NUCLEAR
What if Terror Went Nuclear?
Fischer wins Greens' support
Don't Forget North Korea
Safeguard Russia's Nukes
Reducing weapons, but by how much?
Radiation study may use teeth from years ago
Notes From Underground
Safety Study Of Gas Plant Gets Higher U.S. Priority
MILITARY
Yemen camps in U.S.-British sights
Bin Laden Is Reported Spotted in a Fortified Camp in Eastern Afghanistan
American Marines Land Near Kandahar
How to Put a Nation Back Together Again
Northern Alliance says Kunduz captured
Hundreds of Marines land near Kandahar
Bioterror fears lead to plans for quarantine
Anthrax Type That Killed May Have Reached Iraq
Turner's Foundation to Spend Millions to Fight Bioterrorism
Industry Sees Opportunity in U.S. Quest for Security
We'll Pay for All This Later, Okay?
German Greens Patch Rift and Support Use of Troops
Pakistan's Anxiety Grows as Taliban Collapse
America Tries, Again, to End the Endless Conflict
Japan Ships Depart to Join War Against Terrorism
U.S. wants Russia-NATO ties
Putin's Tilt to the West Riles Key Factions
A Space Station Out of Control
Security Tight for NASA Launch
Anti-terrorism agency faces turf wars, critics say
Bin Laden's camps teach curriculum of carnage
New Battles in Old War Over Freedom of Speech
Yemen, Long a Foe of U.S., Joins Anti-Terrorism Effort
Navajo 'code-talkers' earn medals
Pentagon waging a massive effort
POLICE / PRISONERS
Park officers reassigned to 'homeland'
Local police need terrorism data, Michigan chief says
Ashcroft to face questioning on civil liberties
Leahy: Ashcroft 'owes explanation' about tribunals
Cyber-crime treaty not "Big Brother"
Malaysian Authorities Arrest a Fugitive Philippine Muslim
Swept Up in a Dragnet, Hundreds Sit in Custody and Ask, 'Why?'
Bush's New Rules to Fight Terror Transform the Legal Landscape
Indefensible - The case against military tribunals.
ENERGY AND OTHER
Wolves Wander Into Germany, Aiding a Resettlement Effort
New study clarifies cancer-insulin link
ACTIVISTS
Ulster Protestants to End Demonstrations Against Schoolchildren
On Campus: The Microphone War
-------- NUCLEAR
What if Terror Went Nuclear?
New York Times
November 25, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/opinion/L25NUCL.html?searchpv=nytToday
To the Editor:
Re "The Specter of Nuclear Terror" (editorial, Nov. 19):
The possibility that Al Qaeda operatives might obtain atom bomb materials from Russia and former Soviet republics is a matter of grave concern. But so is the availability of these materials from the growing British, French and Japanese plutonium industries and from a new German research reactor to be operated on bomb-grade uranium. National and international controls against undetected losses and outright thefts of these materials remain weak.
The report you refer to by five American nuclear weapons experts, prepared for the Nuclear Control Institute, provides a wake-up call on the folly of allowing "civilian" atom bomb materials to pile up anywhere in the world. India and Pakistan built their nuclear weapons programs on such materials. Iraq tried. Iran may be next.
STEVEN DOLLEY Research Director Nuclear Control Institute Washington, Nov. 19, 2001
•To the Editor:
You point out the possibility that terrorists could steal Russian highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon (editorial, Nov. 19). But such uranium may be even more vulnerable to theft elsewhere.
Germany is about to commission a new reactor that by the year 2010 will use 800 pounds of bomb-grade uranium fuel, enough for 16 rudimentary Hiroshima-style bombs. The reactor sits at a university less protected than most Russian weapons facilities.
Similarly, most of the world's medical-isotope producers still employ bomb-grade uranium at commercial facilities less secure than Russia's weapons sites.
Russian nuclear material can and should be better protected. But if American officials acquiesce to bomb-grade uranium commerce at even less secure facilities in other countries, we will not be much safer.
ALAN J. KUPERMAN Venice, Calif., Nov. 19, 2001 The writer is a visiting scholar, Center for International Studies, University of Southern California.
•To the Editor:
The need to vastly improve the security of materials that could be used to make nuclear weapons is immediate and of paramount importance to global security ("The Specter of Nuclear Terror," editorial, Nov. 19.) Before Sept. 11, the Bush administration, citing budget concerns, planned to cut financing for joint Russian-American efforts to do just that.
If money is the issue, the billions now being spent on missile defense should be redirected to address this far more immediate nuclear threat. There can be no excuse for failing to act aggressively.
MICHAEL CHRIST Exec. Dir., International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 20, 2001
•To the Editor:
Besides beefing up measures to prevent nuclear theft, two other matters should be addressed by United States policy makers ("The Specter of Nuclear Terror," editorial, Nov. 19):
¶Support the International Atomic Energy Agency's new initiatives. The agency's governing body will meet soon to receive the director general's report on ways to prevent terrorism involving nuclear materials. There should be swift support for the recommended measures.
¶Get moving on international legal instruments. Since 1998, a draft convention on suppressing acts of nuclear terrorism has been languishing in the Legal Committee of the United Nations General Assembly. That draft not only addresses terrorism in the form of trying to acquire nuclear material to build a nuclear explosive device. It also deals with the use of other radioactive material that could be used with a conventional device ("dirty bomb") to terrorize and spread radiation.
