David Costello – Should Australia conduct joint exercises and training with Indonesia's special forces to boost the fight against terrorism and the hunt for the Bali bombers? The question has become a political football in Canberra and Washington.
The dilemma for the Australian Government and the Bush Administration can be summarised like this: Both countries want a solid working relationship with Indonesia's military (TNI), and this requires restoring some of the ties severed in the late 1990s in protest at its role in the rape of East Timor.
Most controversially, Defence Minister Robert Hill last month proposed that Australian troops resume joint operations with Kopassus, the special forces whose name has become a byword for terror throughout the Indonesian archipelago.
The problem is that new allegations about military involvement in extra-judicial killings keep surfacing.
Most troubling is the bombshell lobbed this week by The Washington Post, which linked TNI's top brass to the August 31 ambush near the enormous Freeport gold and copper mine in Papua which killed two American teachers and one Indonesian.
It quoted reliable sources as saying TNI commander-in-chief Endriartono Sutarto was involved in discussions about a possible operation against Freeport.
The Post reported that this claim was backed by intelligence intercepts likely to have been provided by Australia's Defence Signals Directorate.
The assertion that Indonesian soldiers were involved in the ambush is not new. In fact, it was reported last month that Papua police chief I Made Pastika, who now heads the Bali bombing investigation, had told senior military officials that troops were responsible.
It has been speculated that whoever masterminded the incident was targeting the separatist Free Papua Movement, which was quickly blamed for the killings. But now, the allegations about Sutarto have put the cat among the pigeons.
Labor foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd on Tuesday night called on the Federal Government to rule out the resumption of ties between Australian and Indonesian special forces, calling the idea of joint operations "just plain wrong". He also raised the other big black mark against Kopassus, the charging of 12 of its personnel over the murder in November last year of Papuan independence leader Theys Eluay.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer responded yesterday by stating that Australia wasn't planning to reinstate exercises with Kopassus. But he did not rule out any future relationship with the Indonesian special forces.
In Washington, alarm about TNI's "black" operations has penetrated the Bush Administration, with ultra-hawkish Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz calling the latest allegations "very disturbing".
Wolfowitz, who knows Indonesia all too well from his stint as US ambassador there, called on President Megawati Sukarnoputri's regime to get to the bottom of the claims. But he restated the Administration's aim of re-establishing military contacts and argued that the policy of isolation was not working.
Other people in Washington were not so accommodating. The Post quoted Democrat senator Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, as saying that if it was proved the TNI planned the ambush, then proposed military training aid of $US400,000 for next year should be put on hold.
Whatever these differences, politicians in the US and Australia know that the military in Indonesia is in an appalling mess and that hopes for reform are minimal. Indeed, the funding and structure of the TNI just about guarantee that it is mired in crime and corruption.
Former defence minister Juwono Sudarsono is on the record as saying that only 30 per cent of the 43,300 billion rupiah defence budget is funded by the Government. The rest comes from military "businesses".
As Brisbane academic Bob Elson points out, this arrangement has been forced on Indonesia because of its weak tax base and has been going on since independence.
That's not the worst of it. Elson, author of an authoritative biography of master dictator Suharto, says the military's legitimate businesses are not particularly profitable, and that much of the funding eventually comes from illicit operations, including drug running, prostitution and extortion rackets.
Naturally, military people need little encouragement to protect their interests by force.
This year there have been turf wars in Papua and Sumatra between soldiers and police elements also involved in rackets.
Elson says the chance of reform is zero. Proper funding of the TNI would entail quadrupling the military budget. And there is little chance that the indecisive Megawati would be prepared to take on the generals when she needs them to shore up her support base.
What then should Australia do? Unfortunately, there is no alternative but continued engagement with the Indonesian military. It is the only institution which has any kind of co-ordination and operational capacity across the archipelago, and thus the only one capable of countering Muslim extremism.
The working relationship and the personal relationships between the top brass on both sides provide an opportunity to encourage reform and moderation within the TNI. However the suggestion that Kopassus personnel should resume training and joint operations with Australia's SAS is not on. Until Kopassus is brought under control, it should be kept off Australian soil.
[David Costello is foreign editor of The Courier-Mail.]