SIVACRACY.NET

I'm spending my Sunday morning in news blackout to avoid learning the score of the Lakers-Suns game that I'll catch later today on tape delay. In a sense, I already know the outcome: intense anxiety and bitterness on my part. Whether Kobe puts up 80 points and sinks a final three from 40 feet away as time expires to secure a one-point victory, or Steve Nash dishes out 24 assists and scores 35 points, making me have to endure another round of fawning over the superstars, I'll emerge an unhappy camper, and will just have to hope that Ben Wallace can administer some pain to the eventual Western Conference victors at a later date.

In the meantime, I'm reading the newest report about Indonesia from the International Crisis Group, which continues to put out first-rate work on terrorism in Southeast Asia. "Terrorism in Indonesia: Noordin's Networks" is avaialble in pdf format on the group's Indonesia page, and is filled with typically exacting research. It's not my favorite of their reports, as it largely eschews political context to focus on the nitty-gritty of the organizational efforts of Noordin Mohammed Top, the Malaysian militant believed to be responsible for a number of Indonesia's most recent terrorist attacks. The report suggests that it's hard out here for a Southeast Asian terrorist; though there's no shortage of potential recruits for suicide missions, financing is now so spotty that new militants are relying increasingly on armed robbery to fund their own training, and the police are hot on his trail. Interestingly, while Noordin views himself as leading Jemaah Islamiah's military wing, he evidently has little in the way of formal contact with the rest of the JI organization, and virtually none with Al Qaeda's core; he speaks no Arabic and has had only limited exposure to the original Al Qaeda base, though he feeds on their rhetoric and iconography. More evidence that Al Qaeda is far more of a social movement deeply constrained by local conditions than it is some kind of central brain with global reach.

This isn't because global terrorist organizations are playing a kind of transnational game of telephone, in which a message gets subtly twisted by every person who whispers it furtively along a chain between Osama himself and a few suicide bombers in Bali. Instead, it has a lot to do with the ways in which global themes, repertoires of violence, and potential tactics resonate with local actors engaged in much more proximate battles than the overall jihad against America.

On a related topic, Merlyna Lim, a visiting fellow at USC's Annenberg Center, published a fascinating paper last year (I'm a bit behind on my Indonesia reading) in the East-West Center's Policy Studies series. According to Lim, the group Laskar Jihad -- long cited by western counterterrorism specialists as the main Islamist threat in Indonesia, at least until JI became a bigger blip on the radar -- used the Internet to stir local anti-America and anti-Israel sentiment, turning it toward their own local priorities. These weirdly mixed nationalist icons with Islamist language, though the messages were themselves understood in divergent ways among Indonesia's Muslims. It's a fascinating and very well-written piece, one that's well worth checking out.