Southeast Asia is the region of the developing world that has been most consistently friendly to America and Americans over the past half century, both at the governmental and the individual person-to-person level. Most countries here were US allies during the Cold War and the Vietnam War, and are deeply engaged economically with the US. Several of the region's governments — the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore — have now declared their willingness to support the US in its "war against terrorism," including offering facilities and logistic support for any military action.

But this picture of support for the US — together with widespread sympathy for its sufferings of the September 11 terrorist attacks — is complicated by internal diversity and domestic politics.

Islam is the dominant religion in Southeast Asia. Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim country and its third largest democracy. Muslims form the majority of the population in Malaysia, and are 10-15 percent of the population in the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore. But all these Southeast Asians, predominantly Malay peoples, have traditionally practiced what has been called a "gentle strain of Islam" — open, tolerant, moderate, and used to mostly harmonious co-existence with other races and religions, and a stronger role for women than in most non-Islamic countries.

Recently, however, Islam has taken on a stronger political salience in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. Many acts of violence, including bombings, large-scale kidnapping, hostage-taking and murder, have been committed in the southern Philippines by the Abu Sayyaf, who are thought to have links with Osama bin Laden. Muslim-Christian hostility and acts of violence, including numerous church burnings and the bombing of the Jakarta stock exchange, have beset Indonesia since the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998. The Laskar Jihad group whose militia activities have contributed to over 9,000 Muslim and Christian deaths in the Moluccas in the past several years also has purported ties to bin Laden. Malaysia claims to have nipped in the bud several attempted acts of violence by foreign-trained Islamic militants. The Muslim-dominated Malaysian government also faces a more conservative Islamic opposition which has grown in strength among Muslim voters displeased with what they perceive as the government's growing corruption and repression. In Indonesia, Muslims constitute a heterogeneous faction in parliament and nationalist secessionists in Aceh province, who also happen to be conservative Muslims, have suffered for decades at the hands of a so-called "moderate" military once supported by the US.

In this political context, support for or opposition to the United States in its war against mainly Muslim terrorists elsewhere, is not the simple matter of universal good versus evil that it seems to be to many Americans. Governments previously chastised by the US for human rights violations in their internal crackdowns on Islamic radicals are suddenly claiming that the recent events vindicate their own tough and generally unpopular internal security actions. These governments also risk more domestic radical Islamic opposition if they cooperate too closely with the US, while the US itself risks looking like a supporter of localized political repression in the guise of a supposedly global war against terrorism.

Muslim friends in both Malaysia and Indonesia were noticeably quick to send me their condolences, expressions of shock and horror and condemnation of the recent attacks, but they also pointed out that Islam explicitly forbids violence against civilians and innocents, even in jihad or holy war, and also condemns suicide. The actions of the terrorists in New York and Washington were, to these staunch practicing Southeast Asian Muslims, against Islam itself.

At the same time, these pro-American friends also voiced their despair and sympathy with the dominant local sentiment expressed in the media and by ordinary citizens, often reacting to what they have been seeing on CNN and other US media. This was the question "Why?" — uttered not to justify but to explain and understand the actions of the presumed terrorists. Why does America privilege only its grief and its suffering, ignoring the sufferings of others who have long suffered as much, if not more, sometimes at the hands of US foreign policy itself? Why does America demand and expect compassion only for its victims of terrorism, without showing any compassion for the innocent victims of many other terrorisms, or of its own military actions, particularly in the Middle East? Why does America support repressive regimes in the Muslim world, which it calls "moderate" but whose own citizens only experience as despotism? Why does America know and care so little about the rest of the world?

The one thing that all Southeast Asians share today is a fear of American military retaliation — what it might be and what it might bring. Allied governments who have pledged their support fear that this in itself will incite more domestic resentment, including acts of terrorist or electoral retaliation, against them, that it might garner more support for indigenous Islamic radicals, and provoke more anti-Americanism. The region's many fragmented and fractious Islamic radical groups could possibly provide sanctuary for Middle Eastern terrorists, drawing these countries themselves directly into the US "war against terrorism," with attendant political and financial costs that they can ill afford. Even the politically unconcerned fear the consequences of a massive and sustained US military retaliation for the global economy, local financial markets, and their own personal welfare. War is the one thing that none of America's allies in Southeast Asia want.

Finally, Southeast Asians still vividly remember that, not so long ago, the US fought and lost a very long war here, against a much more definable and geographically concentrated enemy. Vietnam alone suffered as many as 2 million civilian deaths. Yet Vietnam is now on good terms with the US, having exchanged ambassadors and signed a trade treaty. Given the enormity of their sufferings, ordinary Vietnamese today bear Americans remarkably little rancor. Hopefully with the passage of time, reflection and understanding, Americans too will eventually learn to forgive others as they themselves have been forgiven.

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