Rats and the sinking ship

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

The successful campaign in Afghanistan may be denied that final victory of Osama Bin Laden “dead or alive”. That’s a loss for President Bush’s campaign. American policymakers with the help of the media may have exaggerated Bin Laden’s importance, although his talents were, granted, unique. Nor is it likely the peculiar Afghanistan situation, which gave his operations such a serendipitous haven will be repeated anywhere again soon.

But Washington is going to have a helluva mopping up operation.

There are basically two quite different but highly entangled problems: how to move against governments which for two generations sponsored terrorism against the U.S. just short of declared warfare. These include, of course, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Yemen, Sudan. A codicil is, of course, extortion to and incitement by religious fanatics — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other Gulf State allies — permitted.

The second problem is making sure that the rats leaving the sinking do not settle into isolated corners of the world where they can with limited resources continue to wage asymetric warfare.

For the first problem, like the bullies they are, even Iran with its much larger resources, have learned an important lesson: the eagle once aroused can strike, and strike devastatingly. The professions of sympathy and cooperation — however hypocritical — from Damascus and Tripoli were symptomatic.

Reports that Iran has reduced its overseas terrorist network are probably wishful thinking. Syria has not withdrawn from the Bekka Valley and Damascus’ Lebanon puppet government has refused to curtail terrorist financing. Baghdad is adamant it will not reestablish the supervisory weapons regime that the end of the Gulf War dictated. Qadaffi is quiet but his longtime Southeast Asia fulminations are probably percolating.

The debate inside the Bush Administration over what to do about Sadaam Hussein may be decided, for the moment, by strictures on U.S. capacities. The military rundown [low inventories of cruise missiles, for example] and the enormous current stretch from Korea to Zamboanga to Bosnia may temporarily decide that debate. [Chaotic policy fulminations and low defense budgets of our NATO allies, and their conflicted attitudes toward the Mideast, will ultimately make for a Washington unilateral decision if but all in name — as in Afghanistan.] It could be months — just as before the Gulf War — before Washington has the ability to issue an effective ultimatum to Sadaam.

At the moment, what is more worrying is the possibility that some of the escaping El Qaeda cadre — and Bin Laden’s training camps 70,000 alumni who have returned to their home countries, Europe, and perhaps the U.S. — will set up shop on a smaller scale elsewhere. Opportunities exist in isolated environments with long histories of spawning terrorist-cum-banditry; Somalia, of course, where the U.S. has already tangled.

One, of course, is the southern Philippines. [A Sense of Asia: A 'Blackjack' Pershing needed as Osama's reach extends to the Philippines] Washington is already extending assistance to the Manila — which in late December was battling followers of Nur Misuari, an Al Qaeda alumnus. Misuari reneged on the 1996 peace deal that made him governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

A series of five apparently coordinated Christmas Eve attacks on police checkpoints in three of Thailand's five predominantly Muslim southern provinces has set off alarms. The region has a long history of terrorism aimed at independence or joining neighboring Malaysia. For several decades, a Communist Chinese guerrilla pocket defied Thai and Malaysian military. One of the Moslem organizations, the Patani Liberation Front, allegedly has Qadaffi funding.

In Malaysia, itself, Prime Minister Mahathir has tried to have it both ways — using Malay Moslem xenophobia in his anti-American campaign. Like his neighbor Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yu, Mahathir refuses to leave the stage even as Malaysia’s peculiar government party, an ethnic construct to mollify its often troubled race relations among Malays, Chinese, and Indians, declines. And he runs the risk, acute in several Islamic societies, that fundamentalist opposition — which now rules two Malaysian states — will monopolize “reform” with externsive social welfare and anticorruption campaigns.

In the Spice Islands in East Indonesia, a virtual religious war has broken out between Christians and Moslems, fanned by a radical Islamic cult based in East Java with ties to Al Qaeda. President Megawatti — including the military — have simply refused to engage. Megawatti, despite support for the Bush Administration early on, has courted Moslem sentiment with a denunciation of the Afghanistan campaign. The area was the site of a short but bloody and bizarre Moslem insurrection in the late 1940s led by a former Dutch soldier, “Turk” Westerling, and an abortive pro-Christian Republic of the South Moluccas.

Washington has learned the bitter lesson that an isolated area of the world like Afghanistan can spawn a devastating atrocity. The rats have to be cornered.