Asia Times Online


	March 21, 2002	atimes.com

Front

US risking 'imperial overstretch' again
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Even the business press is beginning to grow nervous about the US administration's pursuit of counterterrorism.

"Is Washington fighting terrorism on too many fronts?" asked a headline in the most recent issue of Business Week magazine. "The Bush administration is now combating terrorism on fronts in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Even the globe's sole superpower needs to be careful not to overreach," the article concluded. It failed to mention Washington's plans to ramp up its military involvement in Colombia.

In an editorial titled "The clear and present danger", the Financial Times newspaper warned on Tuesday that victory in Afghanistan itself remained some way off and that Washington needed to concentrate its efforts there for now "rather than allowing its efforts to be diffused in too many theaters of war".

Even as Vice President Dick Cheney toured the Middle East to prepare US allies there for a new military campaign against Iraq, Washington was busy deploying troops and military advisers in an ever-expanding quest to defeat terrorism around the world.

"I have set a clear policy in the second stage of the war on terror," President George W Bush said last week on the six-month anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and at the Pentagon. "America encourages and expects governments everywhere to help remove the terrorist parasites that threaten their countries and peace of the world. If governments need training or resources to meet this commitment, America will help."

Since September 11, Washington has promised or provided new military aid in the form of training or equipment to dozens of countries, only a few of which face a credible external threat, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, the Philippines, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Yemen, not to mention Afghanistan, where it intends to build a national army.

Last week's promise - to help "governments everywhere" fight terrorism - is fueling still-whispered concerns that Washington is well on its way to what Yale University historian Paul Kennedy once referred to as "imperial overstretch".

The urgent dispatch of some 1,700 combat-ready British troops to Afghanistan in the wake of what the US commander, General Tommy Franks, called "an unqualified and absolute success" in Operation Anaconda has only served to raise new doubts about the decisiveness of the two-week battle. Afghan commanders insisted that most of the al-Qaeda troops supposedly trapped there had escaped, presumably to fight another day.

The reported engagement of US Special Operations Forces (SOF) advisers on a "training mission" in fighting with Abu Sayyaf guerrillas on Basilan island in the southern Philippines brought home the reality of risks in that battle against what most observers describe as a small band of no more than 100 bandits. Peace talks between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which has 15,000 men under arms in the same region where the Abu Sayyaf is active, have in effect been suspended amid charges by Manila's brass that that the Front is a "terrorist" group with close ties to al-Qaeda.

A contingent of 200 SOF trainers is en route to Georgia to train and equip four anti-terrorist battalions to bring calm to the unruly Pankisi Gorge, a haven for Chechen rebels and armed Islamist militants - including, so the administration has said, al-Qaeda and Taliban forces who have fled Afghanistan. With embattled Chechnya just over the mountains from the Gorge, coupled with at least two other major insurgencies in Georgia, the question that bothers analysts here is whether Washington could become entangled in any of these larger struggles, or even in neighboring Azerbaijan, to which the administration has also promised anti-terrorism assistance despite its still-unresolved conflict with Armenia and rising tensions with Iran over Caspian Sea oil claims.

In Kyrgyzstan, where Washington is not only providing military training and equipment but is also building a major air base, an opposition protest week ended in the reported deaths of 13 people and the destruction of several government buildings in a remote village where an opposition leader was being held on corruption charges. The violence marked a first for Kyrgyzstan since its independence 10 years ago and followed a lengthy period in which increasingly authoritarian President Askar Akayev has moved against opposition figures and reduced basic freedoms. This process has accelerated since September 11, according to analysts here.

In Yemen, where Washington plans to send some 100 military advisers to help the army assert control over heavily armed tribal areas that have always resisted central control, a US military plane carrying Cheney resorted to evasive maneuvers to land at the capital for a quick, two-hour visit with President Ali Abdullah Saleh. "A show of nervousness" is how New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof described Cheney's arrival in a country to which Washington hopes to help bring order. "Sending American soldiers to places like Yemen, where the great majority of people seem to oppose their arrival, raises precisely the problems of over-deployment that President Bush complained about during his [presidential] campaign," Kristof noted.

Last weekend's lethal attack on a church in Islamabad in which two US citizens were killed raised new and disturbing questions not only about the authority and security of Pakistan's military leader, General Pervez Musharraf - perhaps the single most important regional leader in Washington's war on terrorism to date - but also on the next phase in the war itself.

Both US and Pakistani analysts agree that the weekend attack, coming so soon after the killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, presumably by al-Qaeda sympathizers - was aimed against both Washington and Musharraf. They also report that many Pakistani militants who fought for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan have returned home and are regrouping.

(Inter Press Service)

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