February 1:
The two Islamic separatist groups battling the Philippine government for an independent southern homeland appear to be joining forces under the leadership of the son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, reports adnkronos.com. The Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) have agreed to establish a joint council, to be chaired by Saiful Islam Muammar Gaddafi, in the coming year. The new effort, dubbed the Bangsamoro Solidarity Council, will mark a long-delayed rapprochement between the two groups; the MILF split from the MNLF in the late 1970s to pursue a more religiously motivated insurgency.
February 3:
Ties between England and Afghanistan are in a tailspin following yet another revelation of plans by London to engage members of the Taliban without first consulting Kabul. The Financial Times reports electronic documents seized from a team of western and Afghan officials in late 2007 reveal that British forces in Afghanistan had drawn up a secret plan to build military training camps for 2,000 former Taliban fighters. Unbeknownst to the Afghan government, the camps would provide military and vocational training, and equipment to recruits in an effort to “drain popular support for the Taliban.” Two of the diplomats linked to the plan have been expelled from the country, but Afghan officials remain puzzled: “We have operational discussions... on a weekly basis, so [why] did they keep this secret?”
February 4:
Amidst an across-the-board thaw in relations in recent years, India and Pakistan have agreed to strengthen security and intelligence exchanges and “build channels of communication at the level of scholars.” A new agreement signed in early February will create a mechanism whereby each country’s top strategic-military think tank will collaborate in state-sponsored workshops, eventually leading to joint military research projects, according to the Agence France Presse. Security cooperation between the two historic regional rivals has lagged behind the broader diplomatic opening in recent years, as former Indian defense secretary Shireen Mazari acknowledges: “except for contacts at international forums, we never had open discussions on security issues.” “Huge gaps still exist,” admits Sujit Dutta, a scholar at India’s participating think tank, but “this may help us to achieve some frank exchanges of views.”
February 5:
For South Korea’s new president, Lee Myung-bak, recalibrating his predecessor’s controversial “sunshine” policy towards the DPRK and repairing frayed ties with Washington have become top priorities. According to the Taipei Times, that process will soon get underway with the reinstatement of a “military operational plan,” codenamed OPLAN 5029, by the end of the year. The effort constitutes a joint contingency plan with the United States to “handle political turmoil and a sudden exodus of refugees, natural disasters that include floods and earthquakes, or the regime’s loss of control over nuclear and biochemical weapons.” South Korea’s former president, Roh Moo-hyung, had put a freeze on the plan in early 2005, citing “a possible breach in national sovereignty.”
February 6:
Baitullah Mehsud, the operational chief of a group of Pakistani militants termed the “neo-Taliban,” has replaced Osama bin Laden as the West’s most deadly threat, according to the Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, MI6. The Times of London reports that Mehsud, a Pashtun warlord from South Waziristan frequently linked to al-Qaeda, has been blamed for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto last December as well as a number of planned attacks against Western targets in Afghanistan and Europe. Inkster and other observers now say Mehsud and his coterie of “next-generation” Taliban extremists represent the top terrorist threat to the West.
[Editor’s Note: Mehsud’s group is distinguished from the Afghan Taliban led by Mullah Omar by its focus on Pakistani and Western targets – a position that has strained its ties with traditional elements of the ousted Islamist movement, which remain focused on the overthrow of the Karzai government in Kabul.]
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