Quotes of the Day

The bombs that demolished part of Bali's bustling Kuta district three years ago represented more than a vicious terrorist attack and a terrible human tragedy. For many of those familiar with the Indonesian island—with its beauty, serenity and spirituality—the bombs exploded the idea of a peaceful safe haven in an increasingly violent world. Consumed by fear and horror, tourists fled Bali in droves.

Yet after three suicide bombers detonated knapsacks filled with explosives at packed restaurants in Kuta and Jimbaran Bay on Oct. 1, there wasn't the same rush for the exits. Kuta's famous waves are still dotted with surfers. Even the wide-open beachfront restaurants in the high-end Seminyak district north of Kuta are still buzzing, despite a warning last week from the Australian government that the area might be next on the terrorist hit list. At the trendy restaurant Ku De Ta, 20 or so tipsy Australian revelers wearing flower leis and fake horns circulate among the loungers and red umbrellas lining the beach, and couples dance in the sand, terrorism the last thing on their minds.

Of course, one key difference between the latest attacks and those of three years ago is the scale of the carnage: 20 confirmed deaths so far (excluding the bombers), not 202. But it's not just these lower numbers that have convinced visitors like Trish Davies to proceed with trips to Bali. Davies, who is visiting from Australia, expresses a mixture of defiance and resignation that reflects how inured many of us have become to the notion that terrorists can strike anytime, anywhere. Standing in front of the blasted remnants of the Raja restaurant in Kuta, the 39-year-old homemaker says she, her husband Greg and their three children arrived in Bali just three days after the bombs went off. "Our neighbors think we're crazy, but Bali isn't the only place that has bomb threats," says Davies. "It happens everywhere—look at London. We even had one at home in Melbourne." Besides, she adds, "we have planned this family holiday for six months and we're not going to let terrorists mess it up."

But the Oct. 1 attacks are far more ominous than these determinedly stoic reactions might suggest. What they demonstrate is that something fundamental has changed—that the terror threat, both in Indonesia and beyond, has mutated into a new and more elusive creature that may be far harder to combat. In 2002, the operation involved more than a dozen individuals who spent months and tens of thousands of dollars assembling nearly a ton of explosives. This time, police speculate that only six plotters, including the suicide bombers, may have been involved. Their equipment? A few sticks of TNT, some sacks of ball-bearings, nine-volt batteries, and three backpacks. In 2002 the nearly immediate discovery of key forensic evidence—the chassis number of the car used in the main bombing—started detectives on a trail that would lead them to sweep up all but a few of the plotters. This time, recognizable photographs of the three suspected bombers' severed heads have been widely published in Indonesia, yet police are still struggling to identify them. Bali police chief I Made Mangu Pastika admitted to reporters on Friday that his investigation had made "no progress."

Meanwhile, a visit to Jimbaran beach—where two of the bombers walked among the tables of holidaying families and detonated their explosives—underscores a grim truth: just how hard it's going to be to prevent further attacks like these. The police have finished their forensic investigation, the yellow tape and red flags marking body parts have been removed. Tables and chairs have been set upright, and the bottles and plates that stood for days as the sad reminder of never-finished holiday meals have been cleared away. The owners of restaurants at Jimbaran Bay say that when they reopen in a month or so, the popular eating strip will have security cameras and guards checking cars and their occupants. But with large numbers of young Indonesians ready to sacrifice their lives for Islam, says Zachary Abuza, who has authored several books on Islamic militancy in Southeast Asia, such measures may prove pointless: "When you are willing to die with a bomb that will fit in a backpack, targets like the Jimbaran restaurants are basically undefendable."

Experts like Abuza warn that there are plenty of young militants willing to take up this fight for an Islamic state in the region. Ironically, he notes, small-scale attacks by suicide bombers like the ones in Bali may be a side-effect of earlier police successes against extremists. After the first Bali bombings, police across Southeast Asia began a crackdown on Jemaah Islamiah (J.I.), the network of militants blamed for that attack. More than 300 alleged militants were arrested, including many top J.I. leaders. But by crippling much of the network's upper echelons, police have created a more fragmented and in some ways more elusive enemy. "Those initial arrests got the mantiqi [regional command] structure and the cells below that," explains Abuza. "But I don't think anyone realized how deep the structure went. We know from their interrogations that J.I. takes the cell discipline—most members only know a few people in their own cell—very seriously. Now there are so many compartmentalized cells and even cells from other radical groups that no one knows the full picture, even senior J.I. leaders."

An Indonesian government official with access to investigation reports offers a similarly unsettling picture of the difficulties involved in tracking down these loosely linked bands of terrorists: "Many of them have broken off relationships with older connections and have now formed smaller groups of their own. These people get recruited for jobs and may not even know who or what is recruiting them. Information is kept to a minimum and they are usually only told what they need to know."

