US troops prepare Afghan cave raids, airports edgy

KABUL/WASHINGTON, Dec 25: Fear of terror attacks haunted the world on Christmas day, with airport security tight after the attempted "shoe bombing" of a transatlantic flight and US forces hunting Osama bin Laden in eastern Afghanistan.

US President George W Bush telephoned the troops today as they prepared a new push into the caves and tunnels of the Tora Bora mountains and he told families of the more than 3,000 people killed on September 11: "America grieves with you".

It was still unclear whether bin Laden, the United States’ prime suspect for those suicide hijack attacks on New York and Washington, had survived the intense US bombing that finally routed his Taliban protectors in Afghanistan.

But the threat that cells of the Saudi-born Islamist’s Al Qaeda network may still be operational has the world on edge, with holiday travellers having to get used to having even their footwear screened at airports after a man tried to blow up an American airlines flight with explosives hidden in his shoes.

Investigators in the United States and Europe were checking his identity and whether he had links to bin Laden as well as reviewing how he managed to board Saturday’s Miami flight in Paris with wires sticking out of his shoes.

Identified in court documents as richard reid, 28, he is being detained in Boston, where Saturday’s Paris to Miami flight was diverted after cabin crew and fellow passengers overpowered the man as he apparently tried to light a fuse to bombs in his shoes that experts said could have destroyed the Boeing 767.

In Afghanistan, US forces girded for a new push in the hunt for bin Laden as the country’s new interim leader, Hamid Karzai, pressed on with the task of extending his authority across a nation shattered by war into armed fiefdoms.

US defence officials said American and allied forces would soon make a fresh thrust into caves and tunnels in the eastern Tora Bora area, where Al Qaeda fighters made a last stand and where bin Laden was last reported to have been sighted.

"Operations are imminent," one Washington official said.

One option is to use "thermobaric" bombs to blast the air out of the underground mountain warrens, suffocating anyone holed up inside. The Pentagon said on Friday that it was sending 10 of the experimental bombs to Afghanistan.

However, army sergeant Major Rich Czizik, a spokesman for the Florida-based US Central Command, the military unit running the campaign in Afghanistan, said the thermobaric bombs had not yet arrived in Afghanistan as far as he knew.

Other officials said late last week that about 500 marines had been put on stand-by on the ground to help search the caves.

A spokesman for the US-led coalition operating in Afghanistan ysterday said it was "quite possible" bin Laden himself had been killed. But the search is still on.

As Karzai, sworn in on Saturday under the terms of a UN peace deal, met tribal elders in Kabul in an effort to overcome ethnic tensions, there was relatively little fighting across the country although US bombing raids had resumed at the weekend.

US officials said air strikes resumed on Sunday with precision raids on caves and munitions dumps north of Kandahar.

The bombing ended a lull which followed a deadly attack on a road convoy on Friday that survivors said had been a mistaken "friendly" target, contesting the Pentagon’s insistence that it had comprised senior Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders.

Karzai met one of the survivors and his spokesman added to speculation that the convoy might have been deliberately misidentified to the Americans by a local tribal rivals.

In Kandahar, the former southern stronghold of the Taliban, eight wounded Arab Al Qaeda fighters armed with guns and grenades were barricaded in a ward of a local hospital after a failed attempt by US-backed forces to flush them out.

Troops were also out in the United States homeland, patrolling airports with rifles at the ready. In Paris, where officials have been embarrassed by the way the man evaded security checks, extra police with sniffer dogs were on patrol.

At US airport security checkpoints, screeners knelt to inspect passengers’ shoes, waving wands over them and asking them to remove them and put them through x-ray machines. (AGENCIES)

Afghan Education Minister has to start from scratch

KABUL, Dec 25: Afghanistan’s new education chief took the helm of his ministry today with the daunting task of rebuilding a school system from scratch with no budget, few qualified teachers and only one telephone.

After 23 years of war, Afghanistan’s schools have been stripped bare of desks and teaching materials, most qualified teachers have fled abroad and those remaining have not been paid for at least six months.

