While the insurgents have shown they mean business, the same determination cannot be seen in the security apparatus, whose job it is to make sure this does not happen.

It was clear that yesterday's attacks, which involved the use of small, improvised explosive devices, were aimed primarily at humiliating the local authorities, police and the armed forces. They also served to remind the local population that the cause championed by small groups of Malay nationalists to create a separate homeland in the Muslim-majority region is still very much alive, and that the government's effort to restore peace and re-establish the rule of law is not working.

There are only a few possible answers to the question of why local officials failed to prevent attacks of such scale, which must have involved scores of insurgents, bomb-makers and collaborators.

Either the insurgents have become a lot better at what they do or the police and military officials responsible for security in the region have stayed incompetent or remain confused about their mission or military rules of engagement. Or they simply lack the will to fight the elusive insurgents, who have made effective use of the tactic of hit-and-run and then blending into the local population.

The lack of intelligence-gathering skills has been identified as the main problem ever since more than 100 insurgents overran an army installation of battalion strength in a daring raid in January 2004, killing two soldiers and making away with nearly 400 pieces of weaponry from the arms depot before disappearing without a trace. Since then police and Army troops - not to mention unarmed civilians - have been on the receiving end of insurgent attacks.

The only exception was the April 28, 2004, incident in which more than 100 armed insurgents were killed in a single day after their plot to launch coordinated attacks against military and police targets was intercepted. The high number of casualties among the insurgents should not be credited to the government side, given the fact that the militants chose to walk into certain death. It was a political statement - one that made many nervous as it was the closest thing to a suicide mission Thailand has ever seen.

Without a doubt, yesterday's attack was another slap in the face of the country's security apparatus. Like previous incidents, our esteemed political leaders were left with virtually nothing to say - merely mumbling their way from one interview to the next, unabashedly saying how government policy has been on the right track and how things are going to improve.

They continue to see the crisis in the Malay-speaking region as an issue of law and order, while ignoring various complexities and the issues of identity among the Malays, who have continued to resist assimilation and Thai cultural influence for fear of losing their own.

More than 1,200 people, including Buddhist and Muslim civilians, have been killed in the ongoing violence in the three southernmost provinces in the past two and a half years. Yet there is no indication that the policy makers are willing to think outside the box and explore other possibilities, such as political or structural reform. It seems all they can think of is how to make the Malays more Thai.

On the ground, security personnel continue to be targeted by insurgents, and their morale is being eroded continuously as colleagues one by one become another statistic.

The response time to crises has not improved one bit, as the beating of two teachers in Narathiwat's Kuching Reupah village illustrated.