US holds back move to strike Iraq

WASHINGTON, Sept 24: Apprehending a possible setback to the efforts in building a worldwide anti-terrorist coalition, the United States was holding off hawks pushing for a strike on iraq to accompany an imminent attack on Afghanistan.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has pointed out that a full-blown military strike against Iraq would result in civilian casualties, enrage the Arab world without probably unseating Saddam Hussein, newsweek reported in its current issue.

Earlier, at a recent meeting of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board, hardliners including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich arrived at a consensus to launch an attack on Iraq soon after a first strike against Afghanistan.

Mr Gingrich was of the view that when the US lost more than 6,000 people, "there has to be reaction so that the world clearly knows that things have changed."

Mr Powell believe that the anti-terrorist coalition’s ability to pool intelligence on terrorists with global reach is at least as crucial as any military action, the report said.

Hardliners pressing for a strike against Iraq fear that US credibility will suffer if the country gets bogged down in Afghanistan. They also believe that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction could be used against America next week.

The report quoted one participant at the Pentagon meeting as having acknowledged that it would be very tough to get Osama Bin Laden in the rocky and mountainous terrain of Afghanistan and justifying the need for doing ‘something that counts.’ (UNI)

UN Envoy sees ex-Afghan king as key peace player

ROME, Sept 24: The United Nations envoy to Afghanistan has said he thought the country’s ex-king could play a vital role in uniting the Afghan people behind a new Government and restoring peace to their ravaged homeland.

Speaking after 45 minutes of talks with former Afghan Monarch Mohammad Zahir Shah, UN Envoy Francesc Vendrell yesterday said the current crisis in the region might ironically enable Afghanistan to turn its back on more than two decades of war.

"This could be the opportunity for the people of afghanistan to finally decide their own future and have a better future than they have had for the past 25 years," Vendrell told reporters.

"I’m convinced that his majesty can play a very important role in the coming months," he added.

The 86-year-old king has been living in exile in Italy since 1973 in relative obscurity and has unexpectedly found himself in the limelight following the devastating September 11 suicide attacks on New York and Washington.

With the United States accusing Afghanistan’s hardline Taliban rulers of harbouring the alleged mastermind behind the assault, diplomatic activity has intensified to find an eventual alternative Government in Kabul.

"We have the feeling that a lot of Afghans after 22 years of misery, see in their former king the last ruler that had any legitimacy and the last ruler that presided over a period of relative prosperity," Vendrell said.

The Frail Monarch, who made no statement after Sunday’s meeting, appealed on Friday for an emergency Assembly of representatives of all Afghan groups to be convened to elect a head of state and set up a transitional Government.

He is due to meet later this week a delegation from the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance to discuss the idea and to work on creating a broad-based coalition to counter the Kabul rulers. Vendrell said the monarch, who lives in a secluded, leafy housing estate on the northern outskirts of Rome, did not necessarily want to be king again and would leave it to the Afghan people to decide what form of Government they desired.

The US State Department released an opinion poll earlier this year that found that most Afghans regarded their former king as the man most likely to address the country’s problems.

Zahir Shah ascended to the throne in 1933 after his father was assassinated and oversaw 40 years of stability and cautious modernisation before he was ousted in a bloodless coup led by his brother-in-law.

He has lived in Italy ever since, rejecting overtures from the Soviet Union to return as leader following their invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and waiting instead for his own people to call him back.

He looks weak and needs help walking up and down stairs, but his family insisted that he was ready to serve his people.

"He has always been a very strong man. We have to help him but we need him. He can give us precious advice," said his youngest son, Mir Wais Zaher, who lives with him in Rome.

Vendrell said he would continue his shuttle diplomacy and hoped the ex-king and northern alliance would reach an accord.

"I think developments could move fast in the coming weeks and months," he said. (REUTERS)

Lifting of US sanctions a token gesture to Pak

ISLAMABAD, Sept 24: One down, 508 to go. That was the number of US sanctions still in place against Pakistan yesterday after the United States announced it was lifting economic penalties on Islamabad.

The penalties were imposed in 1998. After Pakistan followed India with tit-for-tat nuclear tests and joined the elite group of declared nuclear powers.

"Pakistan welcomes the decision by the United States to lift sanctions imposed in 1990 and others imposed in 1998 following nuclear tests by India and Pakistan," Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar told Reuters.

But delight at the decision, motivated by a US need to reward friends who have offered support in the manhunt for the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington that have left 7,000 people dead and missing, was tempered by reality.

"It may be pointed out that 508 sanctions continue to remain in force," the Foreign Ministry said without giving details.

