Twenty years ago today, on a Thursday morning, an innocuous white delivery van stuttered towards the gate of the Australian embassy in Jakarta. Seconds later, an explosion shattered windows for blocks around and left 10 Indonesians dead, including embassy security staff and a mother waiting in the visa line with her young daughter. More than 200 Indonesians and Australians were injured, mainly by flying glass.
This was the first time an Australian embassy had been attacked, although other Australian missions in the region had previously been the subjects of terrorist planning.
At the van’s wheel was Heri Golun. Those who sent him on his suicide mission and made the 1-tonne bomb included notorious Malaysian terrorists Azahari Husin and Noordin Mohammed Top, who would both meet their ends at the hands of Indonesian police, in 2005 and 2009, respectively. Co-conspirator Rois would be sentenced to death. Accessories Irun Hidayat and Agus Ahmad were jailed.
The embassy attack came after the cataclysmic Bali bombings on the night of 12 October 2002 and the August 2003 bombing of Jakarta’s Marriott Hotel—both representing hitherto novel targeting of Westerners in Indonesia. It would be followed by a second attack in Bali in October 2005 and then the simultaneous bombings of Jakarta’s Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in 2009. After that, the focus of terrorist attacks moved to Indonesian government targets, mainly law-enforcement officers.
What War on Terror?
Despite the extraordinary shock felt initially in Australia, the risk is that, 20 years on, it’s been largely forgotten, along with broader memories of the decades-long struggle against Islamist terrorism regionally. Similarly, a more recent anniversary, the highpoint of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) ‘caliphate’—Mosul’s capture in June 2014—passed with little notice. Australia largely overlooked that anniversary even though a disproportionate number of its citizens had sought to join the ranks of ISIS (and 230 did so). Many others were citizens of Australia’s neighbours—including Indonesians, whose numbers are variously estimated between 689 and almost 1300.
Nor does the name ‘Marawi’ resonate now, despite it being the scene of a bloody, five-month-long battle between the Philippines military and ISIS affiliates only seven years ago in 2017. Australia’s role in supporting the Philippines to liberate the city and recover from the siege is little remembered.
Understanding this history is a reminder that, notwithstanding the recent raising of the terror threat level in Australia to ‘Probable’, Australians have historically been more at risk of being victims of terrorism overseas, and especially in Southeast Asia.
This community-wide amnesia reflects ephemeral contemporary culture but also the degree to which the counter-terrorism experience was not shared equally across Australian society. Maybe this forgetfulness is in some sense deliberate, perhaps as a form of national resilience by just moving on quickly from crises. Or maybe we just want to focus on the next threat.
There’s also a certain embarrassment associated with counter-terrorism ‘elsewhere’, following Kabul’s fall in 2021 to the Taliban and revelations in the Brereton inquiry into special forces operations in Afghanistan. And we can too easily forget that it was an Australian, motivated by extreme racist ideology, who visited terror on Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019.
And there’s also an understandable desire to nurture social cohesion by modulating rhetoric on religiously motivated terrorism.
But with all those reasons—time, other threats, missteps and social cohesion—the reality is that silence is a short-term facade that eventually leads to unnecessary surprise, increased tension and distrust not only within the community but in the very institutions whose role is to keep us safe. That’s why long-term national resilience requires risk management, not avoidance. And that means there’s a need for regular, informed messaging about the threats we face and our successes and mistakes, so that the public is brought along on the journey calmly and objectively, not just when confronted by a crisis.
One reason the public can be surprised by the realisation of a threat is that too often governments fail to learn from history or to unpack crisis moments after the hard yards of recovery, which means that the lessons to help avoid or at least mitigate the next crisis are not heeded. What’s more, our broader bureaucracies are often more adept at responding to crises, rather than preparing for or preventing them. Their structures prioritise established procedures and reactive measures over proactive planning and innovation. And, at the societal level, Australia frequently experiences success in managing one-off events but often fails to adequately reflect on the ongoing and cumulative nature of persistent threats, due to a tendency to focus on immediate, high-profile incidents rather than sustaining long-term, systematic risk-management and prevention strategies.