Literacy rates are near the bottom of the global scale and women, the backbone of the teaching profession, were banned from working under the Taliban’s rigid Islamic rule.

"It’s a tremendous and daunting task," said Education Minister Rasul Amin, an academic who returned from 21 years in exile in Pakistan and Australia to take the job.

"We have lost whole generations who just spent their time fighting," he said.

"We don’t have desks for the students, we don’t have trained teachers, we need to provide materials for reading."

Amin formally took up his post today at a simple ceremony attended by his 400-odd staff in the ministry, a vast Soviet-style building full of cob-webbed offices, broken windows and long, empty corridors.

"There is one telephone, which I think is working," said Amin, who is staying in a hotel until he can find a house.

Asked if the ministry had any money, Amin consulted his deputy. "none," was the reply.

Tomorrow, the new ministry will hold its first meeting to discuss how to rebuild an education system from scratch.

The priorities, Amin says, are to rebuild schools and "just to collect the children’s.

"The kids should come back to school because they have been deprived for a long time," he said.

Amin will also oversee the delicate task of re-introducing education for girls, who were forbidden from attending school under the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islamic law.

"There will be no discrimination between boys and girls," he said. "But in some places, even if you open a school for girls, their parents won’t let them attend. I know my society, I know how conservative they are."

Women would be allowed to teach in all schools, but boys and girls would remain segregated up until university, he said.

"This is a very sensitive subject, no doubt," he said.

"You can’t impose a secular education system on Afghanistan overnight."

Women teachers who attended the welcoming ceremony backed Amin’s proposals.

"We cannot introduce mixed schools overnight," said Pariwin Nasiri, who ran an underground home school for girls under the Taliban and taught her students to sew secret pockets in their clothes to hide pens and books.

"We must move step by step," said Nasiri, a literature graduate from Kabul University who lost her job as a teacher when the Taliban took over the capital in 1996.

Nasiri was one of about 20 women teachers, with faces unveiled and wearing make-up, who presented amin with a bunch of flowers at the welcoming ceremony.

"School buildings must be repaired and new books should be published because the few books we have are too old and boring for students" she said.

"We need more experienced teachers and a proper salary," said Nasiri, who earns about one million Afghanis (40 dollars) per month at her private home school.

But until aid money starts to fill the interim Government’s coffers, even Amin will work for free.

"They haven’t got their salaries for the last six months," he said. "I am just thankful that they stayed here. When people are living without a salary, I must also be without."

It is a strange contrast for a man who has spent the last 21 years shuttling between the Pakistani city of Peshawar, where he ran the Afghanistan study centre, and Melbourne, Australia, where his children live.

Amin fled Afghanistan after he was arrested by the Communist Government in 1979 while teaching sociology at Kabul University.

When he was offered the position of minister during UN-backed talks in Bonn to establish an interim Government, Amin says he felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.

"But if you are fighting for something, if you are dreaming for something, and you find it, then you must be happy," he said. (AGENCIES)

Disappearing terror groups known to return
under new names

NEW DELHI, Dec 25: A signboard announcing the headquarters of Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) in Muridke, 30 km north of Lahore, came down last week just before President George W Bush declared its inclusion among terror groups and asked Pakistan’s military ruler, Gen Pervez Musharraf, to arrest its leaders and disband it.

But an American newspaper, which reported this yesterday, also suggested, quoting unnamed senior Pakistani officials, that even if LeT disappears, it may turn up again in a different guise.

For Gen Musharraf, deciding what steps to take against LeT will be a tricky matter, the New York Times said, pointing out that in the words of senior Pakistani officials, even if he orders LeT closed down, it may just be a prelude to a shell game that has been played before.

In the past, groups that have become too contentious for Pakistan to continue supporting have "re-badged" themselves under new names, and resumed their attacks in Kashmir, the officials were quoted as saying.

