The uncertainty of war on terrorism

By Ewen MacAskill

LONDON: There could hardly be a worse place for military action. Draw up a list of the world's most volatile regions and the Pakistan-India-Afghanistan triangle would be at the top or close to it.

Add the Middle East and, as the United Kingdom's foreign secretary Jack Straw said Monday, there are the makings of "the most frightening situation since the Cuban crisis in the early 1960s."

U.S. foreign-policy makers in the 1960s and 1970s loved the domino theory: allow communism to gain a grip in one country and its neighbor will also fall. It never happened, but an Islamic variation of it is possible now. The danger is that a U.S. military strike will not be confined to Afghanistan but have a knock-on effect, destabilizing governments from Islamabad to Beirut.

The first and biggest risk is that the already unstable military regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan could be overthrown by a coup or in a civil war fought by Islamic fundamentalists angry that the government is cooperating with the United States.

This opens up the prospect of the first Islamic fundamentalist government with access to nuclear weapons, and it would be pitched into the ongoing conflict with India, also armed with nuclear weapons, over the future of the Muslim majority in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

That is alarming enough. But the U.S. crusade, as George Bush described it, goes beyond the Indian sub-continent. The United States has said repeatedly that the aim is to attack terrorism at its roots and the states that harbor it.

If the United States was to apply this criteria rigorously, almost every state in the Middle East would be a target. Egypt harbors, though unwillingly, Islamic Jihad, an offshoot of Osama bin Laden's empire, and Yemen is home to two similar Islamic fundamentalist groups. And there is Syria and Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority.

Iran, which has re-established diplomatic ties with Britain but not with the United States, sponsors two of the main Middle East guerrilla organizations: Hizbollah, which operates almost exclusively in southern Lebanon, and Hamas, which operates in Gaza and the West Bank. Syria too supports Hizbollah and some of the Palestinians groups, as does the Lebanese government.

But Iran, which opposes Taliban rule in neighboring Afghanistan, was quick to position itself in support of the United States, an extraordinary turnaround. The U.S. secretary of state, Colin Powell, heartened by this response and keen to build as big a coalition as possible against the Taliban, spoke almost warmly about Iran. All the old certainties of foreign policy vanished in the hours after the attacks on New York and Washington.

Any move by the United States against groups such as Hizbollah or Hamas is full of risk. They are not regarded in the populations where they reside as terrorists but as warriors engaged in a legitimate fight against Israel: in the case of Hizbollah, in successfully forcing Israel out of south Lebanon and of Hamas, in fighting against Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

The United States, to win over Arabs, has to reposition itself in the Israeli-Arab conflict. Taking action against Hamas or Hizbollah would reinforce the Arab view that the United States is on Israel's side.

Countries such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, rich in oil and close to the United States, are already uncomfortable with the level of U.S. support for Israel. These countries, as with Pakistan, have big Islamic fundamentalist groups that are at odds with the government.

These groups share Bin Laden's line that U.S. soldiers should not be stationed in the land that contains Islam's holiest shrines, and they will not be happy when the Saudi government severs its links with the Taliban under U.S. pressure, and worse still when the U.S. attacks fellow Muslims, the Taliban.

There are other states in the Middle East that could end up as casualties of what Bush called a broad and sustained war. Jordan, with Palestinians making up almost 50 per cent of the population and pressing for a more pro-Palestinian line from its monarch, has long been the most fragile of the countries in proximity to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.

If all this was not worrying enough, there is also Iraq. Some of the U.S. hawks, especially in the defense department, see the remit of dealing with states that harbor terrorism as a chance to finish off the Gulf war by toppling Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein. Others, such as Colin Powell, are resisting such action.

Alongside the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Iraq, and the impact of sanctions on its population, is one of the reasons why the United States is so unpopular among Arabs. An all-out attack on Baghdad, as opposed to the present U.S.-British raids along its southern border, will not help. There is no evidence to link Saddam to the New York and Washington attacks, and neither Britain nor France would support war against Saddam without it.

Despicable as his regime may be, Saddam has little history of encouraging terrorist movements. There was an assassination attempt on George Bush's father in Kuwait in 1993 and Saddam pays compensation to Palestinian martyrs' families: but there is little else.

The U.S. fears, though, that if he is left alone, Saddam, emboldened by U.S. focus elsewhere in the region, might feel like an adventure of his own.

The war against terrorism being planned in Washington and London could have a lot of unpredicted and unwelcome outcomes.

-- Guardian News Service