September 26, 2004 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Security
Lax oversight in the rush of exports since 9/11 has raised the specter of weapons landing in the hands of America’s enemies.
Washington – The United States is failing to safeguard much of the
highly sought weaponry it sends abroad – from assault rifles to
sophisticated combat technology, a review by The Denver Post
concludes.
Lax oversight of weapons exports opens the door for adversaries to
get their hands on lethal missiles, assault guns and components for
larger weapons systems, sources say.
Homeland Security agents recently have uncovered plots to divert
night-vision lenses to Iran, fighter-jet parts to China, grenade
launchers to Colombian guerrillas, nuclear triggers to Pakistan,
and more.
And despite internal warnings, government-sanctioned sales worth
more than $10 billion a year continue spreading more weapons
worldwide.
Congressional leaders responding to The Post’s review are promising
legislation. Among the problems that caught their attention:
Tens of thousands of arms deals aren’t fully reviewed, nor are
weapons inspected abroad as required under the U.S. Arms Control
Export Act to prevent diversion or misuse.
When government officials do review arms deals, they find
increasing problems – including diversions to at least one criminal
and several hostile nations. Nearly one in five arms deals checked
last year – 76 out of 413 – had such problems.
Homeland Security agents investigating illegal dealing say
sophisticated weaponry probably already has reached adversaries.
Total arrests for illegal arms dealing doubled from 62 in 2002 to
125 last year. Customs agents last year made 665 seizures of arms
worth $106 million.
The problems grow from a core dilemma. On one hand, the United
States long has relied on arms exports to support private defense
contractors and to get allies to support U.S. foreign policy goals.
On the other, uncontrolled weapons mean a more dangerous world at a
time when terrorist activity is increasing.
“At a time when many consider the greatest threat to our national
security to be terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass
destruction, I am extremely concerned that the U.S. government is
not doing enough to make sure that we ourselves are not the source
of any weapons that may be used against us either domestically or
against our citizens, soldiers or allies abroad,” said Sen. Dianne
Feinstein, D-Calif., ranking member of the subcommittee on
terrorism and homeland security and member of the Select Committee
on Intelligence.
Feinstein will work on legislation that will “close some of the
loopholes that allow American technology and products to get into
the wrong hands,” she said.
“Simply put, the way business is done now, we have no way of
knowing if much of this technology – including advanced computers,
telecommunications and information systems, lasers, toxins, and
even certain nuclear material and technology, and the like – has
been diverted or is being misused,” Feinstein said.
Defense, Commerce and State department officials responsible for
regulating what goes where acknowledged deficiencies.
Bush administration foreign policy has created pressure to move
weapons quickly to allies, overwhelming controls, Air Force Lt.
Gen. Tome Walters, head of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency,
said in an interview before his retirement in July. The agency is
charged with facilitating sales to foreign governments as well as
making sure weapons aren’t diverted or misused.
“A big problem” is the lack of inspectors to keep track of
weapons, Walters said. “And that’s the challenge … the manpower. …
Our system is not designed to do this.”
Diversions exposed by limited reviews raise the possibility of more
diversions not detected.
“I am not comfortable at all,” said Greg Suchan, deputy assistant
secretary of state for defense trade controls.
Even some defense industry leaders – traditional advocates for
relaxing controls – now favor a safer approach.
“A lot of the health and strength of the U.S economy is based on
exports, and it is going to be for some time. But we’ve got to find
a way to manage those exports in a fairly uncertain world,” said
Bob Bauerlein, a former Air Force undersecretary who now serves as
Boeing’s vice president for international operations.
U.S. arms in high demand
Senior Bush administration officials defended the status quo. U.S.
small arms “have not been the weapons that end up in the hands of
child soldiers,” said Lincoln Bloomfield, assistant secretary of
state for political-military affairs. And accelerated sales since
Sept. 11, 2001, will help in the war on terrorism, he said. “Most
of the major arms exports the U.S. does are to armed forces who are
going to do things we want them to do.”
Today, more and more countries – from booming East Asia to the
volatile Middle East – are seeking advanced items for their
arsenals.
And the United States is by far the world’s leading arms supplier,
with annual industry sales topping $300 million and government
sales topping $13 billion last year – a figure expected to reach
$13.8 billion this year, government data show.
In Colorado, some 300 companies are registered to export military
technology – mostly dual-use items that have commercial as well as
military uses. The State Department lists 4,000 companies
nationwide. Names are kept secret.
All deals are supposed to be screened – with congressional
oversight to make sure Defense, Commerce and State department
officials do their jobs. But government documents and interviews
with senior officials, arms control experts, industry lobbyists,
and consultants reveal a systemic failure to control weapons
exports as required by law.
Eye on portable missiles
Consider the case of Stinger shoulder-launched missiles – which the
United States supplies to at least 17 countries, including Egypt,
Israel, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Experts agree that if any U.S.
weapon must be controlled, this is it.
One man can carry a 40- pound, heat-seeking Stinger and, with a bit
of training, shoot down a jumbo jet up to 3 miles away as high as
15,000 feet. In the past 20 years, shoulder-
launched missiles have hit at least 40 civilian planes around the
world, causing crashes and deaths, security analysts estimate. In
November 2002, terrorists firing two Russian-
made shoulder-launched missiles almost hit a Boeing 757 airliner
chartered to evacuate Israeli tourists from Kenya.
Thousands are beyond U.S. government control, according to a study
released in May by the Government Accountability Office, the
investigative arm of Congress.
The Defense Department office responsible “does not know how many
Stingers have been sold overseas,” it said. “Records on the
number and destination of Stingers sold overseas are incomplete,
unreliable and largely in hard-copy form.”
The study followed an August 2000 GAO study that identified similar
problems – which defense officials had promised to fix.
Stinger missiles still move out. A Defense Department spokesman,
who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Army has sent out 237
this year and is in the process of sending 249 more. He declined to
say where.
Overall, State and Defense department regulators last year approved
more than 49,500 deals involving all types of weapons without full
review – let alone monitoring and inspection abroad, documents
show. Arms deals are screened by staffers who process electronic
applications but generally lack time and expertise to conduct
detailed investigations of buyers and sellers. Even in cases where
an application is flagged for closer scrutiny, the most detailed
reviews seldom involve inspections.
Still more deals, involving dual-use technology, were approved
without full review at the Commerce Department. A GAO study
released in March found Commerce officials conducted inspection
visits for only 1 percent of 22,490 sales of missile-related
technology they approved between 1998 and 2002.
The GAO also addressed dual-use technology sent to
government-designated “countries of concern” such as China, India
and Russia that are supposed to receive extra scrutiny. Of 26,340
approved dual-use sales during that period, 7,680 involved
countries of concern. Commerce officials reviewed 428, or 5.6
percent, of those, according to another GAO study. It concluded
that the government “cannot ensure that dual-use items exported to
countries of concern are not misused or diverted.”
Congressional leaders are considering action to deal with “lagging
oversight,” said Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., a member of the Senate
Armed Services Committee.
“It seems incongruous to say one of the primary purposes of the
war on terrorism is to make sure weapons of mass destruction don’t
get into the hands of evildoers, and then not to enforce our own
safeguards on weapons sales,” Nelson said.
Probes uncover trouble
When the government does scrutinize arms deals, it finds trouble.
Last year, State Department officials charged with overseeing
private-company deals selected 413 for more careful review, though
still not inspections to verify where weapons are and how they are
used.These targeted reviews found irregularities with 76, or 18.4
percent, of those deals. That’s the highest percentage ever, up
from 11 percent, or 50, of the deals reviewed in 2002, State
Department documents said.
The 413 reviews interrupted a plan to move firearms to a criminal
in Central America, sales of helicopter parts to a hostile country,
and misuse of electronics and communications equipment sent to
Asia, records show. Details were omitted.
The findings indicate more weapons may have slipped through in
deals not reviewed. At a recent industry conference in Colorado
Springs, Suchan, the State Department’s chief regulator, appealed
to defense companies for help. He urged senior managers to make
sure their companies police themselves and voluntarily disclose
violations.
State Department supervisors said 32 inspectors – including
contract employees – must process applications for some 50,000
commercial arms deals each year.
At the Defense Department, officials couldn’t say how many
inspections they may have conducted or what they found. Instead,
Walters, the chief overseer, described how after Sept. 11 he faced
pressure to speed up sales.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “was frequently getting phone
calls from the king of Jordan, from folks who were in countries
that were friends of ours that were close by Afghanistan, close by
Iraq. We needed their help, and they needed things,” Walters said.
“The spotlight was really turned on us to work faster and to
provide things, to help Jordan if Jordan needed equipment, to help
Pakistan.”
Weapons on the loose
Now evidence is mounting that weapons likely are reaching
adversaries including terrorists – via legal and illegal channels.
In Iraq, customs agents picking through stockpiles recently found
much U.S.-origin weaponry and dual-use technology – evidence for
“at least 40 cases involving U.S. companies or people that we
suspect of exporting illegally to Iraq,” Homeland Security
spokesman Dean Boyd said.
And across the world “there is all sorts of material out there … a
lot of things we don’t have any control over,” Boyd said.
Agents last year opened nearly 3,000 new criminal investigations of
suspected illegal arms deals.
In June, a Jordanian man accused of trying to sell fighter-jet parts illegally to China pleaded guilty in Los Angeles. In May, a federal grand jury in Philadelphia indicted a former television journalist from Houston accused of illegally selling night-vision lenses to Iran.
In April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested a
Florida businessman on charges of attempting to purchase more than
6,000 machine guns, grenades, grenade launchers and pistols,
weapons worth nearly $4 million, and send them to the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia – a group the government labels as
terrorist.
In January in Denver, immigration agents arrested a South African
man on charges he illegally exported nuclear trigger devices from a
company in Massachusetts, via South Africa and the United Arab
Emirates, to Pakistan.
Spreading insecurity
The failure to control weaponry presents a major threat to U.S. and
global security, according to critics who question the use of
weapons exports as a tool of foreign policy.
“What we’ve done is spread insecurity around the world,” said
former U.S. Sen. Tim Wirth, who also served in the State Department
and now runs the United Nations Foundation.
Arms control advocates contend the rise of terrorism requires
stricter control at home – as well as internationally through
better treaties.
Americans “have to be certain who they are shipping arms to,”
said Wade Boese, research director for the Arms Control
Association, a Washington think tank. “If there is any blind spot,
any place arms slip through cracks, they can reach terrorists.”
But many defense industry leaders oppose increased regulation. They
argue weapons exports are essential even if there are risks. And
some regard arms control as a political tactic at best.
“You can’t control technology,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen.
Larry Farrell, president of the National Defense Industrial
Association. “There are going to be weapons. There are going to be
people who wish other people trouble.”
Terrorists have shown they can harness even ordinary technology to
kill Americans, Farrell pointed out.
