September 21, 2005

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 21, 2005

1//Asia Times Online, Hong Kong--JANUS-FACED COUNTER-TERRORISM (While the government of President General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan continues to claim it is making frantic efforts to uproot the al-Qaeda network from the troubled Waziristan region bordering Afghanistan, the Hamid Karzai government in Kabul has repeatedly questioned Islamabad's willingness to effectively eliminate the Taliban-backed insurgents operating from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and attacking the US-led allied forces in Afghanistan. … While Islamabad strongly denies Taliban and al-Qaeda infiltration into Afghanistan from the Pakistani side, the Karzai government insists that the infiltration is actually being orchestrated from the Pakistani border area. Not long ago, it was the South Waziristan Tribal Agency that used to hog the media limelight on account of the military operation there against local and foreign militants. Now the focus of attention has shifted to the neighboring North Waziristan region. It was South Waziristan that first became the hub of Taliban and al-Qaeda rebels, but after the Pakistan's grand operation to hunt down militants in this area, the wanted men slipped away into the North Waziristan tribal region after losing their hideouts. … The Afghan government's official newspaper, Anis, claimed recently that many key Taliban commanders are openly living in the Kachlogh and Pashtunabad regions of Balochistan's capital - Quetta, and have based their military presence in these areas. The daily stated that some of the Taliban commanders being ferried by the ISI are sheltered in the residential blocks belonging to the Pakistan army cantonment in Peshawar. Significantly, North West Frontier and Balochistan provinces are governed by the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, a fundamentalist alliance with close links to the Taliban. With these details in mind, the Taliban resistance is expected to gain further strength until and unless the Pakistani establishment, which wants to keep the Taliban alive in the hope of using them to retrieve Islamabad's lost influence in Afghanistan, eventually decides otherwise.)

2//The News International, Pakistan--US TO PROVIDE $30M TO FIGHT DRUGS MENACE (US Ambassador Ryan C Crocker announced on Tuesday that the US Embassy’s Narcotics Affairs Section (NAS) will provide $30 million in supplemental funds to support Pakistan’s efforts to fight narcotics and enhance border security. This money further joins Pakistan and the United States in common cause to stamp out the scourge of drug use that daily destroys lives throughout the world, indiscriminate of nationality, says a statement. Crocker and Economic Affairs Division Secretary Khalid Saeed signed the official Letter of Agreement. In addition to the supplemental funding announced Tuesday, the US government is providing $30.905 million to support ongoing programmes in border security, counter-narcotics and law enforcement, for a total of $60.905 million this year. Since 2001, the United States has provided over $230 million in such assistance. … "We applaud the steps that Pakistan has already taken to root out terrorists and other criminal elements, sometimes at the high cost of its own law enforcement and military personnel. As partners in the global war on terrorism and drugs, we are proud to contribute toward your efforts to ensure a stable, secure Pakistan," Crocker said.)

3//The Hindustan Times, India--AL JAZEERA IN ENGLISH, COMING TO INDIA (Coming soon to your living room: George W Bush’s worst media headache. Arab channel Al Jazeera, which has repeatedly trumped White House spinmeisters with Al Qaeda exclusives and hard-hitting coverage from Afghanistan and Iraq, is set to launch its 24-hour, global English service. The free-to-air channel will be beamed across India and the world some time during the first quarter of 2006, managing director Nigel Parsons told Hindustan Times on Tuesday from his headquarters in Doha, Qatar. Officially owned by the Qatar government, the channel will be fully financed by the Emir of Qatar. Some familiar faces, including ex-CNN anchor Riz Khan, will be seen on the channel. … Ironically, America is a prime business target for Al Jazeera. “Americans form the biggest chunk of visitors to our English-language web site. We are in the process of discussing distribution alliances with US satellite and cable networks,” Parsons said. … Incidentally, it has retained Brown Lloyd James, a PR company that was one of two firms hired to build political support for one-time CIA man and Bush administration ally Iyad Allawi during his successful 2003 bid to become Iraqi prime minister.)

4//The Independent, UK--BLAIR WARNS LABOUR AGAINST MOVING LEFT TO COUNTER LIB DEMS (Tony Blair is to warn Labour not to take a left turn in an attempt to win back disaffected voters who switched to the Liberal Democrats at the May election. The Prime Minister will tell next week's Labour conference in Brighton that the party will risk losing power if it vacates the centre ground of British politics. Several Labour figures, including some allies of the Chancellor Gordon Brown, want Labour to shift to the left to win back voters who opposed the Iraq war or Mr Blair's domestic policies.)

