World Media Watch

by Gloria R. Lalumia

BuzzFlash Note: WMW provides BuzzFlash readers foreign views and perspectives that are not usually available from the media here in the U.S. The presentation of these articles from these international publications is not an endorsement of their viewpoints.

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WORLD MEDIA WATCH FOR SEPTEMBER 13, 2004

1//Inter Press Service News Agency, Italy--ANALYSIS: THREE YEARS ON, WAR ON TERRORISM LOOKS LIKE A LOSER (Three years after al Qaeda-commandeered planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon, the leaked ruminations of U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seem more pertinent than ever. "Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," he wrote in a memo to his top staff 11 months ago. "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" If that is how success in the Bush administration's "war on terrorism" is to be measured, then Rumsfeld would have to conclude that he is failing badly.)

2//Asia Times Online, Hong Kong--OSAMA ADDS WEIGHT TO AFGHAN RESISTANCE (Since the disintegration of the Taliban regime at the end of 2001, the Afghan resistance has endured, managing, if nothing else, to keep US-led occupying forces and the Afghan National Army engaged in small pockets. But much bigger things are planned. The Taliban are commanded from within Afghanistan by the likes of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, Mullah Dadullah and Saifullah Mansoor. And significantly, according to Asia Times Online research, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, along with other senior al-Qaeda figures, are no longer in Pakistan but orchestrating the Afghan resistance from within Afghanistan, remote from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.)

3//The Jordan Times, Jordan--'US, SYRIA WORKING TO SECURE IRAQ BORDER' (US official William Burns said on Sunday after a trip to Damascus that Washington and Syrian officials were looking at ways to secure Syria's border with Iraq with the aim of stopping alleged militants crossing into the war-wracked country. Burns, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, was speaking in Cairo after talks on Saturday in the Syrian capital with President Bashar Assad which he described as "thorough and candid." "We talked about ways in which we might explore cooperation with regard to Iraq and our concerns about border security as well as the activities of groups operating out of Syrian territory, who threaten efforts to ensure stability and security in Iraq," he told journalists...In a press conference, Syrian Information Minister Ahmad Al Hassane described the initial dialogue as "a positive development that will have consequences on the regional situation.")

4//The Scotsman, UK--ARMY CHIEF IN IRAQ CONDEMNS PLANS TO CUT THE NUMBER OF REGIMENTS (Britain's most senior soldier in Iraq has openly criticised government plans to cut infantry regiments, warning that the army could be seriously compromised. General John McColl, the deputy commanding general of the multinational force in Iraq, told The Scotsman that the Ministry of Defence now had to decide whether to make cuts or continue with current levels of operations...Although couched in diplomatic terms, such comments from the second in command of all coalition forces in Iraq will cause embarrassment in Whitehall at a time when the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Mike Jackson, has forbidden senior officers from discussing cuts in the number of regiments. The high level criticism comes after Iraq's new UN ambassador, Samir Sumaida'ie called on Britain and the United States to increase their number of troops in Iraq to prevent it from degenerating into a "super rogue state".)

5//The Turkish Daily News, Turkey--TURKEY: STOP TAL AFAR OPERATION (Turkey has warned the United States over an ongoing operation in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar, almost exclusively populated by Turkmens, after civilian casualties in the clashes have surged in the latest stages of what U.S. officials said was a crackdown on a militant cell in the town. News reports said that as many as 120 people have died in the U.S. onslaught in the town that started last weekend..."The clashes have come to a point of destroying Turkmens," the statement said, adding that some 50,000 Turkmens in the town of 460,000 had been displaced as a result of the clashes. In a strong warning, the statement said Turkmens over the age of 18 were not allowed to leave Tal Afar, raising worries that "there could be a genocide in the town.")

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1//Inter Press Service News Agency, Italy September 10, 2004
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=25437

ANALYSIS: THREE YEARS ON, WAR ON TERRORISM LOOKS LIKE A LOSER
by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep 10 (IPS) - Three years after al Qaeda-commandeered planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon, the leaked ruminations of U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seem more pertinent than ever.

"Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," he wrote in a memo to his top staff 11 months ago. "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

If that is how success in the Bush administration's "war on terrorism" is to be measured, then Rumsfeld would have to conclude that he is failing badly.