And inevitably today’s cutting-edge weaponry “will be discovered
somewhere else,” he said. “It’s just the way people are. … You’ve
got to protect yourself.”
April 4, 2004 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Security
Passenger planes still at risk as efforts to fight terror lack funds, technology
Each month, freight loaders pack some 17 million pounds of
uninspected cargo into the bellies of passenger planes leaving
Denver.
More uninspected commercial cargo – an estimated 2.5 million tons a
year – moves at airports nationwide. No federal agency monitors the
cargo or who’s sending it. Counterterrorism officials see each
piece as potentially explosive – and call this a major threat to
passenger safety.
Congressional leaders have demanded inspections.
“It is a matter of such critical importance, such an obvious
security gap, we cannot afford not to inspect the cargo that
travels on every passenger plane,” said U.S. Rep. Jim Turner,
ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Homeland
Security.
But U.S. Transportation Security Administration officials say
inspecting all cargo is unrealistic. They say they don’t have
enough money or big enough machines to scan enough cargo fast
enough without impeding commerce.
The situation illustrates the soft spots in security and heightened
anxiety plaguing the home-front war on terrorism today.
The railway bombings that killed 191 and wounded more than 1,800 on
March 11 in Madrid, and testimony at the Sept. 11 commission’s
hearings in Washington, have raised concerns that Americans aren’t
as safe as they should be.
Federal agents with access to classified intelligence say there’s
still no way to know whether Denver, or any other city, is more or
less vulnerable.
Part of the problem is money. Part is the nature of the threat.
Agents say their job is becoming harder with new vulnerabilities
emerging as the war on terrorism evolves. “It’s difficult to cover
every potential vulnerability,” said Phillip Reid, FBI agent in
charge for Colorado and Wyoming. “There obviously are
vulnerabilities out there that we aren’t aware of. … It’s an
endless job.”
Government intelligence suggests that enemies, particularly those
tied to al-Qaeda, “tend to look for the major terrorist attack,
where it has major consequences and numerous fatalities,” Reid
said. So agents assume the risk in cities is greatest and treat
Denver as a potential target.
Bus, rail lines threatened
FBI and homeland security chiefs issued bulletins last week warning
police that terrorists might try to bomb buses and rail lines in
U.S. cities this summer and that terrorists might try to use
cultural, artistic or athletic visas to slip into the country.
For three years, security officials have focused on airports.
The bulletins reflect a desire, after the Madrid attacks, to do
more. In addition to rail and bus systems, there’s also concern
about cargo containers that aren’t always fully inspected at
seaports and border crossings. Thousands of these metal containers
sit unattended in rail and truck yards around downtown Denver –
possible vehicles for delivering deadly weapons.
“We’ve got to get to a point where we have a high level of
confidence,” said John Suthers, the U.S. attorney in Colorado.
The Sept. 11 commission this month is scheduled to look more
closely into homeland security. Meanwhile, the $40 billion budget
for the Department of Homeland Security, created last year after
other agencies were consolidated, is not expected to increase
dramatically.
Recent congressional testimony from counterterrorism chiefs
revealed that a unified terrorist watch list to enable screening
for terrorists is not complete. The list drawn from multiple
intelligence databases was supposed to be done last year. FBI
leaders said it should be done this summer.
Testimony also revealed that another task is incomplete: a national
threat and vulnerability assessment to prioritize critical
infrastructure for protection. Homeland Security spokesman Donald
Tighe said that work would be done by December.
Implementing protective measures will be left to “local
leadership,” Tighe added.
There’s the rub. Colorado Department of Public Safety spokeswoman
Patti Micciche said local agencies are requesting equipment and
training “far beyond” what Colorado can afford after receiving
about $50 million in federal homeland security funds last year.
Few on the front lines see security spending as sufficient.
“We get all kinds of information,” said Pat Ahlstrom, the U.S.
Transportation Security Administration director in Denver.
“Does the Madrid thing portend the possibility of that happening
in America? Yes, it does. Do the suicide bombings in other parts of
the world portend what could happen in America? Yes. Does 9/11
portend that people who planned that horrible, unthinkable set of
acts, could they or others of their mind-set attempt the same thing
again, only now trying to defeat what we have in place? The only
answer is yes.”
Ahlstrom said he’s pushing to increase his force of 750 passenger
screeners at Denver International Airport – up from 600 to 700
before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks – to about 1,000 until better
technology is available. He’s also asking for more inspectors – 13
instead of the current 10 – to ensure that there aren’t any
lapses.
Cargo slipping through
The matter of cargo moving on passenger planes looms unaddressed –
at DIA and nationwide.
While TSA agents swarm around passengers and their carry-on
baggage, and check-in baggage is scanned, commercial cargo moves on
conveyor belts and carts toward passenger planes without systematic
inspection. Officials have the authority to conduct random spot
checks but could not confirm whether any had been done.
DIA statistics show that in January, passenger airlines carried
17,922,194 pounds (8,961 tons) of commercial cargo domestically and
internationally.
“What is essentially too cumbersome at this point is to check
everything,” said TSA spokesman Mike Fierberg. “We don’t have the
resources. And we don’t have the technology, most important.”
Instead, airlines are supposed to police themselves by allowing
only “known shippers” to send cargo on passenger planes. TSA
officials keep no list of known shippers – the airlines are
supposed to do that – and no audits are done to make sure airlines
comply, Fierberg said. However, TSA technicians are working on
giving airlines access to government databases so that they are
able to check out cargo shippers and customers before loading
planes, he said.
At one point, officials considered issuing licenses to known cargo
shippers, Fierberg said. They decided that would be too
cumbersome.
Current policy “meets the requirements of Congress” that cargo be
inspected, Fierberg said.
U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., said he is “very concerned about
the potential risks of unscreened cargo on passenger airlines” and
has supported efforts to have all cargo screened. “A lot of work
remains to be done,” he said.
Also in the Denver area, hundreds of cargo containers arrive daily
by truck and rail – all supposedly screened by customs agents at
U.S ports and border crossings.
A federal security directive also deploys Denver-based customs
agents in this effort.
The concern, customs agents say, is that terrorists could smuggle
weapons of mass destruction in containers and team with terrorists
already inside the country to coordinate attacks.
The rail yards are fenced but not impenetrable. Union Pacific
security agent John Cavanaugh said pilfering “goes on.” He also
said federal customs agents seldom inspect containers in rail
yards. “My understanding is (that) whatever is inspected, it is
inspected at the port of entry.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials were unable to give
statistics on how many physical inspections are conducted at ports,
border crossings and in Denver. They are setting up radiation
detectors and X-ray scanners at seaports and elsewhere.
Yet along the U.S.-Mexico border at El Paso, customs agents raise
concerns. Trains moving from Mexico into the United States pass
through X-ray and other scanners but only occasionally are stopped
for physical inspections, agents said.
“Customs and Border Protection officers are not comfortable with
the emphasis on facilitation of traffic and trade,” said Kevin
Odenborg, a National Treasury Employees Union representative on the
customs force at El Paso. “The security systems are not
infallible,” he said. Hundreds of trucks and cars deemed low-risk
are routed through fast lanes where they may not be checked, and
staffing levels aren’t always sufficient, he added.
Spot checks in fast lanes have found illegal drugs, raising the
specter that dirty bombs or explosives might slip through in trucks
or cars, Odenborg said. “With the emphasis on facilitation in the
vehicle and truck cargo area, inspectors feel they are less able to
use their observational and interviewing techniques. The fact is,
that’s how most contraband is caught.”
Cash smuggling a concern
Another concern is money moving illegally through airports.
Terrorists trained in Afghanistan and Sudan have fanned out into
more than 30 independent anti-U.S. groups, said Ambassador Heraldo
Munoz, the Chilean diplomat who chairs the United Nations Security
Council’s al-Qaeda sanctions committee. And “finding the money”
that funds attacks is “absolutely fundamental,” Munoz said.
Today, with more banks monitoring transactions, terrorists “are
using, now, couriers, bags of money,” he said. “For example, we
know the Bali bombing was financed by about $100,000 and a second
amount of about $35,000 brought into Indonesia in suitcases.”
A recent customs spot check at DIA found a London-bound passenger
carrying $17,000 in cash he had not declared. The man told agents
he was going on vacation. The legal limit for undeclared cash is
$10,000.
A federal agent relaying that incident on condition of anonymity
said there’s no systematic enforcement of financial controls at DIA
and that customs agents need an ink-sniffing dog to conduct that
work effectively.
Federal supervisors acknowledged those challenges, though they
declined to comment on specific cases. Dealing with “an enormous
problem” of cargo containers and better enforcement of financial
controls “are in the scope,” TSA chief Ahlstrom said. “You focus
on what you can afford to do at the time and try to develop plans
for other pieces as you are able to get some resources.”
America must set priorities: “Look at all the holes you have at
once and then decide how many of those you can afford to deal
with,” said Page Stoutland, program leader for radiological and
nuclear countermeasures at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
which does homeland security work.
Stoutland supervised recent testing, at Federal Express cargo
facilities in Denver, of a device placed beneath a cargo conveyor
belt to detect possible dirty bombs. The device proved effective
and is available at a cost of about $50,000, he said.
“There is no way to predict with high confidence” what terrorists
might do, he said. But “our security (system) can’t be one where
we fix one hole and then fix the next because we’ll never get
done.”
Two weeks ago, customs agents scrambled when they learned that an
uninspected shipping container from Uzbekistan was moving by rail
toward Denver. It had been targeted overseas for inspection in
Houston. A recipient’s name and address in Denver proved to be
fake. Authorities figured that the manifest describing the
container’s contents – motorcycles – also might be fake.
Inspectors in Houston let the container pass. It arrived in Denver
around March 25 and sat in a Union Pacific freight yard north of
downtown. Customs agents here, speaking on condition of anonymity,
said they sealed it and notified Union Pacific that they wanted to
examine it.
But for lack of a proper inspection facility in the freight yard,
the white container sat unattended for seven days. “We couldn’t
shield it from the public. We wanted it moved to an indoor facility
so we could contain it” if dangerous material was inside, one
agent said.
Finally on Thursday, at a contract cargo warehouse in Aurora, a
team of three customs agents wearing radiation monitors on their
belts opened the container – and found motorcycles. Old,
broken-down antique ones, brown and green, with black sidecars.
They were hauling out the bikes for further inspection that night.
“Something that ends up in Denver is always considered low risk”
because port inspectors presumably have cleared it, a customs
supervisor said.
“We had to look to make sure.”
September 9, 2002 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Yemen
Critics: Military focus, perceived arrogance ignore problem’s
roots
MEDGHIL AL-JEDAAN, Yemen – A U.S. convoy cut past wild camels and
ancient stone cities recently to a rocky plateau west of Osama bin
Laden’s ancestral home.