LARRY D. JOHNSON Davis, Calif., Nov. 19, 2001 The writer was legal adviser at the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1997-2001.
-------- germany
Fischer wins Greens' support
World Scene
November 25, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011125-17786584.htm
BERLIN - Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer won the backing of his Greens party yesterday for sending German troops to aid the war on terrorism, averting the risk of a government collapse.
A national party conference passed a motion endorsing the troop pledge after an emotional plea for support by Mr. Fischer, who demanded solidarity with the United States and warned the Greens that they would risk political oblivion by bringing down Germany's center-left coalition.
"This is a clear mandate," said Greens lawmaker Albert Schmidt, who supported sending troops.
The vote signaled a fresh move away from the Greens' anti-war roots and also bolstered Mr. Fischer's position as his nation's chief diplomat.
-------- korea
AFTER THE TALIBAN, WHO?
Don't Forget North Korea
New York Times
November 25, 2001
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/weekinreview/25SANG.html?searchpv=nytToday
WITH the Taliban badly battered in Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden on the run, the biggest parlor game in Washington has now boiled down to one question: What will Phase II of the war look like?
Theories abound. The Bush administration may not have decided. But one scenario beginning to gain credence goes something like this: In coming months, while it steps up pressure on Al Qaeda's haunts, the United States also gives countries long suspected of hiding their nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs short deadlines to open up to intensive international inspection. If they refuse, as they have in the past, Washington will quickly raise the pressure, apply sanctions through the United Nations, and vaguely threaten that at some point diplomacy will give way to bombs.
Or, as one high-ranking hawk in the Bush administration said Friday, "they might be urged to consult the Taliban" about the risks of stiff-arming Washington.
At the very top of the list would sit Iraq, of course. Conservatives in and out of the administration have been talking about making Saddam Hussein a target almost from the first week of the war. But there is a hint of talk about another secretive, totalitarian nation with a troublesome history of nuclear and germ warfare: North Korea.
For two months, the odd regime in Pyongyang had rarely been mentioned, even though the C.I.A. has long suspected that it has amassed enough nuclear material for two or three atomic weapons. The silence ended last week. John R. Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, named Iraq and North Korea as the two nations the United States has concluded are actively developing germ weapons, in violation of a global treaty. He added Iran, Libya and Syria as countries strongly suspected of following suit. "The purpose of naming the names today was to put the international spotlight on them," Mr. Bolton said. "Prior to Sept. 11, some would have avoided this approach. The world has changed, however, and so must our business-as-usual approach."
It would be easy to read too much into Mr. Bolton's statement. Naming names is quite different from demanding inspections and punishing those who play shell games or refuse to open their doors. It could be a feint. "Why not get everyone we dislike on notice?" asked Ashton B. Carter, the Harvard professor who was in the midst of negotiations with the North during the Clinton administration. He said that since Sept. 11, "the North Koreans have been laying as low as they can."
But this is an administration that never put much faith in the Clinton-era negotiations, and stopped such talks dead when it took office. So it was notable that Mr. Bolton said the Bush administration would no longer wait for "slow-moving multilateral mechanisms that are oblivious to what is happening in the real world."
Still, North Korea is an immensely complicated case, and it poses perhaps the most interesting test of how far Mr. Bush is willing to push his war on terrorism and his vow to make sure that weapons of mass destruction do not threaten America or its allies.
North Korea has mixed weapons production and intimidating tests of its medium- range missiles with peace gestures, including negotiations that nearly brought President Clinton to Pyongyang a year ago. President Kim Jong Il abandoned his father's habit of sponsoring terrorism, but he still makes his money by trading in missile technology, notably with America's newest friend, Pakistan. It wants Western aid and trade, but believes its fearsome stockpile of weapons is the only way to hold Washington's attention.
So from the Bush team's first days in Washington, North Korea has divided the administration's "engagement" camp (led by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell) from hard liners who urge that the country must be isolated and, if possible, pushed to the brink of collapse. Mr. Powell lost round one of that debate, and prevailed in round two. Then came Sept. 11, which may change everything.
No one doubts that the North has behaved badly. The 1994 nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula was set off by Pyongyong's refusal to allow international inspectors into its huge nuclear reprocessing site at Yongbyon, north of the capital. The Air Force floated a proposal to take out the nuclear facility in an air strike (it insisted that the resulting nuclear contamination would be minimal), but William J. Perry, then the secretary of defense, warned President Clinton that the approach "was highly likely to start a general war."
THEN, just when Mr. Clinton was on the verge of imposing what amounted to an economic embargo on the country, and reinforcing the 40,000 American troops on the Korean Peninsula in case things turned ugly along the DMZ, a partial deal was reached.
Ultimately, North Korea allowed inspectors into Yongbyon, and froze the fuel production from a reactor that the C.I.A. believes had already yielded enough weapons-grade material to produce a few nuclear weapons. (Whether they have been assembled is anyone's guess.) In return, the Western allies agreed to help North Korea build a new generation of "proliferation resistant" nuclear power plants. But construction has proceeded at a dead slow pace, the country is starving, and after 11 months in office the Bush team has yet to hold a serious meeting with North Korean officials.
Now comes the hard part.
Does Mr. Bush try to revive the talks, and with it the Clinton-era offer that North Korea could get itself off the State Department's terrorist list, opening up the possibility of economic aid? Or does he heed conservative advisers who see in North Korea a chance to make an example of a non-Islamic country that poses a threat to two close allies, South Korea and Japan? After all, the intelligence community has a long list of suspect sites it would love to see north of the DMZ.