That the terrorism level was raised last month with limited public discussion or build-up, and therefore came as somewhat of a surprise, shows that it’s human nature to think that a one-off success (‘mission accomplished’) is forever lasting: killing bin Laden and dismantling al-Qaeda in the Middle East and the Taliban in Afghanistan were viewed as ends in themselves. And, subsequently, ‘defeating’ ISIS may have helped to temporarily lower the global and Australian terror level but was always going to be cyclical. The lesson should be clear: these threats do wax and wane, but they don’t disappear. As they adapt, so must we.
We can identify this tendency in other counter-terrorism examples from the recent past:
—Mosul, of course, was declared a ‘no-go’ zone by the Australian government in 2015, just the second such declared zone after al Raqqa in 2014, and after both had been taken over by ISIS. With that legislative power having come under review, there were questions as to whether it remained necessary, only to now have recent reports about the government considering the declaration of parts of Lebanon as being controlled by Hezbollah.
—While it took longer than it should have, Australia listed Hamas in its entirety as a terrorist organisation under the Criminal Code (rather than in part or just for counter-terrorism financing purposes) in February 2022—only eight months before Hamas attacked Israel with shocking acts that have destabilised the region and resulted in conflict. That conflict has, at least in part, added to growing tensions in Australia that resulted in the terror threat level being raised.
And, in reducing the terror threat level, the ASIO director-general was at pains to say that the change didn’t mean the threat was gone. But the perception at the policy level appears different. The counter-terrorism coordinator no longer sits in the same portfolio as ASIO and the Australian Federal Police (AFP), is also the designated Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator and no longer seems to be the prime minister’s principal adviser on terrorism.
A success story in Southeast Asia
A more positive explanation for this amnesia is the genuine operational success experienced in Southeast Asia, aided considerably by the close and resilient working relationship between the AFP and the Indonesian National Police. In July 2024, after continuous degradation of Jemaah Islamiyah (in 2021, Indonesian police said that almost 900 JI members had been arrested since 2000), senior members of its remnant announced it was disbanding. One of JI’s most prominent imitators, the East Indonesia Mujahideen (MIT) was literally obliterated: its last member was killed in September 2022. In the southern Philippines, the notorious bombers, beheaders and kidnappers of the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), lately affiliated with ISIS, suffered defeat in Marawi and the deaths of their principal leader and his ally. This year, the Philippines military claimed final victory over ASG.
While there is still ongoing violence regionally, including an IS-inspired attack on a Malaysian police station this year, the current situation is fundamentally different from that Thursday morning in 2004 outside the embassy. But dormant, dismantled and degraded don’t mean defeated permanently.
Indeed, Australia should exercise caution in declaring ultimate success against terrorism in Southeast Asia, as many of the underlying drivers of terrorism, such as socio-economic instability and regional conflicts, persist and could undermine longer term counter-terrorism efforts. For example, beyond Southeast Asia, we’re also seeing a familiar script play out in concerning reports about al-Qaeda and Islamic State—Khorasan Province (ISKP) growing in Taliban-led Afghanistan.
How to remember—and what to learn?
It’s also timely to ask: What was the ultimate meaning of those efforts? How should we commemorate sacrifices made by Australians in and out of uniform, by civilians who were the targets of terrorist atrocities and, not least, by the numerous brave police and soldiers (principally Indonesian and Filipino) who were the key to ‘victory’? And how should our reflections inform how Australia responds to future national security challenges?
While the former ASIO director general (and national security adviser) Duncan Lewis has provided a useful starting point with his ‘six lessons’, there’s much still to be drawn upon from the counter-terrorism age, especially in Southeast Asia.
From a narrowly operational perspective, the counter-terrorism age proved the value of:
—Setting clear objectives (and measures) in national security;
—Using intelligence to lead and enable public policy;
—Integrating national efforts across government, with collaboration actively prioritised and incentivised by ministers;
—Empowering and supporting those at the coalface, especially at the mission level overseas;
—Innovation—including intelligence fusion centres, new models of cooperation, and collaborative institutions, such as the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation;
—Partnerships and (two-way) capacity building regionally—exemplified in the Indonesian Police’s Detachment 88 (DET 88), supported by Australia and the US;
—Traditional intelligence relationships, including as a broader framework for intelligence sharing and advanced capability development;
—Methodological advances in intelligence work, such as the development and mastery of targeting analysis; and
—Investment in the development of long-term interpersonal relationships between countries.