U.S. Ambassador Edmund Hull got out in a crowd of pro-al-Qaeda
tribesmen, proud in their turbans, cheeks puffed with sour wads of
qat, armed with traditional curved daggers and Kalashnikov assault
rifles.
“Welcome,” Sheik Bin Rabeesh Kelaan told Hull. The two cemented a
ceremonial brick in a wall of what is to be a U.S.-funded health
clinic Rabeesh’s people desperately need.
It was one brick in a wider wall against terrorism that – a year
after the Sept. 11 attacks – is far from solid.
Resistance to the U.S.-led campaign to eradicate terrorism is
growing across much of the world. America’s emphasis on military
and police tactics rather than addressing the roots of terrorism
often causes as much concern abroad as terrorism itself.
Here in Yemen, young men cry, “Osama bin Laden a good man!” In
the capital, Sana’a, a recent explosion ripped open an apartment
where Islamists had hidden bombs like those used to attack the USS
Cole warship two years ago as it refueled in a Yemeni port. Yemen’s
government, though officially a partner against terrorism,
restricts U.S. special forces.
Nearly a year ago, Bush declared “you’re either with us or against
us.” He announced a 136-country military coalition to fight “a
new enemy.” Nations teamed up to topple an Afghan regime that
tolerated anti-American training camps and hosted Osama bin Laden.
Now, with Bush invoking terrorism to push military action in Iraq
and elsewhere, official government support is strained. People from
Arabia to London who initially rallied with America are becoming
doubtful and sometimes openly hostile to the U.S.-led campaign.
A Denver Post assessment based on dozens of interviews and visits
in five countries found that:
Treating the campaign as a “war,” with military deployments and
open threats, fosters resentment that feeds support for
terrorists.
Bin Laden and al-Qaeda fighters have ready support in areas beyond
government control.
Backlash against broader U.S. policies – toward Israel and the
Palestinians, Iraq, and on global issues from the environment to
criminal justice – erodes support for U.S.-led efforts against
terrorism.
Key allied governments call on America to focus more on root causes
of terrorism and consult more about tactics.
“We are acting in solidarity with the United States, but we really
do not mean war,” Karsten Voigt, Germany’s coordinator of
relations with America, said in a telephone interview from his
office in Berlin.
An ex-parliament member targeted by European terrorists in the
1970s, Voigt said Americans must deal with a perception “that the
campaign against international terrorism is only pretext, that what
you are really interested in is access to oil and gas pipelines.”
One of Bush’s strongest overseas allies on Afghanistan, British
Prime Minister Tony Blair, has said something must be done about
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein – but just what is “an open question,” he
said. Any military action, he said last week, would require “the
broadest international support.”
Bush in recent days also has lobbied the leaders of Russia, China
and France to support U.S. pressure to oust Hussein.
Beyond Blair, there is little sign of support for a war on Iraq.
And allies worry about U.S. tactics on foreign policy in general.
European leaders are increasingly concerned that U.S. policymakers
approach all the world’s complex and interconnected challenges
through “the exclusive prism of the war on terrorism,” French
Ambassador Bujon de l’Estang said from Washington, D.C.
“The response to terrorism cannot be only a military response,”
de l’Estang said. “That’s the basic issue. There are a number of
causes of terrorism, roots of terrorism that we need to address. If
you want to win people’s hearts – not only to be feared – you
certainly need to address these roots.”
America’s efforts also raise questions in Africa. Millions of
jobless Africans struggling to survive watch America ramping up “a
war economy,” said Ambassador Molelekeng Rapolaki of Lesotho, a
south African nation.
Some who grow bitter could be prey for terrorist recruiters, she
said. “A poor person can become so desperate that he can be
vulnerable,” Rapolaki said.
Even in Turkey, a NATO member straddling Islam and modern Western
ways, public opinion is shifting quickly.
The government favors “international cooperation against
terrorism, and in that regard supports the United States,” said
Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Huseyin Dirioz. U.S. warplanes
use Turkish bases for patrols over Iraq’s no-fly zones.
Turkey is strongly opposed to a U.S.-led war on Iraq, but the NATO
member has long been an ally with the United States.
Yet when Turks saw television images of U.S. bombs exploding in
Afghanistan, popular support for the campaign against terrorism
plummeted. Relying on force to stop terrorism “will only make more
enemies,” said Murat Sabuncu, 33, an editor at Milliyet, one of
Turkey’s largest newspapers. “When Muslims see (military action),
they think it is a ‘crusade.’ Uneducated people especially think it
is a ‘crusade.”‘
Some Turkish university students now link the war against terrorism
with U.S. foreign policy toward Palestinians, Iraqis and economic
growth at all costs.
“America is using the attack on Sept. 11 as a reason to attack, to
push its policies around the entire world,” said biomedical
engineering researcher Koray Ciftci, 28, sitting in a Bosphorus
University canteen.
In Istanbul’s working-class Fathi neighborhood, political
campaigner Turker Saltabas, 44, a district director for the
“Saadet” Happiness Party that tries to restore Islamic
traditions, said America could be a model for Muslims who desire
greater religious freedom.
“But now America only gives freedom to its own people” while
supporting repressive governments for Muslims, Saltabas said.
“Before, the United States was for human rights. After Sept. 11,
it changed. Now it is for security first, freedom second,”
Saltabas said. “Why did this change? I think the American nation
is going to end, and the U.S. president and government see that. So
they are trying to do whatever they can to keep it on top.”
So how much global goodwill does America need to be safer?
Some diplomats and scholars contend that lining up official
government support for counter-terrorism – as opposed to rallying
popular support – is sufficient. But governments such as Yemen’s
can’t always control all their people. In a wired world where a few
men hidden in apartments can cause great harm, others contend
grassroots support and cooperation will be crucial.
Today, U.S. programs aimed at building understanding and goodwill
lag. Funding for exchanges that bring influential foreign
professionals to America decreased by 33 percent from $349 million
in 1993 to $232 million last year. While Bush has called for some
increases in aid, his emphasis in words and dollars has been on the
military.
Meanwhile, a U.S. Council on Foreign Relations study found that 85
percent of Germans, 80 percent of French and 73 percent of Britons
believe the United States is acting in its own interests in the
fight against terrorism. It found that more than two-thirds of
Turks, and higher percentages in Arab countries, opposed U.S.
bombing of Afghanistan as morally wrong.
If bin Laden or al-Qaeda fighters walk into the outskirts of Sana’a
seeking help, Yemenis say, they would be as likely to be welcomed
as rebuffed.
Al-Qaeda “is for Islam,” said qat farmer Mohammad Rabiama, 19,
chewing a cheekful of the mildly narcotic green leaf with his
brother, Yahya, 20. Al-Qaeda fighters “are the good guys,”
Mohammad said, “because they support Muslim people.”
A month or so after the Sept. 11 attacks, said dagger-maker Ali
Odary, 28, terrorist recruiters approached him outside a mosque.
They offered money. He shares their views – that “the United
States wants to colonize the whole world.”
Only his religious belief against killing, and his devotion to his
family’s dagger business, made him resist, he said: “I want to be
rich, but I want to be rich in my own way.”
It’s not just in Arab countries that al-Qaeda forces draw support.
In graffiti-splotched immigrant apartment blocs north of Paris,
men’s “hearts are with Osama bin Laden, against Bush,” said
Abdallah Selman, 30, a preacher struggling to moderate extremists
at his mosque. “Put yourself in their place. They are a minority
in France. They see injustice. They experience racism. They are
rejected in French society.”
They find their identity in a fundamental Islam that blames
infidels for their woes.
What most worries people in France – not only Muslims – is the
sense conveyed by Bush in the fight against terrorism “that ‘I
decide who is good and who is bad,”‘ said Syria-born Farouk Mardam
Bey, 55, a scholar at the Arab World Institute in Paris. America’s
approach, demonizing perceived enemies while disregarding global
treaties on the environment and other matters, only encourages more
terrorism, Bey said.
Back in Yemen, the Aug. 9 explosion that rocked a three-story
apartment building raised U.S. concerns of a possible escalation of
violence. The blast killed two men, both identified by authorities
as bomb-makers plotting attacks against U.S. interests. Jamal
Al-Badani, 27, who lives nearby and rushed to the scene, said he
counted 16 wooden boxes of explosives among other weapons before
police hauled them away.
It was only the latest reminder of resistance. A man lobbed a
grenade over the U.S. Embassy wall in March, and a bomb exploded
near the embassy in April. Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh,
had visited Washington in November and agreed to crack down on
pro-al-Qaeda elements. He reversed his previous refusal to accept a
rotating contingent of about 100 U.S. special forces soldiers to
mobilize a Yemeni counter-terrorism force.
But the situation is far from solid. Some security officials in
Yemen are former jihad fighters who returned from Afghanistan in
the mid-1990s and were rewarded with government positions. Yemen’s
coastline is still unpatrolled, and airport security lets
Pakistanis, Iraqis and Saudi Arabians come and go freely.
Ambassador Hull and others seek other ways to undermine terrorist
recruiting, training and plotting here.
Three days after the explosion, Hull set out through the searing
heat to open what he called “another front.”
His convoy wound through mountains and dry river beds into one of
three northern provinces where al-Qaeda forces recently have
clashed with soldiers.
Hull, through intermediaries, had proposed funding a health clinic
at Medghil.
By diverting $80,000 from other projects, he could help
tribespeople address medical needs that Sheik Bin Rabeesh Kelaan
considered dire. Since 1990, tribesmen in the area, where average
annual income is less than $380, have kidnapped more than 100
tourists in an effort to get government money and draw attention to
social needs.
“After the building is finished, it must have equipment inside”
and trained doctors, Rabeesh demanded upon Hull’s arrival at this
dusty outpost.
Hull nodded, then announced in fluent Arabic: “God willing, we’ll
try to do the best we can do.”
The two cemented the ceremonial brick. Then Rabeesh and tribesmen
in a Toyota topped with a mounted machine gun escorted Hull down a
backroad to a mud-walled compound resembling the Alamo.
Inside they sat, shoeless, on blue cushions and talked quietly
about everything from guns to U.S. support for Israel.
Even as Hull and Rabeesh conferred, 40-year-old tribesman Saleh
Ahmed, sitting across from them, confided that the only solution to
terrorism he sees is for Osama bin Laden to rule the world.
But guns were set down. A goat feast followed.
Hull’s commitment “shows how American authorities are willing to
help the Yemeni people in the future,” Rabeesh said.
Winning over these tribesmen “would be a major victory,” Hull
said. “It will make it very difficult for al-Qaeda and like groups
to find refuge, to have breathing space, which they use to
organize, to train, to plot. What we did today may not be as
dramatic as some of the military operations. But I think it is just
as important.”
Other sheiks who control Yemen’s countryside are seeking American
help.
