Behind the Hambali hype, tension rises

[Dover]

Southeast Asian anger

http://www.iht.com/articles/106796.html

HONG KONG Governments in Southeast Asia have reason to be pleased by recent successes in arresting Islamic militants, notably Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, the supposed operations leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, an Islamic extremist group. But Hambali's importance may have been overplayed, and there is evident resentment across Southeast Asia at the United States assuming the role of "regional cop" and disregarding legal extradition procedures.
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Talk of terrorism having been "decapitated" and the Australian prime minister's description of Hambali as the "mastermind" and "main link to Al Qaeda" appeal to those who like to believe there is some highly organized, Leninist-style structure at work in the region - a view that has been successfully peddled to the Western media by friendly intelligence sources ever since the Bali bombing. At the top, so the story goes, quietly sat the organization's ideologist, the Indonesian cleric Abu Bakr Bashir, while Hambali, chief operations officer and Al Qaeda's top man in Southeast Asia, contrived plots to be carried out by loyal foot soldiers, often trained at camps in the southern Philippines.


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Any arrest of genuine terror plotters reduces the likelihood of further attacks. But the decentralized nature of the cells and the variety of motives and objectives behind them suggests that the arrest of Hambali, while important symbolically, will of itself do little to reduce regional threats.
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Although various national agencies claimed a cooperative role in Hambali's capture, the fact that he has been spirited away to U.S. custody in a secret location has not been well received. Thai sources first announced that he had been extradited to Indonesia. In fact he should have gone either to Malaysia, which has been looking for him for longer than any other state, or to Indonesia, his home country, which has also been seeking him....MORE >