In the spring of 1998, the citizens of Indonesia took to the streets and, in one of history’s most electrifying displays of people power, tossed their long-serving dictator out of office.
Happy though that moment was, almost everyone expected the country to quickly fall apart. Enormous and wildly diverse—Indonesia is made up of 17,500 islands scattered over three thousand miles of ocean, and is home to some 250 million citizens speaking more than seven hundred languages—the nation barely seemed to make sense in the first place.
Suharto*1 may have been a tyrant, but at least he’d been a competent one. That was especially true when it came to the economy, which he’d kept growing by an average of 7 percent a year for his thirty-year tenure. And it was true when it came to the management of religious tensions. For all his faults, Suharto had been a reliably secular tyrant. Though almost 90 percent of Indonesians are Muslim, and the country never separated church (or mosque) and state the way many Western nations do, Suharto had ruthlessly crushed or co-opted any attempt to make the place more Islamic.
With the strongman suddenly gone, the economy in free fall, and the lid of repression removed, the country seemed headed for a cataclysm. In December 1998 the New York Times warned that Indonesia was “facing one of the most dangerous years in its history,” and Time predicted that the nation would burn. Even sober academics warned that this massive, impoverished archipelago could explode and disintegrate Balkan-style. Or the still-powerful army would reassert itself. Or the world’s largest Muslim-majority country would adopt a tyrannical form of Islamic rule, becoming an Asian Iran on the Andaman Sea.
In the months that followed, Indonesia seemed headed in just those directions. As the state faltered, riots rocked Jakarta. Nationalist thugs targeted Indonesia’s wealthy and much-resented ethnic-Chinese minority, looting their stores and killing over a thousand. Separatists relaunched insurgencies in outlying provinces. Mulyanto Utomo, the editor of a local newspaper, captured the exhilaration and terror of the moment well when he told a reporter, “Indonesian people have been in chains for 30 years, and now everyone wants to shout. Nobody is in control.”
Islamist militias soon jumped into the fray, unleashing a nationwide bombing campaign that racked up hundreds of casualties and sparking a virtual Muslim-Christian holy war in several regions. Theocratic political parties began to rebuild themselves, training cadres and setting up ultraconservative pesantrens (religious boarding schools) in areas underserved by the rudderless central government. When, in 1999, Indonesia held its first free legislative elections in forty-four years, Islamic parties scored an alarming 36 percent of the vote.
Now fast-forward to today: against all odds, not one of the worst predictions about Indonesia’s future has actually materialized. Instead of descending into dysfunction or repression, the world’s fourth-most-populous country has become one of its more successful democracies; in the 2014 presidential elections, for example, some 135 million ballots were peacefully cast at 480,000 polling stations, and power changed hands in a fairly orderly fashion for the fourth time in sixteen years. Civilian control over this former military dictatorship has been so thoroughly consolidated that nowadays the generals wouldn’t dream of challenging their elected bosses. All but a few corners of the country are at peace: terrorist attacks, which once claimed hundreds of lives and kept most Western tourists and businesspeople away, have become rare, and most of the long-burning insurgencies have been peacefully resolved. At the same time, what was once one of the world’s most unified states has undertaken an extraordinarily far-reaching experiment in decentralization, doling out most political power to its regions (the only briefs Jakarta retains are defense, justice, religious affairs, and foreign, economic, and fiscal policy). Indonesia has become a rare thing in the Muslim world—indeed, in the developing world at large—a safe and stable beacon of open, decent, and tolerant rule.
That last adjective—“tolerant”—bears underscoring, since it represents contemporary Indonesia’s greatest accomplishment. Even as its citizens have raucously embraced their new freedoms, including the right to practice Islam far more openly and devoutly than before, the vast majority have stopped their ears to the siren song of extremism. Today fewer Indonesian Muslims think their state should adopt sharia (Islamic law) than do the citizens of Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Malaysia, or Pakistan. Indonesia’s Islamic parties, meanwhile, have consistently underperformed at the polls. Since hitting a high point in the 2004 legislative elections, with a combined 38 percent, their popularity has dwindled: they managed just a quarter of the vote in 2009, and though their tally improved slightly in 2014, more than half that share went to the moderates among them, while support for ultraconservative parties fell.