5//The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan--CHINA TAPPING NATURAL GAS IN DISPUTED ZONE (The government confirmed Tuesday that China had started production at natural gas wells in one of the three fields in a disputed area of the East China Sea. Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Shoichi Nakagawa said Tuesday that a gas flare had been seen at one of the drilling sites in the Tianwaitian field, suggesting the gas well had begun full-scale production. Japan has long protested development by Chinese consortiums of the three fields all just a few kilometers from the disputed median line separating the Chinese and Japanese exclusive economic zones in the East China Sea. … The government has insisted China stop development that may be sucking up natural resources on the Japanese side of the median line. China has refused to recognize the median line as the demarcation for resource development.)

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1//Asia Times Online, Hong Kong Sep 21, 2005
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GI21Df02.html

JANUS-FACED COUNTER-TERRORISM
By Amir Mir
Amir Mir, senior Pakistani journalist affiliated with the Karachi-based monthly, Newsline.

While the government of President General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan continues to claim it is making frantic efforts to uproot the al-Qaeda network from the troubled Waziristan region bordering Afghanistan, the Hamid Karzai government in Kabul has repeatedly questioned Islamabad's willingness to effectively eliminate the Taliban-backed insurgents operating from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and attacking the US-led allied forces in Afghanistan.

There has been unrest in the Waziristan region and other tribal areas for almost three years, amid clashes and military actions between foreign fighters and the Pakistan army. Operations have been carried out and it has subsequently been announced by the Pakistan government that these have been "successfully" wound up. Quite clearly, however, militant activity has not been eliminated; indeed there are reports of al-Qaeda and Taliban militants re-grouping in the area.

While Islamabad strongly denies Taliban and al-Qaeda infiltration into Afghanistan from the Pakistani side, the Karzai government insists that the infiltration is actually being orchestrated from the Pakistani border area. Not long ago, it was the South Waziristan Tribal Agency that used to hog the media limelight on account of the military operation there against local and foreign militants.

Now the focus of attention has shifted to the neighboring North Waziristan region. It was South Waziristan that first became the hub of Taliban and al-Qaeda rebels, but after the Pakistan's grand operation to hunt down militants in this area, the wanted men slipped away into the North Waziristan tribal region after losing their hideouts.

(SNIP)

For the time being, the situation in the Waziristan region is deteriorating fast, despite official claims to the contrary by Pakistani authorities. Between August 15 and September 15, alone, over 100 persons have reportedly been killed in armed clashes in North Waziristan between militants and the army. The bodies of 25 persons, mostly Pakistanis, were recently recovered inside Pakistani territory in North Waziristan after they were reported to have been killed in a missile strike and bombing raids by American warplanes. This was blatant US transgression into Pakistani soil, but American, Afghan and Pakistani authorities have all justified the action by alleging that the victims had taken part in an attack on a US base in Afghanistan's Paktika province, and were trying to flee across the border to Pakistan.

The Afghan government has accused Islamabad from time to time of turning a blind eye to the infiltration from Pakistan's tribal areas into Afghanistan and the high command of the US-led allied forces even suspects some official complicity between the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants, as attacks intensified in the runup to the September 18 parliamentary elections in Afghanistan.

(SNIP)

Since early 2005, the Taliban and their al-Qaeda aides, backed by new volunteers from Pakistan, have been reuniting and expanding their area of operations in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan, which were their former stronghold. Despite the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in October 2001, the US-led allied forces have failed to uproot the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan who have regrouped and are reorganizing their resistance.

With ample funds from the opium trade, the Taliban-led resistance has the funds to finance its struggle against the allied forces. The Taliban are reported to be buying more sophisticated arms, and Russian and Chinese-made surface-to-air missiles in particular are flowing into Afghanistan in increasing numbers, giving an added dimension to the Taliban's fighting capabilities.

Don't fence me in ...

These trends have provided repeated opportunities to the Bush administration to push Pakistan to do more to curb the activities of militants operating along the 2,500 kilometer and porous border with Afghanistan.

It was in response to such persistent accusations that Musharraf suggested in New York on September 12 that the Pakistan-Afghanistan border be fenced to prevent cross-border infiltration. He was of the view that, besides addressing the Afghan government's concerns, the fencing would also help block the entry of Afghan refugees into Pakistan. The proposed fence would start from the point of convergence of the frontiers of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan and extend right up to Pakistan's border with the Chinese territory of Xinjiang, passing on the way the Wakham Corridor where the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs meet. The barrier would obviously be a miracle of engineering if it ever materialized.

The border fencing idea may sound good at first glance, but it is weighed down by enormous negatives. First, the cost: the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline, which would be only about 1,120 kilometers long, is estimated to cost $7.2 billion; the fence would just be a humble fence, but its 2,500 kilometers wouldn't come too much cheaper because of the forbidding terrain involved. Secondly, this may not succeed in stopping the flow of determined militants or even the traditional two-way traffic of tribals from either side for trade, marriages and other interaction.