Sheik Abdul Karim Bin Ali Murshed, 38, formed a group of tribal
leaders that U.S. officials have dubbed “sheiks against terror.”
They include 60 of about 200 sheiks in the three provinces where
al-Qaeda is active, Murshed said, “who find it very difficult to
convince their people to give up weapons and fighting.”
Young jobless tribesmen with nothing in the world but their machine
guns “are the ones most easily recruited,” Murshed said. Clinics,
schools and exchange visits to America would give hope.
That may seem like extortion, but some officials in Washington see
a strategic rationale.
America must step in with development assistance, Murshed said,
because pro-terrorist forces “are waiting for the chance to say,
‘Look, this project is no good.’ They are willing to spend their
own money to undermine the efforts.”
If America only sends soldiers and police, he said, “people will
say you are selfish and people will become enemies.
February 24, 2002 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Inside the "War" on Terrorism
BEIRUT – Hezbollah ruling council member Abdallah Kassir –
perched in a third-floor office under a large photo of the late
Iranian revolutionary Ayatollah Khomeini – boasts that “we have
Katyusha” rockets to shoot at Israel.
And Hezbollah is linked to more American deaths than any
group other than Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
But this group also runs social welfare projects and enjoys
wide popularity. Kassir and 11 other Hezbollah leaders serve in
Lebanon’s parliament.
The dual role of Hezbollah – part caretaker of the poor, part
guerrilla force – illustrates why heading off terrorism after the
Afghanistan campaign may prove vexing for the United States.
Is progress more likely if you engage with a group such as
Hezbollah, or if you try to isolate it?
U.S. diplomats recognize Hezbollah’s two sides.
“There are good works that they do in social and economic
areas,” State Department spokesman Greg Sullivan said. “That said,
they are clearly linked to terrorism. They are clearly involved in
the planning and execution of terrorist actions that have resulted
in the deaths of Americans. That’s got to stop.”
So far in the war on terrorism, nobody’s taken action against
Hezbollah, even amid reports the group may have helped al-Qaeda
fighters fleeing Afghanistan. Despite President Bush’s
with-us-or-against-us doctrine, Hezbollah operates about as usual.
Foremost, it opposes Israel. “We are not terrorists. We are
resisting terror,” Kassir said. Any violent acts are “self
defense” against Israel – which is supported by the United States.
“You should stop supporting terrorism yourselves.”
U.S. officials blame Hezbollah for the 1983 suicide truck
bombing in Beirut that killed 241 Marines, for attacks in Israel
that killed Americans and for kidnappings and plane hijackings.
They accuse Hezbollah of supplying a bombmaker linked to the 1998
deaths of more than 250 people at two U.S. embassies in Africa.
They suspect a role, which Hezbollah denies, in the recent
weapons shipment from Iran to Palestinians that Israel
intercepted.
Yet Hezbollah runs schools and health clinics, delivers
drinking water to slums, repairs roads and feeds the poor – all of
which wins support across Lebanon.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and various European
diplomats have met with Hezbollah leaders in recent years,
recognizing the group’s influence.
Hezbollah spokesman Hussein Naboulsi said U.S. officials
negotiated indirectly with Hezbollah before Sept. 11, sending an
intermediary to offer “anything you want” if the group would
renounce violence against Israel.
Sullivan denied this. “If others have claimed to represent
U.S. views, they are doing so without U.S. approval.” British
officials “have had a dialogue with Hezbollah” and may have
mentioned U.S. positions, Sullivan said, but “are not acting on
our behalf.”
U.S. hard-liners argue for attacks on Hezbollah training camps
in Lebanon and for pressure on Lebanon’s Syria-backed government
for harboring Hezbollah.
“You have to be much more aggressive about hitting people
before they hit you,” said veteran U.S. diplomat Paul Bremer, a
corporate security consultant who coordinated counterterrorism
efforts and chaired a terrorism commission under President Ronald
Reagan.
Hezbollah officials call for a different approach. Kassir,
42, insists he’s a reasonable man with the highest regard for
human life.
“God has forbidden us to hurt any human being or animal
without a really strong reason.” He added, “Hezbollah is not an
enemy of the American people.”
As a young man, the son of a teacher, Kassir had just moved
from the family home to Beirut when in 1982 an Israeli mortar
attack killed his 19-year-old brother, Abdel Monem, in southern
Lebanon.
“It made me extremely upset and sad. It gave me
determination: “I am going to force the Israelis out.’ It
convinced me without a doubt that Israelis are terrorists.”
Hezbollah came to prominence in the 18-year conflict that
followed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
Now the Israelis have withdrawn from most of Lebanon. One
southern area still is contested, and Israeli warplanes fly over
Lebanon several times a week. Hezbollah condemns the flights – as
do the United Nations and United States.
“We’ve made known to the Israelis our concern that
overflights are a violation of the U.N. demarcated line of
withdrawal,” State Department spokesman Sullivan said.
For the United States to attack Hezbollah would be
counterproductive, igniting rage when people in Lebanon are
turning away from violence toward progress, Kassir said.
“You must control yourself. Think with your brains, not your
emotions. Work with partners to make solutions to problems in the
world,” he said.
“I feel with you, with what happened to you in New York. But
now I want you to feel with me, too.”
February 24, 2002 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Inside the "War" on Terrorism
KUWAIT – Behind a yellow brick wall in this ultramodern city
sits the headquarters for the Social Reform Society, devoted to
pure Islamic life.
Inside the compound, the parking lot is practically full.
Soccer fields, a gym, a snack shop and a video arcade attract
teenagers.
Bearded men sit around in a meeting hall sipping fruit
drinks. Then they break for evening prayers in an adjacent mosque.
Posters around the headquarters convey a sense of injustice.
One shows a black strand of barbed wire choking the mosque in the
middle of Jerusalem.
But there’s no clear evidence this group is violent.
U.S. officials have cracked down on Islamist organizations
that they believe are linked with terror.
The Social Reform Society still operates.
Like dozens of Islamist groups across the world, it does good
works. These groups have huge popular support and are pressing to
join the political mainstream. Governments count on them to
perform social welfare work.
The groups also advocate powerfully for traditional Islamic
practices such as segregation of men and women in schools.
The main difficulty Social Reform Society members face, group
secretary Abu Abdel Rahman says, is heavy-handed treatment by
Kuwait’s government.
“We can’t do a thing here without asking permission,” says
Rahman.
Activities consist of “people getting together for their
aims,” he says. “In America, aren’t there groups doing that?”
One aim is helping the poor.
“Many poor people,” Rahman says. “And all over the world,
poor people with poor people, rich with rich.”
Another aim is giving teenagers alternatives to trolling
about Kuwait’s Los Angeles-style shopping malls amid sexy images
of Western women in tight jeans.
“This is a Muslim club,” says Hamad al-Awady, holding soccer
shoes before an evening practice under lights. “Some people here
say Osama bin Laden is a good man; some say he’s a bad man. Many
Muslims say he is a good man.”
Ahmed Baloul, 16, heading to the video arcade with his
brother, says he supports Palestinians, “but I don’t support the
suicide bombers. The prophet said don’t kill any human, plant or
animal. Just kill the man who resist you.”
In Kuwait, Islamist groups have more freedom than in much of
the Mideast. The result is growing fundamentalist influence in
Kuwait’s Parliament. A U.S-backed proposal to let women vote in
Kuwait was narrowly defeated last year because of Islamist
opposition.
U.S. diplomats are torn.
Officially they support greater political openness in the
Mideast, which would give greater influence to popular groups.
They also support Western freedoms, particularly involving women,
that many Islamist groups reject. And the possibility that some
groups may advocate violence complicates everything. About 40
Kuwaitis fought with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
“One of our chief concerns is the lack of tolerance some of
these groups display,” says U.S. Ambassador to Kuwait Richard
Jones, suggesting that a willingness to impose beliefs can
“predispose you to violence.”
Quoting from the Koran, Jones says: “There is no compulsion
in religion.”
February 24, 2002 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Inside the "War" on Terrorism
Fighting poverty seen as first step in waging war on future terrorism
BEIRUT – Security guard Jamal Al-Masalmy trudges the sour
streets of the refugee slum Shatila, one of 20,000 Palestinians
here with no legal job, no political representation, no property
rights.
They lug sloshing water into teetering brick buildings. They
bootleg electricity from overloaded wires. They pick through
garbage heaps for plastic, tin. Children beg, tiny hands tugging.
“No future,” 33-year-old Al-Masalmy concludes, seething as he
retires to smoke in the back room where he sleeps on a cot.
He blames the United States – not Lebanon – “because you are
the superpower.” Americans “see on television what happens to
Palestinians” and “nobody talks about it.” Instead, Americans
support Israel, occupier of land he views as Palestinian.
He’s against killing innocents. But if a terrorist recruiter
asked him to attack Americans?
“Maybe yes. Maybe no,” he says before the light bulb flickers
off and his cigarette burns, an orange dot hanging in the dark.
Al-Masalmy embodies the potential for terrorism that grows
daily in political frustration, anger, poverty and despair.
Worldwide, legions of educated but underemployed men such as
Al-Masalmy, resentful of American power, give extremists such as
Osama bin Laden a ready pool of recruits.
And extremists operate everywhere. Many draw support from
militant Islamist organizations that oppose pro-Western
governments and America.
While the United States stands committed to a war on
terrorism, and the U.S. military is ready to go anywhere, security
for civilians may require more than a crackdown.
It may require sustained efforts to stop terrorism at its
roots.
Nearly six months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S.
government has barely begun to mobilize on this front. President
Bush has concentrated on responding militarily to the immediate
threat posed by terrorism. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says
the best defense is a good offense.
Bush has proposed an expansion of the Peace Corps. The State
Department distributed several thousand cassettes of Muslims
preaching peace, and the president called for children to
communicate by e-mail across borders. The U.S. is among many
countries providing humanitarian aid to Afghanistan.
Yet the administration has offered few new efforts for
reducing poverty, engaging with Islamists to win hearts and minds,
and encouraging democracy that could offer political options that
relieve frustrations.
The billions earmarked for fighting terrorism go mostly to
the military and homeland defense.
“Force alone is not enough’ to ensure security
Some U.S. diplomats contend a broader campaign is crucial.
“We need to work with our friends, particularly our friends
in the Middle East, to demonstrate that we have a shared interest
in offering people a sense of hope – whether it’s economic hope,
whether it’s political hope by encouraging participation and
greater openness, or whether it’s a resolution of (conflicts),
which I know are of longstanding concern to people of this
region,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State William Burns said.
Such goals “have acquired even greater importance” since
Sept. 11, said Burns, the top U.S. adviser on Near Eastern
affairs, during a recent visit to the Persian Gulf.