As for terrorism, Indonesia’s success there has been even more dramatic. True, militants still manage to pull off the occasional attack, but these are generally small. The big truth is that Indonesia has come close to effectively eliminating the threat of extremist violence. Hillary Clinton, during a 2009 visit to the country as secretary of state, was moved to declare: “If you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity and women’s rights can coexist, go to Indonesia.”
She was right: Indonesia has solved the puzzle and figured out how to put all these pieces together. That makes its story an invaluable object lesson for the world’s forty-eight other Muslim-majority states, most of which are still desperately trying—often in vain—to beat back radicalism in its many ugly forms.
To understand how exactly Indonesia managed all this, it’s important to start by acknowledging that, as scary as things looked in 1998, the country did have a few things going for it.
First, while its population has long been overwhelmingly Muslim, Islam had traditionally looked different there than it did closer to the Arabian heartland. The religion, which is thought to have arrived in the islands around the thirteenth century, was never imposed by the sword, as it was by the princes and sheikhs of the Near East. Instead, locals picked it up piecemeal from visiting Arab and Indian traders. That slow process of accretion produced an extremely diverse set of practices and beliefs, which incorporated preexisting animist and tribal traditions and tolerant Sufi teachings. This blending of faiths, which academics call “syncretism,” made Indonesians unusually open-minded and resistant to centrally imposed doctrine. And its legacy can still be felt today: as Elizabeth Pisani, author of Indonesia, Etc., documents, despite an influx of more orthodox influences from the Middle East, some Indonesians still get their spiritual guidance from reading bird entrails. Every year, the Muslim sultan of Yogyakarta commemorates his romantic ties to the goddess of the South Sea. And many ordinary Indonesian Muslims regularly visit the tombs of holy saints or attend performances of wayang: Java’s famous indigenous form of theater, in which baroquely filigreed shadow puppets act out tales inspired by Hindu epics like the Ramayana.
Indonesia’s second advantage had to do with its Islamist political parties. While these groups have become a significant force in the country since Suharto’s overthrow, they’ve turned out to be a reliably incompetent one—consistently failing to present a coherent economic agenda or live up to the more ethical, less corrupt standards they claim to represent. In 2013, for example, Luthfi Hasan Ishaaq, the head of one major Islamist party, was busted for taking a billion-rupiah (about $100,000) payoff to help secure a government contract—after investigators discovered his bagman holed up in a hotel room with a naked nineteen-year-old girl. And just a few years earlier, another of Luthfi’s lieutenants was captured on camera watching porn on his iPad—during a session of the legislature, no less. So much for Islamic values.
So Indonesia got lucky in at least a couple of ways. But it would be a big mistake to chalk up its success to fortune or history alone. By the time Indonesia became a democracy, its blended approach to Islam was actually on the wane, as many locals turned to more conventional Sunni practices. In fact, Indonesia’s population has actually been growing steadily more religiously conservative (at least in a personal sense) for some time now, as is illustrated by the growing popularity of headscarves and of fasting during Ramadan.
Indeed, what makes Indonesia such a striking case is that its moderation has little to do with secularism. Paradoxically, the nation has been moving further and further away from Islamic extremism at precisely the same time that its population has been growing more devout. This apparent contradiction can confuse visitors. On the surface, the increasingly visible displays of faith can look like signs of trouble. So do public opinion surveys like the 2012 poll in which some 70 percent of Indonesian Muslims said they favored the idea of living under Islamic law. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find that picture is more complex. So, for example, while many Indonesians do indeed now tell pollsters they’re interested in sharia, most of them shudder at the harsh way it’s enforced in places like Saudi Arabia. And very few of them stand up for Islamic law where it could actually make a difference: in the polling booth.
What explains these seemingly contrary trends: growing personal piety on the one hand and increasing antipathy toward political and militant Islam on the other? Apart from what I’ve already mentioned, the lion’s share of credit goes to the top: to Indonesia’s first three democratic leaders. This trio—Abdurrahman Wahid, Megawati Sukarnoputri, and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono—was a highly diverse and often-underwhelming bunch. The truth is that they could be downright incompetent at times. But they got things right where it counted most, managing to steer their nation toward the moderate middle and outmaneuver Indonesia’s Islamists at almost every turn.