While some 70 percent of al Qaeda's leadership from the time of the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks has been killed or captured -- as Bush and his top aides never cease to remind nervous voters -- terrorism experts have been amazed at how quickly the group appears to have reconstituted itself, in part by associating with new "franchises" that have grown like mushrooms, particularly since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

"A rump leadership (of al Qaeda) is still intact and over 18,000 potential terrorists are at large with recruitment accelerating on account of Iraq," the respected International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London said last May in its latest assessment, one that is widely accepted among counterterrorist experts here.

"U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalisation of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s," wrote a top counter-terrorist official at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who calls himself "Anonymous", in a new book entitled 'Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror'.

"Anonymous", whose real name is Michael Scheuer, has argued -- like the top counter-terrorism official under Bill Clinton and during the first half of the Bush administration, Richard Clarke -- that the administration's decision to invade Iraq, purportedly to disarm a mortal threat and bring the blessings of Wilsonian democracy to oppressed Arabs and Kurds, has produced precisely the result that Rumsfeld was most concerned about.

(SNIP)

Similarly, the percentage of respondents in the Arab world who say their overall opinions of the U.S. are "favourable" has fallen into the single digits in most countries, according to the UMD and other recent surveys. The figures are much the same in Pakistan, a critical U.S. ally in the fight against al Qaeda, and barely more elsewhere in predominantly Muslim countries in Eurasia, including even in Turkey, a strategic stalwart of the U.S. for more than 50 years.

This has clearly given bin Laden's potential followers a much larger sea in which to swim. The result is that, despite the much greater counter-terrorist co-operation provided to Washington during the past year by previously more reticent governments, especially Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the gulf that divides those states from their publics may have grown wider than ever, offering yet more fertile ground for al Qaeda's recruiters or others who wish the U.S. ill.

That, of course, is particularly true for Iraq which by now, 18 months after the U.S. invasion, should have been well on the way to consolidating a democratic government in a federal system, protected by only about 50,000 or 60,000 U.S. troops quietly garrisoned at various permanent bases around the country with the support and gratitude of the surrounding population and its pro-western rulers.

The fact is that Washington still has nearly three times that many troops bogged down in Iraq, most of them surrounded by a resentful, if not actively hostile, population that can be counted on not to inform on a growing, albeit multifaceted, insurgency that mounts an average of more than 80 attacks on U.S. targets a day -- four times more than one year ago. All of which suggests that it is not only "madrassas and radical clerics" that are turning out "more terrorists", as Rumsfeld's question suggested, but the U.S. presence itself.

(SNIP)

"We have a stronger jihadi presence in Iraq today than in March 2003," noted Roger Cressey, the former director for Transnational Threats in Bush's National Security Council at a briefing at the libertarian Cato Institute earlier this week. "Jihadists now see Iraq as a strategic opportunity."

"It is hard to find a counterterrorism specialist who thinks that the Iraq War has reduced rather than increased the threat to the United States," wrote James Fallows, a prominent national-security journalist, in the current edition of 'Atlantic' magazine..

Nor is it only in Iraq that Washington has achieved much less traction than it had hoped. In Afghanistan, most of the country remains under the rule of fractious warlords, whose cultivation of opium has, in just a few short years, reached historic levels, even as the ousted Taliban continue to make inroads in the predominantly Pashtun south and southeast.

(SNIP)

At a time when the United States is unifying the Islamic world against it, the Bush administration has demoralised and divided the West.

It may be time for Rumsfeld to ruminate some more.

2//Asia Times Online, Hong Kong September 11, 2004
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/FI11Ag01.html

OSAMA ADDS WEIGHT TO AFGHAN RESISTANCE
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
Syed Saleem Shahzad is bureau chief, Pakistan, Asia Times Online.

CHAMAN, near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border - Since the disintegration of the Taliban regime at the end of 2001, the Afghan resistance has endured, managing, if nothing else, to keep US-led occupying forces and the Afghan National Army engaged in small pockets.

But much bigger things are planned.

The Taliban are commanded from within Afghanistan by the likes of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, Mullah Dadullah and Saifullah Mansoor. And significantly, according to Asia Times Online research, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, along with other senior al-Qaeda figures, are no longer in Pakistan but orchestrating the Afghan resistance from within Afghanistan, remote from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

(SNIP)

Enter one Mullah Mehmood Haq Yar. He was sent by Mullah Omar to northern Iraq to train Ansarul Islam fighters before the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. Ansarul Islam is a Pakistani militant group. Mehmood returned to Afghanistan only a few months ago and was inducted into a special council of commanders formed by Mullah Omar and assigned the task of shepherding all foreign fighters and high-value targets from Pakistani territory into Afghanistan.

