The broader picture in the southern Philippines is of thefailure of the state. Substantial Philippines military operations,backed at times by hundreds of U.S. troops in a so-called"advisory" role, have made little progress against either AbuSayyaf or the MILF. Until its military becomes more effective, andnumerous other arms of the state can deliver the services and orderthey are supposed to, the prospect is for more of the same. In manyways it is the most disturbing piece in the Southeast Asianjigsaw.

Though not nearly as challenging as the Philippines, Thailandhas the potential to become yet another sore spot in the region.The Thai state is effective and its economy, like Malaysia's, ismoving forward. But trouble is brewing. There are about fourmillion Thai Muslims, out of a total population of some 60 millionpredominantly Buddhist Thais. Most Thai Muslims live in a fewsouthern provinces that border Muslim Malaysia.

Historically, there has been separatist agitation in the south,but in recent years this had settled down. High profile Muslimsserved in senior positions in the cabinet--former foreign ministerSurin Pitsuwan is an example--and the growing economy had improvedeveryone's lot. But 2004 produced an extraordinary spate ofkillings and terrorist attacks in the south. As with similarattacks in the Philippines, these have not gotten much publicity inthe West because they have not been directed against Westerntargets.

The level of violence in southern Thailand has been quiteshocking. In the first eight months of 2004, according to privatebut reliable Thai estimates, some 500 people died as a result ofradical Islamist violence. The Thai Government would argue thatthis is an overestimation, but the number of deaths is certainly inthe hundreds. There have been attacks on police stations and othergovernment buildings, burnings of schools, beheadings of Buddhistfigures and suicide attacks on government soldiers.

Undoubtedly, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's government hasbeen clumsy in its dealings with southern Muslims. The worstepisode was the grotesque overreaction to a riot in Narathiwatprovince in October. After the riot, the military crammed most ofthe rioters, some of them injured, into army trucks. After hours inthe tropical heat, more than seventy of the rioters died, fromsuffocation, broken necks and convulsions. This was an entirelyunrepresentative act by the military, and the government hasapologized and promised an inquiry. Although the episode wasindefensible and a great boon to the terrorists, the most salientfact about the separatist violence is that the campaign was in fullswing months before this tragedy occurred. No one thinks that theThai terrorist and criminal groups in the south are being directedby Al-Qaeda, or even JI. Indeed, some government spokesmen dismissmuch of the violence as mere criminality on a large scale. But JIhas operated in Thailand, and some southern Thai Muslims served inAfghanistan, fighting the Soviets. Moreover, it is clear that someThai militants cross the border into Malaysia, where they getideological guidance and other support.

It is the timing of the upsurge in violence in southern Thailandthat is most suggestive of JI and Al-Qaeda influence. It coincideswith an increase in Islamist terrorist violence in other parts ofSoutheast Asia and elsewhere in the Muslim world. This indicatesthat Al-Qaeda is now as important as an ideology as it is as anorganization. As an ideology it offers disgruntled Muslimpopulations a prism through which to interpret their grievances anda way to respond to them. The interpretive prism centers on Westernand infidel imperialism and the operational response is terrorism.Thailand is a generally well-run society with effectivegovernmental agencies, but what is most notable about the troublesin the south is the difficulty the police and the military have hadin coping with it. Part of the problem is that it is not a hugeleap from paranoid, conspiracy-theory-ridden Islamist extremism,which is non-violent and therefore legal, to support for terrorism.Some analysts believe that Thailand is on a knife-edge. Ifterrorism should spread to Bangkok, where at least one JI embassybombing plot has already been foiled, or to tourist destinationspopular with Westerners such as Phuket, the effect could bedevastating.

Singapore, of course, is a model of order and decorum in thistroubled region. But Singapore avoided something like its own 9/11only by the slenderest of margins. Ethnically, Singapore is theopposite of Malaysia--majority Chinese, with substantial Indian andMalay minorities. It is strictly a meritocracy, and its fourmillion people form the most affluent and stable society in all ofSoutheast Asia. Yet it came desperately close to suffering acatastrophic terrorist attack. As a result of the U.S. operation inAfghanistan, evidence was discovered that disclosed a JI plot toblow up the Singapore embassies of the United States, the UK,Israel and Australia, as well as other economic targets. Planningand logistics were at an advanced stage. One of the many shockingaspects of all this for Singaporeans was that the arrested bombplotters were mostly middle-class young Muslim men who had quite adecent education and enjoyed reasonable jobs.

