Alan Boyd – Terrorism thrives on symbolism, and investigators did not need to look hard for signposts after Thursday's bombing outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta.

It was almost three years to the day since the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon near Washington; about two years since car bombs ripped through several nightclubs at Kuta Beach in Bali; and a mere 12 months after Jakarta's JW Marriott Hotel was blasted, probably by the same extended network of extremists.

Then there is the political imagery. Indonesia and Australia, shared targets of the latest outrage, are both preparing for national elections that have been overshadowed by the security debate, including their own hesitant efforts to cooperate in the hunt for Asia's bombers.

Canberra is under pressure from a reluctant electorate to pull its remaining 850 troops out of the US-led coalition in Iraq. Jakarta has infuriated Islamic hardliners by turning the screws on fundamentalist cells in Sulawesi and western Java.

Yet the greatest symbol of Southeast Asia's impotency in the war against terrorism – its failure to put together a cohesive response at the regional level – was paraded for all to see in a meeting room just down the street from the ill-fated embassy two days before the attack.

Military chiefs, who have led the stuttering offensive against an enemy that recognizes no national boundaries and can draw on a scattered army of thousands of sympathizers, refused to establish a joint task force that could work within the same abstract set of rules. Perhaps fittingly, the initiative had come from Indonesia, which knows lots about the futility of empty diplomatic gestures.

"To anticipate [terrorism] we have to hold military exercises and exchange information. If the terrorists use weapons of war such as bombs or missiles, or make or steal nuclear weapons, the military must get involved," said army chief General Ryamizard Ryacudu, adding that other countries saw "no need to form" a standby force.

It should be pointed out that Jakarta's partners in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have probably been much quicker to recognize that confronting terrorists with brute force merely invites more of the same.

Moreover, there is an inevitable element of domestic point-scoring in the countdown to the second round of Indonesia's presidential poll on September 20, which has seen much maneuvering by the armed forces as they seek to regain some of their lost political clout.

But Ryamizard's strategy might at least coerce the various security services into setting aside national interests and pooling their intelligence resources. It might have allowed a common appraisal of the scale of the problem, permitted cross-border pursuits and established a consistent legal framework for sentencing and extradition.

"It is not commitment that is lacking, but rather the way they prioritize their resources. We are very happy with the security element of Indonesia's [anti-terrorism] cooperation, but not with information-sharing and intelligence capabilities in general," said an Australian security attache who was previously based in Southeast Asia.

"The same goes for other ASEAN countries, with the Singaporeans excepted, who I would say have shown the greatest openness and the best overall commitment to what we have always maintained should be an equally shared burden of responsibility."

Most specific intelligence input comes not from Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur but Washington and Canberra. Significantly, the US State Department issued a high-level warning just last week, on September 3, that an attack might be imminent in Jakarta, though the target was believed to be "identifiably Western hotels" rather than an embassy.

Security experts in Jakarta had been convinced since June that Jemaah Islamiya (JI) terrorists, who were blamed for the subsequent bombing as well as the earlier Bali and Marriott Hotel incidents, were preparing to strike again in Indonesia.

Ironically, Australian diplomats responded several days ago by moving their annual embassy ball, one of the social events of the year for the expatriate community, from the Marriott to the grounds of the fortified consular building. Australian security analysts said the JI warnings were based on intelligence reports that the organization still had part of a stockpile of explosives that was acquired shortly before the Bali bombings. Some of that stockpile was later used in the Marriott attack.

The United States has also been upgrading its assessment of JI's resources, amid concern in the security fraternity that some of the ASEAN states may have become complacent following an impressive, but probably deceptive, rate of success in hunting down its operatives.

While more than 200 JI suspects have been rounded up in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines since the 2001 attacks in the US, the grouping is believed to operate with a compartmentalized system of dispersed cells that provides a buffer against isolated setbacks.

"The information emerging from the interrogation of JI suspects indicates that this is a bigger organization than previously thought, with a depth of leadership that gives it a regenerative capacity," the International Crisis Group (ICG), a research agency, concluded after the Marriott bombing. "It has communication with and has received funding from al-Qaeda, but it is very much independent and takes most if not all operational decisions locally."

Much of the uncertainty in intelligence circles is due to the paucity of detail on JI's relationship with al-Qaeda, which originally fulfilled a training function for the Asians but is now undoubtedly more deeply involved.

One assessment, by the International Institute of Strategic Studies (ISS), contends that despite the US offensive in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda may still have two-thirds of its core leadership and most of the estimated 20,000 activists who have been trained in its Afghan camps since 1996.

Another, from British-based terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, calculated in 2002 that 20% of al-Qaeda's organizational strength was in Asia, including volunteers from Central Asian, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines.

Indonesian police and Australian authorities believe that two Malaysians trained by al-Qaeda in bomb-making and terrorism planning, identified as Azahari Husin, 45, and Noordin Mohammed Top, 33, were responsible for the Jakarta attacks.

Both have been hunted for more than a year through fundamentalist havens, with Indonesian investigators on one occasion entering a village just as Azahari was leaving.

This week's ASEAN summit made a vague commitment to pool more intelligence and "improve cooperation" so that terrorists have fewer safe areas where they can hide. A regional center for counter-terrorism in Malaysia, which recently held its first training session, will attempt to coordinate operational skills.

But Western security analysts worry that regional efforts are too piecemeal, and usually reflexive rather than proactive. Border controls are porous, especially in maritime zones, and specialist training is not made available to the localized customs and security personnel who are most likely to have contact with terrorists.

One of the most telling statistics is that despite their generally ambivalent stance on US counter-terrorism policies, most Southeast Asian states often have a closer security relationship with Washington than with one another. This reflects long-standing territorial conflicts, diplomatic suspicions and a belief that some security services, notably in Indonesia and northern Malaysian provinces, have probably been infiltrated by fundamentalists sympathetic to extremist aims.

ASEAN cooperation "is typically characterized by bilateral efforts, mostly with the United States", analyst Dana Robert Dillon wrote in a 2003 study for the US-based Heritage Foundation. "Participation in anti-terrorist coalitions is frequently circumscribed by an individual country's commitment to America as an alliance partner and that country's individual perception of terrorism as a threat to its national security."

The ICG believes that JI's biggest threat may not be from the region's disjointed security offensive but its own internal cohesion, which has been severely put to the test since the Marriott bombing.

Some of the JI leadership is known to be unhappy with the most recent choices of targets, which have generally killed Indonesian workers. All of the victims of Thursday's attack were Indonesians. Australian diplomatic personnel, the presumed targets, were shielded by their fortified embassy perimeter.

"There is disagreement about the appropriate focus for jihad and over the practice [of using] non-Muslims to support Islamic struggle. Internal dissent has destroyed more than one radical group, but in the short term, we are likely to see more JI attacks," the researchers concluded.