Economic help in particular must give “tangible results” in
narrowing a “rich-poor gap … so that people have a sense that if
economic growth occurs, it’s going to be spread fairly across
society,” Burns said.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who
supported the military campaign in Afghanistan, agreed. “Force
alone is not enough,” Albright said recently in Denver. “America
is against terrorism, but what none of us should ever forget is
what America is for.”
Allies in Europe and the Middle East also seek broader efforts.
In Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak for years confronted
Islamist insurgents with force, authorities found they eventually
had to address causes of violence.
“Certainly economic development is very important,” said Gen.
Sherif Gala, first deputy in Egypt’s Interior Ministry. Egypt
launched poverty-reduction projects in the sugar cane fields along
the Nile River, where terrorists once drew recruits.
The result “is to raise the potential for the normal person
to raise his standard of living,” Gala said. Egypt reports no
terrorist attacks since 1998.
A sustained U.S. campaign that targeted roots of terrorism
“would be cheaper, less dramatic and, yet, more effective” than
military action, said veteran U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke,
former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
One key, Holbrooke said, is “to find credible Islamic
leaders” – an alternative to militant ideologues who exploit the
religion – to help build a new sense of hope.
Militant Islam, emerging over the last 80 years, nudges
thousands of disaffected young men toward violence.
It grew out of urban neighborhoods such as the teeming Imbaba
section of Cairo – row upon row of brick apartments separated by
narrow unpaved streets.
“We’d go to the streets and teach,” drawing crowds, Sheikh
Ahmad, an imam there, recalled of the early 1980s.
Radical Islamists assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat
in 1981 and also tried to overthrow Mubarak.
Like rulers across the Middle East, Mubarak – with $2 billion
a year in U.S. aid – cracked down. This drove many Islamists to
Britain, the United States and other Western countries. Some
claimed refugee status as victims of human rights abuses.
Displaced and sometimes alienated in apartment towers or on
university campuses, some took refuge in small, makeshift mosques
where they nurtured an ideology casting Western society as evil.
One group in Hamburg, Germany, plotted the Sept. 11 attacks
on America.
Crackdown on militants leaves frustration, fear
Today in Egypt, there isn’t much room for militants to operate.
The government controls all mosques. An estimated 15,000 Islamists
are in jail, U.S. officials say.
Only government-approved imams lead prayers.
Sheikh Ahmad spent years in jail before authorities released
him. Bearded in the fashion of devout followers, he read a
newspaper recently in the back-treet corner poultry shop he runs.
“Now I am a moderate one,” Ahmad began, speaking on condition
his full name not be printed. He teaches the Koran informally to
neighborhood children, he said. And he fumes. “I am a university
graduate. I expected to be a Muslim teacher. Now I can’t find a
good job. It’s difficult here. Everything is under control.”
Frustrated?
“Sure,” he said, looking up and down the street as women
peered out doorways. “I can’t talk about it.”
Militant fundamentalist ideology still thrives worldwide,
said Khaled Salah, 31, an Al-Ahram newspaper political editor
whose uncle was executed for his role in a jihad group’s weapons
raid.
And around the Middle East, he said, frustrations are peaking
– about unaddressed needs for housing and health, constraints on
opposition politics, Israeli tanks parked in the middle of
Palestinian communities.
“We can’t do anything. We can’t do anything. This is the
problem. This is the real problem,” Salah said. “It’s a critical
situation here. We need democracy.”
He said the U.S. approach to cracking down on terrorism –
“you treat everybody with rockets, bombs” – may ignore other, more
effective strengths.
“America has the most advanced civil society in the world. It
needs to teach people in Egypt who can be leaders and implement a
civil society here.”
Salah has applied for professional exchange programs in the
U.S., so far without success. He believes experience in America
could boost his local clout. He said that for the cost of a
missile, the United States could instruct hundreds of journalists
from across the Arab world in how to run independent media.
Islamist groups trying to reach out in peace
Across the Muslim world since Sept. 11, U.S. authorities have
brought pressure to bear on dozens of Islamist organizations that
they say helped fund terrorists. But some Islamists now say
they want to join the political mainstream, distancing themselves
from violence, building relations with the West.
For example, the Islamic Presentation Committee in Kuwait
City is trying to enlist U.S. soldiers, deployed for training in
the Kuwaiti desert, for cross-cultural discussions, said Abdel
Latif, spokesman for the group.
Many Muslims see America primarily in “images of materialism:
“Baywatch,’ Madonna,” Latif said.
“They fear that they might lose their religion, be
materialized. People are trying to cope with the overpowering
sense of emphasis on gaining wealth. They want to somehow live as
a Muslim. They also want to be part of these things. You need to
try to understand them. And people here don’t know about the
United States.”
Another potential starting point for Americans is working in
schools to prevent terrorism.
In Jordan, U.S. diplomats four years ago had a hand in
beginning one effort.
They sent an experienced middle school teacher, Muna
al-Shami, 45, to the U.S. on an exchange to study local
government.
During her two-week tour, she dropped in on a city council
meeting in Troy, N.Y. People, including elderly women, were
arguing about garbage collection.
Al-Shami was amazed at “the forcefulness” with which
Americans expressed their opinions to council members, “putting
forth their point of view yet without causing injuries.”
This ability to act politically without resorting to violence
seems to be lacking in Arab societies, she said.
Back in Jordan, she took action, forming a group of about 100
teachers interested in developing “civil society.” They began
talking about teaching 11- to 14-year-olds “to participate in
public life” nonviolently, she said.
“When you are trained to use evidence, objectivity, your
emotions will be more under control.
“You can write letters, you can go to the press. You can hire
a lobby. It is important to equip your citizens with knowledge of
how to express themselves concerning issues they’d like to change
in a peaceful manner. You alleviate the sources of frustration.”
Al-Shami led about 20 teachers in a training seminar recently.
On her presentation board she wrote phrases in Arabic: “legal
knowledge,” “public policy” and “activating the role of the
citizen.”
One of the teachers spoke up. Poverty in his town has led to
begging in the streets. Is this the kind of social problem that
his students could research?
The teachers planned a curriculum. Students could discuss
poverty, then interview beggars. Then they could call local
government officials to find out its policy toward beggars. Then
students could design a social action plan.
“I cannot give you a guarantee now that this program will
stop violence,” al-Shami said. “But if these efforts are started
and consistently maintained, then I can give you a guarantee.”
The problem, U.S. embassy officials in Amman said: no funding.
Hard to gauge success of different kind of war
Nobody’s sure whether efforts to “drain the swamp” of the
poverty and frustration that breeds violence would succeed.
And the horror of what happened Sept. 11 may cause militants
to think twice about terrorism.
Months after the attacks, men on streets from Africa to
Central Asia express sympathy to visiting Americans.
“Everyone feels it’s no good to make terrorist actions like
that – even against nonbelievers,” Sheikh Ahmad said in Cairo.
Even in Beirut’s Shatila slum, Palestinian refugee Al-Masalmy
said: “It’s bad work, what happened in America. We don’t like
killing people.”
But then he adds a caveat – one still heard so often in
discussions about how to stop terror.
“Conditions here are very tough. And the other side, he kills
us.”
How we fight
The United States seeks to prevent terrorism from taking root.
Among the approaches under discussion:
Education.
“Extending compassion” by expanding the Peace Corps.
Humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and other countries.
Democratic institutions, to give people a voice in government.
Economic assistance.
Encouraging moderate political and religious leaders.
Some terrorist groups, Al Qaeda, many countries
The name of Osama bin Laden’s group means “the base.”
Founded in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, it is one of the two
main members of the International Front for Fighting Jews and
Crusades, an alliance bin Laden unveiled in 1998 that he said was
formed to kill Americans and destroy U.S. interests around the
world.
The Egyptian Jihad, or Holy War, Egypt
Led by Ayman al-Zawahri, bin Laden’s top lieutenant. Blamed for
assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Group
split when al-Zawahri announced his decision to join bin Laden’s
International Front, with some members fearing it would draw too
much attention from the United States. After the bombing of two
U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, several leaders were arrested
abroad and sent to Egypt.
Gamaa Al-Islamiya (The Islamic Group), Egypt
Egypt’s biggest radical Muslim group led a violent 1992-97
campaign to set up a purist Islamist state. Killed dozens of
tourists near Luxor in 1997. Armed Islamic Group (GIA), Algeria
The group was formed after Algerian authorities canceled
elections that Islamic activists were poised to win, touching off
a conflict that has left more than 100,000 dead. Bin Laden is
suspected of using this network in Europe and it has been linked
to a Canadian cell involving Ahmed Ressam, the would-be millennium
bomber caught in Washington in 1999.
February 22, 2002 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Inside the "War" on Terrorism
Street-level vigilance and savvy combine to ferret out suspects
UDAIRI DESERT, Kuwait – As the sun dips behind sand dunes
near the Kuwait-Iraq border, glowing red tracer bullets zing over
black barbed-wire coils.
U.S. Army Sgt. Lance Perkins lobs a smoke bomb that lands
just beyond the wire by a z-shaped trench. His fellow troops from
Fort Carson then hurl grappling hooks to tear back the wire. The
eight infantrymen creep through yellow smoke and take the trench,
opening fire in crackling bursts. “Light ’em up!” one shouts,
pumped up in this drill.
They’re preparing for action anywhere from Central Asia to
the Horn of Africa in America’s war to rid the world of terrorism.
But this is a new kind of war.
While Perkins and thousands of other highly trained,
extravagantly equipped U.S. troops are formidable, a shambling
Kuwait City policeman, assigned to a bazaar two hours south of
here, where he drowsily writes parking tickets, may be more
effective in cracking down on terrorists.
Police Sgt. Khalid Al-Saba, 44, perked up recently when he
spotted four South Asians, two from Pakistan, lingering in a
neighborhood where they didn’t live.
Al-Saba stopped them. They gave names that proved fake. He
arrested them for further investigation.
“We should not be forgiving. We have to stop terrorism,”
Al-Saba said. “Check everything. Fight the crime before it
happens.”
The terrorists who attacked America lived and operated among
civilians in cities – not in open deserts.
Five months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Al-Saba’s sort of
street-level police vigilance, not dramatic military intervention,
emerges as the way the war on terrorism may be won or lost.
President Bush has wielded the U.S. military as America’s
primary force.
Almost all money devoted to the war on terrorism goes to the
military. In January, Bush called for a $48 billon boost for the
Pentagon’s $331 billion annual budget.
That total would be three times the combined military budgets
of China, Russia, India, Britain and France.
A White House inner circle, including Vice President Dick
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, sent U.S. soldiers
to the Philippines, Somalia and Yemen.
“If we have to go into 15 countries, we ought to do it, to
deal with the problem of terrorism,” Rumsfeld said recently.
The Pentagon also is looking at the logistics of overthrowing
Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. Analysts envision a
deployment of 100,000 or more U.S. ground troops (Iraqi forces
number 350,000, including 100,000 elite Republican Guards) that
could risk thousands of American lives.