It's a tough call," said one senior administration official. "There is no link to Al Qaeda," he said, and no evidence of active proliferation of weapons since Sept. 11. South Korea, intent on reviving its own rapprochement with the North, would resist any effort to make its menacing neighbor the next target of the war on terrorism. China and Japan are equally uninterested in creating a crisis. But, the official said, "you can't say you are serious about neutralizing weapons of mass destruction and ignore Kim Jong Il."
-------- russia
Safeguard Russia's Nukes
By David S. Broder
Sunday, November 25, 2001; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7805-2001Nov23?language=printer
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=broder25&date=20011125
As a rule, procedural votes in the House of Representatives are about as important to the citizenry as yesterday's tide table. But one scheduled to come up this week could affect the lives of you and millions of other Americans.
The question is whether the Republican leadership of the House will allow a floor vote on an amendment that would increase spending on anti-terrorism programs by $6.5 billion. A key part of the proposal would boost funding for joint U.S.-Russian efforts to keep Russian nuclear materials from falling into terrorist hands.
The amendment was rejected by a narrow 34-31 margin in the Appropriations Committee, with two Republicans joining all the Democrats on the losing side. Chairman Bill Young of Florida, who led his fellow Republicans in scuttling it, made it clear that he did not disagree with its substance but felt constrained by President Bush's threat to veto any appropriation larger than the administration had requested.
Still to be decided is whether the Rules Committee, which takes its guidance from the Republican leadership, will allow a floor vote on the amendment or, alternatively, if the House will insist on it.
Here's why it matters to you. In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, federal agencies asked the White House for $127 billion more to recover from that assault and beef up security. The White House Office of Management and Budget cut that back by more than two-thirds.
Most of the extra $6.5 billion proposed by Wisconsin Rep. David Obey and the other Democrats would be spent on security measures here at home. Among other things, their amendment would enable the FBI to modernize its computer system for tracking suspects by next spring, instead of waiting until 2004. It would give the U.S. Postal Service funds for detection equipment to prevent anthrax-laden envelopes from going through the mail. It would increase coverage at 64 Canadian-U.S. border points that now are not staffed 24 hours a day, and boost port security, where currently only 2 percent of entering cargo containers are searched.
But "the major deficiency" that Obey says his amendment would rectify is the scant $18 million add-on the Bush-imposed ceiling allows for securing Russian nuclear materials from terrorists, who have made repeated efforts to acquire ingredients for atomic weapons. The amendment would add $316 million to the Nunn-Lugar program, which began 10 years ago under the bipartisan sponsorship of then-Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia and Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana.
Those who watched NBC's "Meet the Press" Nov. 18 heard national security adviser Condoleezza Rice say that President Bush has been "very supportive of the Nunn-Lugar program." She said, "The funding was not cut. . . . All the way back in the campaign, the president talked about perhaps even increasing funding for programs of this kind." Rice said Bush has asked for as "much money as is actually needed."
Perhaps the usually well-informed security adviser was misinformed, but what she said was wrong.
The administration's budget request cut the Department of Energy part of the Nunn-Lugar program from $872 million to $774 million and the Department of Defense portion by another $40 million. The "materials protection and accounting" program that safeguards and monitors Russian nuclear materials was cut $35 million; the program to subsidize research facilities for jobless Russian nuclear scientists and keep them from working for terrorists, another $10 million.
Nor is it true, as Rice claimed, that no more money could usefully be spent. Veteran professional staff people in Congress and the administration tell me the Russians have never been more receptive to American help in locking up or disposing of these materials. On Sept. 26 the Russians agreed to give U.S. inspectors access to nuclear sites never before opened. The window is open, but money is short.
The program for disposing of plutonium -- a basic ingredient of nuclear weapons -- is essentially bankrupt. Some in the Bush administration argue that current disposal methods -- burning it in nuclear power reactors or storing it in glassified form -- are too expensive. I cannot judge. But last week, 20 senators wrote Bush "strongly urging" him to give "full and adequate funding" to the plutonium disposal program. Among the signers were 10 Republicans, including the party's senior defense and budget spokesmen, Sens. John Warner and Pete Domenici.
This is a stupid place to try to save money. The House deserves a chance to reverse the error.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Reducing weapons, but by how much?
By Walter Pincus
WASHINGTON POST
Sunday, November 25, 2001
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/11/25/national/MX25.htm?template=aprint.htm
WASHINGTON - In January 1992, President George Bush announced that he was prepared to eliminate all 50 MX "Peacekeepers," a 10-warhead intercontinental ballistic missile that is the largest in the U.S. strategic arsenal, if Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin made a comparable offer.
Yeltsin responded the next day by saying that he would dismantle all of Russia's giant SS-18 ICBMs as part of a deal to cut each nation's nuclear stockpiles from 6,500 warheads, the level set by the 1972 START I treaty, to between 2,000 and 2,500.
Earlier this month, President Bush offered a unilateral reduction in the U.S. strategic force to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads. Among those to be cut would be the 500 warheads on the MX missiles that his father offered to eliminate nearly a decade ago.
The story of the resilient MX is something of a cautionary tale about Russian-American efforts to reduce nuclear stockpiles. History has shown that eliminating nuclear weapons is far more difficult than designing and building them.
