[Beginning with our next issue, AFPC Fellow in Asia Studies Joshua Eisenman will return to the helm of the Asia Security Monitor.]
March 15:
Malaysia’s March 8th national elections have dealt a serious blow to the country’s ruling National Front coalition. The bloc, dominated by ethnic Malays, controls roughly 60 percent of parliament’s seats following the vote – down from 90 percent following the previous polls. Moreover, opposition parties won control of some of Malaysia’s largest and wealthiest states – five in all – for the first time since independence, writes the New York Times. The unprecedented setback for Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi’s coalition has been attributed to a spreading backlash against state-mandated favoritism toward ethnic Malays, who constitute only half of the country’s population. Ethnic Chinese and Indians, together accounting for a third of the population, are increasingly frustrated with the country’s 35-year-old affirmative action program, which “gives Malays benefits like discounts on new houses and 30 percent quotas in companies’ initial public offerings.”
March 16:
Pakistan has expelled three Saudi nationals “illegally staying in troubled areas,” according to the Saudi Interior Ministry. Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that at least two of the three were said to have contacted the Saudi Embassy in Pakistan in an attempt to turn themselves in, but authorities did not elaborate on the charges. Pakistan’s tribal areas have long been a destination for aspiring jihadists worldwide – particularly Saudis, who first popularized the voyage to South Asia in the 1980s during the Soviet-Afghan war.
March 23:
Now in its 40th month, the insurgency plaguing Thailand's majority Muslim south shows no signs of abating. The Bangkok Post, citing law enforcement sources, reports that the poorly contained violence has claimed some 3,000 (mostly civilian) casualties since being reignited by Islamic extremists in January 2004. Thai officials, meanwhile, have made little headway in their quest for a solution; Chalerm Yubamrung, Thailand's Interior Minister, has admitted that he has "no idea" how to curb the ongoing ethno-religious unrest.
Terror Free Tomorrow (TFT), an international polling firm, has released a stunning opinion survey conducted in Pakistan in mid-January. The results, culled from 1,157 face-to-face interviews in the run-up to that country’s February elections, showed a “dramatic reversal” in opinions of bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the Taliban from only a few months ago. Support for bin Laden was cut in half – from 46 to 24 percent – while al-Qaeda and the Taliban fared little better, both dropping from the mid-30s to the teens. Meanwhile, only one percent of the Pakistanis polled said they would have voted for al-Qaeda had it been on the ballot in the February poll.
Most striking, however, is the evaporation of support for bin Laden in the Northwest Frontier Province, considered the Pakistani state most friendly to the Taliban. In TFT’s last poll, bin Laden garnered support from more than 2/3rds of respondents. This time, only four percent of the population approved of the terror leader.