Influential ally Israel urges America to consider action
against Iran as well.
Bush repeatedly has said the war on terrorism will be
different – not like the Gulf War that liberated territory, not
like the air war on Kosovo that involved few ground troops, not
like the quick war on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
But just what it will be isn’t fully decided.
Meanwhile, local police are arresting terrorist suspects
throughout the world in Barcelona, Leicester, Hamburg, Manila,
Algiers, Singapore.
U.S. authorities often aren’t involved until after initial
interrogations. Especially in the large multicultural cities
that give terrorists anonymity and opportunities to plot, local
police working streets and airports often are the only force
tied-in enough to head off attacks on civilians.
“Even if we knew where terrorists were, they would be hard to
hit with a bomber,” said James Phillips, Middle East analyst for
the conservative Heritage Foundation. “A lot of times, we don’t
know where they are. They operate among civilians and attack
civilians.”
Military operations face growing resistance.
Turkey’s prime minister recently asked the United States to
refrain from attacking Iraq, warning that this could destabilize
the region. Rulers in Saudi Arabia, where many Muslims bristle at
the presence of 5,000 U.S. soldiers, said they wouldn’t support
use of those troops against Iraq or any other Arab or Muslim country.
“Please don’t rush. Think about it before you do bad things
to people all over the world,” pleaded Suad al-Walaiti, who lived
in Denver in the late 1980s and now directs an Islamist women’s
group in Kuwait.
“War is not a solution,” said al-Walaiti, “I don’t like
Saddam Hussein. But what about his poor people?”
Some analysts warn that too much military force could drive
away countries that the United States needs as partners.
“The problem is going to be that on issues like intelligence
cooperation and law enforcement cooperation, we are not going to
get anything. Countries will just start to walk away from us,”
said Jim Lindsay, the National Security Agency’s global issues
director under President Clinton. Lindsay now runs the Brookings
Institution program on terrorism and American foreign policy.
“Their governments are going to say: “Look, you have become
so unpopular with our public that we are not going to work with
you. You have become sort of radioactive.'”
U.S. troops deployed since Sept. 11 are among the first to
grasp the new challenges a sustained war on terrorism presents.
Plainclothes officers can “Go in, flush ’em out’
Camped in Kuwait, in a sandy training area dubbed “the kabal,”
Fort Carson infantrymen recently motivated themselves setting up
mock tombs for Hussein and Osama bin Laden. But “it’s difficult”
to catch terrorists, said Sgt. Lawrence Montoya, 31, in his tent,
clasping three letters from his children near Colorado Springs.
“Because they wear no uniform. This is where police would probably
be more effective. They can plainclothes it. Go in and flush ’em out.”
Standing in a chow line, Sgt. Joey Mushinski, 25, figured
“intelligence needs to be beefed up a lot” to make progress.
“We’re not very much use until they find a specific country
or city. We need CIA, or something. We’re definitely a broad
sword. America could do a lot more than we are now. It’s seeming
to slow down. Boost the CIA. Get it back to Cold War levels.”
U.S. commanders also recognize limitations.
“If we think that the military is the single answer, we’ve
got that about wrong,” says Col. Mike Weimer, 52, assistant chief
of operations for Army Central Command, speaking at a Mideast base
that he asked not be identified for security reasons.
Rather, Weimer said, expect a multidimensional campaign in
several countries at once.
“What we can do is maintain very close cooperation with the
military and law enforcement operations in a particular country,”
he said. “Ultimately there has got to be some linking and some
trust.”
The State Department already has a police program to combat
terrorism. It is built on Cold War contacts the United States
developed to fight communism. Since 1983, this Anti-Terrorism
Assistance program has trained more than 25,000 law enforcement
officials in 117 countries.
The advantage for U.S. taxpayers: The cost is a small
fraction of what military mobilization costs. The annual budget is
$38 million, with $45 million in supplemental funds available.
Police from other countries come to the United States for
training. They learn the latest techniques for border security,
bomb detection, dignitary protection, dealing with weapons of mass
destruction. And they begin to view America as a partner.
“We need cooperation and the ability to exchange information
rapidly” so that local police in one country “can pick up and call
their counterparts anywhere in the world,” said Ambassador Francis
Taylor, the U.S. government’s counterterrorism coordinator.
Strengthening a global police dragnet would require
“relationship-building in places that we have not traditionally
had law enforcement relations,” Taylor said. “The problem of law
enforcement worldwide is pretty simple. A cop wants to know
everything he can so that he can make a judgment.
“That means you’ve got to move intelligence. We don’t do that
across the world very well. We don’t do that in some of our own
cities very well. Law enforcement is how we basically protect our
societies. We’ve got to enable every law enforcement officer to be
a sentinel in this fight against terrorism.”
In support of police cooperation, U.S. diplomats are pressing
for extradition treaties to bring suspects across borders for
trials. They’ve developed informal hand-over procedures –
diplomatic security officers refer to “rendering” suspects abroad
– that can hasten roundups with less hassle for governments
fearing publicity.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, police cooperation worked.
In December 1999, terrorists in Amman, Jordan, plotted
attacks on a hotel and at tourist sites. Policemen who had worked
with U.S. authorities before broke up the plot, then notified U.S.
officials.
“They think bin Laden’s people, a local cell there, was
involved,” said Mike Kraft, a State Department official familiar
with the case. “It was just basic police work.”
U.S. officials want to build a new police training center
outside Washington, D.C. Currently, foreign police candidates for
anti-terrorism training must wait up to a year before courses and
relationship-building can begin. “This is a major constraint,”
Kraft said.
Close cooperation builds more than security
Authorities abroad often are enthusiastic because U.S. support
strengthens their domestic position.
“We welcome any kind of cooperation between the police
agencies in Egypt and the police agencies in the United States,”
said Gen. Sherif Galal, first deputy in Egypt’s Interior Ministry.
“Our wish would be all the developmental and technical assistance
we can get.”
Egypt offers an example of close cooperation. Authorities
here have cracked down against Islamist militants over the past
two decades. Groups linked to the 1981 assassination of President
Anwar Sadat also wanted to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak, and
eventually resorted to attacking tourists. In 1997, 58 visitors
from Japan and Europe were gunned down near a temple at Luxor.
In Cairo, Egypt’s capital, U.S. regional security attache
Gentry Smith, a former police officer in North Carolina, recently
headed out from the embassy with Maj. Helmy Ghazy, an Egyptian
Central State Security officer.
Ghazy is a veteran of Egypt’s anti-terrorism campaign, in
which police infiltrated groups and jailed an estimated 15,000
people. Now he works as a liaison officer on the U.S. payroll out
of an office in the U.S. Embassy.
“You can’t find Osama bin Laden. You are finding his small
soldiers,” Ghazy said of America’s war on terrorism so far.
“Military-wise, you won’t succeed as you will if we cooperate with
intelligence.
“The world is now like one big country. If you don’t have
agencies united, this problem will come back to you. Intelligence
cooperation can solve this problem faster than military work.”
He and Smith park their sport utility vehicle at Cairo
International Airport and check in at the office of Gen. Abdel
Mohamed, who directs airport police operations. Smith asks amiably
about the framed photo on Mohamed’s wall showing him with other
Egyptian officials on a training visit to Oklahoma City in 1990.
Mohamed assures Smith that bomb-sniffing dogs, raised in the
U.S. and then trained in Egypt as part of the cooperative program,
check all luggage and aircraft for every flight from Cairo to the
United States.
Egyptian police now use more than 200 dogs. They house and
train them at a new 5,000-acre police academy, running them
through obstacle courses of explosives hidden in suitcases,
televisions and computer keyboards.
“OK, show me again,” Mohamed Anter says to his Labrador,
Gloria, after she locates a pouch of C-4 stuffed behind the left
front headlight of a Fiat. “Good dog.”
But military or police operations face growing resistance.
Initial sympathetic goodwill toward the United States is waning.
Many around the Middle East oppose U.S. support of Israel.
Many object that U.S. efforts to isolate Iraq hurt civilians. Many
resent U.S. troops based in the region. And police are widely
seen, in low-income sectors and among intellectuals, as
heavy-handed. “America is becoming like our regime here,” said
Darwish Salama, 32, a bedouin displaced from the ancient stone
city at Petra, Jordan, now selling souvenirs.
He supports stopping terrorism. “You have to do something,”
he said. “But soldiers will not do anything. You have to find out:
What makes terrorists? Here it is the Palestinian issue. Elsewhere
it is something else. You have to help solve these problems.
“You could say to your allies: “We are not giving you money
to kill people.’ Because that makes people hate America. And then
people will continue to attack America in many countries. America
must use her power for good things, things that are good for
humanity.”
A group of retired Jordanian generals, reviewing the war on
terrorism in Amman recently, concluded that Bush is going about it
all wrong.
Americans seem reflexively to rely on brute force, instead of
diplomacy and aid programs, to resolve problems rooted in poverty
and despair, they lament.
“Look, you have lost the love of 70 percent of the people in the
world,” said Gen. Midhyib Alaur. “Instead of your military fighter
jets and guns, why not spend some money to help people out of
poverty? This is a real cause of terrorism.
“The United States must fix its foreign policy. Otherwise it
will meet the fate of Rome. And we will be sorry to see America
go.”
Key terms
Islam – A monotheistic religion based on submission to Allah
(the Arabic word for God) and the chief prophet, Mohammed. Their
holy book is the Koran.
Muslim – One who practices Islam.
Islamist – Someone who seeks a society run on Islamic
principles. The movement is called Islamism – essentially,
political Islam – to distinguish it from the religion.
Defining terrorism
The State Department uses the definition of terrorism adopted
by the government in 1983 for statistical and analytical purposes.
It derives from Title 22 of the United States Code, Section
2656f(d):
“Terrorism’ means premeditated, politically motivated
violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational
groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an
audience. Noncombatant is defined as civilians, or military
personnel who are unarmed or off duty.
The term “international terrorism’ means terrorism involving
citizens or the territory of more than one country.
The term “terrorist group’ means any group practicing, or
that has significant subgroups that practice, international
terrorism.
December 2, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Pakistan-Afghanistan Borderlands, Security
As sea shrinks, danger grows
MUYNOQ, Uzbekistan – Once it was anthrax island.
But now the shrinking Aral Sea is leaving a land bridge to a
windswept site north of here where Soviet scientists tested deadly
bio-weapons and dumped enough of a supervirulent brown powder to
extinguish humanity.
For years, Pentagon insiders and locals, including Uzbek
cargo ship captain Aygali Tankimanov, who steered past the island
regularly, have known that anthrax alive in the soil could spread.
Via burrowing gophers or antelope.
Or unemployed fishermen who cross to the island seeking scrap
metal to sell.
Or government crews interested in drilling for oil.
Or terrorists.