Their strategy for doing so involved five basic parts—though calling their approach to extremism a “strategy” may be a bit of a stretch. Much of it was improvised, and in some cases the three leaders stumbled backward or had to be pushed into the right policies. Nonetheless, it’s worth considering their various efforts as a whole, since it’s in aggregate that they proved so effective and offer a template that can be used elsewhere.
The first major prong of their approach actually had nothing to do with Islam per se. Different as Indonesia’s first three democratic rulers were from one another, they shared one key trait: a dogged determination to consolidate their country’s still-fragile freedoms. And that determination would reap major rewards. If not for their efforts to stabilize and strengthen Indonesia’s fledgling democracy, the country could easily have gone in the other direction—which would have made subsequent reforms impossible. By making pluralistic politics more effective, these three leaders also made them seem more attractive to ordinary Indonesians. And that helped make the alternatives—like Islamic rule—seem less so.
To see what I mean, I need to take you back to October 1999, when Indonesia’s freshly elected legislature, the People’s Consultative Assembly (known by its Bahasa Indonesia acronym, MPR), chose Wahid to become the country’s first democratic president.*2 Gus Dur, as everyone called him, was only fifty-nine at the time of his inauguration, but he was already virtually blind and recovering from a stroke. He seemed like a tired old man—and that impression never improved once he took office. He was a highly respected intellectual and a beloved religious leader (Wahid was a cleric and a former head of Nahdlatul Ulama, the country’s biggest Islamic social welfare organization, which has some thirty to forty million members). But he turned out to be a clumsy, erratic politician, and his presidency is better remembered for his habit of nodding off in public—including, at least once, during one of his own speeches—than for any major legislation or reforms. That said, Wahid was a steadfast progressive and a pluralist, and he consistently stood up for the rights of ethnic and religious minorities during his tenure—stands that, given his Islamic credentials, made a lasting impression on ordinary Indonesians. Wahid was also a longtime critic of military rule, and he used his office to challenge and cashier a number of powerful generals when they tried to interfere in politics.
Yet Wahid’s conduct proved so ineffectual in most other respects that just nineteen months after it made him president the MPR decided to replace him with his vice president, Megawati. Unlike Wahid, who had cut his teeth opposing the country’s old regime, Megawati was a product of it: her father, Sukarno, was independent Indonesia’s first ruler, and she had always viewed the presidency as her birthright. Helmet-coiffed and imperious, Megawati rarely deigned to speak in public and was widely derided for her limitations; The Economist once scoffed that she “makes George Bush seem like an intellectual.” Joshua Kurlantzick, a Southeast Asia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, recalls that after taking office Megawati never showed much interest in the tedious work of actually running the country. She allowed Indonesia’s economy to languish, and she was far too slow to acknowledge the growing terrorist threat.
Megawati thus accomplished little more in office than her predecessor had, and she didn’t manage to hold on to her job for much longer either. She does, however, deserve great credit for building on Wahid’s efforts to ease the army out of politics. When she first became president, the country had only been a democracy for two tumultuous years. The generals who had served as Suharto’s praetorians still held considerable sway, were very leery of Indonesia’s new freedoms, and were determined to retain the wealth and perks their old boss had used to buy their loyalty. Reasoning that, at the end of the day, they probably cared more about money than power, Megawati offered them a deal: she would let them keep their ill-gotten riches if they, in return, retreated to their barracks and abandoned their remaining roles in Indonesia’s government.
The generals accepted. But because Megawati only lasted a few years in office, it fell to the man who replaced her—Yudhoyono—to consolidate and extend these gains.
Unlike his predecessors, SBY (as everyone calls him) managed to serve two full terms, holding power until October 2014. That can make it hard today to remember the somewhat ominous figure he cut when he first arrived on Indonesia’s political scene. Back then he hardly looked likely to become a champion of civilian rule; if anything, Yudhoyono’s ascent seemed to augur a return to the country’s dark old days. The man was a recently retired and much-decorated four-star general who had staffed his campaign with many former military men. He’d also been a reliable Suharto stalwart back when he was still in uniform—even serving in East Timor during its bloody war for independence.
