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War on terror suffers
setbacks
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - US President George W Bush's war
against terrorism does not appear to be going as well as
planned.
While the White House succeeded in
cowing sufficient numbers of Democrats last week to get
Congress's approval for war with Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein, a series of attacks on key Western targets have
suggested that, despite their defeat in Afghanistan,
al-Qaeda and its supporters are far from finished.
Saturday night's devastating car-bombing of a
nightclub on the Indonesian paradise island of Bali
capped two weeks of pin-prick but nonetheless lethal
attacks ranging from Yemen to the Philippines that were
organized or possibly inspired by al-Qaeda.
The
sudden appearance last week of an audio tape by
al-Qaeda's No 2, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as
a purported statement by Osama bin Laden that hailed two
recent attacks in Kuwait and Yemen and was broadcast
over Qatar's Al Jazeera television station on Monday,
have further disconcerted the war's Washington
commanders.
While US and allied intelligence
agencies tried to determine the authenticity of both
communications, as well as the provenance of the recent
attacks, Washington was still trying to absorb the
implications of potentially serious political setbacks
to their ambitions.
Administration officials
remain furious that German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder
won reelection last month by stressing his refusal to
participate in a US invasion of Iraq, which he called an
"adventure".
"We would expect that in France,
but not in Germany," said one official, who asked not to
be identified.
Even more distressing,
particularly for those running the "war against terror"
on the ground, was last Thursday's vote in Pakistan,
when a coalition of Islamist parties, some openly
sympathetic to al-Qaeda, emerged with much greater
support than anyone had predicted.
The United
Council for Action's (MMA) biggest success came in
Baluchistan and the Pashtun-dominated North-West
Frontier province bordering Afghanistan, where they won
an outright majority in the provincial assembly.
"Seeing an electoral majority on a border
province that is probably the most sensitive province in
Pakistan for US military operations will obviously have
implications," Samina Ahmed, Pakistan project director
for the International Crisis Group, told the New York
Times this weekend.
More to the point, the MMA's
platform called for Pakistan to stop permitting US
military and intelligence forces to use Pakistani
territory as a base for rooting out the remnants of
al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Afghanistan's former regime.
Another national election in the region also has
US officials on edge, this one in Turkey, a key ally in
any war against Iraq. The Justice and Development Party
(AKP), the latest incarnation of an Islamist party that
has been banned repeatedly for violating the country's
secularist constitution, is poised to win at least a
third of the popular vote and emerge as the nation's
largest party by far.
Experts say its popularity
is due far more to the corruption and inefficiency of
its secular rivals than to hostility to Washington or
the war on terrorists. But growing anger in Turkey about
Israel's actions against Palestinians, Washington's
strong backing for Israel, and the perception that Bush
is forcing Turkey to support a risky war against Iraq
has reportedly added to expectations about the AKP's
showing.
While its leaders have stressed that
the AKP will cooperate with US strategy in the region
and the International Monetary Fund's efforts to bail
out its struggling economy, a sweeping victory by the
party could set up a new confrontation with Turkey's
staunchly pro-US and pro-Israel military establishment
that was behind the ouster of the last Islamist
government in 1997.
While the November 3
congressional elections are still more than two weeks
away, the administration is clearly more focused on the
series of attacks that have been carried out against US
and other Western targets this month.
Just a week
ago, a French oil tanker was badly damaged in an
explosion in Aden harbor in Yemen. The Yemeni
government, which has also received several hundred
members of US special operations forces to advise them
on counter-insurgency operations against alleged
al-Qaeda members or their allies, insisted at first that
the explosion was due to a fire on the ship. But
investigators now appear convinced by eyewitness reports
that a small craft set off that explosion in the same
way that a US warship docked there was attacked by
al-Qaeda operatives in 2000.
Two days after the
attack on the tanker, two gunmen in a pickup truck
killed one US marine and injured another in an assault
carried out on a Kuwaiti island during US training
exercises. The following day, another marine fired on a
vehicle from which he said a gun was poised to shoot.
Despite Kuwait's alliance with the United States
- indeed, the emirate is expected to be the main
launching pad for any US invasion of Iraq - recent
reports have indicated growing anti-US sentiment,
particularly within followers of the main Islamist
Party, which holds a third of the seats in the Kuwaiti
parliament.
While fingers quickly pointed to
al-Qaeda - or what Washington alleges is its local ally
in Indonesia, Jemaah Islamiyah - as the likeliest
suspect in the Bali blast, Jemaah leader Abu Bakar
Bashir vehemently denied it. One Indonesia expert here,
University of Washington Professor Dan Lev, said the
fact that it took place on a predominantly Hindu island
and in a spot that would be little frequented by Muslims
did suggest the possibility of an Islamist connection.
But it could also have been a provocation by
elements in the army, whose ties to Jemaah go back
almost 30 years. If blame could be diverted, such an
incident would demonstrate to both Indonesians and
Washington that "you really need the army to restore
stability throughout the country".
"The army has
access to explosives, they have the experience, and they
move with relative ease," said Lev, stressing that it
was premature to reach any conclusion.
(Inter
Press Service)
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