Indeed, even as Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin concluded a three-day summit at which they said they were laying the foundation for a new strategic framework based on a relationship between friends rather than adversaries, both countries continued to modernize the nuclear weapons they intend to keep.
The United States is spending billions of dollars to refurbish and make more accurate its warheads, whose yields are more than 10 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The only purpose for such weapons is to strike hard targets, such as missile silos, found only in Russia.
Putin said last week that Russia also would drastically reduce its nuclear stockpile. Though he did not give an exact goal for his reductions, he has in the past used 1,500 warheads by the end of the decade as a target. Most U.S. experts believe Russia would be able to afford to keep only 1,000 or fewer operational by that time.
Even so, Russia is still building new warheads to replace those on ICBMs it intends to keep. Russia also is building the SS-27, a new ICBM to replace those already dismantled because of obsolescence, though economic problems have cut SS-27 production levels to fewer than 10 a year.
Under START II, signed by Bush's father and Yeltsin in January 1993, dismantling the MX was to be accomplished by next month. But when President Bill Clinton suggested he might unilaterally begin dismantling some of the 50 ICBMs before the Russians had ratified START II, Republicans in Congress passed legislation prohibiting any such reductions until treaty ratification was complete.
Earlier this year, when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he wanted to begin taking down the missiles, although ratification was still not complete, he had to go to Congress to get the restriction repealed.
The House agreed to exempt the 50 MX missiles from the prohibition, and the Senate eliminated the restriction entirely, permitting the President to reduce any number of strategic warheads he wished. The House-Senate conference on the fiscal 2002 defense authorization bill has yet to vote on the issue, according to congressional sources.
-------- us nuc other
Radiation study may use teeth from years ago
By Stephanie Simon
Los Angeles Times
Monday, November 26, 2001
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=teeth26&date=20011126
http://detnews.com/2001/health/0111/27/a02-352169.htm
ST. LOUIS - The study was designed to stir alarm and did it ever: As the United States tested nuclear bombs with scores of explosions in Nevada, researchers here - four states away - found radioactive fallout in local kids' teeth.
No one knew at the time how the radiation might affect the children's health. No one attempted to find out. The study simply documented that as nuclear tests intensified through the late 1950s and early 1960s, kids were absorbing ever more radiation.
The study's goal was to help lobby for an end to above-ground tests.
The strategy worked. The St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey gained worldwide fame. Scientists collected nearly 300,000 teeth - most from the St. Louis area, a hot spot for fallout from the tests. Their findings helped build public pressure for the ban on atmospheric atom-bomb tests that President Kennedy signed in 1963.
Now researchers hope to revive the tooth study - and the public activism it sparked - by exploring whether the fallout those Cold War children absorbed has caused health problems over the years.
The follow-up is possible because of a chance discovery. Workers cleaning out an old ammunition bunker at Washington University in May came across a cache of small envelopes secured with rusty paper clips. Inside were 85,000 baby teeth left over from the 1960s, each matched with a card identifying the donor.
The university was about to throw them out when a biology professor recommended donating the teeth to the Radiation and Public Health Project, a private research group in New York. Elated, scientists from the radiation project launched an effort this month to track down donors so they can collect 40 years of health data.
Project director Jay Gould calls the opportunity "priceless."
Not every scientist is so enthused.
"The short story? It's unabashed junk science," said Steve Musolino, a health physicist specializing in radiation at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. "It's a study designed to scare people. It will never be able to reveal anything conclusive."
Even the biologist who engineered the original tooth study has his doubts about the new project. "It's going to be very difficult" to get any valid results, said Barry Commoner, now a professor at Queens College in New York. Not only that, the study will destroy the teeth, which Commoner would prefer to see preserved as a historical archive.
Critics say there's no way to compare the tooth donors' health with that of contemporaries who did not absorb nuclear fallout. There's also no way to measure other sources of radiation the donors might have been exposed to over the years.
But Gould thinks he will be able to draw valid conclusions. He plans to divide his subjects into three groups according to how much radioactive contamination is found in their decades-old baby teeth. He then will compare health statistics from each group to determine, for instance, whether those with the most contaminated teeth have suffered more cancer.
In the first five days after Gould went public with his plans, he received more than 1,000 e-mails from people who remember contributing their teeth and who are willing to answer health questionnaires. "The interest has been quite extraordinary," Gould said. "We're flabbergasted."
One volunteer is Julie Fleck, 39, of St. Louis, who remembers that when she put her baby teeth under her pillow as a kid, the tooth fairy would leave her a quarter but would not take the tooth.
"Our teeth are going to a study," her mom would explain, "and our tooth fairy is smart enough to know that."
The original Baby Tooth Survey marked one of the first times the public mobilized en masse to aid scientific research. The hoopla spread far; researchers received baby teeth from children around the world, some in envelopes addressed to "Tooth Fairy, St. Louis."
Most teeth from remote locales were laid aside, however, to focus on kids from St. Louis. Although the bomb tests were conducted in Nevada, wind patterns pushed much of the byproducts there, where it fell to the ground with the rain. Animals grazing on that ground would absorb radioactive elements, which could be passed to people consuming local milk or meat.
The high levels of strontium 90 in St. Louis affected mostly fetuses, whose bones and teeth readily absorbed any radioactive elements their mothers had ingested through contaminated food.
Thus, the Baby Tooth Survey found the levels of strontium 90 in kids' teeth varied dramatically by birth year.