Singapore may not be everyone's ideal society, but there wasnothing in these people's experience which should have led toterrorism. It was the Singapore plot which first showed us that, aswith so many Middle Eastern terrorists, it was not the lifeexperiences of Southeast Asian terrorists that counted, but theirideology.

The other Muslim state in Southeast Asia is Brunei, a tiny,oil-soaked sultanate of 350,000 souls, aptly described as a crossbetween Saudi Arabia and Brigadoon. Though the royal family spendsvast sums of money on itself, Brunei is a mostly gentle place thatspends a respectable proportion of its oil wealth on the welfare ofits people, who are pampered by regional standards. Its Islam isconservative, but this has not had very great politicalconsequences as there has been, until very recently, virtually nopolitical culture in Brunei, which is an absolute monarchy. Bruneihas started to experiment with elections and a parliament, but thetrajectory of this endeavor has yet to be firmly established.

The Future of Moderate Islam

Indonesia remains the center of Southeast Asian Islam, becauseof its size. It is the home of JI, but, as with all terroristgroups in Southeast Asia, they represent only a tiny fraction ofthe population. If there is such a thing as moderate, activistpolitical Islam, it exists in Indonesia.

On paper, Indonesia should be an emerging regional power. It isthe world's fourth most populous state, and since the fall oflong-time dictator Suharto in 1998, it has made a remarkabletransition to democracy. In 2004 it held its first direct electionfor the presidency, and the results were good news for theopponents of Islamic extremism. The winner was former general andcabinet minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a secular-nationalist.Indeed, the top four candidates were secular-nationalists with theonly Islamist coming in fifth.

Still, the election campaign uncovered some problems as well.Yudhoyono was certainly the best candidate for the job, and was thepreferred choice of both Washington and Canberra. As a formersecurity minister he was the most active senior figure in promotingeffective counter-terrorism action. And he is certainly prepared todenounce terrorism publicly. Yet not he nor Megawati Sukarnoputri,the defeated incumbent, nor the other leading figures in Indonesianpolitics, has been prepared to denounce JI by name. (After all, theterm Jemaah Islamiyah literally means "Islamic community.") Thiscreates a certain sensitivity for Indonesian leaders, but no oneoutside Indonesia doubts that JI is a formal and deadly terroristorganization. It is on the United Nations' list of terroristorganizations, yet Indonesia has declined to ban JI. It has alsodeclined to close down a network of pesantren, or Islamic boardingschools, of which many JI terrorists are alumni.

Indonesia is a fascinating nation of vast ethnic varietysprawled across a diamond necklace of islands at the southern baseof Southeast Asia. Like all huge nations, it gives the impressionof being a universe unto itself. It is only really a nation at allbecause of the happenstance of colonial history. One of its fewunifying forces has been Islam. Another, somewhat as in Turkey, hasbeen the military.

Indonesia's state apparatus is more effective than that of thePhilippines but less than that of Thailand. Its response toIslamist terrorism has been characteristically unique, uneven andperplexing. There is a lot of political violence in Indonesia, asis common in such a vast and poor nation. Much of it is justcriminality, and still more is unclear in its parentage. A seriesof bombings of Christian churches around Christmas 2000 was wronglythought at the time to be the work of disaffected elements of themilitary pursuing some obscure agenda. We later learned it was thework of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated JI.

The biggest terrorist incident in Indonesia was the Bali bombingof 2002. There have been spectacular bombings since, such as at theMarriott Hotel in Jakarta in August 2003 and outside the Australianembassy in September 2004. But neither rivaled Bali in the deathsit caused. In response to the Bali bombing, the Indonesiansresponded promisingly. They welcomed the participation of theAustralian Federal Police as well as U.S. assistance, and throughhighly skilled forensic work, tracked the vehicle used in thebombing. This led in turn to the arrests of the bomb plottersthemselves.

Then, to everyone's amazement, the Indonesians ran a transparentpublic trial and convicted more than thirty terrorists ofcomplicity in the bombings. Some of them received the deathpenalty. The trials themselves were of immense importance. They areclose to unique in the Muslim world. They punctured theanti-Western paranoia that infects even moderate Islamic ideology.The relentless presentation of evidence, the long testimony ofwitnesses, including survivors and friends and relatives of thedead, did more than anything else to educate the Indonesian publicabout the reality of terrorism in their midst.