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ENDURING FREEDOM: One year
on
Fear of a neverending
war
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
One year after President George W Bush won his first big
battle in his "war against terrorism", the balance sheet
looks decidedly mixed.
It was a year ago this
week that Northern Alliance forces and their US advisers
swept into Kabul, handing Bush his first major victory
in the war he declared against al-Qaeda and the regimes
that supported it in the aftermath of the September 11
attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
While the
Taliban appears to have been thoroughly routed as a
military force throughout Afghanistan since then, Bush's
larger short-term ambitions to secure Afghanistan and
hunt down al-Qaeda - not to mention to oust Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to the Arab
world - remain unrealized.
Last week's broadcast
by Qatar's Al Jazeera television of a new audiotape of
Osama bin Laden threatening the United States and other
Western nations came as a bitter reminder that the man
whom Bush vowed to bring to justice "dead or live"
remains at large.
Given bin Laden's charismatic
leadership, one national security expert who worked on
the al-Qaeda file under former president Bill Clinton
described his re-emergence as a "a real moment of
triumph for Islamic radicals". Other experts, including
US intelligence officials, said it presaged new and
possibly spectacular attacks against Western targets.
Almost as troublesome to US officials have been
the mostly pin-prick attacks carried out by al-Qaeda or
its sympathizers over the past few months across a huge
swathe of territory, running from the southern Arabian
peninsula to the southern Philippines.
Last
month's more-spectacular attacks, including the bombing
of a French oil tanker off Yemen and the night club
bombing in Bali, Indonesia that killed more than 180
people, have also naturally raised alarms, even as they
helped persuade reluctant governments in Sana'a and
Jakarta to cooperate more closely with Washington.
Last week, two US soldiers in Kuwait were
seriously wounded by gunshots fired by a police officer
who fled into Saudi Arabia, adding to a growing list of
anti-US incidents in a country that, aside from Israel,
is probably Washington's closest ally in the region.
Two other US soldiers participating in exercises
in Kuwait were gunned down by presumed al-Qaeda
sympathizers there last month, increasing US concern
about future attacks, particularly as tens of thousands
of US forces pour into the emirate in preparation for an
invasion of Iraq over the next six to eight weeks.
These incidents, combined with bin Laden's
re-emergence, have emboldened some critics of Bush's
fixation with Iraq, most notably the Democrat who
defeated him in the popular vote in the 2000 elections,
former vice president Al Gore.
In a whirlwind
series of televised and published interviews over the
past two weeks, Gore, who says he has not decided
whether to seek the Democratic presidential nomination
for 2004, has repeatedly attacked Bush on precisely this
point.
Afghanistan "is falling back into chaos",
he told the New York Times this week. "Osama is back.
Al-Qaeda has reconstituted itself and, according to the
director of central intelligence, possesses just as
severe a threat to us right now as it did during the
weeks leading up to September 11. Meanwhile the
president has been out on the campaign trail, beating
the drums of war against Saddam Hussein."
While
the administration has pooh-poohed these complaints as
"politics as usual", it appears that Bush aides are
increasingly sensitive about them. Pentagon officials
have stressed to reporters in recent days that they have
dispatched US combat troops and civil affairs
specialists to key areas outside Kabul to try to extend
the central government's authority beyond the capital
and into key areas under the control of local warlords
and regional power-brokers who filled the political
vacuum after the Taliban's collapse. They also insist
that they have now entered the "reconstruction" phase of
stabilizing the country.
And it was no accident
that the administration chose to tell reporters just
before the evening TV news on Thursday - the same day
that Gore appeared on several national television talk
shows and the Times published his interview - that they
had captured bin Laden's top Gulf commander, Abd
al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Although al-Nashiri was actually
nabbed three weeks ago, the networks obligingly ran it
as their top story.
While al-Nashiri's capture,
and the assassination by a Predator drone missile of
another senior al-Qaeda official in the remote desert of
Yemen earlier this month, mark clear advances in the
struggle against that network, more worrisome to some
analysts are the signs that the war against terrorism
could fuel a broader conflict, especially if the US
invades Iraq.
Spectacular gains by Islamists in
recent elections in Pakistan, Turkey and Morocco (which
also reports an alarming rise in the number of baby boys
named Osama) are raising concerns among Arabists here,
who point as well to this month's harsh crackdown
against Islamist leaders by Jordanian forces in the
southern town of Maan, close to the Saudi border.
Adding fuel to the fire over the past year are
remarks by prominent US Christian evangelists, including
several - such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell -
closely associated with Bush himself, crudely
denigrating Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. While Bush
himself has denounced such attacks, they have
nonetheless contributed to a growing sense that the war
risks become a "clash of civilizations".
A
recent warning by one Middle Eastern expert, Fawaz
Gerges of Sarah Lawrence College, that young men
unconnected to al-Qaeda but infuriated by US actions in
the region may also help explain the murders of a senior
US aid official in Amman late last month and of a US
missionary in Sidon, Lebanon, last week.
"The US
must take seriously the rage against US foreign policies
in the world of Islam," he wrote in the Los Angeles
Times. "The White House, instead of preparing for war
with Iraq, should be seeking creative strategies to
decrease the pool of recruits and block further inroads
into the world of Islam by the militants."
(Inter Press Service)
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