“Even though Americans are far away,” 62-year-old Tankimanov
warned, “it could still reach them.”
Only now – after the Sept. 11 attacks, the surfacing of
anthrax in the U.S. mail, and the possibility a terrorist could
reach the once-remote island on foot – are U.S. officials
beginning to act on such warnings.
The island named Vozrozhdeniye (“Rebirth”) served as the main
open-air testing site for the vast Soviet germ-warfare machine
that, during the Cold War, perfected methods of killing Americans
en masse.
Scientists tied hundreds of monkeys to poles on
Vozrozhdeniye, set off bombs that puffed yellowish brown clouds of
anthrax and other biological agents, then monitored how long it
took for the monkeys, bleeding from their mouths, to collapse and
die.
In the late 1980s, Soviets buried more than 100 tons of
Anthrax 836 – enough to extinguish Earth’s population several
times over if delivered efficiently – just a few feet underground,
said Ken Alibek, a Soviet bioweapons program leader who defected
to the United States.
U.S. soil tests a decade later revealed that the anthrax was
alive.
By then, multiple U.S. government programs had emerged to
deal with the Soviet bioweapons complex that mobilized an
estimated 65,000 scientists at 40 or more factories and labs.
Yet for years, Uzbek authorities refused to let Americans
work on Vozrozhdeniye. Uzbekistan controls airpsace and two-thirds
of the island. Kazakstan claims the northern tip.
U.S. involvement
Last April, White House officials launched a review of all
spending on programs to help Russia and former Soviet states
dismantle Cold War weapons facilities. Some U.S. analysts and
lawmakers long have challenged such spending, warning that Russia
might take the money and still secretly develop bioweapons in four
military labs off-limits to U.S. officials.
Then hijackers killed nearly 4,000 people on Sept. 11. And
policy makers now view containing weapons of mass destruction as
more of a priority for U.S. international policy.
“I won’t say people have been doing any cartwheels. But you
can see, in bits of pieces, that there is not only heightened
awareness on our part but also on the part of our allies,” said
Brian Hayes, the Pentagon project director entrusted with
Vozrozhdeniye. He and other U.S. experts, wearing protective
suits, have visited the island. They are developing a plan to
clean up the anthrax and raze testing facilities “within six months.”
Rather than cut spending, Congress now is considering adding
$40 million or more to the $17 million allotted for Vozrozhdeniye
and other bioweapons threats, said Jim Reid, chief of the
Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program.
A bioweapons attack on America now is seen as “more possible
sooner, and therefore warrants a more intense, earlier
(prevention) effort,” Reid said.
On Oct. 22, Uzbekistan, too, got moving, granting U.S.
officials permission to begin work.
Meanwhile, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s forces already
may have developed bioweapons. A U.S. commander announced last
week that American soldiers in Afghanistan found widespread
evidence of tinkering with bio-agents.
Soviet weapons sold
Leaders of anti-American groups stated as far back as 1999
that they’d bought biological and chemical ingredients in former
Soviet states for possible attacks on Israel and the United States.
Yet still, there’s no visible security out here on the sandy
scrub land between Muynoq and Vozrozhdeniye’s deadly spores.
“To grow even a ton of this agent (Anthrax 836), it would be
enough if you get just a small vial of it,” Alibek, 51, said in an
interview from his home outside Washington D.C. Obtaining such a
vial from Vozrozhdeniye would require “three or four days” and no
particular scientific expertise.
“A technician” could collect it, said Alibek, who rose to
second-in-command of the Soviet “Biopreparat” weapons-developing
system before defecting in 1992.
“Something needs to be done. If we don’t do anything, there
is some probability that this thing could come to the United
States in the form of actual weapons.”
In meetings with members of Congress, Alibek has advocated
aggressive action to neutralize bioweapons facilities and help
employ Soviet scientists who receive only $50 to $100 a month if
they’re lucky.
“We’ve already seen what could be caused by a very small
amount of anthrax” delivered inefficiently in letters, Alibek
said.
“Such biological agents are becoming attractive to terrorists
from two standpoints: First, as weapons which could kill people.
Second, as weapons that can keep the entire country hostage for
weeks, even months. We saw a very severe psychological effect.”
During the Cold War, Soviet and U.S. military scientists
began developing bioweapons along with nuclear weapons.
But Soviet biowarfare efforts surpassed anything U.S.
military scientists even tried. Soviet scientists developed
hundreds of tons of weaponized anthrax, plague and possibly
smallpox. They had isolated incurable viruses including Ebola and
Marburg by the early 1980s, Alibek said, and then melded them into
weapons.
Americans had an inkling early on. U-2 spy planes flying over
Vozrozhdeniye in the late 1950s photographed the evenly spaced
posts where Soviets tied up animals and building configurations
resembling America’s own bioweapons testing facilities in Utah.
Soviet programs progressed steadily at least through 1992,
Alibek said, with Mikhail Gorbachev and other leaders viewing
bioweapons as insurance “in case of war” even after the 1972
Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which banned bioweapons.
Alibek said he personally developed a weapon using an anthrax
strain three times more lethal than the Anthrax 836.
On Vozrozhdeniye, Soviets disposed of massive quantities of
Anthrax 836 from other bioweapons facilities because of the
island’s seemingly remote Central Asian location, in the windswept
Aral Sea, surrounded by sparsely populated desert.
Spores remain
Soviet soldiers poured hydrogen peroxide onto the anthrax in
stainless steel drums, let the mix sit, then repeated the process
three times, according to Alibek, who added that spores certainly
survived. A Western analyst in the Uzbek capital Tashkent, who
spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed the account.
Then the Soviets dug shallow pits and emptied the stainless steel drums,
containers they may have considered valuable, and buried the
anthrax a few feet underground, Alibek said. U.S. officials
sampled soil here in 1997 and found live, lethal spores.
Hayes, the Pentagon project chief, confirmed U.S. officials
have “firsthand knowledge” of the threat.
All this time, the Aral Sea has been shrinking.
Large-scale irrigation projects to produce cotton across arid
Central Asia drained the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers that once
fed the sea.
Now Vozrozhdeniye Island is practically connected to the
mainland. Already, people in Muynoq say, they can walk across
marshes to the island during dry months. An international team of
scientists reported in August that the sea, with average depth
down to about 50 feet, soon will be just a cluster of
pesticide-laced lakes.
On Vozrozhdeniye, dilapidated dorms and a playground stand
near an airfield. Soviet researchers and their families lived on
the island during tests.
An emerging Pentagon plan likely would require use of
respirators. Hayes described the plan as “manpower intensive”
involving “a lot of dirt moving,” but he declined to give details
for security reasons.
Alibek says drilling thousands of holes no deeper than 5 feet
and pumping in disinfectant hydrogen peroxide and formaldehyde
chemicals also might work. Capping the contaminated areas would
not be sufficient, he said.
Cancers, birth defects
For years, residents of Muynoq and other former seaside towns
have been leaving. Partly that’s because of the demise of Aral Sea
fishing, and partly because millions of people in this region
suffer health problems. Over the years, unexplained mass deaths of
animals and a high incidence of rare cancers and birth defects
raised public concerns about pesticide dust storms and the impact
of bioweapons testing.
But retired captain Tankimanov says he can’t afford to leave.
He tries to stay healthy, taking walks by the ramshackle gray
wood warehouses of what once was his port, looking nostalgically
at boats beached in sand where bony cows nibble weeds. Beyond
terrorists, he said he worries about viruses spreading through
wildlife.
“People here could die. There are many rats on that island.
If the land connects more with the island, all those rats could
come out here,” he said. “America should try to kill the rats. And
then you must clean that whole island completely.”
November 11, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Pakistan-Afghanistan Borderlands, Security
ALONG THE AMU DARYA RIVER, Uzbekistan – The fall of a key
northern Afghan city to U.S.-backed rebels offered a military and
humanitarian breakthrough in America’s campaign against terrorism.
Northern Aliance rebels captured Mazar-e-Sharif, about 35
miles south of this river that forms the Afghanistan-Uzbekistan
border, after several days of attacks from the south supported by
American airstrikes.
Taliban officials said their forces withdrew. But it wasn’t
immediately clear how far, for how long, or whether Taliban forces
north of Mazar-e-Sharif (population 200,000) may still threaten
the supply route.
Mazar-e-Sharif is considered strategic because of its link
to Uzbekistan – a relatively good road south from the river, with
access to Kabul that is not as vulnerable to weather as the many
mountain passes in Afghanistan. The city also has an aiport that
the Northern Alliance reportedly controls.
Anti-Taliban troops who were massed at the front about 30
miles north of Kabul cheered at reports of Mazar-e-Sharif’s fall,
with villagers crowding around radios to hear the news.
“This is the beginning of the collapse of the Taliban,” said
Nur Agha, a 22-year-old fighter.
Alim Khan, a Northern Alliance commander, said anti-Taliban
forces would launch a major attack on the capital within three
days.
He said that 1,000 opposition troops would assemble today at
Bagram, site of an opposition-controlled air base near the front
line.
Mohammad Afzal Amon, the commander of the opposition’s elite
Zarbati troops north of Kabul, said 600 fighters had been sent to
his area since the victory in Mazar-e-Sharif.
But the opposition will likely face a much tougher battle for
Kabul, a city of about 1 million people, than it did at
Mazar-e-Sharif. Taliban forces are more numerous and the terrain
more mountainous. And the United States – whose warplanes would be
vital to any advance – has expressed reservations about the
alliance taking the capital.
Speaking at the United Nations, President Bush said he wants
the Northern Alliance forces to steer clear of Kabul, part of an
effort to assure that power is eventually shared among the various
tribes of the country.
“We will encourage our friends to head south but not into the
city of Kabul itself,” Bush said.
While Northern Alliance commanders relished their success at
Mazar-e-Sharif, signs of division are emerging in the group’s
political leadership.
Alliance officials say two factions have emerged in the two
months since the assassination of the alliance’s leader, Ahmed
Shah Massood: the younger, pro-Western, religious moderates and
the older, religious conservatives, who are more skeptical of the
West.
A senior alliance official said the power struggle had
emerged because officials and commanders feared they would lose
the power, wealth and status they enjoyed if a new government was
formed.
The more conservative wing includes the alliance’s president,
Burhanuddin Rabbani, and one of its more senior Pashtun leaders,
Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the official said.
The more moderate wing, he said, includes the foreign
minister, Dr. Abdullah Adbullah; the interior minister, Yunos
Qanooni; and Anwari, leader of ethnic Hazara forces fighting in
the alliance, who has only one name.
The capture of Mazar-e-Sharif and the planned Kabul offensive
increase urgency for forming a post-Taliban government. But so
far, government-building has moved slowly, in part because of the
struggle within the alliance.
The prospect of humanitarian aid getting through may be the
most immediate impact of the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif.
