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Welcome to USAGOLD's "Gilded
Opinion" pages.
We invite you to browse our index
of outstanding gold-based commentary.
(Back to Holger Jensen Index)
While we find Mr. Jensen's columns particularly informative with respect to foreign affairs, his opinions do not necessarily represent those of Centennial Precious Metals, USAGOLD, its management and clientele.
INSIDE FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Cause for optimism in Afghan
campaign
by Holger Jensen, International Editor
With the bombing of Afghanistan entering its fourth week, the humanitarian crisis there is getting worse and Americans are beset by anthrax jitters.
Our Muslim and Arab allies worry about the growing number of Afghan civilians killed and wounded by errant bombs while Osama bin Laden and his Taliban hosts remain elusive. Many advocate a bombing halt for Ramadan.
Aid agencies warn that 5 1/2 million Afghans, fully a quarter of the population, may starve to death or die from the cold if the bombing is not paused to allow the delivery of relief supplies before the onset of winter.
Some American lawmakers, including Arizona Sen. John McCain, have joined anti-Taliban commanders in urging an immediate insertion of GIs on the ground -- enough to establish a forward base in Afghanistan -- or risk losing the support of opposition groups fighting for the northern alliance. That means body bags.
Whether President Bush's coalition against terrorism will hold depends much on his conduct of the Afghan campaign in the next few weeks. And it is sure to crumble if he broadens the war to Iraq without proof positive that it was involved in the attacks of Sept. 11.
That's the dark side of the coin.
Looking at the big picture, however, there's cause for optimism.
Afghanistan is, after all, only the first round of a long, probably open-ended war on many fronts, financial and diplomatic as well as military. There have been some dramatic foreign policy realignments at home and abroad, and one can safely say that bin Laden has achieved none of his purported goals.
In the words of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, "Out of the shadow of this evil should emerge lasting good."
Despite all the talk of jihad, bin Laden has not succeeded in launching a war of civilizations between Islam and the West. Sure, thousands of Pakistani holy warriors are flocking to "defend Afghanistan," and shrill condemnations of the United States are being heard from as far away as Senegal.
But the radicals are a vocal minority. The silent majority of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, no matter how resentful it may be of U.S. policy in the Middle East or American conduct elsewhere in the world, is neither fundamentalist nor approving of bin Laden's tactics.
Surveying Muslim communities in Southeast Asia -- Indonesia (the world's most populous Muslim nation), Malaysia, Thailand, the southern Philippines, Brunei and other smaller states -- the Far Eastern Economic Review found most too preoccupied with domestic economic problems to worry much about the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Fundamentalist attempts to whip up anti-Americanism, it said, were "all talk and no action."
The Arab "street," though radicalized by U.S. support of Israel, still makes a distinction between Palestinian "freedom fighters" and bin Laden's brand of terrorism. Thus, while Arab newspapers are becoming more critical of American tactics in Afghanistan, they do not condone the attacks on New York and Washington nor call for holy war against the United States.
Arab governments, faced with Bush's ultimatum of "either you're for us or against us," have wisely opted to be for us as long as we do not attack an Arab country. Many, in fact, are using the war on terrorism as an excuse to crack down harder on their own political opponents.
Widespread arrests of fundamentalists have been reported in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Tunisia. Longtime foes such as Algeria and Morocco have begun extraditing each other's militants. And countries where they were previously welcomed, such as Sudan, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates, now want nothing to do with them.
European governments likewise have become less generous in granting political asylum to fugitive fundamentalists. There used to be so many of them in London that Libya's Moammar Gadhafi suggested we bomb the British capital if we were really serious about fighting terrorism.
Britain has since arrested Yasser al-Sirri, a leader of Egypt's Gamaat Islamiya, encouraging Egyptian military courts to begin prosecuting 243 Islamic militants jailed but untried for fear of offending European governments.
In other words, bin Laden has made life harder for those who want to establish Muslim theocracies in the Arab world, not easier.
He also has failed to hijack the Palestinian cause. While some Muslim fundamentalists among them consider him a hero, most Palestinians realize he is a Johnny-come-lately to their struggle for statehood and Yasser Arafat has done everything in his power to distance his Palestinian Authority from bin Laden's al-Qaida.
He has, for example, outlawed suicide bombing. While militants continue to defy his cease-fire orders, they acknowledge that now is not the time to be blowing up innocent civilians.
Other separatist groups and "liberation armies" are starting to reassess their tactics. As one British counter-terrorism expert pointed out, "Bin Laden has given terrorism a bad name. Those who used to kill indiscriminately to gain attention for their cause will have to choose their targets more carefully."
And some are suing for peace.
After years of stalling, the Irish Republican Army finally agreed to disarm because it did not want to be blamed for destroying the Good Friday peace agreement. Muslim rebels in Chechnya eagerly accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin's offer of disarmament talks. And Muslim rebels in the southern Philippines -- all except a small group of terrorists in the Abu Sayyaf Brigade -- are seriously talking peace with the Catholic government in Manila.
Bin Laden's greatest mistake, perhaps, was in creating an alliance that no collection of religious zealots or Muslim states can hope to defeat.
Tom Grant, a research fellow at Oxford University, calls it "Bin Laden's Grand Miscalculation." In an analysis written for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, he said: "Whether or not he forges a Pan-Islamic movement united against the West, bin Laden is near to triggering the establishment of an alliance far more fearsome than any conceivable alignment of Muslim countries.
"America, Russia and China -- a weight that indeed no other geopolitical combination whatsoever could withstand -- may well and indeed should on bin Laden's provocation themselves join together in an alliance no less grand than he hopes to create against us."
Grant reasons that whatever their differences, the three nations all have an interest in maintaining the current world order simply because they are its premier powers. Bin Laden has declared his intent to revise that world order, thus posing a mutual threat. Not only that, he threatens their domestic order as well by attacking the world's only superpower on its home soil.
Thus "it is a double threat: to unseat us all as international powers and to deny us tranquility even at home," said Grant. "His scheme of alliance-building is quite simply in the process of backfiring on a scale of epic proportions.
"He may or may not yet prove able to foment a Muslim uprising of great breadth but, by inadvertence, he seems to have made a far more potent alliance nearly inevitable. Only a strategic blunder even greater than his own will prevent the United States, China and Russia from joining now in common cause to protect the order and security of which they uniquely are guarantors."
October 30, 2001
Copyright © 2001 The E.W. Scripps Co. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted by USAGOLD with permission of Mr. Jensen. No further reproduction without permission.
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