Other flashpoints compete with Mideast crisis for U.S. attention

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

It is a cliché among old Washington Hands that a U.S. administration can focus on only one crisis at a time. With the Israeli-Arab conflict at boiling point that may be just what is happening. Even the President’s war on terrorism seems taking a back seat to proposed negotiations to deflate the Mideast dilemma. That dilemma is, of course, the fact that clearly the Israelis are defending the concept of the Bush Doctrine – those who harbor terrorists are as guilty and as a much an enemy of the United States as the perpetrators themselves – and the need to maintain our fragile, often unrewarding alliances with Arab regimes.

But a look around Asia demonstrates the rest of the world does not stand still in the meantime. And while there is a tendency – sometimes totally irrelevant or self-serving –to tie these other outbreaks of violence to the Mideast, they spring for the most part from a different, complex past. Many of these have the potentital to grow, if left unintended into as serious crises as the Israeli-Arab conflict.

And as always in the world-jungle, there is no certainty about priorities. Who predicted a decade ago that terrorists headquartered in Afghanistan would reach into the heart of U.S. domestic life? It is also clear that while the world acknowledges the overwhelming preponderance of U.S. power and influence, there is some unknown finite limit to our resources in our effort to be the world fire brigade.

A look around Asia clearly demonstrates this growing dilemma for our policymakers:

Adm. Blair, the CINPAC commander, has publicly called for additional American force to bring to heel the Abu Sayed terrorists in the southern Philippines. Let’s leave aside the dangerous habit of the CINCs to talk too much too publicly, a hangover from the vacuum that these regional headquarters sought to fill in the Clinton Administration. There is a worrying possibility of the conflict spreading to a larger Moslem population with its ties to Libya’s Qadaffi and some more recent ties to Osama Bin Laden.

Indonesia’s President Megawatti dithers between denunciations of terrorism and the refusal to crack down on renegade terrorists named and implicated in plots to attack Singapore. Her secularist background makes her vulnerable to Islamacist opposition in Indonesia’s shaky political climate. So she has further confused the issue by contradictory statements while Islamic fanatics with ties to Osama Bin Laden have pursued a virtual holy war against Christians in East Indonesia.

For six weeks one of the worst outbreaks of communal violence has engulfed India’s 40-million people in Gujerat state, one of its most prosperous and stable. The central government under Prime Minister Vajpayee has refused to dump its allied state government, headed by a notorious Hindu chauvinist. And the violence threatens to spill over into Maharashtra where there is a long tradition of communal violence.

Nepal’s self-proclaimed Maoists – they say China’s current leadership is too moderate – have again staged a bloody attack on police in a classic guerrilla campaign to destabilize the regime. Nepal, a crucial battleground for Chinese and Indian influence since the 1950s, has no natural borders with India, and the possibility of the violence spilling over into its neighbor is ever present.

Pakistan’s President-Gen. Musharraf has announced a May referendum on his takeover of the government, hoping to give his regimelegitimacy in the face of brutal violence by a small Islamacist minority, apparently allied with the remnants of the al Qaida network fleeing Afghanistan. The Islamic fanatics are exploiting ethnic and linguistic grievances and violence which have dogged Pakistan since it was carved out of British India in 1948. All of this, exacerbated, of course, by the refusal of the Indians to withdraw their forces mobilized on Pakistan’s eastern border in New Delhi’s effort to count Pakistani aid and support to Kashmir’s increasingly bloody resistance to the huge Indian security force in the disputed province.

And although the command structure of Osama bin Laden appears to have been eliminated in Afghanistan – despite propaganda on the suspect Al Jazeera network – sporadic violence continues. The local feuding for which the country is famous, competition between warlords, the weakness of the interm government, are all feeding continued instability. And American forces are still trying to search and destroy elements of Osama’s network that remain in the country or are trying to flee to neighboring countries. Washington’s solution, an Afghan national army, may be a project with impeccable logic but not attainable in the short run.

These are only the flash points. There seemingly remain the continuing problem of North Korea, now ready to talk to Washington, but a continuing threatening specter. And there is the unresolved issue of Taiwan and its relationship to Mainland China which could be a domestic firebrand as Beijing shuffles its military and braces for a Party Congress and succession issues in the fall. And then there is the ever-present problem of Iraq, a ruthless dictatorship attempting to develop weapons of mass destruction, already suspected of allying itself with the various terrorist bands.

It’s no wonder the lights are burning late at 1600 Pennyslvannia Avenue.