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| Down Under |
| Australia warned to expect attacks |
| 2004-07-05 |
| AUSTRALIA has been warned it could expect direct attacks from Al-Qaeda if Jemaah Islamiyah proved incapable of striking again. A leading terrorism expert yesterday warned that Al-Qaeda would take a more active role in the region if JI failed to follow up the Bali bombing with another devastating attack. Aldo Borgu, from the Government-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told a Brisbane anti-terrorism conference that JI would "sooner or later" need to demonstrate its continued relevance. "Should JI prove itself to be incapable of mounting serious operations against Australia, we may well witness Al-Qaeda taking more of a direct interest in targeting Australia," he said. Mr Borgu said authorities and analysts should not "fool themselves" that JI was the only terrorist threat Australia faced. It would be equally wrong to downplay JI’s ability to strike in the wake of the post-Bali crackdown that resulted in the arrests of 200 JI members. "While JI’s abilities to undertake relatively sophisticated operations may have been degraded, their ability to attack soft targets remains," Mr Borgu said. He said he was concerned that, despite the apparent emphasis placed on the seriousness of the terrorist threat, Australia still did not have an overarching national counter-terrorism strategy. "We have a national anti-terrorism plan to deal with terrorist attacks after they occur, but no whole-of-government, whole-of-nation strategy to fight it on a comprehensive, ongoing and long-term basis," he said. Mr Borgu also urged the Government to establish teams of analysts to "think and behave as terrorists". "Once we begin to think like them, then we’ll be at a point of better understanding them and hence able to combat them much more effectively," he said. "One of the major problems we face is that we have little understanding of the threat or whom we are fighting." Also at the symposium yesterday, Australian Defence Force chief General Peter Cosgrove urged stronger relationships between Australian police and military to fend off terror attacks in Australia. General Cosgrove also warned delegates the Australian public needed to be "more vigilant and more aware" of the ever-present threat of terrorism. He said the growing terrorist threat had forced civil and military forces to work together to prevent attacks and that state and territory police were Australia’s first line of defence rather than the "sledge hammer of military force". |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |