Terrorist losing battle in Asia

NY Times:

The deadliest terrorist networks in Southeast Asia have suffered significant setbacks in the past three years, weakened by aggressive policing, improved intelligence, enhanced military operations and an erosion of public support, government officials and counterterrorism specialists say.

Three years after the region’s last major strike — the attacks on three restaurants in Bali that killed three suicide bombers and 19 other people — American and Asian intelligence analysts say financial and logistical support from Al Qaeda to other groups in the region has long dried up, and the most lethal are scrambling for survival.

In Indonesia, since 2005 authorities have arrested more than 200 members of Jemaah Islamiyah, an Islamic group with ties to Al Qaeda. In the Philippines, an American-backed military campaign has the Abu Sayyaf Group, an Islamic extremist organization with links to Jemaah Islamiyah, clinging to footholds in the jungles of a handful of southern islands, officials said.

Indonesia and the Philippines, which have faced the most serious terrorist threat in the region, have taken sharply different approaches to combat it. Each has achieved some success, offering lessons to American and allied counterterrorism efforts worldwide. But there are worrisome signs that the threat could rebound quickly.

A bombing at a Philippine air base in the southern island of Mindanao late last month killed two people and wounded 22 others. Peace talks between the Philippine government and the country’s main Muslim separatist group are threatening to fall apart, which could ignite wider violence, building on deep anger about the country’s military-first approach against Muslims. In February, the head of Jemaah Islamiyah in Singapore slipped out a prison bathroom window, hopped a fence and disappeared.

But senior American officials, government authorities in the region and counterterrorism specialists say that the most serious threats are on the wane — in contrast to American intelligence assessments that Al Qaeda in the Pakistani tribal areas is resurgent and that regional affiliates like Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb are gaining strength.

“The governments out here take it very seriously and, in my opinion, seem to be doing a very good job individually and working together to deal with that terrorist threat,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, a former director of central intelligence, told reporters on June 1 at a regional security conference here.

Senior American intelligence officials began noting progress earlier this year. “Southeast Asia continues to be a concern, although not nearly that which we might have envisioned two or three years ago,” Michael E. Leiter, acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in a speech in Washington in February.

The United States and Australia, in particular, have played major roles in helping Southeast Asian countries combat terrorist threats in the region.

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If Pakistan took the fight this seriously the war would be close to being over. Instead Pakistan is backing away from its responsibility and entering into phony agreements with tribal leaders it knows can not deliver anything of value. The aggressive approach in Asia is paying off. One reason is because of the capture of Hambali in Thailand by the US a couple of years ago. He rant he operation for al Qaeda and they were apparently lost without him.