed, the US could withdraw and leave the Iraqis (minus Saddam) to sort own their own problems. Roughly speaking, this was the war we were sold, and this was the war we got, at least until it turned it there were no WMDs, and an early exit wasn’t really feasible.

Although the Iraq war seems to involve this problem to a high degree, it arises all the time. For example, there are a lot of different reasons for supporting reform of the House of Lords in the UK (the old structure was anachronistic, inefficient, anti-democratic, biased against Labour and so on), but they imply different kinds of reform.

Concern with democracy suggests an elected House, more representative than the Commons, where the first-past-the-post system turns minorities into majorities. By contrast, the main motive for the reforms around Blair seemed to be that hereditary legislators were bad for Britain’s image and occasionally obstructed Labour PMs – hence the preference for a weak upper chamber with appointed members.
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The release of hostage Douglas Wood by Iraqi troops, apparently as the result of a lucky raid, is good news for us all. And while we’ll probably never know the full story, it’s likely that the efforts of the Australian government’s negotiating team, and of Sheikh Taj Aldin Alhilali, helped to convince the kidnappers not to proceed with their original threat to kill Mr Wood within a few days of his capture. Regardless of the details, and of differing views about Iraq in general, this is an event worth celebrating.