Thirdly, the biggest fly in the ointment can be sighted in a statement by an Afghan government official on September 1 that, before accepting any such idea, the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, which has been the cause of much friction in the past between the two neighbors, be demarcated. Since the British demarcated the Durand Line - as the border between British India and Afghanistan (which split the Pashtun tribes between the two countries) - it remains a bone of contention, with Kabul clinging to irredentist claims that the Pashtun belt on the Pakistani side belongs to Afghanistan. The border fencing proposal, consequently, is unlikely to fly.

The situation in Afghanistan has been deteriorating since the beginning of 2005. Nearly 150 US troops have been killed there since the US intervention commenced in October 2001, some 50 of them between January-August this year. About 17,000 American troops are in Afghanistan battling a Taliban-led insurgency focused on the south and east, and training the new Afghan army. Increasing numbers of better-trained, better-equipped and better-led Taliban cadres operating from sanctuaries in Pakistan have stepped up their hit-and-run raids into southern and eastern Afghanistan to demoralize the newly-raised Afghan army and police in the hope of inducing large-scale desertions.

(SNIP)

These are the factors that make Karzai accuse Musharraf of treating the Taliban differently from al-Qaeda. Karzai has pointed out, further, that even though Pakistan has arrested and handed over to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation half a dozen senior al-Qaeda leaders, not a single senior Taliban commander has been captured and extradited to Afghanistan. And it remains an open secret in Pakistan that the top leadership of the Taliban military hierarchy lives and operates out of Pakistan's Quetta and Peshawar cities, even today.

The Afghan government's official newspaper, Anis, claimed recently that many key Taliban commanders are openly living in the Kachlogh and Pashtunabad regions of Balochistan's capital - Quetta, and have based their military presence in these areas. The daily stated that some of the Taliban commanders being ferried by the ISI are sheltered in the residential blocks belonging to the Pakistan army cantonment in Peshawar. Significantly, North West Frontier and Balochistan provinces are governed by the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, a fundamentalist alliance with close links to the Taliban.

With these details in mind, the Taliban resistance is expected to gain further strength until and unless the Pakistani establishment, which wants to keep the Taliban alive in the hope of using them to retrieve Islamabad's lost influence in Afghanistan, eventually decides otherwise.

2//The News International, Pakistan Wednesday September 21, 2005-- Shaaban 16, 1426 A.H.
http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/sep2005...

US TO PROVIDE $30M TO FIGHT DRUGS MENACE
By our correspondent

ISLAMABAD: US Ambassador Ryan C Crocker announced on Tuesday that the US Embassy’s Narcotics Affairs Section (NAS) will provide $30 million in supplemental funds to support Pakistan’s efforts to fight narcotics and enhance border security.

This money further joins Pakistan and the United States in common cause to stamp out the scourge of drug use that daily destroys lives throughout the world, indiscriminate of nationality, says a statement.

Crocker and Economic Affairs Division Secretary Khalid Saeed signed the official Letter of Agreement. In addition to the supplemental funding announced Tuesday, the US government is providing $30.905 million to support ongoing programmes in border security, counter-narcotics and law enforcement, for a total of $60.905 million this year.

Since 2001, the United States has provided over $230 million in such assistance.

The bulk of funds will be used to procure vehicles, communication and surveillance equipment in support of the Frontier Corps (FC) and a personnel expansion in the Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF).

Another portion will be allocated towards building bridges in connection with the ongoing construction of over 350 kilometres of roads to increase the access of Pakistani law enforcement agencies to remote border areas.

US counter-narcotics cooperation with the Government of Pakistan has been strong for two decades, the statement said.

Alternative development activities in Bajaur, Mohmand and Khyber Agencies have included the introduction of high-value crops, electrification and water schemes, and construction of over 450 kilometres of roads to open up inaccessible areas.

The statement said the United States also provides operational support to the Anti-Narcotics Force, assists the government of Pakistan’s poppy monitoring and eradication efforts, and supports demand reduction activities.

"We applaud the steps that Pakistan has already taken to root out terrorists and other criminal elements, sometimes at the high cost of its own law enforcement and military personnel. As partners in the global war on terrorism and drugs, we are proud to contribute toward your efforts to ensure a stable, secure Pakistan," Crocker said.

(MORE)

3//The Hindustan Times, India Mumbai, September 20, 2005
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1496034,0008.htm

AL JAZEERA IN ENGLISH, COMING TO INDIA
Bobby Anthony

Coming soon to your living room: George W Bush’s worst media headache.

Arab channel Al Jazeera, which has repeatedly trumped White House spinmeisters with Al Qaeda exclusives and hard-hitting coverage from Afghanistan and Iraq, is set to launch its 24-hour, global English service.

The free-to-air channel will be beamed across India and the world some time during the first quarter of 2006, managing director Nigel Parsons told Hindustan Times on Tuesday from his headquarters in Doha, Qatar.