Children born in 1950, when there had been just a few small-scale atom-bomb tests, had barely perceptible levels of the element in their teeth. By 1957, when powerful hydrogen bomb tests were under way, they averaged 2.6 picocuries of strontium 90 per gram of dental calcium.
That ratio more than quadrupled for babies born in 1964, when atmospheric testing had ceased but remnant fallout was at its peak over St. Louis, said Joseph Mangano, an epidemiologist with the radiation project.
"We really thought we were making a big contribution to science," said Sandy Rosen, 69, who sent her four children's baby teeth to the project.
----
Notes From Underground
New York Times
November 25, 2001
BURROW IN
By NAOMI WAX
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/weekinreview/25NWAX.html?searchpv=nytToday
AS Taliban forces retreat under pressure, many are trying to regroup in the crags and caverns of Afghanistan's mountains. Then the real war will start, Osama bin Laden recently told a Pakistani journalist. But President Bush has repeatedly vowed to "smoke them out of their holes," conjuring an image of burrowing rodents whose eradication is a only a matter of fumigation.
And last week Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said he hoped that the cash rewards being offered for information on the location of Mr. bin Laden and eight other Al Qaeda leaders would persuade Afghans to "begin crawling through those tunnels and caves looking for the bad folks."
The Taliban's use of caves has been cast as primitive, cowardly and amusing by everyone from late-night comedians to cartoonists. Even so, it wasn't too long ago that Americans looked to their own caves for sanctuary.
At the height of the cold war, the Army Corps of Engineers commissioned a survey of buildings and natural spaces that could be used as fallout shelters in the event of nuclear attack. According to a 1963 National Speleological Society bulletin, at least 60 caves were deemed "usable" as they were, and "a surprising number" of others were adaptable.
"Caves were selected and food was stored," said Nicholas C. Crawford, the director of the Center for Cave and Karst Studies at Western Kentucky University. But the enthusiasm was short-lived. "The problem is that caves breathe," Dr. Crawford said. "Air and water go in and out, so they don't adequately protect from radiation. You can make a cave airtight, but then there are ventilation problems."
In addition, most of the caves were too far from large population centers to be accessible. New York's largest cave system, for example, McFail's Cavern (with 6.7 miles of mapped passageways), might be viable for evacuating Manhattan's masses, but it's a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the city.
Beyond that was an image problem, according to Kenneth D. Rose in "One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture" (New York University, 2001). "It proved extremely difficult to put an admirable (much less heroic) spin on burrowing into the earth to save one's hide," he wrote. Retreating into shelters "represented a devolution of the human species," he said, suggesting "that humanity's long climb out of the dark caves was now being reversed."
That may help explain the derision that the Taliban's cave-lurking incites. But Mr. bin Laden probably perceives metaphor as being on his side. After all, the Prophet Muhammad had his first revelation in a cave on Mount Hira in the 7th century. Later, when his life was threatened by the ruling party of Mecca, Muhammad took refuge in a cave.
"Muslims steeped in Koranic narrative can't help seeing the parallels," said Steven Simon, the former director of counterterrorism in the Clinton administration. "Bin Laden knows these perceptions will enhance the aura of sacredness that surrounds him."
Given that Mr. bin Laden insists the war is fundamentally religious, his sympathizers are likely to interpret Afghanistan's labyrinthine, booby-trapped cave networks as a modern-day parallel to the acacia tree, bird's nest and spider web sent by Allah to camouflage Muhammad's cave from his pursuers.
Jews and Christians have also retreated to caves in times of persecution. The Prophet Elijah (revered by Muslims and Jews), encountered the Divine while hiding in a cave on Mount Carmel. A Christian legend (recast in the Koran) tells of the "sleepers of Ephesus," who refused to worship idols and took refuge in a cave, where they slept for 300 years. The principle book of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, was written during Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai's 13-year refuge from the Romans in a Galilee cave.
From China to Europe, elaborate cave systems that have provided shelter to those on the run are not uncommon. Many, including those in Afghanistan, have been expanded and upgraded over the years. Afghanistan's Zhawar complex, for example, which was bombed ineffectually by both Russians and Americans, reportedly featured lengthy tunnels, some 40 spacious caves, a hospital, an ornate mosque, a bilingual library and a plush hotel even before the Taliban moved in.
WHETHER Mr. bin Laden is living like the Cyclops or Calypso - both denizens of Odyssean caves (his primitive, hers plush) - his quarters have so far shielded him from American air attacks. But the womblike protection of caves is only part of the story: they can also be tombs. Mythology, literature, psychology and even religion often conjure caves as places of death, darkness, confusion and evil. The Islamic hell is located deep underground, according to some traditions, as it is in Christianity. Hades ruled over a host of doomed souls in the Greek underworld, whose gates were guarded by the grotesque three-headed dog Cerberus. Dragons, monsters, trolls and witches are all traditionally portrayed as denizens of the deep. Mark Twain's Injun Joe hid out in a cave, and Shakespeare's Caliban was "deservedly confined into . . . rock" because of his savagery. And although (according to early tradition) Jesus was born in a cave, he was also tempted by the devil in one. He was buried in a cave, as well, before he ascended.
America's caves - there are about 10,000 - have harbored criminals like Jesse James and oddballs like the Leather Man, a 19th-century leather-clad loner who wandered Westchester County's environs by day and spent his nights in its caves. Caves have also had a role in various war efforts, primarily as munitions depots and to mine material for explosives, and were sometimes used as temporary barracks.
