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INSIGHT: Not military aid but mapping: How Jakarta and Manila can cooperate
Indonesia can help the Philippines government fight the Islamic State (IS), not by sending troops but by helping map extremist networks.
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Fight against terror: Police and military personnel attend an anti-terror training jointly held by the National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) and the Indonesian Military and the National Police at the East Java Police’s Mobile Brigade headquarters in Malang, East Java, on May 18. (Antara/Ari Bowo Sucipto)
I
ndonesia can help the Philippines government fight the Islamic State (IS), not by sending troops but by helping map extremist networks.
One of the reasons the siege in Marawi has dragged on for so long is that the authorities in Manila never put the pieces of the extremist puzzle together. Detachment 88 has now been solving those puzzles for almost 15 years, and the Philippines desperately needs its expertise.
Marawi has been a disaster on the intelligence front. Philippine security agencies treated all factions of Abu Sayyaf the same, making no distinction between the kidnapping-for-ransom groups and their more ideological counterparts. They routinely labelled all Indonesians “JI” without trying to understand the distinctions between Jamaah Islamiyah and Jamaah Ansharud Daulah (JAD), or why it mattered.
The United States’ Department of Justice’s million-dollar bounties on the heads of high-profile extremists turned counter terrorism operations into a quest for money at the expense of strategy. The local gun culture was such that the national police chief himself acknowledged no one saw the stockpiling of arms and ammunition in Marawi as odd — it never occurred to the police that a fundamentally new kind of coalition had been formed in the name of IS.