Officially owned by the Qatar government, the channel will be fully financed by the Emir of Qatar. Some familiar faces, including ex-CNN anchor Riz Khan, will be seen on the channel.

Al Jazeera is already in talks with an undisclosed strategic partner in India. India is going to feature prominently, with bureaus in Delhi and Mumbai. “We have even shot a few documentaries in India for our launch,” Parsons said.

Refuting allegations that the channel is pro-Osama Bin Laden, Parsons said, “I would take the allegations of critics like the Heritage Foundation, which is an extremely right-wing neocon think tank, with a pinch of salt. We’re not anti-West and we’ve not broadcast any beheadings. Even Western TV channels have interviewed Chechen terrorists like Shamil Basayev.”

Ironically, America is a prime business target for Al Jazeera. “Americans form the biggest chunk of visitors to our English-language web site. We are in the process of discussing distribution alliances with US satellite and cable networks,” Parsons said.

(SNIP)

Incidentally, it has retained Brown Lloyd James, a PR company that was one of two firms hired to build political support for one-time CIA man and Bush administration ally Iyad Allawi during his successful 2003 bid to become Iraqi prime minister.

The channel has also begun sending out feelers to the new Iraqi government. “We are planning to reopen our Baghdad bureau which the Americans shut down. We’re also very keen to have a Teheran bureau. We will be there if Iran is attacked,” Parsons said.

4//The Independent, UK Published: 21 September 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article314020.ece

BLAIR WARNS LABOUR AGAINST MOVING LEFT TO COUNTER LIB DEMS
By Andrew Grice and Colin Brown

Tony Blair is to warn Labour not to take a left turn in an attempt to win back disaffected voters who switched to the Liberal Democrats at the May election.

The Prime Minister will tell next week's Labour conference in Brighton that the party will risk losing power if it vacates the centre ground of British politics. Several Labour figures, including some allies of the Chancellor Gordon Brown, want Labour to shift to the left to win back voters who opposed the Iraq war or Mr Blair's domestic policies.

In a report sent to cabinet ministers, Downing Street suggests Labour should direct its main fire at the Tories rather than the Liberal Democrats at the next election. It warns that expected boundary changes will reduce Labour's majority from 65 to 50, making the election closer.

The report says: "In the 25 most marginal Labour seats, the Conservatives are second in 19, the Lib Dems in five. Of the top 25 target seats [for Labour] to gain, the Conservatives hold 19, the Lib Dems five. Therefore swings to the Conservatives are much more dangerous than swings to the Lib Dems while swings from the Conservatives are much more productive than swings from the Lib Dems."

It adds that Labour would lose its current majority on a swing of 2.5 per cent to the Liberal Democrats but only 1.4 per cent to the Tories.

At a 40-minute political session of the Cabinet to discuss next week's conference, Mr Blair promised to make the challenge of the new global economy the central theme under the banner of "Securing Britain's Future". He said his recent visits to China and India had brought home to him the need to equip the British people to deal with the rapidly changing world economy.

(MORE)

5//The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan Sep. 21, 2005
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/world/20050921TDY01001.htm

CHINA TAPPING NATURAL GAS IN DISPUTED ZONE
The Yomiuri Shimbun

The government confirmed Tuesday that China had started production at natural gas wells in one of the three fields in a disputed area of the East China Sea.

Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Shoichi Nakagawa said Tuesday that a gas flare had been seen at one of the drilling sites in the Tianwaitian field, suggesting the gas well had begun full-scale production.

Japan has long protested development by Chinese consortiums of the three fields all just a few kilometers from the disputed median line separating the Chinese and Japanese exclusive economic zones in the East China Sea.

Nakagawa last month confirmed the beginning of construction work to lay pipe for drilling at another gas field, Chunxiao, indicating the beginning of gas drilling there.

Of the three disputed gas fields--Tianwaitian, Chunxiao and Duanqiao-- Tianwaitian is located closer to the Chinese mainland than the other two and Japan is not certain if the underground structure of this particular gas field stretches into the Japanese side of the median line, according to Nakagawa.

But the minister said it was regrettable that China had gone ahead to develop the Tianwaitian field while the ongoing high-level talks on the gas field issue have been stalled.

(SNIP)

The government has insisted China stop development that may be sucking up natural resources on the Japanese side of the median line. China has refused to recognize the median line as the demarcation for resource development.

The last round of the talks at the level of director generals of concerned ministries took place in May, but the officials failed to narrow the gap and the two governments have yet to agree on the schedule for the next round of talks.

In an earlier countermove, the government in July granted Teikoku Oil Co. the prospecting rights to drill a field on the Japanese side of the median line right across from the Chunxiao field. But the company has yet to start drilling, saying it would take some time to establish a safe working environment.