JAKARTA - "Diplomacy" and "debate" share the
same first letter but they refer to very different concepts. The same could be
said of what "defense" and "dialogue" turned out to mean in
the just-concluded Jakarta International Defense Dialogue 2012 convened in
Indonesia's capital city from March 21 to 23.
JIDD 2012, attended by an estimated 1,500 delegates from 37 different
countries, was the product of collaboration between two sorts of people:
military professionals in Indonesia's armed forces and its defense ministry on
the one hand, and classroom specialists in the Indonesian Defense University
(IDU) on the other. The latter were teachers and students more accustomed to
discussion than deterrence.
As stated by IDU's rector Syarifudin Tippe, the main theme of JIDD 2012
seemed well suited to a meeting of military and civilian minds. Military
Operations Other Than War (MOOTW) neatly bridged the gap: if the
battlefield-savvy officers knew about military operations, the
classroom-trained analysts were comfortable thinking about activities other
than war. But as the officials spoke at unrestricted length in defense of their
respective governments, the time for dialogue with the analysts ran out.
Presumably delegates took constructive advantage of the opportunity for
bilateral meetings and corridor chats on the margins of the main event. The
booths in an adjacent Asia-Pacific Security and Defense Expo showcased the
weapons and other products of Indonesia's defense industry for would-be buyers
and investors from other countries. JIDD 2012 both illustrated and augmented
Indonesia's rising profile in global affairs. [1]
Yet the effort to achieve creative synergy between soldiers and
scholars fell short as diplomacy pre-empted debate. On the conference program,
officials vastly outnumbered academics, think-tankers and private sector
representatives. While scholars don't always speak truth to power, there were
few opportunities to explore and critique what officials said during their
presentations.
Too many official speakers spent too much time abstractly stressing the
cliched need for international cooperation. Too few delved into the granular
details of how such cooperation should be structured and focused to achieve
concrete results. At times it seemed as if "confidence building" had
become an end in itself.
In this dispiriting context, former Philippine president Fidel Ramos
woke up the proceedings by asking the delegates inside the vast plenary hall of
the Jakarta Convention Center to shake their neighbors' hands. This was done,
albeit laughingly to conceal embarrassment. But when Ramos went further to ask
the delegates to kiss one another, delegates kept their distances. The former
defense secretary could have used the joke to explore and exemplify in specific
terms, using actual cases, the real limits of friendly exhortation and the
actual methods of constructive cooperation. Instead he pulled what could have
been his punch.
Singapore's counter-terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna recounted in
impressive detail the recent history of jihadist violence in Southeast Asia,
but he did not go beyond arguing that such violence was still a threat. Nor did
he convey and assess the specifics of what could be done to contain or reduce
the threat.
Significantly, there was no time left over between speeches for anyone
to answer that key operational question, despite its location precisely in the
overlap between policy decisions and scholarly analyses that the "defense
dialogue" seemed so clearly designed to explore.
Had the policy question been dealt with, JIDD 2012 might have grappled
with an especially debatable implication of its very theme: that
non-traditional challenges to security such as extremist violence and cyber
crime are best handled through explicitly military operations other than war -
the "M" in MOOTW - rather than by civilian institutions and
initiatives involving the police and the public but not the armed forces.
Striking in this context is the argument made by counter-terrorism
analyst Sidney Jones in the current issue of Indonesia's new world affairs
journal Strategic Review:
Since 2009, there has been a concerted effort by the Indonesian
government to give the country's Armed Forces, or Tentara Nasional Indonesia
(TNI), a larger role in counter-terrorism. This is not a good idea. However
logical it may seem on the surface, the TNI is now almost 10 years out of date
in understanding the nature of the terrorist threat. It prides itself on
operational readiness, but it is readiness to confront a theoretical enemy.
Without specialized knowledge of how extremist groups function in Indonesia
today, the TNI's involvement will bring no added value to the fight against terrorism:
it is more likely to bring confusion, competition and duplication of effort.
Without criticizing the TNI, Tito Karnavian, a high official in
Indonesia's National Counter Terrorism Agency, gave a refreshingly prescriptive
presentation at the intersection of public policy and academic analysis. But
the larger issue - specifically what military operations short of warfare might
be appropriate in meeting which specific non-traditional threats to security -
not receive the attention it deserved.
For two reasons, the JIDD 2012 came up short in meeting its stated
objectives. First, the conference was explicitly tasked to consider MOOTW in
the context of a democracy in which the armed forces are meant to be
subordinate to civilian leadership and institutions. Viewed in that context,
the issue of military "mission creep" is not an academic matter. It
is a proper concern of analysts and policy makers alike, precisely the
constituencies that the conference was meant to feature and serve.
Second and finally, the series of annual Defense Dialogues, of which
JIDD 2012 was the second, can be interpreted as a bid by Indonesia to
indigenize security policy discourse in Southeast Asia: to develop an
attractive supplement, or even an alternative, to the near-monopoly enjoyed by
the Shangri-La Dialogue that has been organized annually since 2002 in
Singapore by the International Institute for Strategic Studies headquartered in
London. A parallel Southeast Asian initiative to discuss security policy is the
Malaysia-based Putrajaya Forum, an annual event first convened in 2010.
The Shangri-La Dialogue continues to call itself "the key regional
forum for discussing important defense and security concerns." [2] Will
the JIDD or the Putrajaya Forum succeed to the point of challenging that claim?
With that question in mind, observers will be comparing the recent JIDD in
Jakarta with the upcoming Putrajaya Forum in Kuala Lumpur on April 17-19 and
the subsequent Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on June 1-3. [3]
Whether the Shangri-La Dialogue's centrality will be dislodged or not
will depend on many contingencies, including the willingness of China and other
major players to bestow prestige on this or that venue by sending its top
leaders to attend. Its Western provenance and management could prove to be a
liability of the Shangri-La Dialogue as it tries to maintain its reputation in
Southeast Asia.
Yet the Shangri-La formula has much to recommend it: High-ranking
officials are allowed to say whatever they predictably wish to say. But they
are also exposed to direct and lively interrogation from the floor by scholars
and journalists who pose the probing questions that the officials in the
audience are thinking of but do not dare to ask, and are secretly happy that
someone else has.
The 2013 JIDD will focus on cyber security. It will be up to the
younger generation of policy scholars from Indonesia and other countries,
working with the Indonesian defense establishment, to make sure that the
discussion goes beyond acknowledging a general need to cooperate in stemming
crime and sabotage in cyberspace.
Rather they will need to propose and debate specific and creative
answers to the question asked by Vladimir Lenin in a different context more
than a century ago: What is to be done? If that happens, a real dialogue about
defense will enable Indonesia's experiment to live up to the D's in its name.
Donald K Emmerson
Asia Times
Notes
1. For more on this subject, see the chapters in Anthony Reid, ed,
Indonesia Rising: The Repositioning of Asia's Third Giant (Singapore: Institute
of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012), including my own, "Is Indonesia Rising?
It Depends," pp. 49-76.
2. See here.
3. Other Southeast Asian initiatives, narrower in scope, include the
Network of ASEAN Defense and Security Institutes (NADI), reportedly scheduled
to meet in the third week of April in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
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