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An intriguing sidebar to the story of the Indonesian president's visit to Australia this week has been the additional insight into Jakarta's role in trying to solve South-East Asia's biggest problem: the brutal grip of Burma's military regime.

Burma is the most glaring bit of evidence for the critics of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, ASEAN. To them, the regional grouping's inability to persuade Burma's military junta to retreat from political power shows it up as a toothless tiger, unable to provide the foundations for a wider security arrangement in Asia, and its human rights standards to be set at the lowest common denominator.

Indonesian opinion makers here for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's visit privately expressed a lot of frustration that their...