On Terror's Trail

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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."