We can also learn at a strategic level:
—Terror and politically motivated violence (PMV) will always be with us, so long as they deliver political, spiritual and/or material benefits to terrorists. The real question is how they affect us and how we respond.
—We must appreciate the persistence and impact of disruptions and threats—see how Russia’s illegal war on Ukraine, the fighting in Gaza and Iran’s terrorist proxies of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis have upended the best laid plans globally—especially given Beijing’s active encouragement and enablement of spot fires that weaken those it regards as adversaries.
—Proactivity in addressing potential threats is important—a stitch in time (especially in the Southeast Asian context)—while remembering that operational success is just one piece of the puzzle, for any strategy that fails to tackle the causes of terrorism and PMV is destined for long-term failure.
—Public support for counter-terrorism measures is essential for their successful implementation and effectiveness, as it encourages collaboration between communities and authorities. It’s equally important for the public to stay security-aware without succumbing to fear, as excessive anxiety can undermine societal cohesion and resilience. Transparency, trust in government and clear communication play critical roles in fostering that balance, ensuring that counter-terrorism efforts are understood and supported while mitigating the risk of unwarranted panic or misinformation.
Those lessons are applicable, given that the challenge now for Australia is an expanded version of ASIO’s own careful balancing of the risks of espionage and interference on the one hand and PMV on the other. And balance is indeed key.
That is, how should Australia most effectively calibrate future effort on the biggest big-picture threat—Chinese hegemony in our hemisphere—while still taking proactive steps (within our power, that we can contribute to meaningfully and not as a token) to mitigate other pressing national security disruptions? Disruptions that include domestically propelled security concerns (such as terrorism, people smuggling, crime and so on) as well as increasingly in cyberspace. All within the context of the inescapable realities of our strategic geography and accelerating technological and demographic trends.
While informed by the work of the National Intelligence Community (NIC), it will be Australia’s policy agencies (in the departments of defence, home affairs and foreign affairs and trade, and also in the central agencies of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury and Department of Finance) that will need to step up to shape and sustain efforts to address this hydra-like challenge. They and the NIC would benefit from concerted and comprehensive research into the lessons outlined above.
The human story of Australian counter-terrorism
But, in addition to matters of statecraft and public policy, there’s also a human story upon which to reflect.
Australia’s counter-terrorism campaign extended out beyond Southeast Asia. In fact, it started in Australia itself, in the intensive preparations of police and intelligence agencies leading up to the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Although we’ve now entered a new age of ideologically diffuse terrorism by radicalised individuals, the previous incarnation supposedly finished in 2016 and 2017 in the deserts of northern Iraq and on Marawi’s streets.
During that decade and a half, terrible names, terms and acronyms haunted the nightmares and waking hours of many thousands of Australians—diplomats, intelligence officers, defence personnel, police and bureaucrats alike. ‘VBIEDs’, ‘building stand-off ranges’, ‘indirect fire’, ‘KFR’, ‘duty to warn’, ‘EOD’, ‘JAT’, ‘blast wave’, ‘AML’, ‘takfir’, ‘terrorist transit triangle’, ‘pocket litter’, ‘CVE’, ‘CTF’, ‘mass casualty’, ‘multi-modal attack’ and so on and so on.
And for some of your neighbours, siblings and friends, the night still isn’t peaceful.
Governments and agencies are now much more aware of the mental-health impacts of national-security service and are building that awareness into their future ways of working, although the evidence provided to the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide suggests there’s much more to do.
Necessarily, mental (and physical) support is of primary importance but there is also a commemorative requirement. There could never be VP Day-style parades for Australia’s counter-terrorism veterans, but that’s no reason to not keep exploring more suitable opportunities for remembrance. Some of us have already written about how to better recognise intelligence service, but there’s a particular gap when it comes to honouring officials who served in Southeast Asia, outside of Defence deployments, or who worked to prevent terrorist outrages inside Australia itself.
But, first and foremost, today we should look back to the terrible atrocity committed 20 years ago, and to those it hurt so badly—but also to the indomitable response of Australians and Indonesians together. As then foreign minister Julie Bishop remarked on the 10th anniversary:
If the aim of the Jakarta embassy bombers was to fracture the relationship between Australia and Indonesia, they failed. If anything, they … helped draw our two countries even closer together and strengthened our resolve to work together against terrorism, and to address the risks of violent extremism in our region and beyond.