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elevision viewers were presented with horrific pictures over the last few days, showing footage of likely bombers of the J.W. Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels, who carried out their barbaric acts on the morning of Friday July 17, 2009.

With such a sophisticated modus operandi, significant amounts of money being spent and, more importantly, sacrificing their own lives just to hurt other people, we must wonder why these young men decided to become suicide bombers in the first place?

News records have shown that suicide bombers have typically been youths. Most were single and came from relatively normal family backgrounds.

There is, therefore, an urgent need for Indonesia to understand the different "struggle" its youths are facing that has attracted these men to do what they did.

Statistically, Indonesia has the fourth largest youth population in the world with about 38 million men and women between the ages of 15 and 24 - around 18 percent of the population. Under normal circumstances, a large proportion of youths has great potential for a country's future.

However, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO), in many economies young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults, and in Indonesia they are five times more likely to be unemployed than their adult counterparts.

One estimate suggests that youth unemployment in Indonesia has reached 25 percent, compared to only 15 percent in the Philippines. If many of our youths are unemployed and undereducated, having seen the TV footage of the two young suicide bombers, all of a sudden the large youth population looks like a time bomb.

With many Indonesians feeling good about themselves after two peaceful election events this year, and also with the relatively small impact of the global credit crisis thanks to Indonesia's strong domestic consumption, the latest bomb attack after four peaceful years is indeed a wakeup call. Despite our better resilience in democracy and in the economy, apparently our youths, and thus our future, remain vulnerable.

If there are messages to draw from the odd combination of successful elections, a strong economy, and the increasingly sophisticated latest homegrown latest terrorist attacks, the first would be the need to seriously tackle the problems of under-education of youths, under employment and unemployment.

In the short term, national and local governments have to work harder in accelerating their efforts to boost public spending that can create employment, especially for youths.

Many of our manpower planners are often too absorbed with the idea of preparing our younger generation to take up sophisticated white collar jobs requiring IT or management skills.

In reality, most of our youths are undereducated and unskilled with few that can manage to gain competitive skills capable of surviving on their own without government aid.

Therefore the government should focus on helping the poor and undereducated youth with skills and employment opportunities that can reduce their susceptibility to extremism.

There have been several successful cases of essential public services that have absorbed significant numbers of young workers such as the Trans-Jakarta and the Trans-Jogja bus services.

These enterprises have employed many young women and men as bus crew members, ticket sellers, maintenance engineers and security officers. The young women and men in these companies are very proud about the jobs they do.

But many more bus routes in many other cities need to be put into operation and employ more youths. The elites and those who have invested in the publicly owned transport enterprises can do much more to help our youths, rather than to continue bickering about which companies should win bids to supply and operate the buses.

There are many more sectors such as trains and ferry operations, utility companies, subsidized food distributors, public fish auction markets and public infrastructure construction projects that could employ young people.

Central government planners also need to wake up to their illusion of asking the private sector to provide public services.

This illusion has delayed many essential public infrastructure investments. It will not be called "public" service if a private company can make a simple profit out of it - it's as simple as that.

Only when the majority of our youths see opportunities and a bright future ahead will words of wisdom and sermons they hear from teachers and religious leaders make sense.

And only then will they see their lives as more valuable, and realize that killing themselves and other innocent people will does not make any sense. Now is a critical time for Indonesia to rescue its unemployed youth from the potential fatal attraction of terrorism.