Today most of the nation's caves are privately owned and used primarily for research, tourism and sport. (Meramec Caverns in Missouri offers tours of its extensive cold war-era fallout shelter at $12.50 a head.) Nearly 100 subterranean bunker cities have been created across the country (some natural, others dug out of rock) to harbor government officials in the event of catastrophe. Vice President Dick Cheney, for one, was spirited to a bunker beneath the White House on Sept. 11.
In Plato's allegory of the cave, Socrates acknowledges the human impulse "to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light," as it adjusts to the world's brightness. But he warns that it is less appropriate to laugh at the person who emerges and then chooses to return to the darkness without reconciling truth with illusion; for such a soul has the potential for evil and to manipulate those "who have never yet seen absolute justice." As much as Mr. bin Laden's cave-cowering has been scoffed at, philosophically speaking, it's not so funny.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- maryland
Safety Study Of Gas Plant Gets Higher U.S. Priority
Ridge Makes Request After Mikulski Protest
By Raymond McCaffrey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 25, 2001; Page SM01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8392-2001Nov24?language=printer
Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has asked federal officials "to move up the priority list" the completion of safety review of a Tulsa company's plan to import liquefied natural gas via foreign tankers to a plant on the Chesapeake Bay in southern Calvert County.
Ridge's involvement came at the urging of U.S. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), who has publicly criticized the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's October approval of reopening and expanding the Cove Point plant in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"After Governor Ridge got the call from Senator Mikulski, he picked up the phone and asked if the secretary of energy, [Spencer] Abraham, will look at it," said Susan Neely, director of communications for the Office of Homeland Security.
FERC announced on Nov. 9 that it would reconsider the Williams Co. project, just two days after Mikulski first publicly criticized the commission's original approval. Mikulski has pointed out that the fuel primarily would come from Algeria, the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, and that it would be delivered to a site near the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant.
A week after the decision to review the matter again, FERC staff conducted a technical conference not open to the public during which interested parties and regulatory agencies discussed "any national security issues" raised after Sept. 11.
In its order, FERC said it would "take further action, as appropriate, based on the additional evidence received and in conjunction with action on any rehearing petitions."
The Cove Point project was not considered at the commission's November meeting on Tuesday, according to FERC spokeswoman Tamara Young-Allen.
"The ball's in the commission's court," Young-Allen said.
The Williams Co. still needs the Coast Guard to complete a risk-assessment study this month before foreign tankers can begin delivering liquefied natural gas to the Cove Point plant. Company officials were present at the FERC technical conference, but declined to reveal how they would address concerns about the project.
"We know everybody's concerned about September 11, and so are we," said Cindy Ivey, a Williams spokeswoman.
The terrorist attacks have caused many local officials to revisit the possible security risks of the project. Previously, County Commissioners President David F. Hale (R-Owings) told FERC officials about local support for the plant, which when fully operational would become the county's second-highest taxpayer, behind Calvert Cliffs.
However, on Nov. 13, Hale and the four other board members sent a letter to FERC asking for an evaluation of "the proposal in reference to the prevention of terrorism."
And officials at Calvert Cliffs, who previously determined that "Cove Point operation would not jeopardize the operations" at their facility, were reexamining safety, too.
"Events like the September 11 incident lead us to conduct a new review, which we're doing right now," Karl Neddenien, a Calvert Cliffs spokesman, said recently.
On Tuesday, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) toured the nuclear power plant and proclaimed that he was "impressed" with heightened security there. But Hoyer added that it would "foolish not to relook" at the potential impact of the Cove Point operation on Calvert Cliffs.
FERC's approval came despite concerns raised by nearby residents and elected officials about the potential for a disaster if there were a fire or explosion on a tanker or at the facility. Neighbors told FERC representatives about their worries months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
State Sen. Roy P. Dyson (D-St. Mary's and Calvert) already stated that he preferred that the Cove Point plant "not open right now," saying, "I don't think they've answered all the safety questions."
Although a draft of FERC's October order deals with safety concerns, it does not specifically address the possibility of terrorism, according to Young-Allen. The commission required that the plant meet 37 conditions, including establishing direct communication with the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant.
Williams Co. officials expressed hope that the company could begin to import gas to the existing offshore pier in the second quarter of 2002.
The plant's former owners, Columbia Gas and Consolidated Natural Gas, operated a liquefied natural gas terminal and related pipeline facilities there. The import operation ended in December 1980 because of falling domestic natural gas prices and a dispute with dealers in Algeria.
-------- MILITARY
Yemen camps in U.S.-British sights
November 25, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/25112001-063750-8662r.htm
Terrorist training camps in Yemen, Sudan and Somalia are the next targets of the U.S.-British war on terrorism, the Sunday Times of London reported.
Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh visits Washington this week and the United States hopes for his cooperation.
The newspaper reported that British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush have agreed that the momentum created by the anti-terror coalition's successes must be maintained.
The report said intelligence officers from both Britain and the United States have been gathering information about terrorists in the three countries although targets have not been made final.
Yemen is considered to be the country most likely to see coalition action, the newspaper reported. That was where 17 American sailors died in a suicide bomb attack launced on the USS Cole from a small boat.
Al Qaida supporters are reported to have established bases in Yemen's northern mountains.
