[With this issue of the Asia Security Monitor, editorial duties are being assumed by AFPC research fellow Richard Harrison. Many thanks go to outgoing editor Joshua Eisenman for his work on the Asia Security Monitor to date. Joshua will continue to edit the American Foreign Policy Council's China Reform Monitor.]
June 16:
The Raja Suleiman Movement (RSM), a Philippine-based group with links to al-Qaeda affiliates Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyyah, has been blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury Department. The measure also marks the RSM's leader, Ahmad Santos, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under U.S. Federal law. "The leader and members of the Rajah Solaiman Movement are responsible for reprehensible acts that include killing citizens and tourists in the Philippines to advance their terrorist agenda," Adam Szubin, the director of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, said in publicly unveiling the designation. "Today's action will make even basic operational functions more difficult for RSM and its members by increasing their isolation from the international financial system."
June 24:
The power and reach of the Taliban - and the group's threat to the government of Hamid Karzai in Kabul - continues to be augmented by massive profits from its exploitation of Afghanistan's flourishing narcotics industry, the UN's top anti-drug official has warned. According to Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN's Office of Drugs and Crime, the ousted Islamist movement netted some $100 million in revenue from the opium trade last year - money that has been instrumental to keeping the group in business. Coalition officials concur. "The closer we look at it, the closer we see the insurgents to the drugs trade," David Belgrove, the head of counternarcotics at the British embassy in Kabul, tells the BBC. "We can say that a lot of their arms and ammunition are being funded directly by the drugs trade."
June 30:
Sri Lanka's military is declaring victory in its long-running struggle against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. According to Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka, the commander of the Sri Lankan army, a steady campaign of attrition waged by government forces against the terrorist group has left it all but defeated as a conventional military force. "They have lost that capability, although they are fighting with us, not in the same manner like earlier," Fonseka has told reporters in comments carried by the BBC. "They had the defensive lines, we couldn't move even one kilometre for two or three months. That kind of resistance is not there any more." According to Sri Lankan officials, just 4,000 to 5,000 LTTE fighters now remain, and additional gains against the group should be expected in the near future.
July 1:
The controversial civilian nuclear cooperation agreement that has been the subject of intensive discussions between the United States and India over the past two years is not likely to materialize in 2008, a top U.S. lawmaker has concluded. According to Representative Gary Ackerman (D-NY), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, delays on finalizing the nuclear deal on the part of the government in India, where the agreement remains highly controversial, mean that the U.S. Congress will be unable to approve the agreement before the end of President Bush's term in office. "The clock has run out on our side of the border, because the clock has run out on their side," Ackerman has told Reuters.