Yet while the methods of J.I. and its affiliates are morphing due to increased police pressure (the smaller bombs used on Oct. 1 may be the result of less funding, for example, or stricter security), one aspect of the picture hasn't changed: authorities still believe that the terrorism linchpins in the region are 48-year-old Malaysian statistician Azahari bin Husin and his former student Nurdin Mohammed Top, 37. They are suspected of playing key roles as planners and bombmakers in the 2002 Bali blasts, the August 2003 bombing of Jakarta's JW Marriott Hotel, the September 2004 attack on the Australian embassy in the capital and the Oct. 1 bombings. While police don't have a smoking gun linking the two fugitives to the latest attacks, they say that the type of explosives and other materials used point to their involvement. Even Ali Imron, now serving a life sentence in a Jakarta jail for his part in the first Bali attacks, shares the view that Azahari has struck again. The use of TNT sticks and nine-volt batteries, Imron told a local paper last week, was classic Azahari.

During a Bangkok terror summit in 2002, J.I.'s then-operations chief, Riduan Isamuddin (a.k.a. Hambali, now in U.S. custody), ordered Azahari and Nurdin to plan attacks on "soft" Western targets in Indonesia, according to a J.I. member who was present and who is now under house arrest in Malaysia. Since then, the two have eluded Indonesia's largest ever manhunt. Azahari, whom captured accomplices have testified has a habit of accompanying his bombers to within a few hundred meters of their targets, has had no less than six breathtakingly narrow escapes from arrest over three years on the run. He twice slipped out the back doors of houses minutes before police arrived, and he was once waved on by a policeman who had stopped to check motorcyclists leaving a bombing site; the officer failed to recognize Azahari. The string of narrow misses continued on Friday when police in East Java, across the Bali Strait, said they had likewise missed capturing Nurdin by a few hours. According to local press reports, police were certain of his whereabouts but waited several hours before raiding the house because they were "worried he was armed with explosives." This record of failures illustrates a key problem facing Indonesia's security forces. "There is a huge gap between the professionals at the top and the local police," says Sidney Jones, who heads the Southeast Asia office of the International Crisis Group. "They can be hopeless."

Along with luck and formidable bombmaking abilities, Azahari and Nurdin, once colleagues in the geophysics department of an obscure Malaysian university, have one other critical talent—the ability to convince young men to sacrifice their lives in the name of Islam. Azyumardi Azra, a moderate Islamic scholar and rector of the State Islamic University in Jakarta, argues that a combination of poverty, the speed of societal change since the fall of dictator Suharto in 1998, and the Western military presence in Iraq, has left many young Muslims alienated and receptive to the message of global jihad. "The recruiters are good at brainwashing disoriented people and finding their weaknesses," says Azyumardi. Naiveté is also a factor. "Many of the recruits are simple village boys, and people like Nurdin can win them over with incredible speed," says Jakarta-based terrorism expert Ken Conboy. He notes that captured accomplices told police that two recent recruits were so raw that they had to be taught to drive before they could carry out missions in Jakarta and Bali.

It's not just Indonesia that's vulnerable to this force of malleable recruits. Some of them are already being dispatched from Indonesia to help fellow militants in neighboring countries. A Malaysian security official told TIME that three Indonesian militants arrested on June 9 in the Malaysian Borneo state of Sabah revealed to interrogators that they were intending to die as suicide bombers in the Philippines' troubled, Muslim-majority south. A senior Philippine security official has told TIME that after the arrest of militant Abdullah Sunata on July 2 in Indonesia, the authorities recovered e-mails between Sunata and Umar Patek, a fellow Indonesian and suspected bombmaker; in them, Patek allegedly asked for two recruits to be sent to the southern Philippines for training as suicide bombers, and also requested help in raising money for a bombing campaign in Manila and the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.

The authorities in Manila are engaged in peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (M.I.L.F.), the main group of Islamic insurgents on Mindanao. According to regional and Western security officials, parts of Mindanao, possibly outside the M.I.L.F's purview, serve as critical training and refuge areas for Islamic militants, primarily from Indonesia but also from Central Asia and the Middle East. On Friday, a M.I.L.F. spokesman told reporters that Dul Matin, an al-Qaeda-trained electronics expert suspected of playing a pivotal role in constructing the bombs for the 2002 Bali attacks, is on Mindanao, but not as a guest of the M.I.L.F.; the U.S. is offering a bounty of $10 million for Dul Matin, making him Washington's third-most-wanted terrorist after Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda's Iraq boss, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. With seasoned leaders like Dul Matin, Azahari and Nurdin on the loose and with a new generation of volunteers at their service, there is little doubt that more attacks can be expected.

Still, in Bali last week, life went on. Locals decked out in their finest clothes—colorful sarongs, snowy-white jackets, gold woven headscarves—flocked to the island's beaches at sunset to celebrate their most important festival, Galungan. It's a day when the Balinese recall the legendary victory of Dharma over Adharma, of good over evil. But even as they lit their festive candles and covered the beach with baskets of flowers, it was hard to forget the blood that had so recently been spilled on these same sands—and tempting to wonder if evil has once again regained the upper hand.

• Simon Elegant | Jimbaran Bay
• The Bali suicide bombings show that Asian terror networks have become more loosely organized—and harder to combat