WHILE THE WORLD focuses its attention on Lebanon, the bloody civil war in Sri Lanka looks poised for yet another flare-up. Even excluding the Sri Lankan army’s current offensive, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)’s June 15 bombing of a passenger bus that killed 64 people and the June 26 assassination of a top Sri Lankan general, LTTE terrorism and Sri Lankan military reprisals have claimed hundreds of lives this year. Sri Lanka is a democratic ally, but the United States has limited options for preventing further bloodshed. However, international frustration with LTTE intransigence has created a rare, low-cost opportunity for American leadership in the region. If the United States can effectively target the LTTE’s international finance and smuggling networks, a lack of money and weapons will reduce the group’s capability to commit terror attacks, increase the possibility of a political solution in Sri Lanka, and improve the regional situation in Southeast Asia.

Long before the terms entered the American lexicon, the LTTE’s struggle for an independent, ethnically Hindu Tamil homeland in northern Sri Lanka featured hundreds of suicide bombings and IEDs at a cost in lives now estimated to exceed 64,000. According to the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, the LTTE has a history of recruiting child soldiers (including children orphaned by the December 2004 tsunami.) The LTTE has bombed Sri Lanka’s World Trade Center and assassinated dozens of political leaders, including two national leaders: former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandhi in 1991 and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993.