On Saturday, the General’s aides instructed the State Bank of Pakistan to freeze LeT bank accounts. But the group’s founder Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, who once taught Islamic theology in nearby Lahore, dismissed the action on his website as meaningless, since LeT owns no bank accounts or buildings and counts its "holy warriors" in Kashmir as its "only assets," the paper said.

In practice, Pakistani officials were quoted as saying, all of the money in Saeed’s Islamic empire has been vested in LeT’s parent organisation, presumably a reference to Markaz Dawa Al Irshad of Pakistan.

In aiming LeT, Bush had cited India’s accusations that the group was behind an attack on December 13 on Parliament in which 14 people died, including all five attackers. LeT has denied involvement, and Pakistan, implying Indian mischief, has demanded that India produce its evidence, the paper noted.

It said the possibility that Gen Musharraf will begin a crackdown on return from an official visit to China on Monday, appeared only to evoke studied indifference. "That’s Bush’s headache, and Musharraf’s, not ours," it quoted a Pakistani official at LeT’s educational complex as saying.

Rashid Minhas, rector of the 200-acre LeT educational complex where 1,200 students are steeped in the tenets of militant Islam—and, according to western and Indian intelligence reports— in the basics of "Jihad," or holy war, was quoted as saying that "let Bush do what he will our duty as Muslims is to follow the teachings of the holy prophet."

The paper said he waved away any questions relating to the LeT’s activities, the attacks of September 11, Osama bin Laden or Kashmir, where LeT’s Islamic fighters have been challenging Indian rule for much of the past decade. "We are not frightened of Bush, we are only fearful of god."

Recalling how a million people had died in rioting that followed the 1947 partition— many a short distance from Muridke along the Grand Trunk Road and the rail line across the Punjab— and how the two countries had fought three wars, adding tens of thousands more victims, the paper said the wounds were kept fresh more than 50 years later by frequent killings in Kashmir, the one territory that remains disputed between the two countries today.

The paper said that adding LeT— notorious for ambushes, bombings and assassinations mainly targeting the Indian army and police but also killing large numbers of civilians since the early 1990’s— to a list that also contains bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist group was a natural step for the Bush administration after September 11.

But for many Pakistanis, branding LeT a terrorist organisation was nowhere near as obvious a sequel to the events of September 11 as it must have seemed to Bush— the "struggle for Kashmir" being an epic no Pakistani leader could abandon without risking immediate ouster by fellow politicians or the army, the paper said.

According to Pakistani intelligence officials, LeT together with Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) has been responsible for about 70 per cent of all Pakistan-backed militant attacks in Kashmir in the last two years.

For India, the paper said, getting LeT and JeM declared terrorist organisations by the US, and persuading Bush to press Gen Musharraf to disband them, was a strategic goal from the moment of the September 11 attacks. (UNI)

If alive, bin Laden may cherish unrealised goals

ISLAMABAD, Dec 25: Osama bin Laden was always elusive and now he has vanished. Whether he is alive or dead, his myth lives on. But whether he has achieved his goals is another matter.

His own words show limited ambitions, but his actions reveal a man with potentially unlimited objectives.

"I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only," he said in an amateur videotape recovered at a house in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.

"This is all we had hoped for," he says.

Instead, the hijacked airliner attacks on September 11 claimed thousands of lives and destroyed the landmark twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center in the worst attack in history on US soil.

On the videotape, bin Laden gloats and chuckles with delight at the achievement of his goal to humble the world’s only superpower at the hands of Muslim "martyrs".

But the soft-spoken Saudi-born militant may not have achieved all he wanted.

He brought upon himself the wrath of US military might, resulting in the destruction of his protectors, the fundamentalist Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, and the end of the rugged land as a safe haven for extremists and outlaws.

He has pledged more attacks, but none has yet materialised. Some may be in the works, plotted by cells activated without the need for his direct word.

Last Saturday, a man with explosives in his shoes was overpowered and detained on a flight from France to the United States, and a key unanswered question is whether he acted alone or is linked to bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

Bin Lladen either lies dead in some gravelled, dingy cave or is on the run, unable to issue new orders to his followers for fear of US satellites seeking him from the sky and unable to flee far because of a 25 million dollar price on his head.

