A Troubling Sense of Deja Vu
The feds are scrambling to address new terrorism threats in both Asia and Africa
Now officials are scrambling to address the threats. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traveled to North Africa and Southeast Asia earlier this year to strengthen military cooperation with key allies there. At the FBI, Director Robert Mueller has tasked Fuentes with creating a "global FBI." Over the past five years, the FBI has almost doubled its presence in these regions, expanding the bureau's reach to nearly 20 countries--including Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Morocco, Australia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and India. The bureau is considering opening offices in New Zealand, Fiji, Ethiopia, Algeria, Ghana, Cambodia, and Bangladesh.
But the political and diplomatic hurdles are substantial. Each office costs millions of dollars to establish and equip. And the FBI has long struggled to recruit and train G-men with the know-how to effectively work in these regions--language skills especially, plus the necessary historical, geopolitical, religious, and cultural sensitivities. In addition, some of these countries are resistant to allowing much of a U.S. law enforcement presence.
The ground zero of terrorism in the region is the Indonesian archipelago, with 17,500 islands, a 90 percent Muslim population, and a big regional terrorist organization, Jemaah Islamiyah. Since 9/11, JI--like al Qaeda--has been fragmented but by no means vanquished. "There's a concern that instead of the organizations we all know and love, there will be small groups not on anybody's radar screen," says Sidney Jones, Southeast Asia project director for the nonprofit International Crisis Group, "that will plan and undertake suicide attacks." The terrorist camps in the southern Philippines, which Indonesian jihadists use for combat training, present another huge problem, as does the recent spate of bombings in rural south Thailand--triggered by anger toward the Bangkok government for failing to serve and protect the poor Muslim Malay minority. "It's the kind of thing," says Jones, "that if it's allowed to fester, you'll see people coming from the outside, wanting to help their Muslim brethren."
Ripe. A recent phenomenon of Islamic militants migrating from Thailand through the porous border into Cambodia is also worrisome. "You have a poor peasant population susceptible to anybody promising a better way," says Fuentes. "In the 1960s, it was the Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge. The question is whether those same peasant areas are now ripe for Islamic fundamentalism."
An Indonesian-born al Qaeda operative, Riduan Isamuddin--known as Hambali--certainly believed so. A former JI operations chief and close confidant of bin Laden's, Hambali--who masterminded the 2002 Bali bombing--lived in Cambodia for six months and plotted to bomb the American, British, and Australian embassies in Phnom Penh. He later aborted the plan and fled to Thailand, where he was captured in a 2002 joint CIA-Thai operation and "rendered" to an undisclosed country. In Africa, U.S. officials are monitoring the Saharan jihadist pipeline bringing Islamists from Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt into Iraq to fuel the insurgency against U.S. military forces. "About a quarter of the jihadists we picked up in Iraq are coming out of Africa," says Dennis Pierce, chief of the FBI's Africa Unit. The jihadists who return to Africa are trained, connected, and battle hardened. "It's a short hop from the African countries either into Italy or the south of Spain or Portugal," says Fuentes. "And once you are in Europe, it's a direct flight into the U.S."
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