-------- afghanistan
THE FUGITIVE
Bin Laden Is Reported Spotted in a Fortified Camp in Eastern Afghanistan
New York Times
November 25, 2001
By TIM WEINER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/international/asia/25LADE.html?searchpv=nytToday
JALALABAD, Afghanistan, Nov. 24 - Osama bin Laden was seen this week at a large and well-fortified encampment 35 miles southwest of this city, a minister of the self-proclaimed government here said tonight.
The official, Hazarat Ali, the law and order minister for the Eastern Shura, which claims dominion over three major provinces in eastern Afghanistan, said trusted informants had told him that Mr. bin Laden was spotted near Tora Bora, a village where two valleys meet in deep mountains in Nangarhar Province.
"We have some people who told us that three or four days ago, Osama bin Laden was in Tora Bora," Mr. Ali said. "I trust them like my mother or father."
"He is moving at night on horseback," he said, citing his informants. "At night he sleeps in caves."
Overlooking the village of Tora Bora is a large network of mountain caves and forts used by the Afghan rebels who fought the Soviet Union in the 1980's. Eastern Shura commanders say operatives of Al Qaeda, Mr. bin Laden's organization, paid the villagers of Tora Bora $50 a family to vacate the village weeks ago.
Aides to Mr. Ali say as many as 2,000 foreign fighters - "Afghan Arabs," as they are called here - are at Tora Bora too, armed with rifles, machine guns and surface-to-surface missiles.
He described the fighters as "experienced and suicidal."
Mr. Ali's intelligence chief, Sohrab Qadri, said the Tora Bora encampment lay along a ridge of the White Mountains, and could not easily be reached except on horseback. It includes a network of caves, bunkers and ammunition depots, he said, and is sheltered by deep forests. The Afghan rebels who fought the Soviets wintered there over several years, he said, and he assumed that the caves included heating and ventilation systems.
The reported sighting of Mr. bin Laden may lead to an increased American presence in and around Jalalabad, which is precisely what the Eastern Shura commanders would like to see.
They are eager to get their hands on American weapons and matériel to help them shore up their week-old government.
Soviet Army reports described the most sophisticated caves used by the Afghan rebels as "the last word in NATO engineering." Some of the caves were upgraded in the mid-to-late 1980's, when the rebels were receiving hundreds of millions of dollars a year in covert aid from the United States and Saudi Arabia.
The Soviets threw almost everything in their arsenal at the caves, short of tactical nuclear weapons, but with little success. They did not have the precision-guidance systems possessed by the Pentagon. But "bombing alone will not be effective" against the caves at Tora Bora, Mr. Qadri said. He said the site would have to be taken by siege.
A network of mule trails connects Tora Bora and the Afghan border with Pakistan. It was a three-day journey for the men and the mule trains that moved weapons and supplies from Pakistan into Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. The trail ends in the Tirah Valley of Pakistan.
Mr. Ali said it was possible that Mr. bin Laden would "slip into Pakistan" if Tora Bora came under heavy attack. Other Eastern Shura commanders said Mr. bin Laden was taking shelter in early October at a farm in Nangarhar Province owned by Yunis Khalis, a commander of Afghan rebels in the 1980's who was closely allied with the Taliban.
They said that Mr. bin Laden left the farm days before the American bombing started in October and that "Afghan Arabs" in his retinue had gone to Tora Bora to secure the site.
---
American Marines Land Near Kandahar
New York Times
November 25, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/international/25WIRE-SOLDIERS.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 - In the first major infusion of American ground troops into Afghanistan, hundreds of American marines carried aboard helicopters landed at a makeshift airfield near the southern Afghanistan city of Kandahar today, beginning what Pentagon officials said would be a period of sustained assaults against Taliban and al Qaeda forces.
The marines were to be the front edge of a powerful force of more than 1,000 combat troops who, the officials said, will join within days the hunt for Osama bin Laden and begin launching raids against Taliban forces concentrated in Kandahar and in mountain redoubts near the border with Pakistan.
Immediately upon landing in CH-53 and CH-46 transport helicopters, the marines set to work securing the airstrip, located just 12 miles southeast of Kandahar, the Taliban's political base and last major military stronghold. As early as Monday, C-130 cargo planes carrying additional troops, armored vehicles and supplies were expected to begin landing at the field, the officials said.
The officials said the advance party of marines, members of the 15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units, encountered no resistance when they landed shortly after nightfall. It appeared that their arrival was welcomed by local tribal leaders opposed to the Taliban.
The landing by the Marines unambiguously confirmed the shift in the American strategy from one of using air power and proxy Afghan armies to oust the Taliban from power, to one of relying on powerful U.S. forces - still with heavy air support, and probably with western allies - who can, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it, "crawl around on the ground and find people."
Before today, there had been just a few hundred American ground troops in Afghanistan, almost all of them Special Operations forces who had been advising rebel militias, helping to direct air strikes and working in small teams to watch and sometimes harass Taliban and al Qaeda forces. And aside from a brief air assault in October by commandos who parachuted onto a runway near Kandahar and raided a Taliban building there, the only sustained use of troops on the ground has involved Special Forces advisers traveling with the Northern Alliance.
The Marines who have now taken up position are a different kind of force entirely. With their superior firepower - the marines bring with them armored personnel carriers, Cobra attack helicopters and Harrier jump jets - they will be more heavily armed and more mobile, capable of conducting sustained and repeated assaults across a much larger geographic area, Pentagon officials said.
