At a briefing in the dilapidated police headquarters in Jakarta late last month, senior Indonesian police officials announced that Islamic militants would probably soon detonate a bomb in the capital and tacitly acknowledged that they could do little to prevent it. A captured Islamic militant confessed that he had delivered two carloads of bombmaking materials to the capital. And a police raid in the central Java city of Semarang uncovered papers outlining areas of Jakarta earmarked for attack by Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a network allied to al-Qaeda and tied to last year's Bali bombing.
The officials were proved right last week...