Underneath SBY’s medals, however, beat the heart of a democrat. Despite his many years in the army, Yudhoyono—unlike a lot of his former brothers-in-arms—was never credibly accused of human rights abuses. He’d also, critically, spent several stretches of his military service in the United States, studying at Webster University in St. Louis, where he got a master’s degree in management, and then at Fort Benning, Georgia, and the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. These experiences had imbued SBY with a deep love for America, which he liked to call his “second country.” And they seem to have left him with some American ideals as well.
That would become clear during a dramatic episode early in SBY’s political career. In 2001 Yudhoyono, newly out of uniform, was serving as Gus Dur’s senior security minister. In late May, his boss, facing impeachment at the hands of a hostile legislature, panicked and made an uncharacteristically illiberal move: he ordered SBY to declare a state of emergency in the hope that it would intimidate the president’s enemies. Yudhoyono refused, and was immediately sacked for his defiance. The standoff temporarily ended his time in government (though Megawati soon reinstated him). But it helped establish his democratic bona fides and reputation for integrity.
Once he did become president, SBY used his military background to push the army even further to the political sidelines. As Robert Hefner, an anthropologist who has long studied Indonesia, explains, the president’s rank and connections allowed him to persuade the still-anxious officer corps that “a détente with democracy was possible.” (Yudhoyono’s efforts to reform the once-notorious army were so effective that in 2005 Washington normalized military relations with the country.)
Even as he reassured his fellow officers, however, SBY also sought to reassure Indonesia’s public that he’d put his old life firmly behind him. As president, he carefully avoided stiff-backed military mannerisms, adopting a mild-mannered, technocratic style instead. According to General Agus Widjojo, who’d served as SBY’s commanding officer, this move was deliberate; his former protégé consciously eschewed the “charismatic, hero styles of leadership.” SBY’s placid, even plodding, demeanor, coupled with his portly and sleepy-eyed affect, would earn him the scorn of his opponents, who liked to compare him to a water buffalo. But it endeared him to a public that, after five decades of dictatorship, was sick of being ruled by domineering strongmen.
All these efforts proved essential to Indonesia’s democratic development. But they were only the first part of its leaders’ campaign against extremism. The other four components, which were mostly developed and deployed by SBY, involved appropriating key chunks of the Islamists’ agenda in order to steal their thunder—and much of their electoral support; inviting Islamist parties into the governing coalition, thereby giving them just enough rope to hang themselves, which they proceeded to do; relentlessly pursuing Islamist terrorists; and doing so in an extremely nimble way, avoiding many of the repressive tactics that would let the Islamists marshal public outrage to their cause.
Step one—depriving Muslim parties of their value proposition—involved something of a double game. On the one hand, Yudhoyono, like Gus Dur and Megawati, was always careful to publicly denounce the idea of Islamic government. While the Indonesian state had never been fully secular in the Western sense—the national ideology, pancasila, is premised on belief in “the one and only God,” and all citizens are required to subscribe to one of six officially recognized faiths—that was as far as things went, and SBY insisted on keeping them there. He frequently criticized the idea of greater government involvement in religion; in 2010, for example, he blasted the notion of a sharia-based constitution as “unacceptable to Indonesians.” And he often preached the virtues of tolerance, especially when talking to foreign audiences. The president told Charlie Rose in 2011 that his government took religious diversity very seriously and understood that it required steadfast support. And speaking at an award ceremony hosted by an American interfaith organization two years later, Yudhoyono promised to “always protect our minorities and ensure that no one suffers from discrimination.”
Yet even as he was making such pledges, Yudhoyono also began to skillfully steal key parts of the fundamentalists’ agenda for himself.
In the legislative contest held a few months before his election in 2004, the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) had exploded onto the political scene, winning 7.2 percent of the popular vote (up from 1.4 percent in 1999) and forty-five seats in the lower house of the MPR. The PKS, which calls for the imposition of sharia and which analysts often compare to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, had campaigned on promises to be more peduli (caring) and bersih (clean) than Indonesia’s secular parties—specifically, by fighting poverty and government graft. This second pledge, in particular, was especially appealing in a state long bedeviled by epic levels of what locals call “KKN”: korupsi, kolusi, and nepotisme. It’s estimated that during his decades in power, Suharto and his family had embezzled $15 billion to $35 billion from the state—a world record. And things hadn’t gotten much better since the dictator’s fall; in 2004 Transparency International ranked the country 133rd in its global Corruption Perceptions Index.