Among the most punishing sanctions, those preventing the United States from extending military aid, are still firmly in place.

Analysts and the Government were swift to show their gratitude, and almost as swift to ask for more for a country whose economy grew at 2.6 per cent in 2000-2001, unchanged from the previous year.

It is struggling under about 40 billion dollars in foreign debt and has meagre reserves to defend its currency, which has been declining for more than a year.

"If it’s only this sanction, then it doesn’t mean very much," said one economic observer.

Glenn economic sanction key

Many economic analysts say the key sanction was in fact the amendment named for former US senator John Glenn and passed after the 1998 nuclear tests and has now been lifted.

It severely limited the ability of the US Government to provide bilateral assistance to Pakistan outside narrowly defined humanitarian aid.

The Glenn amendment barred US support for multilateral aid and US Government financial assistance such as credit guarantees unless a humanitarian exemption was sought.

As Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz said, the United States will now be able to vote in favour of Pakistan in such institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, US investment in Pakistan will be easier and limits are also lifted on US export-import bank encouragement of investment.

But there was much that Aziz left unsaid.

US military assistance to Pakistan is barred under the 1990 amendment named for Larry Pressler that was passed in a futile attempt to prevent Pakistan from joining the elite circle of nuclear powers.

"This is the crucial thing. If that isn’t gone, then military aid can’t come through," an economic observer said.

"They can’t get spare parts for their F-16s (fighter jets) or their battle tanks, their artillery and howitzers as well as their radar communications," he said.

"So it really doesn’t look that good."

But most analysts welcomed the political implications for a state that has been losing international prestige steadily, racked for years by a series of increasingly corrupt Governments, the nuclear tests and then, to top it off, a military coup in 1999 that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power.

First step - ‘but not enough’

"This is a first step but it is not enough," former Information Minister Mushahid Hussain said. "But it shows a change in american attitudes, a new kind of relationship is being built between the US and Pakistan."

There were many who questioned whether a US action prompted by necessity as it rounds up backing for its "war on terrorism" marked a real change, or merely a moment of solidarity before Pakistan disappears back down toward the bottom of the list of Washington’s priorities.

"Every time America stopped aid, it was for political reasons, and every time it resumed, it was for political reasons. It (America) never helped Pakistan to stand on its feet," said M Ziauddin, Resident Editor of the newspaper Dawn in Islamabad.

The US move had been widely anticipated after General Musharraf pledged to help Washington in its fight against what it calls an international terrorism network, suspected to be run by Saudi-born militant Osama Bin Laden out of neighbouring Afghanistan.

The White House announced that President George W Bush had decided to waive sanctions because they were not "in the national security interests of the United States".

"The lifting of sanctions was long overdue. They were sutdated," said Shirin Mazar, Director-General of the Government-funded Institute of Strategic Studies.

"One hopes it will be followed up with the lifting of other sanctions," she said.

A senior Pakistani Government source said the "half-measure" would disappoint many people in Pakistan who have been hoping that a decision by Musharraf to throw Pakistan’s weight behind the United States would work in its favour.

Stop relying on handouts

However, at least one analyst questioned whether it wasn’t time for Pakistan to stop relying on handouts and clean up its economic act.

"This will send us back into a stupor and will not help clear the economic mess," Ziauddin said.

"We will again be in the kind of economic stupor that was actually responsible for Pakistan’s economic dependence (in the past on donors)...When we forgot to collect taxes," he said. (REUTERS)

US tries to surround Laden with political, military net

WASHINGTON, Sept 24: The United States today tried to surround Islamic militant Osama Bin Laden with a far-flung political and military net, sending a team to Pakistan, positioning troops on land and sea, and promising a written indictment against the man who tops its wanted list for the attacks on New York and Washington.

After a weekend of grieving and prayers for the nearly 7,000 dead or missing from the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans tried to return shattered routines back to normal as their leaders promised retribution.

The shaken US economy, meanwhile, faced another test as the stock market prepared to reopen after suffering the largest weekly loss since the great depression. Early today, most Asian stocks staged a tentative recovery.

Bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi-born Muslim dissident believed hiding in Afghanistan, remained the top target of US efforts.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday said that Washington would release evidence linking him to the attacks, in a bid to build support for the coalition President George W Bush is trying to build for his global "war on terrorism."

Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, which has sheltered Bin Laden, has said it will not turn him over unless it is given proof of his involvement in the attacks.

"I think in the near future, we will be able to put out a paper, a document, that will describe quite clearly the evidence that we have linking him to this attack," he said.