More and more US forces are pouring into the mountains of Afghanistan to seek him on the ground.

The attacks on New York and Washington may have exposed the United States as no longer invincible and won him the admiration of those in the Middle East discontented with what they see as superpower arrogance and unwavering support for Israel.

However, there are many other moderate Muslims shocked at the death and destruction wrought by his suicide hijackers.

On Afghanistan’s eastern border, Pakistan, for example, many said they supported bin Laden’s goal, but not his means.

Those mixed feelings meant demonstrations against the war in one of the most populous Muslim states were never able to swell beyond minor street protests.

"Cult figure"

A bin Laden cult may exist, growing up in Islamic nations around the extraordinary daring and terrible success of the September 11 attacks. But real support may be a myth.

Few could have put it better than bin Laden’s visitor, seen when the Afghan video was shot.

"A plane crashing into a tall building was out of anyone’s imagination," said bin Laden’s guest.

But did bin Laden want those attacks to transform him into a cult figure or rather to galvanise Muslims into action on his side?

If the former, then he has succeeded in many Middle East lands. If the latter, then there has been little sign of real support or a flood of new recruits to his cause.

A hint comes from his own words. "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse," he says in the video.

Even after weeks under attack by US air strikes, bin Laden appears relaxed and happy in the video — a hint that he may have another goal in mind.

Martyrdom would ensure him eternal glory in the afterlife.

Whether his Al Qaeda — the base — would still function would no longer be his goal.

On the video, he recites a poem:

"We hear the beats of drums and rhythm...

"They are storming his (the enemy) forts,

"And shouting: ‘We will not stop our raids,

"Until you free our lands’." (AGENCIES)

Pope recalls children suffering in world conflicts

VATICAN CITY, Dec 25: Calling young people the hope of humanity, Pope John Paul II today dedicated much of his Christmas message to children, from Palestinian to Israeli, from American to Afghan suffering from cruel conflicts, and prayed that religion can never be an excuse for intolerance and violence.

Speaking from the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica to tens of thousands of people who were gathered in St Peter’s Square on a chilly day beneath a brilliant sun, John Paul, in a weary voice, offered a frank revelation of how he, too, is suffering over the evils of the world.

"Day after day, I bear in my heart the tragic problems of the holy land; every day I think with anxiety of all those who are dying of cold and hunger," John Paul said in his traditional christmas message "Urbi Et Orbi" (Latin for to the city and to the world).

"May god’s holy name never be used as a justification for hatred! let it never be used as an excuse for intolerance and violence!"

In deference to his 81 years and his frailness, which includes often slurred speech and chronic hand tremor, John Paul several years ago stopped celebrating christmas day mass in the Basilica, making the delivery of his message his sole public appearance of the day.

"Today my thoughts go to all the children of the world: so many, too many are the children condemned from birth to suffer through no fault of their own the effects of cruel conflicts," John Paul said, his voice trembling.

"Let us save the children, in order to save the hope of humanity," the pontiff declared. This, he said, was mankind’s urgent task, "to give us back the right to hope."

In the Baby Jesus, the pope said, "we can recognise the face of every little child who is born, of whatever race or nation: the little Palestinian and the little Israeli; the little American and the little Afghan, the child of the Hutu and the child of the Tutsi," in Rwanda, the African nation bloodied by ethnic fighting.

John Paul made no direct reference to the Sept 11 terror attacks or the US bombings in Afghanistan.

But he prayed that God "come where the fate of humanity is most in peril."

John Paul appeared particularly tired, after reading his message while sitting in a chair. After being helped to his feet, John Paul gripped his silver pastoral staff, which shook violently because of his left hand tremor. The words of his blessing were at times almost intelligible, and after he finished, he slumped quickly back into the chair.

In his message today, John Paul called for support for "those who believe and work, sometimes in the face of opposition, for encounter, dialogue and cooperation between culture and religions." (AP)

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