Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhyono has asked the Indonesian military to cooperate with National Police, in efforts to fight terrorism. President Yudhoyono was speaking during celebrations of the 66th anniversary of the Indonesian military or TNI.

Meanwhile, human rights lawyers in Jakarta have been using the occasion to highlight what they say is the need to reform what they call the TNI's "untouchable status".

So ten years since the military's political role was formally removed by parliament, does the TNI still wield much influence and have successive civilian governments shown themselves capable of running the nation?

Presenter: Sen Lam

Speaker: Dr David Bourchier, lecturer in Asian Studies, University of Western Australia

Bourchier: If you're asking whether the civilian governments have been effective, I'd have to say, not particularly. And when civilian presidents have been in power since the fall of Suharto, the military has looked more edgy and more uncomfortable and perhaps more assertive, or more threatening. Since the election of Susilo Bambang Yudhyono, they haven't been flexing their muscles politically. That's probably because they're not particularly unhappy with the situation, having a general in power. I mean, I shouldn't say that Susilo Bambang Yudhyono is there as a military man, because really, he's not. But certainly, the military feels more comfortable with somebody like him, in power than not.

Lam: Have civilian institutions consolidated their power and influence, now that the TNI has taken a political backseat?

Bourchier: Yes, I think you could say that that certainly happened. There was a discourse, if you like, under the Suharto regime, that civilians were really not up to the job and that it always took a military backbone, which was in the background, to hold the government together and indeed, to hold the whole country together. That kind of discourse has diminished and there's more self-confidence I think, and more capacity in the civilian organisations, and so, there's not a valid argument that the civilians can't run the country properly.

Lam: So how much has Indonesian invested in the military? For example, it's been pointed out that Indonesia's population is almost 246-million, but the overall military strength is something in the region of 400-thousand... is that figure extremely small, in view of Indonesia's wide and huge territorial spread?

Bourchier: Not particularly actually, but I think that the army is actually a reasonable size but the navy and air force are certainly very undersized and under-resourced and for a country, archipelagic nation as big as Indonesia, you would imagine that the navy and the air force ought to be a little stronger than the army. So traditionally, the army has played more of an internal security function, that's probably why the army is so large. But certainly, if you're asking about the navy and the air force, um, the navy's only got I think, 74-thousand people in it, and the air force, 35-thousand or so... and they're quite under-resourced.

Lam: What do you make of human rights lawyers' claims that reform is still very slow within the TNI, the Indonesian military, especially in its higher echelons – that they're still largely untouchable and sections of the military are still acting with impunity. Do you think that is a fair observation?

Bourchier: Yes, there was a report that came out in 2010 by Human Rights Watch which made that point very clearly. I think that's quite justified. I think the military have not bowed to pressure from the Parliament, to punish high-ranking officers for human rights abuses that were conducted in the past.

Lam: Is that a particularly difficult task, to reform the Indonesian TNI?

Bourchier: Yes, it's not easy at all. It's been referred to in the past as "a state within a state" and they're very jealous about the powers that they do have. When there've been civilian Presidents in the past, who have tried to interfere and to make sure that certain people are appointed or not appointed, the military's been very jealous about preserving the right to do that, to conduct its own affairs.

All military people in Indonesia who commit offences are actually tried by the military, and that's one of the problems in bringing military people to justice, because it's a completely internal process. That's something that the United States and certainly, the Indonesian parliament, should've been putting more pressure on the Indonesian military to bring those military people who commit crimes, to a cvilian jurisdiction.

The one area where Indonesian military abuses have been probably the worst in the last ten years, have been in Papua, especially in the last five years, have been in Papua, where they've been fighting a low-level insurgency there for quite a long time. There've been alot of incidents there, which would deserve quite a lot of attention from the courts, but have received very little so far. So that's really the area where the lack of action on the part of the military towards human rights abuses, has been most evident.