United Nations officials in countries around Afghanistan
warned again of a humanitarian crisis with more than 100,000
children and women in Afghanistan dying if more humanitarian aid
doesn’t move soon. The Taliban has seized aid and made it
difficult to deliver, aid workers say.
Along this river at the port town Termiz, U.N. relief
agencies have amassed more than 1,000 tons of food. Crates of
biscuits and milk for babies sit in storage, as do rudimentary
health kits. A long runway at Termiz allows direct delivery of aid
from abroad.
But security concerns about terrain immediately across the
Amu Darya – sand dunes and scrub land recently controlled by
Taliban forces and possibly mined – blocked aid efforts Saturday.
Government officials from Uzbekistan said they planned to
visit the border today to assess the situation.
The U.N. also is taking stock, said Rupa Joshi, a UNICEF
regional spokeswoman.
“Our mission is to get as much aid across as possible as soon
as possible,” Joshi said.
A senior U.S. aid official is scheduled to arrive today in
the Uzbekistan capital, Tashkent.
U.S. officials said Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S.
Agency for International Development, will meet with U.N. and
other aid agency officials at Termiz this week. The visit is part
of a multicountry swing planned before the latest military action.
The Friendship Bridge at Termiz spans the mile-wide, muddy
river.
Uzbek tribal leader Rashid Dostum first captured
Mazar-e-Sharif, where ethnic Uzbeks live, in the mid-1990s after a
siege. Taliban forces recaptured the city in 1998 after another
deadly battle. Each side committed atrocities, according to a UN
investigation.
Uzbeks agreed last month to let barges loaded with
humanitarian aid cross the river at Termiz to Afghanistan. From
there, Afghan employees of international aid groups could move
supplies to Mazar-e-Sharif and points along the way, UNICEF
spokeswoman Joshi said.
Rather than military maneuvers, aid officials focused on
moving a first barge on Wednesday if possible, said Mohammaed
Kumbakumba, UNICEF’s logistics chief at Termiz. It doesn’t matter
who controls what, he said, as long as the supplies reach the
children.
The New York Times and The Associated Press contributed to this
report.
November 11, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Pakistan-Afghanistan Borderlands, Security
GARAM CHASHMA, Pakistan – If ever an Afghan was likely to
help America’s war against the Taliban, it’s Abdul Qahar.
Taliban authorities kidnapped and ransomed his cousin. They
chased Qahar from Kabul. And fighting for warlords runs deep in
his culture.
Yet Qahar and fellow Afghans holed up here in the Hindu Kush
mountains that cover much of Afghanistan are ambivalent,
reluctant, skeptical about the future.
The fall of one Taliban-held city, Mazar-e-Sharif, can be
seen as significant for the military campaign against
Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, and as a crucial step in efforts to
bring aid for some of the nation’s poor.
But it does little to resolve the concerns of some Afghans.
Veteran U.S. diplomats such as Richard Holbrooke, former U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations, say defeating terrorism depends
on creative nation-building rather than simply bombing.
“Things like who controls Mazar-e-Sharif and even Kabul are
important, but they do not directly affect the chances for more
terrorist attacks,” Holbrooke said in a recent interview.
Poverty, political and ethnic fragmentation, and mistrust of
outsiders are among challenges faced by the U.S. in coping with
war-weary Afghanistan. Governing, interviews with Qahar and others
indicate, may be challenging for whoever ends up in charge.
“This is actually an attack against Afghanistan,” Abdul said
recently, as American warplanes bombed Taliban positions around
Mazar-e-Sharif, Kabul and other areas.
“Our airports, the roads, all the development work is being
destroyed. Afghanistan is already a very poor country,” he said,
as others nodded around him in a teahouse while wet snow and dry
gold leaves fell. “Now it’s going to be even harder for us. What
is happening now in Afghanistan, it tells me our children will be
nothing in the future.”
This sense among fighting-age men from rebel Northern
Alliance territory that they have little to gain from taking on
the Taliban – despite the Afghan government’s support for
suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden – is one of many challenges
facing the U.S. campaign.
Poverty across the Hindu Kush is so extreme that the
predominantly rural people, tapped for decades to supply fighters,
don’t dwell much on politics or war.
They try to just survive.
Herders cross 15,000-foot passes in plastic shoes without
socks to try to earn money for tea and rice. Farmers migrate from
pro-Taliban turf to toil as sharecroppers on Pakistani farms.
Afghan infrastructure – roads or railroad or air links or
telephones – barely existed outside major cities even before the
past month of bombing.
Knots of mountain peaks 20,000 feet and higher ensure
isolation.
In the Birir valley south of here, Kalash tribal people just
over the mountains from Afghanistan weren’t even aware of the war.
“We can’t understand the radio,” said RabiJaan, a mother of
two.
And even the unifying influence of Islam hasn’t broken the
fierce, self-reliant parochialism that divides Afghanistan, a
nation in name yet with no agreed-on flag.
Aid workers point out that Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara factions
all have vied for years to control the strategic city of
Mazar-e-Sharif.
U.S. leaders appear to be eyeing Afghanistan’s future even
as they make plans to continue bombing through winter and Ramadan.
President Bush, addressing the United Nations on Saturday,
sympathized with the Afghan people and pledged to help rebuild
Afghanistan once the Taliban are ousted.
“The Afghan people do not deserve their present rulers,” Bush
said. “The Taliban’s days of harboring terrorists, and dealing in
heroin, and brutalizing women are drawing to a close.”
Holbrooke, a player in peace talks from Vietnam to the
Balkans, said in a recent interview: “The events of Sept. 11 were
not micro-managed by someone with a cellphone from a cave in
Afghanistan. It is important to remember that there were no
Afghans involved in the events of Sept. 11.”
“Now we just want peace’
The U.S. goal in Afghanistan must be “simply to stabilize it,
give it a chance to be back on its feet and slowly pull itself
together,” he said.
As Holbrooke and others who have visited the Hindu Kush know,
this is a beautiful place, a storybook land of snow leopards,
towering crooked peaks, and spiral-horned Markhuur goats.
“Now we just want peace, as soon as possible,” said Mohamad
Ibrahim, driving goats and sheep from the Badakshan region of
northern Afghanistan through a sheer granite canyon cut by the
whooshing, muddy Lotkoh River.
“We want the kind of government that can keep peace, not
cause all this trouble. We are hoping the Americans can help us in
making Northern Alliance territory independent and give it to us.”
Traders Ali Ahmad and Islam ud-Din left their families in
Krone, Afghanistan, hauling 1,400 kilos of blue lapis lazuli rocks
they hacked out of cliffs. They rested their donkeys for a few
days while negotiating with Pakistani border police, then entered
Garam Chashma and sold the lapis to shopkeepers.
“It would be better for us if there was no bombing,” Ahmad
said, though they’d had no trouble crossing. “We pray to God, if
possible, stop the war.”
Many worked this high country when the passes served as
supply routes for U.S.-backed mujahedeen fighters during Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan. The passes remain supply routes today
for both Taliban and rebel forces. Loads of blankets and emergency
food also move through on donkeys.
Afghans here identify themselves in relation to warlords –
you might be from Massood’s territory or one of Rabbani’s men. And
they hang together in tribal groups whose loyalty or enmity can
span political boundaries. Those north of Lowarai Pass are mostly
Tajiks, speaking Farsi. Uzbeks inhabit Mazar-e-Sharif.
On pro-Taliban turf south of Lowarai Pass live Pashtun people
who make up an estimated 40 percent of Afghanistan’s 25 million
population.
Over the years, alliances have shifted, warlords have changed
sides. Rashid Dostum, the ethnic Uzbek whose fighters helped take
Mazar-e-Sharif, often has switched loyalties and has clashed with
many Northern Alliance commanders.
And the tribes themselves aren’t always unified. Pashtun men
from Pakistan and Afghanistan dominate the Taliban regime. Yet
Pashtun leaders such as the Wali Khan family bristle at Taliban
fundamentalist rule. “We are losing our identity in our religion,”
Sangeen Wali Khan lamented recently on the family estate down at
Charsadda, Pakistan.
East of Charsadda last week, the family of Mir Rahim settled
into a peanut field for share-cropping work after crossing through
heavily-bombed terrain near Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
Civilians are suffering
Poverty, not war, drove them out, said Rahim, who set up a
grass-and-canvas hovel for his daughter and wife.
“The Taliban has not been affected at all,” he said. “It is
the civilians who are suffering.”
Afghan men in the borderlands described a system in which
every family must supply one soldier to fight for the local
warlord in return for protection and money.
“My brother has gone while I stay here,” Abdul Nasir
explained in Garam Chashma. A former mujahideen, he wore a U.S.
Army-style camouflage jacket against the cold.
Now if Northern Alliance warlords request it, and his brother
returns “to stay with my family, I will go,” Nasir said. “Afghans
were made for fighting. We will never get tired.”
But he said he doubted that Americans really would roust
Taliban and al-Qaeda forces from caves, as Bush has promised.
“When we were fighting the Russians, that’s exactly what the
Russians told us: “We will get you out of your caves.’ But they
never bothered us.”
Nasir and others here say they mainly oppose the Taliban
because of the death of alliance warlord Ahmed Shah Massood. Two
days before Sept. 11, men posing as journalists killed him.
Rather than a drawn-out military campaign, they suggest a
swifter solution through a loya jirga, a tribal council.
“I want a government that can bring peace. I don’t care which
side rules,” Abdul Qahar said as Afghan boys peered through a
doorway of the teahouse.
“For us, the Americans and the Russians are the same. The
only way Afghanistan can be governed is by representatives from
each tribe, the loya jirga system. But we don’t know if America
will like that. We don’t know if America really wants to help us
or not.”
Some people in this isolated realm, such as the black-robed
Kalash people in canyons southwest of Chitral, remain only dimly
aware of the war. The women weave belts. Centuries of Islam have
failed to convert them from an ancient polytheism that includes
animal sacrifices.
In the hillside village of Guru, Kalash-speaking men in a
wooden house squatted around a fire recently trying to keep warm.
Families stockpile barley and wheat for the winter in their
one-room abodes.
“We heard America is killing women and children,” said Jamil,
a villager who left to work in Pakistani cities and now has
returned. “We are not happy about this. Some people say it’s
Osama’s fault. Some people say it’s America’s fault. We’re not
sure what to believe.”
In the area led by Burhannuddin Rabbani, a Northern Alliance
chief, Jan Mohamad was herding nine mules on a 16-day journey from
Haran toward Chitral, where he hoped to buy tea and shoes for his
children.
“We don’t know who these Americans are,” he said. “We don’t
know much about the Taliban either.”
« Previous entries ·
Next entries »
A journalist and lawyer, Bruce Finley has investigated local, national and international issues with on-site reporting in more than 40 countries. In his position as a staff writer for the Denver Post, he is focusing on environment-related news including water challenges, the oil and gas boom and wildfire.
