Musharraf using US to kill anti-Osama groups

By B Raman

When an Army unit is having an encounter with a com-bined group of Arab, Afghan and Pakistani terrorists, do you know of bullets, hand-grenades and rockets which would kill only the Arabs and spare the Afghans and Pakistanis?

Well, Pakistan apparently has them, if reports about its high-profile hunt for the dregs of the Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the Waziristan area of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are to be believed. Let us begin from the very beginning.

It has been a well-known secret in the tribal belt of Pakistan and Afghanistan that many of the hit and run attacks on the American and Afghan troops in Southern and Eastern Afghanistan are being launched from sanctuaries in the Waziristan area. Pakistani troops deployed on the Pakistan-Afghan border to prevent cross-border terrorism into Afghan territory, have actually been providing covering fire to these raiders to facilitate their terrorist strikes in Afghan territory just as they do to cross-border terrorists operating in Indian territory.

Since the beginning of this year the young officers of the US troops deployed in Afghan territory have been itching to cross over into Waziristan in exercise of their right of hot pursuit and wipe out the terrorists and their sanctuaries. They were particularly infuriated over the fact that in one of the hit and run raids of December last, a serving officer of the Pakistani security officers was involved. But, the Pentagon and the State Department have been exercising considerable restraint on them lest their over-reactions destabilise Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

At the same time, senior officials of the Bush Administration have been exercising considerable pressure on Musharraf to destroy the terrorist infrastructure in the whole of FATA in general and in Waziristan in particular.

Since there has been no improvement in the situation despite continuing pressure from the US and the Hamid Karzai Government in Kabul on Musharraf to wipe out the terrorists operating from the FATA and their infrastructure. On the contrary, the anger of the junior and middle level US and Afghan troops was exacerbated when it was found recently that three of the hit and run raiders caught in Afghan territory were serving Pakistani army officers who had trained the Taliban before 9/11.

It is said that the matter was strongly taken up by President Bush with Musharraf when the latter met him in New York last month. According to a disclosure made by Richard Boucher, spokesman of the US State Department, after the return of Musharraf to Pakistan, the two countries signed a Letter of Agreement on September 23, 2003, to undertake the following:

*Strengthen Pakistan's control over frontier areas bordering Afghanistan;

* Continue the construction of roads in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas;

* Support law enforcement reform; and

* Provide training and equipment to develop police capacity, including the creation of a border security coordination center."

According to Boucher, this Letter of Agreement was reaffirmed on October 2 when Secretary of State Colin Powell called on Pakistan's Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali in Washington.

On the eve of a visit to Afghanistan and Pakistan by Richard Armitage, US Deputy Secretary of State, and Christina Rocca, Assistant Secretary of State, the Pakistan Army, which had been sluggish in its actions against the terrorists and their sanctuaries, went into sudden action against suspected hide-outs of the Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the Waziristan area and a hide-out of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) in the Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan) bordering India's Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), starting from October 2. Foreign and Pakistani media representatives were reportedly invited to watch the operation, which was billed as the largest operation undertaken by the Pakistan Army against the Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

However, after an independent investigation, The News reported as follows: "Majority of the captured suspected terrorists in the Operation Mizan, launched by Pakistan armed forces in South Waziristan Agency, are reportedly Pakistanis and Afghans while seven among the killed are believed to be foreigners.

"Sources informed The News from Wana, headquarters of South Waziristan Agency, that five among the dead were Chechens while one of them has been identified as Algerian and another as Turkish. Identity of the remaining ones, who were killed in the daylong operation, could not be ascertained. However, some official sources said all those killed in Bagharh area of Birmal district were foreign nationals and had sneaked into Pakistani territory from Afghanistan.

"Sources in the political administration said hardly two of the 18 captured persons are believed to be Arabs while the rest are either from Punjab, South Waziristan Agency and Afghanistan. ‘No big fish has been identified either among the killed persons or the arrested ones. We were expecting some thing big,’ an official said asking not to be named.

