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With 100 kilos of potassium chlorate, JI wiped out the tourist trade in Bali (it has yet to recover after eight months), gave a name and faces to terrorism in Southeast Asia and showed the reach of its tentacles. The Bali bombers were Indonesians, but they had long histories in Malaysia. JI adherents train with southern Philippine rebels, have been spotted in southern Thailand and are cultivating Muslim minority tribes in Indochina. In 2001 they reconnoitered in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia to see if they could blow up some U.S. naval personnel or warships.
Seven or eight of JI's top leaders are still at large. Could they accomplish another Bali? They might not need to. "It would only take a couple of blasts in Orchard Road [Singapore's main shopping district] to have a grave economic impact," says Zachary Abuza, author of a forthcoming book on al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia. That is not the worst-case scenario, by any means. The Strait of Malacca, between Malaysia and Indonesia, is the world's busiest waterway, a maritime bottleneck that is only 2 km across at its narrowest point: hundreds of ships pass through each day, including those carrying almost all of Japan's oil from the Persian Gulf. Security is so loose that pirates hijack ships every week. "Most people in the business think an al-Qaeda-linked attack of some kind at sea is inevitable," says a senior maritime security official in Southeast Asia.
Last September, captured al-Qaeda operative Omar al-Faruq told U.S. interrogators that he had begun plotting a suicide attack against American vessels visiting Indonesia, but had to give it up due to a lack of local volunteers willing to sacrifice their lives. A scarier possibility is of terrorists hijacking an oil tanker or a ship carrying chemical or nuclear waste, which "regularly transit the Strait without any escort," the official says. That might not be a mere scenario: there have been three mysterious attacks on chemical tankers in the Strait in the past month. "It's particularly worrying that the attackers did little more than get on board, immobilize the crews and leave with a few token valuables," says a regional intelligence official. "They were almost like training exercises." If a terrorist blew up, say, a liquefied natural-gas carrier, the resulting blast would be like a mini nuke and could flatten an entire port. Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew was alarmed enough to issue a public warning last year about the dangers posed by seaborne attacks on the republic's port.
Shortly before the ASEAN ministers declared their region ZOPFAN in 1971, Asia-based journalist Dick Wilson published a thick and thoughtful book called Asia Awakes. Coverage of China, Japan and India filled the most pages. Describing Southeast Asia, Wilson called the region "a quarrelsome collection of small states which are politically, economically and militarily vulnerable." Since then, the region has experienced myriad blessings: oil revenues for some countries, inspiring leadership for others, political freedoms won stirringly elsewhere. Those triumphs of resources, finance and politics became, for a time, batik-tinged lenses through which one could look past Southeast Asia's problems to its tantalizing potential. The issues for the region now—questionable or authoritarian political systems, economic competition from China, and terrorism—are obstacles that even the most optimistic visionary has trouble seeing past. In the 20th century, the region's bogeymen—imperialism, war and communism—came from without. In the 21st century, Southeast Asia's greatest threats come from within.