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

The report from Jenin that a British ordnance expert has identified booby traps identical to those in Northern Ireland suggesting IRA training for Palestinian terrorists comes as no surprise. A Congressional committee has just disclosed IRA liaison with Colombia’s FARC terrorists.

Pres. Bush identified the worldwide terrorist network as the enemy and those who host it as being equally culpable. But the corollary is a working alliance exists among the international terrorists that jumps conventional barriers of race, ethnicity, and ideology. For example, one of the aspects of Osama Ben Ladin’s evil genius was crossing the barrier between his own Sunni to a working relationship with Iran’s Shia theocractic terrorists. And that at a time when in Afghanistan itself the Shia Hazarra were particular victims of his Kabul Wahhabite friends.

Yet that kind of collaboration among terrorists has been frequent for at least two decades. Indian police officials found weapons destined for the Sikh terrorists [who assassinated Prime Minister Gandhi] transported through a Sri Lankan Tamil network; both having links with the PLO. There have been IRA connections to Qadaffi and the Libyan dictator with ETA Basque terrorists in Spain.

That old chestnut used for years by well meaning human rights activists and PC revolutionaries that “your terrorists are my national liberationists” doesn’t hold water. As Spanish Prime Minister Aznar put it after 9/11: “We in Spain have always wanted people to understand that all terrorists are the same. No misunderstood idealism, no conflict in need of a solution, no real or imaginary wrong can serve as pretext to justify terrorism. To say the opposite — — to give even the slightest justification for terrorism — — is tantamount to turning the victims into the guilty." [Alas! Under pressure as EU supremo for this quarter he seems to have forgotten.]

Terrorists who are beyond moral as well as juridical law in their own societies [does anyone really believe that traditional Islam can justify these murders?] belong to an international criminal brotherhood. That is why in the long months and, perhaps years, ahead, the U.S. will face over and over again difficult political and moral dilemmas in stamping out this worldwide phenomenon which threatens our domestic peace and tranquility.

As always, the devil is in the details. The U.S. will have to develop much more sophisticated intelligence not only about these individual groups but must anticipate their changing relationships. It calls for a “Terropol” analogous to cooperation police organizations get [not always, of course] through Interpol in its pursuit of “common” crime that slops over national boundaries.

It will be particularly important – and difficult – in South Asia.

Neither India nor Pakistan is willing to acknowledge the strong ties that bind the Moslems of the whole Subcontinent. Pakistan was built on “the two nation” thesis, that Moslems at independence constituted a separate entity in the vast welter of ethnic and racial mix of British India. India maintains the fiction that its Moslem minority, probably now larger than the population of Pakistan, chose the “nationalist” path in 1948 and remain oblivious to the radicals’ siren call sweeping the Islamic world from Casabalanca to Zomboanga. But the raid on the Indian parliament, which came within a hair’s breath of wiping out the cabinet, employed local adherents as well as foreigners. And in the continuing bloodbath – a dozen victims a day –in Kashmir. convoluted arguments draw across national boundaries. [It seems only a matter of time until homegrown Himalayan Maoists, who recently again blooded the nose of that pitifully weak Nepalese government, connect to the international terrorist mafia not “logically” bonded to them by ideology or ethnicity.]

Further east, thwarted attacks on U.S. targets in Singapore were mounted by terrorists operating in Indonesia, the southern Philippines, and Malaysia as well as in the city — state itself. And it was, apparently, intelligence growing out of American Afghanistan operations that tipped off Singapore officialdom. One has only to look at the conflict in Aceh in northern Sumatra or the religious war in the Celebes, the long history of Manila’s problems with its Moro minority, Thailand’s isolated three southern Moslem provinces, for possibilities of new plots.

To say that this is going to be an enormous undertaking for American intelligence — — including enlisting help from some of our allies not always cooperative for their own narrower political ends – is an understatement. [Manila’s “deal” recently to release three suspects to meet Pres. Megawatti’s political agenda is a case in point.] But just as during the half century of the Cold War, when the U.S. learned [with some very large exceptions] to best Soviet intelligence and “special measures” with its long tradition of Russian Byzantine secret police activities, Washington again will have to prepare for the long haul.