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COMMENTARY
June 12, 2002
Three of the dimensions
Like the last big hit on a U.S. city even if well-placed a small dirty radiological bomb would probably only kill a few thousand people. But as the terrorists realize it's the thought that counts the idea of the thing in the public imagination. The real intended damage is done indirectly when the public reacts with some degree of hysteria to the fact that say five or six blocks around Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington or Broadway in New York can no longer be entered without a butterfly suit. There was a twofold advantage in publicizing as widely as possible the arrest at O'Hare airport in Chicago last month of Jose Padillo a.k.a. Abdullah al-Muhajir as he stepped off the plane from Pakistan. First let the public be reminded what we are dealing with; it would be unwise for us to return to the long nap we were enjoying prior to 9/11. Second by anticipating the kind of panic that could be caused by a successful "dirty bomb" we may reduce the psychological fallout when it happens including some of the economic repercussions that would spread the suffering very widely. I am inclined to say when not if. As President George W. Bush pointed out to anyone who had missed the point Mr. Padillo is just one character sheep-hooked from a cast of thousands. Nevertheless the CIA was for a change able to trace him from the Pakistan end. This is promising. It indicates a higher level of co-operation from Pakistani officials than the U.S. was previously getting. While Al Qaeda certainly took losses in Afghanistan and are a spent force there it is impossible for anyone to guess the degree to which they simply transferred operations to Pakistan (and Iran). That there is still much life in them is indicated by their various (alleged) post-9/11 stunts: the attempt of Richard C. Reid on Dec. 22 to blow up a Paris-to-Miami flight with a shoe-bomb; the April 11 truck bomb that slaughtered 19 mostly German tourists in the ancient synagogue on the island of Djerba Tunisia; and the May 8 bus bombing in Karachi in which 11 French naval engineers were murdered. To which we might add the videotaped beheading of the U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan done as part of a recruiting effort (there are reports of the video being shown to approving audiences in Saudi-financed mosques all over the world). And yesterday the Moroccan police interrupted a plan to send a little fleet of dinghies across the strait to Gibraltar to blow up U.S. and British naval vessels docked there in a reprise of the attack on the SS Cole in Aden. This has the smell of Al Qaeda to it with the romantic-nostalgic allusion to the first Islamic invasion of Europe through Gibraltar (old "Gebal Tariq") in the year 711. Western police should never lose sight of the poetry within the psychopathology of Al Qaeda. It is this perhaps more than any particular genius for organizing terrorist hits that Osama bin Laden has brought to the international movement of militant Islamism. The medium is the message and the real-time real-world carnage is meant as an adjunct to his publicity videos more than vice versa. They are "poetry in action" and to understand or even anticipate the moves it might even be useful to memorize the Koran. (Which is not to say -- standard disclaimer -- that Islam should be reduced to a programme of terrorist aggression and mass murder. It remains the business of every Muslim who does not agree with this proposition to make himself heard loud and clear in unambiguous denunciation. Let it be cried from every minaret.) While the United States continues to consider mostly military or at least quasi-military plans to break the broad "axis of evil" (naming Iraq and Iran) the lesser axis that runs through Saudi Arabia and Pakistan continues to present the more immediate threat to the lives and prosperity of innocent civilians in the West. It has now become clear that very little progress has been made in stopping the huge flow of oil money towards Al Qaeda and other jihadists in Pakistan and Kashmir from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. The admission of this failure emerged from a supposedly secret large conference of the "Egmont Group" (the principal international watchdog on money laundering) in Monaco at the end of last week. Representatives of several dozen countries and international organisations including the IMF and Interpol met to review progress in their campaign against terrorist financing. A large part of the problem is with countries like Canada which have finally brought in laws against fundraising for terrorist activities per se but allow organizations such as Hezbollah to continue raising money publicly and sending it abroad so long as they declare it will only be used for "welfare purposes". This leaves holes much wider than are necessary for truck bombers to drive through. But the largest single part of the problem appears to remain the non-co-operation of financial institutions at either end of the pipes between Arabia and Pakistan. At the receiving end Western investigators continue to believe that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency is according to one of them less interested in closing old pipes than in opening new ones . At the loading end The FBI and Interpol can't even ask well-informed questions. According to a report in London's Financial Times the official view from the conference in Monaco was that the deadline for closing the chief money spigots Sept. 11 this year will not be met. I gather the unofficial view is that the operation hasn't really started and worse Probably can't be done, without extremely powerful political interventions, backed up by the threat of military force. So we may assume that Al Qaeda is still flush with money to operate within Pakistan where it finds no shortage of willing foot soldiers and protectors within the military and intelligence bureaucracies. Its immediate ambition there is to provoke war between India and Pakistan by accomplishing a big enough terror hit on the Indian side. The dream would be to create such chaos that their agents could gain access to nuclear Pakistan's "Islamic bomb". The U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived yesterday in Delhi to find tensions considerably reduced between Pakistan and India. He was preceded by Richard Armitage from the State Department who extracted the usual promises from Pakistan's dictator Pervez Musharraf that he would finally do something about the terrorist infiltrations into Indian Jammu and Kashmir and even about the jihadist camps operating on the Pakistan side. ("Let me guess he needs two months said my Indian source.) What Mr. Musharraf is now being made to understand, is that whatever the schedule he has secretly agreed, the U.S. will be timing it on a stopwatch. In the meanwhile, India is returning its navy to ports (on the Arabian Sea, not to the Bay of Bengal), has permitted Pakistan to resume commercial overflights, and will post a new ambassador to replace the one it withdrew from Islamabad. Mr. Rumsfeld's job will now be to make the promises extracted by Mr. Armitage stick. My information is that he will be showing the Pakistanis, in particular, satellite photos and other evidence that the U.S. knows exactly what it is Pakistan will be closing. Fingers should stay crossed. Working from within Pakistan, Al Qaeda will be doing everything in its power to undermine these agreements with large acts of violence. In principle it is the same game being played against India that has been played for years against Israel: the big bomb at the right moment to put an end to all the useless talk. Watch for it. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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