World Information

US plays for high stakes on
Pakistan-Afghan border
Reuters/bdnews24.com . Peshawar
Former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld may not have been shy about projecting US military power, but even he didn’t dare send American troops into Pakistan’s tribal lands to snatch or kill al-Qaeda leaders.
But now Pakistanis fear the US presidential campaign has heated up the foreign policy debate over how to handle the Taliban and al-Qaeda threat to a point where American leaders could throw caution to the wind by taking unilateral action.
‘If this was a possibility in the past, it’s a high possibility now,’ said a senior security official in the northwestern city of Peshawar, shuddering at the statements coming from the United States.
In 2005, Rumsfeld reportedly aborted a mission to eliminate Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, because it involved too many troops, chances of success were too uncertain, and the danger of riling the situation in Pakistan was too great.
The risks today may be even greater, with Pakistan going through a precarious transition to civilian-led democracy and tribesmen across the northwest reaching for their guns.
‘If Americans hit the Pakistani side, they will make more enemies for themselves,’ Ayaz Wazir, a former Pakistani ambassador to Kabul, said.
Mounting casualties among Western troops across the border in Afghanistan have fuelled alarm, as have intelligence assessments that al-Qaeda could organise strikes on Western soil having regrouped in the tribal areas under Taliban protection.
The United States is now piling resources into Afghanistan, where the Taliban insurgency is stronger than ever 6-years after US-backed forces drove the Islamist militia and its al-Qaeda guests into the mountains on the Pakistan border.
With Western forces pressing into areas where the militants had ranged, there have been more encounters, more casualties, and more talk of ordering ‘hot pursuit’ into Pakistani territory.
Talat Masood, a former general turned political analyst, said US Congressional hearings, the media and think-tanks were generating the kind of hype that could persuade the president, George W Bush, to authorise an intensification of air strikes and even limited ground operations in the tribal belt.
‘Pakistan must have to take action on its own. It is left with no other option,’ Masood said.
An American incursion would be a call to arms for tribesmen who had hitherto shunned the insurgency based in the ethnic Pashtun tribal belt straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and undermine the fledgling civilian, coalition government.
‘Anti-American sentiments will rise exponentially,’ Masood wrote in the Daily Times. ‘The civilian government would be destabilised and moderate forces will be further marginalised.’
In past week US impatience has been very evident.
There is a perception that the Pakistan army reduced pressure on Taliban groups in the border areas as the new government tried to get tribal elders to persuade the militants to end their war.
The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has also cast accusations that members of Pakistan’s security apparatus are playing a double-game by helping the Taliban insurgency in order to preserve leverage in southern Afghanistan for the day when Western governments pull their forces out.


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ASEAN urged to heap
pressure on Myanmar
Agence France-Presse . Singapore
Myanmar must face more pressure over its handling of cyclone relief – and its rights record – when foreign ministers from neighbouring nations, Washington and Europe meet this week, activists say.
The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations has often been criticised for failing to act firmly against its rogue member Myanmar over human rights abuses and a lack of democratic progress in that country.
But the response of the bloc after Myanmar’s delay in allowing foreign experts to help the relief effort after the Cyclone Nargis disaster in May has earned it some praise.
Activists said the group must keep pushing to secure more assistance for up to two million people who, ASEAN secretary-general Surin Pitsuwan said recently, remain in a ‘very precarious situation.’
‘For the first time in its history, ASEAN was actually effective at something,’ said Dave Mathieson, a consultant on Burma for the US-based Human Rights Watch.
‘But there’s still a lot of work to be done,’ he said. ‘So they’ve got to keep the pressure on.’
Myanmar’s military regime earned widespread condemnation by refusing to allow a major relief operation after the cyclone, which left 138,000 people dead or missing. Singapore, the ASEAN chair, called the delay ‘regrettable.’
The junta later agreed to allow in foreign aid workers, and asked its fellow ASEAN nations to coordinate the international effort.
Under a tripartite agreement with the United Nations and the Myanmar government, nearly 300 ASEAN volunteers operated in the hard-hit Irrawaddy Delta to prepare an assessment of those affected by the storm.
That report, to be released Monday, ‘will be useful to help guide the relief and recovery efforts’ to meet the medium-term needs of victims, Surin said.
ASEAN ministers, who begin a series of meetings Sunday night, will be joined on Thursday by counterparts from other nations gathered in the ASEAN Regional Forum, Asia’s main security dialogue.
The grouping includes the United States and European Union – whose sanctions and harsh words against Myanmar’s junta have been at odds with the traditionally softer approach of ASEAN.
Debbie Stothard, of the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma, a rights group, said that how Myanmar’s junta ‘seriously mishandled’ the cyclone will be ‘the elephant in the room as far as the ASEAN Regional Forum is concerned.’


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