Today's editorial in the Australian Age.

Jakarta is not in Afghanistan, Prime Minister

WHENEVER Australians are killed in an overseas terrorist attack, their deaths are inevitably emphasised in domestic reports of the atrocity. And if Australian fatalities appear to outnumber those of any other expatriate group, it is not surprising that some will be tempted to portray the attack as aimed chiefly at Australians. If the interpreters are politicians, it then becomes a short and convenient step to link the attack to other aspects of the nation's foreign and defence policy, whether or not there is evidence to justify such a claim. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd succumbed to the temptation at the weekend.

Craig Senger, Nathan Verity and Garth McEvoy, who were killed when a suicide bomber detonated explosives in Jakarta's Marriott hotel, will be mourned by all Australians, just as the 88 of our countrymen and women who died in the 2002 Bali bombings are mourned. So, too, will the nation mourn Private Benjamin Ranaudo, who on Saturday became the 11th Australian soldier to die fighting in Afghanistan. But, by apparently connecting the two events, Mr Rudd has not helped to clarify either the NATO-led coalition's war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the task Indonesian authorities face in tracking down those responsible for the bombings in the Marriott and the nearby Ritz-Carlton hotel, which killed nine people and injured more than 50.

"In the light of these terrible events in Afghanistan yesterday, it's important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat, and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause," Mr Rudd said.

The Prime Minister surely does not need reminding of the reason that the US and its allies went to war in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. It was to depose the Taliban regime and apprehend the al-Qaeda leaders, who had planned those attacks and were being sheltered by the regime. Since then, a resurgent Taliban has carried out operations on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, prompting a renewed offensive against them under the NATO banner. Mr Rudd has committed Australia to stay the course in that war. He rightly distinguished between the reasons for invading Afghanistan and those used to justify the later invasion and occupation of Iraq, from which Australia has withdrawn. Mr Rudd has no excuse, then, to conflate what is happening in Afghanistan with last week's events in Jakarta. Apart from a shared jihadist ideology, there is no evidence linking the perpetrators of the Jakarta bombings — according to Indonesian police, a faction of the regional terrorist group Jemaah Islamiah, led by Noordin Mohammed Top — with the Taliban. The Jemaah Islamiah network is believed to have inspired and supported the Bali bombers, and perhaps Mr Rudd hopes that by associating the two terrorist outrages with the Afghanistan war he can arouse enthusiasm for a military commitment that enjoys only equivocal support among Australians. If so, the ploy is likely to backfire. The rhetoric of a single, overarching "war on terror" was always misleading and implausible, and Mr Rudd should follow the example of the Obama Administration in discarding.

In the absence of a claim of responsibility, the aims of those who committed last week's atrocities must remain to some extent a matter of educated guesswork. But if, as seems likely, the police are correct in attributing the bombings to Jemaah Islamiah, Indonesia's political discontents must provide the primary context for interpreting the bombings. Beyond the fact that three Australians were killed, and the fact that the room in which the Marriott bomber detonated his explosives was being used for a business breakfast, the reality is that Indonesia is a country whose President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has recently won a landslide victory in free and fair elections. Indonesia's democracy continues to flourish, and to embrace its broadly tolerant tradition of Islam alongside other faiths. That cannot be palatable to a movement such as Jemaah Islamiah, for which any kind of pluralism reeks of Western corruption.