The Taliban sources obviously would not disclose where Mehmood's charges have been taken, but reading between the lines they could be in Paktia province in the care of legendary mujahideen commanders Mansoor and Haqqani.

Mansoor is the son of Nasrullah Mansoor, one of the most respected Afghan guerrilla leaders from the time of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, who terrorized Soviet troops around Gardez. Saifullah Mansoor's reputation as a chip off the old block was cemented when in April 2002 he led a raid in which 18 US soldiers were killed in a guerrilla attack at Shahi Kot in the Zarmat area.

Haqqani also earned his reputation fighting the Soviets, and defeated Afghan communist forces in 1991 in Khost, the first Afghan city to fall to the mujahideen after the withdrawal of the Soviets in 1989.

Neither Mansoor nor Haqqani left Afghanistan - unlike other commanders who sought exile in the chaotic period leading up to and after the Taliban takeover in 1996 - and maintained their field forces. Haqqani's "playground" is Khost and Paktia, but Mullah Omar has empowered him to help devise a military strategy for the whole of Afghanistan.

The latest strategy
Since his return from Iraq, Mehmood has convinced the Taliban leaders that they need to adapt their strategy to take into account limited human and material resources. At present, the Taliban face manifold problems. In particular, they cannot conduct a widespread, coordinated guerrilla movement as their communications have been crippled - all telecommunications are closely monitored by the US.

(SNIP)

In addition to this, Haqqani and Dadullah will keep up the heat from the outskirts of major cities.

Mehmood's strategy is aimed specifically at destroying administrative systems in key cities and disrupting routine life. As this tactic takes hold, the Taliban will step into the vacuum and expand the war front.

At present, Afghan and Arab fighters fully committed to the resistance number only a few thousand. It is believed, though, that once the spade work is completed, the vast silent majority of the Taliban will rise up, especially from the madrassas (seminaries) of Quetta and Chaman in Pakistan, to join hands with the Taliban in Afghanistan, as they have done in the past.

(SNIP)

From Chaman to Kandahar in Afghanistan, products bearing bin Laden's face are guaranteed to sell well.

"The situation is going from bad to worse," says Malik Nabi, district president, Chaman, of the anti-Taliban Pashtunkho Mili Awami Party. "The numbers of Taliban and their supporters are increasing with every passing day. You take a ride to Chaman and you will find black and white turbans everywhere, a sort of propaganda tactic to show their strength. Just go to a football stadium in the evening and you will find hundreds of black turbans, a hallmark of the Taliban," Malik Nabi adds.

Nowadays, as far as the Taliban are concerned, there are two types of Taliban: those who are on the frontline battlefields, and those who are waiting for a call to become cannon fodder once the word goes out for a mass mobilization.

As far as al-Qaeda is concerned, a new, dispersed, generation of cells are involved in plotting attacks worldwide.

The "old" brigade, meanwhile, including bin Laden and Zawahiri, are concentrating their efforts on the battlefields of Afghanistan.

3//The Jordan Times, Jordan Monday, September 13, 2004
http://www.jordantimes.com/mon/news/news5.htm

'US, SYRIA WORKING TO SECURE IRAQ BORDER'

CAIRO (AFP) - US official William Burns said on Sunday after a trip to Damascus that Washington and Syrian officials were looking at ways to secure Syria's border with Iraq with the aim of stopping alleged militants crossing into the war-wracked country.

Burns, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, was speaking in Cairo after talks on Saturday in the Syrian capital with President Bashar Assad which he described as "thorough and candid." "We talked about ways in which we might explore cooperation with regard to Iraq and our concerns about border security as well as the activities of groups operating out of Syrian territory, who threaten efforts to ensure stability and security in Iraq," he told journalists.

Besides its concerns over the porous Syria-Iraq border, Washington accuses Damascus of backing Palestinian militant groups it regards as terrorist and of turning a blind eye to Iraq insurgents. The Americans also charge that Damascus is seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction. They are all charges which the Syrian authorities reject.