"Arab sources, however, claimed that these foreign nationals were affiliated with Muslim militant groups but had no links with Al Qaeda, as majority of them are believed to be from the hardliner Takfiree Group, which was always at loggerheads with Osama bin Laden and his supporters."

Takfir wal Hijra means Repentance and Flight, in other words, "repent your sins and flee the sinful world." This ideology was first propagated in Egypt in the early 1970s by a violent offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Since then, this ideology has spread to Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Jordan and Pakistan. The groups practising this ideology, even if they have other names, are generally referred to as the Takfirees.

In Pakistan, the Takfirees operate under the name the Jamaatul Muslimeen, but the locals refer to them as Takfirees. The Arab Takfirees first arrived in Pakistan in the 1980s to participate in the jihad against the Soviet troops.

Even though some analysts treat the Takfirees as no different from the Al Qaeda, religious sources in Pakistan say that it is one of the very few jihadi groups in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region which has refused to accept the leadership and the modus operandi of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda According to them, it had unsuccessfully tried to assassinate him when he was living in the Sudan before the middle of 1996 when he shifted to Afghanistan. It had also reportedly issued a fatwa in 1999 calling for his assassination.

Even though its religious ideology is as extreme as that of bin Laden, if not more extreme, its modus operandi differs in the sense that it believes that before getting involved in a head-on confrontation with the US one should get rid of all US surrogates in the Islamic countries through targetted assassinations. It feels that bin Laden weakened the cause of the jihad against the US by prematurely taking the US head-on on 9/11 without first eliminating its surrogates in Pakistan and other countries of the Islamic world.

Going by the reports from the police officers of the NWFP, what the army seems to have done was to catch hold of some Takfirees, eliminate them and then show them as killed during a massive anti-Al Qaeda operation.

Why is the Army killing the Arabs? Because, the police officers say, it was worried that if they were interrogated by the FBI, the truth would come out.

Why it did not consider it necessary to kill the Pakistanis and Afghans? Because it is confident they would not compromise the army, if interrogated by the FBI. (adni)

Ozone hole growing alarmingly

By G. V. Joshi

Ozone, a gas, whose molecule contains three atoms of oxygen, was first discovered in 1839 by German scientist Christian Friedrich Schonbein. It is pale blue, relatively unstable gas. The name ozone is derived from the Greek word 'ozein' which means, "to smell". This is also called trioxygen.

The Earth is surrounded by a relatively thin blanket of air, consisting a mixture of gases, primarily nitrogen (77 per cent) and oxygen (21 per cent). This gaseous envelope, commonly called the air, also contains much smaller amounts of gases such as argon, carbon dioxide, methane, ozone and water vapour, alongwith minute solid and liquid particles in suspension.

The stratosphere lies above the troposphere and extends to an altitude of about 50 kilometres. The temperature in this layer increases with altitude.

Ultraviolet (UV) radiation or rays are an invisible form of light. They lie just beyond the violet end of the visible spectrum. The sun is the major natural source of UV rays. UV rays in sunlight split oxygen molecules in the stratosphere into two separate atoms. Some of these free atoms join with oxygen molecules to form ozone.

Above the relatively warm stratosphere is mesosphere, in which temperatures again decline with altitude, reaching roughly -85 C at the top of mesosphere. Temperatures then rise with increasing height through the overlying layer known as the thermosphere. Above about 100 kilometres, lies ionosphere.

Depending on where it resides, ozone can harm or protect human animal and plant life on earth.

Strong sunlight and hot weather cause ground-level ozone to form in harmful concentrations in the air. Many cities tend to have high levels of ozone. Near the Earth's surface, ozone is a harmful pollutant that causes damage to lung tissue and plants. Ozone is a major constituent of smog. Smog kills more people than car accidents.

Most of the ozone is formed over the equator and the tropics, because of sunlight and, therefore, UV radiation is strongest there. The process is continuous.

