Ali Abdullah Wibisono, Nottingham, UK – Indonesia is not alien to the use of military in counterterrorism. From the counterinsurgency against the Darul Islam/Tentara Islam Indonesia rebellion in the 1960s to the pursuit, arrest and killing of Darul Islam (DI) members and leaders in the 1970s and 1980s, the Indonesian military had always been the executor, even initiator.
This was not so hard to ponder: The military was present in every security and intelligence operation the country conducted in those periods through their presence in territorial command and intelligence agency (BAKIN).
However, it is more interesting to find out whether counterterrorism was more effective in those days.
The history of Indonesia's terrorism and counterterrorism is rarely documented, patchy and often biased, but several facts are reliable. We can see that between the late 1970s and early 1980s, members of the decapitated DI movement were continually hunted, arrested and at times eliminated on the spot.
It was remarkable to note that those who were still active in the organization were actually deterred by possible sting operations that they could not anticipate and the determinism of the officers on the ground, which effectively prevented them from conducting even a small mass mobilization during the 1980s, let alone a terrorist action.
DI's plan to assassinate President Soeharto in 1982 for example, failed to materialize even though the weapon of choice, a rocket-propelled grenade, was already at hand.
The executors of the plan were too afraid to do it. The deterrent effect was not only contributed by determined (militarized) counter-terrorism, but also political pressure that imposed a limit on what individuals and organizations were allowed to do to express their ideas, for example in the form of Pancasila as the "sole-principle" policy, which was enforced coercively, and angered many Muslim activists at the time, including those in DI.
However, the strength of any terrorist organization is never in its ability to amount an operation inflicting heavy casualties, but rather in its staying power. It is not about why terrorism occurs, but why it lasts. It is not about why one becomes a terrorist, but why one continues being a terrorist.
So in our case, during the 1970s, DI was able to re-consolidate its scattered leadership board members representing Aceh, West Java and South Sulawesi, as well as maintaining recruitment, indoctrination and training of children, kins and next of kins of DI leaders as members.
So successful was this recruitment and education program that when a military crackdown arrested the entire leadership of DI in West Java in 1981, the organization of the movement was immediately taken over by DI figures in Surakarta, the most prominent of which were Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, although these two were never Imams due to incarceration.
The ideological adaptation of Indonesia's Islamist movement was a key to their staying power. Western observers were quick to classify Indonesian Islamist groups as Salafy-Jihadi by ideology.
But it is remarkable to notice that supposedly Salafy-Jihadi leaders of DI were once allying with traditionalist Islam during the Communist purge of the late 1960s, and even Shiite figures during the height of Iran revolution in early 1980s, as well as political opposition movements well into the 1990s.
Indeed, when DI figures were pinned down by effective counter-terrorism in the mid-1980s, Shiite figures in East Java took up the fight and conducted terrorist actions against churches on Christmas Eve of 1984, and the bombing of Borobudur temple in January 1985. Their next target was Bali in the following February, but the early detonation of the bomb and their carriers ended up delaying the successful execution of the plan for 17 years.
Indonesia's Salafy-Jihadi is also unique in its ability to stay relevant with problems of the umma as opposed to the implementation of takfir ideology, i.e. perceiving those outside the community or jemaah as unfaithful or kafir, commonly found in Salafy-Jihadi terrorist groups in other parts of the world.
Although interaction with Salafy-Jihadi teachings in Afghanistan infused Indonesian Islamist movement with more intolerance against social and religious practices that are suspected as being deviations from the Koran and Sunnah, as well as justifications for the use of coercion to enforce Islamic jurisprudence (sharia), the movement provides a house for all practical interpretations of puritan Islam.
Indonesia's history of terrorism is thus filled with periods of violence and periods of recruitment, training and fund-raising, but never stagnation.
The moral of this lengthy explanation is that there is so little of the terrorism dynamics that the government can control through counterterrorism. The introduction of military forces in counterterrorism in the past had been effective in maintaining a deterrence against terrorist actions, but such effectiveness was short-lived, for it was proven incapable of halting recruitment. In addition, while one group was deterred, another group grew impatient and took the heat. Above all, the enduring hatred against misconducts and arrogant repression of the Soeharto regime was cultivated from one generation of jihadists to the next.
Therefore, even a militarized counterterrorism only provided a delay of the vengeful return of trained and radicalized Salafy-Jihadists to Indonesia after the collapse of the authoritarian regime, for which they made us pay a staggering price.
But Indonesia's mistake in counterterrorism was not in the use of military force, but in an over-reliance, and hence abuse of it. Provision of military force should only be a measured additional improvement in the technical abilities of counterterrorism. And such improvement must be ensured by an accountability mechanism by an external body outside the executors of counterterrorism.
The history of the world's counterterrorism suggests that there isn't one terrorist movement that is clearly defeated by military forces or coercive forces alone. The most successful counterterrorism story, owned by West Germany in its fight against the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion) in the 1970s through the 1990s, suggested that a combination of effective law enforcement and proportional crime prevention measures with an honest dialog with political oppositions, rendered terrorism politically obsolete for the RAF.
I suppose there are indeed better options than simply militarizing our counterterrorism or granting extraordinary powers to security forces.
[The writer is lecturer of international relations at the University of Indonesia and a Phd student at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.]