Seeing the opportunity this tradition gave him, SBY cast himself as a clean-government zealot. Shortly after his inauguration, he declared that the country would be “destroyed” if it didn’t finally tackle corruption and he pledged to make its eradication his top priority. Launching what he called a “shock therapy” campaign, he directed his attorney general to target any banks suspected of dirty dealings—“regardless of who is behind them,” he told an interviewer—and threw his weight behind the country’s Corruption Eradication Commission, which he encouraged to go after high-profile targets. Over the next ten years, the KPK, as it is known in Indonesian, managed to convict and jail some 160 senior officials, including, in 2009, the former governor of Indonesia’s central bank—who also happened to be the father-in-law of Yudhoyono’s son. In 2013 the KPK even nailed the head of the constitutional court.
To undermine the Islamists’ promise to improve living standards, meanwhile—an attractive idea at a time when more than half of Indonesians still lived on less than $2 a day—SBY launched a major antipoverty campaign, featuring direct cash transfers and increased food subsidies. He also focused hard on boosting the economy by pushing through a series of banking and other macroeconomic reforms, slashing government debt, and insisting that the country’s educational system place greater emphasis on job skills. These moves, combined with a ravenous global appetite for commodities, helped turn Indonesia’s moribund market into one of the world’s hottest for most of the decade. Between 2006 and 2011, the country more than doubled its exports and slashed poverty and unemployment; in early 2012 it even regained investment-grade ratings for the first time since the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis.
SBY obviously had plenty of reasons to take on both these issues. But commandeering the Islamists’ main campaign themes appears to have been at least part of his calculus. Greater uncertainty surrounds what would become the most controversial part of his legacy: his refusal to condemn vigilante groups, such as the Islamic Defenders Front, which would harass Christians and smash up bars and nightclubs in the name of religious purity. SBY was also accused of turning a blind eye to attacks on members of Indonesia’s tiny Ahmadiyah sect, whom Sunni fundamentalists view as heretics.
Figuring out why SBY tolerated such behavior is tricky; indeed, the question continues to puzzle experts today. It’s not as if the president, who is personally secular, ever subscribed to the vigilantes’ worldview himself. Some analysts have therefore interpreted his refusal to intervene as a sign of simple weakness. But given that Yudhoyono showed plenty of mettle in other contexts and stared down even more daunting enemies, there’s good reason to believe his passivity here was deliberate—another instance of his double game in action. This theory—that here too the president was working to steal the Islamists’ thunder—is given further credence by the way his administration, on at least two occasions, acceded to those parties’ demands that the government play a greater role in promoting Islam. The first of these instances occurred two years after SBY’s election, when he issued a “religious harmony” decree that ostensibly applied to all the country’s faiths, but in practice was used exclusively to keep minority sects from building new houses of worship. And the second came in 2008, when SBY’s Democratic Party backed a loosely worded antipornography law that bans any images or sounds “that violate the morals of society.”
Scholars and human rights groups have angrily criticized the president’s conduct in these areas; R. William Liddle, an Indonesia expert at Ohio State University, calls SBY’s acquiescence to the persecution of the Ahmadis the greatest stain on his record. That judgment has merit—but it also lacks nuance. Liddle is certainly right that, whatever SBY’s motivation, the president made some unpleasant compromises during his ten years in office. Yet such unpleasantness effectively kept Indonesia’s true radicals weak and off guard—and so in a cold, utilitarian sense may have benefited the country as a whole.
The third stage of Indonesia’s fight against extremism was premised on the recognition that attempts by secular governments elsewhere—think Egypt under Mubarak—to exclude Islamist parties from power have tended to backfire, only enhancing their appeal and radicalizing their members. To avoid this outcome, SBY did the opposite. Not only did he refrain from restricting the rights of Islamist parties, but he even brought four of them, including the sharia-based PKS, into his coalition and cabinet.
Once again, parsing SBY’s motivation with perfect clarity is impossible. The president himself was far too smart to ever openly declare his intent to co-opt the Islamists, since saying so out loud would, obviously, have been self-defeating. And SBY’s strategy seems to have been at least partially determined by political mathematics, given that his Democratic Party controlled only 7.5 percent of the legislature during his first term (its share grew to 21 percent in his second). SBY’s big-tent approach was also very much in keeping with local culture. As one US diplomat with experience in the region told me (asking not to be named since he still works for the government), Yudhoyono’s inclusiveness “was very Indonesian: rather than draw sharply opposing positions, you work toward the middle.”