Earlier this year, Washington imposed unilateral sanctions on Syria and just the week before last was the prime mover of a UN Security Council resolution warning Damascus over its involvement in neighbouring Lebanon.

Asked whether there were plans for joint Syrian-American patrols, Burns said: "We talked about mechanisms through which we can talk about practical ways in which we can help ensure border security, which is in the mutual interest of Iraqis as well as Syrians."

In a press conference, Syrian Information Minister Ahmad Al Hassane described the initial dialogue as "a positive development that will have consequences on the regional situation."

(MORE)

4//The Scotsman, UK Mon 14 Sept 2004
http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=1072762004

ARMY CHIEF IN IRAQ CONDEMNS PLANS TO CUT THE NUMBER OF REGIMENTS
Gethin Chamberlain, Defence Correspondent, in Baghdad
Britain's most senior soldier in Iraq has openly criticised government plans to cut infantry regiments, warning that the army could be seriously compromised.

General John McColl, the deputy commanding general of the multinational force in Iraq, told The Scotsman that the Ministry of Defence now had to decide whether to make cuts or continue with current levels of operations.

He said that while the size of the army should be increased to cope with its growing number of commitments around the world, it was not possible under "the current constraints".

Although couched in diplomatic terms, such comments from the second in command of all coalition forces in Iraq will cause embarrassment in Whitehall at a time when the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Mike Jackson, has forbidden senior officers from discussing cuts in the number of regiments.

The high level criticism comes after Iraq's new UN ambassador, Samir Sumaida'ie called on Britain and the United States to increase their number of troops in Iraq to prevent it from degenerating into a "super rogue state".

Ministry of Defense plans to cut four infantry battalions - including one Scottish regiment - have provoked a fierce debate within the army. Opponents claim that the cuts have been forced on the MoD by the Treasury, with Gordon Brown refusing to sanction extra cash for defence spending to cover the cost of expensive equipment projects, such as the Eurofighter, which have overrun their budgets dramatically.
(MORE)

5//The Turkish Daily News, Turkey September 11, 2004
http://www.turkishdailynews.com/FrTDN/latest/for.htm#f3

TURKEY: STOP TAL AFAR OPERATION
Fatima Demirelli

ANKARA--Turkey has warned the United States over an ongoing operation in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar, almost exclusively populated by Turkmens, after civilian casualties in the clashes have surged in the latest stages of what U.S. officials said was a crackdown on a militant cell in the town.

News reports said that as many as 120 people have died in the U.S. onslaught in the town that started last weekend.

(SNIP)

Turkey has told the United States that "news coming from Tal Afar was worrying" and said "the operation targeting Tal Afar should be stopped immediately," the statement said, adding that civilians should be spared, excessive and indiscriminate use of force should be avoided and food and medical aid should be delivered to civilians.

The Turkish military also expressed concern: "Developments taking place in Tal Afar are being carefully and with concern," a statement from the General Staff said, calling on the parties concerned to exercise caution.

(SNIP)

U.S. officials in Ankara said U.S. forces in Iraq were not targeting Turkmens.

" We assured the Turkish side that although Tal Afar is overwhelmingly populated by Turkmens, we are obviously not targeting Turkmens. We are targeting resistance forces, many of whom have come from other areas," said a U.S. official. "And as always, the military is trying to keep any civilian casualties to a minimum."

Regional sources said the clashes took place as the U.S. military chased Shiite Turkmens loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr from Najaf and Fallujah to Tal Afar.

Stamped out by U.S. forces in Najaf, the members of the al-Sadr resistance fled to their hometown, Tal Afar, chased by U.S. forces, who wanted to finish the job they had started in Najaf.

Turkmens warn of 'genocide'
But in a statement issued yesterday, the Ankara representation of the Iraqi Turkmen Front (ITF), a leading organization for Iraqi Turkmens, strongly criticized the U.S. action in Tal Afar, saying the U.S. forces' operation, initially targeting a number of terrorists in the town, had come to be directed at all the people of Tal Afar.

"The clashes have come to a point of destroying Turkmens," the statement said, adding that some 50,000 Turkmens in the town of 460,000 had been displaced as a result of the clashes.

In a strong warning, the statement said Turkmens over the age of 18 were not allowed to leave Tal Afar, raising worries that "there could be a genocide in the town."

(MORE)