As ozone is produced, stratospheric winds drive it from the tropics towards Polar Regions. In the stratosphere, where 90 per cent of Earth's ozone resides, it does a remarkable good job of absorbing (UV) radiation and acts as a shield to protect Earth's surface from the sun's harmful UV radiation.

In the absence of this gaseous shield in the upper atmosphere, the harmful UV radiation in the sunlight has a perfect window through which to strike earth. The sun's UV rays are particularly harmful to living things. Overexposure to these rays can cause painful irritation on inflammation of the eyes.

High-quality sunglasses protect the eyes. Overexposure to UV rays also can cause a painful burn.

Exposure to the Sun's UV rays over a long period can cause skin cancer and other genetic changes in human cells.

An area where ozone has been significantly depleted - for example, over the North or South Pole - is sometimes called a "Ozone Hole". However, this beneficial ozone is gradually being destroyed by manmade chemicals like Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which are a family of chemical compounds developed way back in the 1930's as safe, non-toxic, non-flammable alternative to dangerous substances like ammonia for purposes of refrigeration and spray can propellants.

Their usage grew enormously over the years. One of the elements that make up CFCs is chlorine. Very little chlorine exists naturally in the atmosphere. However, it turns out that CFCs are an excellent way of introducing chlorine into the atmosphere and its various layers.

Studies undertaken by various scientists like Dr Rowland, Dr Molina and Dr Paul Crutzen during the 1970s revealed that CFCs released into the atmosphere accumulate in the stratosphere.

In the stratosphere, UV radiation from the sun breaks CFCs into their component elements of chlorine, fluorine and carbon. There, each chlorine atom is capable of destroying about 100,00 ozone molecules before becoming inactive. This has been observed especially over Antarctica.

CFCs have a lifetime in the atmosphere of about 20 to 100 years, and consequently one free chlorine atom from a CFC molecule can do a lot of damage, destroying ozone molecules for a long time, and creating ozone holes.

Ozone hole of 2003 has made its appearance, but is smaller. According to scientists studying the ozone hole, this year's ozone hole over Antarctica is the second largest ever observed.

The size of this year's hole reached nearly 28 million square kilometres on September 11, 2003. It was slightly larger than the North American continent, but smaller than the largest hole ever recorded on September 10, 2000, when it covered 29 million square kilometres.

In the mid-1950s, scientists began monitoring the atmosphere in Antarctica. Their studies intensified after 1982, and each spring (September-October in Southern Hemisphere) they detected a loss of ozone. Data from satellites, balloons and aircraft confirmed their findings.

In some regions of the stratosphere, at an altitude of about 18 km, the ozone all but vanishes during the Antarctic spring. The loss of ozone is most serious above the Antarctic, but is spreading towards Arctic. Environmental scientists analysed more than 12 years' data from the Nimbus - 7 satellite and found that in some places at certain times of the year and the northern hemisphere also loses about 6 per cent of its ozone shield.

The loss is gradually replaced, but for part of the summer, we risk greater exposure to dangerous UV rays. Without the ozone layer, UV rays would probably destroy most plant and animal life.

The ozone layer is measured in Dobson units. A Dobson unit is related to the physical thickness of the ozone layer if it could be brought down to the Earth's surface. The global average ozone layer thickness is 300 Dobson units, which equals about 3mm.

In contrast, the ozone layer thickness in the Antarctic ozone hole is about 100 Dobson units, which is one mm.

Further confirmation on their work came in the mid-1980s with the discovery of the so-called hole in the ozone shield over Antarctica.

As a result of this path-breaking research, Dr Rowland and Dr Molina shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Dr Paul Crutzen, a Dutch Chemist who also worked on dangers faced by the ozone layer.

The citation accompanying the Nobel Prize said that Dr Rowland, Dr Molina and Dr Crutzen, the three winners, "contributed to our salvation from a global problem that could have catastrophic consequences."

Although emissions of CFCs from the developed world largely ceased due to international control agreements, the damage to the stratospheric ozone layer will continue to well into the 21st century.

PTI Feature