Whatever his exact thinking, however, SBY’s close embrace of his opponents proved extremely effective in diminishing their appeal. “Keeping the Islamists in the circle was useful,” the US official explained. Just as involvement in the messy world of elections and governance, with its inevitable missteps, disappointments, and failures, dramatically reduced the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in Gaza, bringing Indonesia’s Islamic parties into the political mainstream—and forcing them to try to accomplish something—demystified their allure, as their falling poll numbers and the long list of scandals suggest.
Yet political Islam, remember, was only part of Indonesia’s problem. The new democracy faced an even deadlier threat during its early years: Islamist terrorism. Between 1999 and 2002, fighting in just one province—Maluku—killed more than five thousand people and displaced another five hundred thousand, while in 2001 alone extremists successfully staged more than one hundred attacks nationwide.
The bloodshed reached a terrible peak on the night of October 12, 2002. At 11:05 that evening, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda, set off a small bomb inside Paddy’s Bar, a tourist restaurant on the easygoing, mostly Hindu island of Bali. Seconds later, as panicked vacationers flooded the streets, the terrorists detonated a second, much larger explosive outside the packed Sari Club. The carnage was horrifying: by the time the smoke had cleared and the dismembered bodies had been counted, 202 people were dead, including 88 Australians and 7 Americans, and more than 500 had been injured. (A smaller bomb was also set off outside a nearby US consulate that night, but it did little damage.)
Megawati, who was president at the time, had initially ignored the growing terrorist threat. She had rejected offers of assistance from Washington and other allies and had refused to even acknowledge that Indonesia had a problem, at one point insisting that JI did in fact not exist. But the Bali bombings, as well as a number of subsequent grisly attacks—especially the beheading of three Christian schoolgirls on the island of Sulawesi—horrified and galvanized the public, forcing them to accept that they were all at risk. Under intense pressure at home and from outside partners—President George W. Bush sent a high-level envoy to demand that Megawati get serious, while Australia threatened to use its own forces to start arresting suspects—Jakarta finally reversed course.
Megawati’s first step, less than a week after the Bali attacks, was to support the passage of a broad new antiterrorism law that made it easier to try militants in court. About eight months later, her government set up an elite new counterterrorism unit known as Densus 88 (Detachment 88). And Megawati finally agreed to start accepting outside aid—albeit quietly, so as to avoid provoking a nationalist backlash. With US diplomatic and financial support, Australia embedded a number of police officers with Indonesian units, where they joined in the hunt for suspects and started training local cops in state-of-the-art scientific crime-scene investigation. Indonesia’s allies also flew Detachment 88 members around the world for intelligence training and supplied the unit with high-tech surveillance and military gear. This equipment included, most critically, devices for monitoring cell phone conversations, which Sidney Jones, head of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) in Jakarta, says were responsible for about 90 percent of subsequent arrests. Finally, Western states also provided generous counterterrorism funding and education to Indonesia’s courts and criminal prosecutors; at one point, Washington even arranged to fly in judges and lawyers to conduct training courses.
With the encouragement of Yudhoyono, who took office two years later, the country proceeded to mount what Time magazine has called “one of the world’s most determined campaigns against terrorism.” Detachment 88 quickly grew into a force of over four hundred agents, and soon after it reached full strength the number of successful terrorist attacks in Indonesia began to plummet, becoming so rare that in 2008 the US government lifted its travel warning for the country. There have been few major incidents in recent years. And the death toll has been tiny compared to the early 2000s. Tellingly, almost all of the victims have been police officers. In 2014 the Institute for Economics and Peace ranked Indonesia thirty-first in its Global Terrorism Index (a better score than it gave the United States or Great Britain). While the government continues to uncover the occasional plot, hardly any of them succeed; Jones describes the current threat as “low-tech, low-competence, [and] low-casualty.”
