Dave Hage, Jakarta – If you were an American president scanning the map for allies in the war on terror, sooner or later your finger would surely fall on Indonesia.
It has more Muslims than any other nation – some 200 million in an overall population of 240 million. Yet it is also a parliamentary republic with a free press, a constitution that guarantees religious pluralism and, since the authoritarian leader Suharto stepped down in 1998, an increasingly vibrant democracy. And as Indonesians will proudly tell you, it has a long tradition of moderate clerics and politicians who battled against radical Islamists.
Indonesia, however, has pointedly declined to join President Bush's "coalition of the willing." It sent no troops to Afghanistan, opposes the US occupation of Iraq, and just two months ago rebuffed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he asked for help with a naval interdiction program to catch rogue vessels at sea.
"Your country is so powerful that it tends to create anxiety and resentment, especially among Islamic peoples," Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono told a group of visiting journalists in late June. "It's better that anti-terror measures be left to local authorities than be orchestrated by the United States."
Indonesia's ambivalence is echoed across South Asia, home to two-thirds of the world's Muslims. It's a region where religious moderates, intellectuals and veteran politicians are engaged in a delicate balancing act – marginalizing the extremists and prosecuting terrorists while honoring a religion that, to most Muslims, stands for social justice, national liberation and personal rectitude. Westerners who have stigmatized Islam since 9/11 do no favors to these moderates, and the United States cannot make lasting progress against Islamic extremism until Americans understand this struggle.
To be sure, Indonesia does not come to this debate with clean hands.
Its military committed grave human rights abuses against separatist activists in Aceh and East Timor, and its corrupt police have largely looked the other way in recent years when Islamic extremists attacked Christians and rival Muslim sects. The current president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is regarded as a reformer but gets only lukewarm praise from human-rights advocates.
Yet its perspective is important, for it embodies a series of challenges that face devout but moderate Muslims across the world today.
Spend a day in Jakarta, a smoggy metropolis of 9 million people, and you will understand that Indonesians are not anti-American. They drink Starbucks coffee, watch NASCAR on TV and, when possible, send their children to the United States for college. The nation's founding leaders turned to America's Federalist Papers when they were drafting their own constitution on independence from the Dutch after 1945.
Nor is Indonesia naive about terrorism. It is home to Jemaah Islamiyah, one of the world's most violent and notorious Islamist groups, and it has been the victim of three major terror bombings since 2002. Today there are bomb barriers, metal detectors and uniformed guards at most of Jakarta's big hotels and shopping malls.
Instead, Indonesians' reluctance stems from a belief that the United States has chosen the wrong strategy in combating Islamic extremists.
Their ambivalence dates back to President Bush's opening manifesto after 9/11, that "you are either with us or against us in the war on terror." That played poorly in a country where the Christian West is associated with 300 years of brutal colonialism and where leaders rapidly lose credibility if they are seen as mere extensions of American diplomacy.
The US invasion of Iraq only hardened this skepticism. Indonesian Muslims are no fans of Saddam Hussein, whom they regard as a secular fascist who persecuted his own people. But they also understand that he was no ally of Osama bin Laden, and the US occupation of Iraq now looks like a military blunder that is costing rising numbers of civilian lives – Muslim civilian lives.
"I had a meeting with President Bush, and I told him that what you are doing in Iraq is taking the law into your own hands," Azyumardi Azra, rector of the prestigious State Islamic University, said in an interview. "By doing that you have undercut the idea of democracy in Indonesian minds."
Indonesia's own democracy, of course, is young and imperfect. But there is no question about the country's commitment to fighting terrorism. Since 2002, when a blast killed more than 200 tourists in Bali, the government has arrested and tried hundreds of bomb conspirators, and today many face sentences of death or life in prison. This year the government introduced legislation to prosecute Islamist splinter groups guilty of violent civil disobedience.
In the long run, Indonesia possesses something even more powerful – a tradition of pluralism and political discourse that provides a model for reconciling the finest traditions of Islam with the principles of liberal democracy to advance the interests of Muslims in the developing world. The future of democracy in Indonesia is not guaranteed, but on election day in 2004 the country staged the largest one-day voter turnout in world history.
Anyone who visits the Muslim societies of Asia today will find that the anti-American rhetoric of Osama bin Laden and other radicals obscures an important truth. America's highest ideals – the rule of law, religious tolerance, freedom of speech and government transparency – still have immense appeal to most of the world's Muslims. They are struggling to put those ideals into practice in the face of corruption and poverty, but they understand something that Americans are just learning – that extremism can be defeated only by taking Islam back from the extremists.