John Howard, Hombre: A leader in the war on terror, whose neighborhood is particularly rough.

Australians are rather famous for their dislike of pretensions. And in this respect their prime minister, John Howard, represents them truly. A smallish man, whom you wouldn't necessarily look twice at, he is always busy getting on with things in his own forthright way, in the process winning three consecutive general elections. The economy is in reasonable shape, and he's made himself popular by controlling illegal immigration. On September 11 he happened to be in Washington, in a position to appreciate at first hand that choices have to be made which will help to determine civilization for some time to come.

Under his direction, Australian troops have been successful peacekeepers in the Pacific region, in East Timor and the Solomon Islands. Further afield, their special forces joined the Iraq coalition and in a professional performance hunted down Saddam Hussein's Scud- missile launchers with no losses to themselves. Along with the United States and Britain, Australia has been accepting its share of responsibility for international order.

Australian politics are rough, without pretension even to parliamentary language. While Howard and his foreign minister Alexander Downer and other members of the government proclaim that they are completely unapologetic about their alliance with the United States, politicians in the opposition Labour party and supportive leftists in the media chuck about insults like "slavish" and "arse-licking." Simon Crean, leader of the Labour party, told troops about to sail for Iraq that they should not have been dispatched on such a mission. The actress Judy Davis blackened Australia as a "scavenger on the world stage."

On the grounds that weapons of mass destruction have not yet been found, a former middle-rank intelligence officer named Andrew Wilkie is accusing the Howard government of deceiving the public in order to wage war. Vulgar or fanciful abuse strengthens Howard's hand and is likely to ensure yet more general-election victories in the future. For whether it likes it or not, Australia is inescapably part of the wider war on terror.

To prosper, a terrorist organization requires a territory. To the north of Australia is what specialists in strategy like to call an "arc of instability," ranging from failed states such as Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands to the Philippines, with its Islamist Abu Sayyaf movement, and most especially to Indonesia, an archipelago of islands with a population of 190 million Muslims, as well as perhaps 30 million people of Indian and Chinese origins, who are Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian -- the mix of geography and ethnicity and religious faith has every potential for leading to another failed state. For half a century, a deeply corrupt dictatorship kept the country together by means of the army and police apparatus. Since the fall of the last dictator, Suharto, politicians including the current president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, have been taking tentative steps toward democracy.

Generally speaking, Indonesian Islam is tolerant, with all sorts of syncretistic borrowings, unlike purist Arab Islam. Greg Barton, a respected Australian authority on the subject, suggests that Indonesian society may still be in the process of Islamization. That is also what the Saudis think. Over the last two decades, Saudi money has been pouring into Indonesia quite as lavishly as into Pakistan or the Taliban, and for the same purpose of indoctrinating youth into the hard-line Wahhabi Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia. The local religious schools, known as pesantren, tend to produce pupils whose education is deliberately limited to learning the Koran by heart in Arabic, which is not their language. A Saudi creation parallel to al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiah is a conspiratorial group of Muslim extremists who aim to conscript these youths into a mass movement. Probably there are no more than 500 to 1,000 activists, though thousands more sympathize emotionally. Well aware that in a successful democracy they would be merely an insignificant and unpopular minority, Jemaah Islamiah extremists believe that they must make a bid for power and supremacy, and even a territory, while they still can. The grandiose aim is nothing less than an Islamic caliphate right across Southeast Asia. This would break the country apart into inter-communal and inter-faith murdering, and so destabilize the region far and ...