The reason? Indonesia’s terrorist groups have been all but eviscerated, and foreign groups like ISIS haven’t found much of a foothold. The men who planned and carried out the Bali attack, as well as most of JI’s leaders, have been captured or killed. Facing extermination, the group has officially renounced violence in Indonesia. A few of its diehards have formed new splinter cells, but Detachment 88 has pursued them just as relentlessly. In 2010, for example, it swooped in on a training base in Aceh run by a coalition of JI successors known as Jamaah Anshorut Tauhid. During the raid, counterterrorism officers apprehended a number of senior leaders and recovered a treasure trove of information that has led to the trial and imprisonment of two hundred more militants. (The government is thought to have jailed a total of about nine hundred terrorists since 2002.)
As such operations show, Detachment 88 can function with devastating force. But—and this represents the final part of the government’s larger strategy to counter extremism—it’s not just a hammer. Indonesia’s unhappy history with dictatorship taught its democratic leaders that too punitive an approach only fuels the resentment that feeds extremism in the first place. So Indonesia’s war on terror has been waged with uncommon precision, even delicacy.
Indeed, “war” is probably the wrong word to use; Jakarta has treated terrorism more like a law-enforcement problem than a military one. Instead of relying on the army, which had enthusiastically enabled Suharto’s repression, the government turned to the national police force, forming Detachment 88 from its ranks. And Jakarta has tried to avoid any other moves that might create more sympathy for the Islamists. It has generally only detained terrorism suspects when it has had enough hard evidence to do so. And it’s held public trials for those it seeks to imprison. Taking this approach has involved some painful compromises—for example, to the dismay of investigators, numerous suspects widely thought guilty have been released by the courts or given sentences lighter than counterterrorism officials would have liked.
But Indonesia’s emphasis on law enforcement has also proved highly advantageous. Trying suspects in open court instead of leaving them to rot in secret cells has produced a wealth of evidence that cops and prosecutors have been able to use in subsequent investigations, and provided them with a more sophisticated understanding of how ordinary Indonesians become militants in the first place. Even more important, this approach has also reinforced the rule of law and public trust in government. And, adds Solahudin, a terrorism investigator with IPAC, Jakarta’s use of public hearings has forced ordinary Indonesians—many of whom had grown conspiracy-minded during the Suharto era, when their government often used trumped-up charges to prosecute peaceful political opponents—to accept that Indonesia’s terrorism problem wasn’t the invention of the security services or a CIA-Mossad plot, but rather a genuine, homegrown threat.
The government’s efforts to win the war of ideas haven’t stopped here; in another powerful innovation, it has worked hard to rehabilitate as well as incarcerate. Rather than treat captured terrorists as unredeemable criminals—“evil incarnate,” in Jones’s terms—Detachment 88 has handled them as what she describes as “good men gone astray.” In practice, this has meant offering suspects a range of inducements to try to turn them into informants and get them to renounce violence. Guards allow their prisoners to worship freely, and to build trust and establish their own Islamic credentials, they and Detachment 88 interrogators often share meals with the militants and join them in prayer. Prisoners who agree to cooperate are generously rewarded: the government pays for their weddings, for family visits, and even for their children’s school fees and medical expenses.
To supplement this charm offensive, SBY’s administration mounted a very public campaign to undermine the root causes of terrorism. Spearheaded by the National Counter-Terrorism Agency (BNPT), which Yudhoyono created in 2010, and backed by various civic organizations, the campaign has involved setting up moderate pesantrens; getting prominent local and Middle Eastern imams to denounce violence on Islamic grounds; trotting former terrorists out on TV to graphically describe their crimes and express remorse; and enlisting everyone from comic-book artists to pop stars to promote tolerance and moderation among the public at large (some of the resulting albums have even topped the charts on MTV Asia). Lumped together, these programs constitute what Magnus Ranstorp of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies has called one of the most systematic and successful antiextremism initiatives anywhere. One payoff: according to Pew Research polls, between 2002 and 2013 the number of Indonesians opposed to terrorist attacks against civilians rose from 66 to 81 percent.
After almost a decade of steady progress in its complex campaign against radicalism, Indonesia’s efforts began to flag toward the end of the Yudhoyono administration. Whether it was out of complacency, indolence, or exhaustion—or, most likely, a combination of the three—SBY began to ease up on many of his most effective policies.