But Bin Laden’s whereabouts were a matter of dispute.

A spokesman for the Taliban said the movement’s spiritual leader had approved a request from the country’s clerics that Bin Laden leave, but that the message was not yet in the fugitive’s hands.

"We have still not been able to deliver the clerics’ message to him because we could not find him," Taliban spokesman Abul Hai Mutmaen told Reuters by telephone from the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

Washington scoffed at that report.

Asked if he believed the Taliban had lost track of Bin Laden, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "Of course not. They know where he is."

As he spoke a US military team, believed to number four members, had arrived in Islamabad to consult with Pakistan’s Government on President Pervez Musharraf’s pledge to back Washington’s efforts to remove Bin Laden from neighboring, landlocked Afghanistan.

Bush has demanded that the Taliban turn over all leaders of Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization in that country and close all camps used by the group or face military consequences. Bin Laden has denied involvements in the attacks.

A top aide to Musharraf yesterday said that Pakistan wants to make sure no civilians get killed in any US offensive against Bin Laden and the Taliban.

"By cooperating with the United States, we can ... Ensure there are no civilian casualties," Tariq Aziz, Principal Secretary to the military ruler, told Reuters television. "We’ll help them in moderating their actions, reducing the intensity of their actions."

Aziz said the US team would discuss the plans how to proceed with any strikes against Bin Laden, and what Pakistan might allow the United States to do within its borders.

In Washington, Bush’s top lieutenants indicated that the war he has launched may be a silent, stealthy and possibly secret conflict, targeting financial and political channels as much as people and supplies.

The victory it would yield, they said, may not come with a defining moment but with a return to the safety and security the country has long enjoyed before hijacked airliners destroyed New York’s World Trade Center, the symbol of global financial might, and badly wounded the Pentagon.

"This is not a quick effort, a battle, an event, television event with cruise missiles ending it, with a signing ceremony on the missouri at the end of world war two. That isn’t what this is about," Rumsfeld said on CBS’s "face the nation."

"The ultimate victory in this war is when everyone who wants to can ... Get up, let your children go to school, go out of the house and not in fear, stand here on a sidewalk and not worry about a truck bomb driving in to us, and be able to be free in speech and thought and activity and behavior," he later told reporters outside the CBS studio in Washington.

In New York, over 20,000 mourners attended a tribute at Yankee Stadium to those who died in the ruins of New York’s twin towers, at the Pentagon and in the four hijacked planes, one of which crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers apparently fought with those who had hijacked it.

Clutching flags and photographs of the missing, they joined a prayer for America and sobbed for the devastation wrought when the world trade center’s two 110-story towers collapsed following the hijack attacks.

At the Camp David presidential retreat yesterday, Bush and his wife, Laura, stood in an open field, their hands over their hearts, as marines in dress uniform hoisted the US flag to full staff for the first time since the Sept. 11 strikes.

Flags were flying at full-staff at all Government buildings following the expiration Saturday night of the official period of mourning.

But signs of aftershocks remained.

The US Government yesterday for a second time ordered crop-dusting planes temporarily grounded as the FBI warned their operators to check for "suspicious activity." Published reports said those who carried out the attacks may have been looking at crop-dusters as a potential vehicle for a chemical or biological weapons assault.

The planes were grounded for one day on September 16 before yesterdayday’s order.

New York officials said the number of those missing in the wreckage of the World Trade Center had risen to 6,453, up 120 from the prior toll amid continued checks of lists of those unaccounted for. The chances of finding survivors 12 days after the attacks were very small, although rescue work continued.

As the United States ramped up its response, most Americans appeared solidly behind Bush, with 90 percent approving of the way he has handled his job, according to a CNN and USA today poll. That was the highest rating for a US President ever recorded by the gallup polling group, overshadowing the previous record 89 percent scored by Bush’s father, President George Bush, at the end of the 1991 Gulf war.

US military preparations picked up steam. The Pentagon activated another 5,172 reserve troops on Saturday, a day after eight b-52 heavy bombers began departing for a buildup in the Gulf and Indian Ocean. Aircraft carriers have also left port.

US officials said another deployment was expected to send additional warplanes to the area, bringing to more than 200 the number of planes that would join about 350 aircraft already in the region at land bases and on aircraft carriers. In Kabul, witnesses and officials said the Taliban was building bunkers, installing anti-aircraft batteries and arming men in key border areas to defend against any US attack.

Afghan opposition forces reported launching new attacks in three northern provinces and taking at least one district from the Taliban in a campaign timed to coincide with the threats of a US military strike. (REUTERS)

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