Aim of terrorists' suicide bombings is political

Throughout the bloody American involvement in Vietnam, the most perceptive anti-insurgency experts in the West always understood that the aim of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese was political — the establishment of a communist regime in Saigon — and that military operations were but a means to that end. For instance, the American Embassy in Saigon had no military significance for Hanoi but had high symbolic value. The costly Viet Cong attack on it in the Tet offensive of 1968, though actually a failure, was a brilliant political ploy, designed to shock the American public and undermine support of the war.

So it is with terrorism today. The hapless suicide bombers and truck-bomb drivers who are dispatched on missions of hatred and murder are instruments of terrorist leaders with distinct political agendas. So horrified will Russians be at the slaughter of their children in Beslan that they will get out of Chechnya, goes the reasoning. Kill enough morning commuters in Madrid and you may topple a government that has aligned itself with the U.S. war against terrorism. Kill enough Americans and behead enough other foreign nationals in Iraq and they might go away and cede the country to the extremists who despise democracy.

And so it was in Indonesia last week. The suicide bomber who set off the explosion outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta was the pawn of a terrorist cell with distinct political aims. Of all the embassies chosen, Australia has been one of the sturdiest supporters of the United States in Iraq. Its U.S.-supporting Prime Minister John Howard is facing a lively election Oct. 9 against a Labor Party that has frowned on the dispatch of Australian troops to Iraq. Clearly, although no Australians and only Indonesians were killed in the blast, it was intended as a message of deadly political warning to Australian voters.

But it was not an Australian Embassy in Singapore or Manila that was targeted, but the embassy in Indonesia. That choice, too, is significant and points to a clear political design behind the planning. Indonesia is one of those countries — like Pakistan and Turkey — that are Muslim but not Arab. In fact Arabs make up less than a fifth of the Muslim world.

The observance of Islam in Indonesia, a country of 216 million, the largest Muslim country in the world, is far less radical than throughout the Arab world. This has been a bone in the throat of a radical minority in Indonesia, a violent terrorist arm of which has sought to destabilize the governing order and subvert Indonesia's current movement toward democracy. It is probably no coincidence that last week's explosion took place just 11 days before Indonesia's first direct presidential election on Sept. 20.