For instance, he allowed Indonesia’s economic revival to falter. In 2012 the country’s current account and trade balance went into deficit, GDP growth began to slow, and the rupiah became one of Asia’s worst-performing currencies. In short order, Indonesia went from being touted as a new economic superstar—the next India—to being called one of the world’s “fragile five” economies by Morgan Stanley. Apart from the hardship it’s caused, what makes this ongoing slowdown worrisome is the fact that poverty has been a potent source of extremism in Indonesia—or at least a potent propaganda tool that Islamist parties have exploited. While SBY made a dent in the problem, by the end of his tenure some 43 percent of the population (about one hundred million people) still lived on less than $2 a day.
As he prepared to leave office, SBY’s commitment to fighting corruption also seemed to flag, especially as the investigators he had once empowered drew closer and closer to his own inner circle. In 2012 both the chairman and the treasurer of Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party were implicated in a scandal linked to the rigging of construction tenders—yet the president stood behind both men. Around that time, the KPK (Indonesia’s anticorruption agency) also began to encounter increasing pushback from the MPR and the police, only to discover that it could no longer count on public or bureaucratic backing from its erstwhile patron.
Allegations of torture, unlawful detention, and “encounter killings” (the unprovoked shooting of suspects during their capture) by Detachment 88 and the national police also began to rise, threatening to undo the government’s careful PR campaign. More recently, an unknown number of Indonesians (experts put the figure at several hundred) have joined up with ISIS in Syria and Iraq—raising fears that they could return home and unleash a new wave of terrorism, just as veterans of Afghanistan did a dozen years before. Already these militants have managed to claim several new victims.
Despite these fears and Yudhoyono’s disappointing turn, however, the greatest validation of his general approach to extremism—and confirmation of its moderating effect on ordinary Indonesians—came in July 2014, when those same Indonesians elected fifty-three-year-old Joko Widodo (universally known as Jokowi) to be their next president.
Jokowi’s election was an electrifying event for a number of reasons. For starters, his opponent, Prabowo Subianto, had represented all the worst aspects of Indonesia’s past. A former son-in-law of Suharto and an ex–special forces general with a shady human rights record, Prabowo is an angry nationalist who openly advocated a return to “guided democracy”—the soft authoritarianism practiced by Sukarno, the country’s first dictator.
Jokowi, by contrast, represents the best hopes for Indonesia’s future, and seems even more committed to promoting democracy and fighting extremism than was SBY. Unlike Indonesia’s previous three presidents—all of whom came from elite backgrounds and had ties to the old regime—he is a true man of the people. A former two-term mayor of the central Java city of Solo who then spent two years as governor of Jakarta before unexpectedly vaulting to the presidency, Jokowi is the son of a carpenter and ran a small furniture business before entering politics. He has an extraordinary public touch; as mayor and governor, he spent hours every day walking the streets and listening to his constituents’ concerns. He is also a technocratic reformer who promotes transparency and the use of new technologies to fight corruption: when I interviewed him in Jakarta a few months after his election, he spent most of the time talking about the virtues of e-government and the benefits of using smart cards to deliver government services. Jokowi is known to be fiercely principled—as mayor he declined to draw a salary—and is an unapologetic champion of tolerance. When he first took charge of Solo in 2005, it had a reputation for Islamic radicalism. Yet rather than bow to local extremists, Jokowi made merit, not religion, the core principle of his administration—a tradition he continued in Jakarta, where his deputy was an ethnic Chinese who liked to call himself a “pork-eating infidel.”
Like Barack Obama, to whom he’s often compared, Jokowi had little national or international experience before taking high office, and like Obama, he has stumbled frequently since then (low commodity prices, the lousy international economic climate, and meddling by Megawati, who leads his political party, also haven’t helped). Yet Jokowi remains a potent symbol of Indonesia’s great progress. Such a principled politician could never have become Indonesia’s leader without the shrewd, messy, and often baldly cynical strategies his predecessors used to such great effect in all but defeating the Islamist threat to their country. The fact that their approach combined both flashes of idealism and some less-than-attractive compromises should not diminish its appeal—either for Jokowi himself or for other states still struggling to outflank their own extremists. Indonesia shows that the fight against radical Islam is actually winnable—provided that leaders have the courage, cunning, and flexibility to do what’s necessary.