They can, for example, respond quickly and in relatively large numbers if there are opportunities to encircle mountain hideouts and search them for Taliban or al Qaeda leaders. And they will put the kind of pressure on enemy forces still in and around Kandahar that would be beyond any threat posed by Special Operations Forces or the anti-Taliban militias mustered so far by Pashtun tribal leaders in that region.
In total, the two marine units based on ships in the Arabian sea have about 4,400 troops, basically a brigade of ground forces with its own helicopters, fighter planes and artillery. It is not clear how many of them eventually will go ashore.
The marines are also trained for both conventional ground combat and special operations, guerilla-style warfare, making them available not only for attacking concentrations of Taliban troops but also moving in small groups to pursue Mr. bin Laden and his top lieutenants across rugged terrain.
The marines would probably not roam the countryside in search of enemy forces, as Special Operations forces have been, but would instead be dispatched on clearly focused missions guided by clear and credible intelligence reports, military officials said.
As they arrived, American warplanes continued to bomb Taliban forces in the area, as they have done for weeks.
--------
How to Put a Nation Back Together Again
New York Times
November 25, 2001
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/weekinreview/25CROS.html
THE assignment is Afghanistan. But even after a decade or more of rescuing imploded countries, the United Nations and its members have never faced anything like this. A quarter century of war and repression in the name of Islam has left Afghanistan less a country than a drought-stricken shambles of a battlefield with up to a fifth of its 27 million people huddled in refugee tents or makeshift hovels with scant food and no medicine. And, yet again, they are at the mercy of narrow-minded warlords.
The Bush administration, which once scorned "nation building," now pins its hopes on the United Nations to rebuild Afghanistan. A planning meeting is scheduled in Bonn this week. Fortunately - after a decade of trial and error in Cambodia, the Balkans, Somalia, Haiti and East Timor - there is a corps of experts and a formidable body of expertise to draw on this time.
Many lessons have been learned, often painfully, about what works or does not. Somalia was a disaster. Ethnic cleansing raged in Bosnia until NATO stepped in, and Rwanda endured genocide. Haiti seemed to defy most good efforts. More successful have been recent moves into Kosovo and into East Timor, where a United Nations administration is building new political, judicial and economic institutions. Meanwhile, an instinctively undemocratic government in Cambodia finds it can't quite rid itself of the rule of law, which a United Nations mission introduced, nor silence dissenters who have gathered strength under international tutelage.
Officials who have played a role as the United Nations has tried to untangle the ruins of failed states have refined similar lists of rules to go by. In conversations, they suggested a few cardinal principles:
1. Neither the U.N. nor any one country can perform miracles; a new way of living, however humane, should not be forced on people who don't want it.
"The world has learned a degree of humility in the last decade," said David Malone, a Canadian diplomat who is president of the International Peace Academy, a United Nations agency that tracks conflict resolution. "Ideal social engineering projects devised in the United Nations Security Council or in regional organizations cannot be imposed on populations."
"This was particularly true in Somalia," he said. The United Nations' vision of a state strong enough to displace clan rule "was simply not shared, and ultimately was resisted by the Somalis with incredible loss of life - and loss of heart by the international community, leading to our abdication of responsibility in Rwanda."
Mr. Malone sees warning signs in Afghanistan - "a fractious and fractured country beset by warlordism, where war in many ways is sport as well as livelihood to many of the men. To wean them from the only life they know is going to be extremely difficult." What the United Nations does well, he added, "is peace-building in the right conditions when the parties are actually interested in stability and economic growth, which are taken for granted by us. But they are not taken for granted in many parts of the world where clan honor, ethnic survival or religion may be more important."
2. Don't wait for the peacekeepers. Or count on blue helmets to restore order.
Faster-moving armies are necessary. The Australians in East Timor, the Nigerians in Sierra Leone, NATO in Bosnia and Kosovo, all conducted operations led (with or without United Nations blessing) by national armies, and their quick action made a difference.
Nancy Soderberg, a member of President Bill Clinton's National Security Council who later represented Washington at the United Nations Security Council, said the debacle in Somalia, where warlords had reduced the country to violent fiefs, occurred because the international presence was weak and miscast. "The U.N. didn't have an international force occupying Somalia to keep the peace," she said. "Our troops were there to provide humanitarian assistance." When that proved impossible, the mission collapsed and Americans died.
Ms. Soderberg is now vice president of the International Crisis Group, an organization that issues rapid- fire reports on areas of unrest and conflict. In Bosnia, she said, the troops sent by the Security Council were inadequate to handle the murderous rivalries. "In the early days of Bosnia, you had a bunch of U.N. guys who weren't there to fight a war and it was disastrous - U.N. people chained to lampposts watching ethnic cleansing going on," she said.
The key to peace and reconstruction in Afghanistan will be the quick introduction of an outside force to provide enough safety for work to begin, she said.
"It's entirely possible that the Afghans will reject an outside force," Ms. Soderberg said. "If you can't get an international force in there, then the U.N.'s ability to help the Afghans would be severely hampered."
3. Set the table for talks and leave the room.
Richard Goldstone, the South African judge who was the first prosecutor for United Nations tribunals on war crimes in the Balkans and Rwanda, said South Africa's transition to majority rule and the hunt for Balkan war criminals taught him that "clearly the first priority - not always attainable - is getting local people talking to each other, preferably on their own."
"The key to South Africa's success," he said, "was that negotiations were handled by South Africans themselves but with crucial input, support and encouragement from the international community." In the Balkans he sees still-unfinished business. He said he has seen people there "consumed by their own history, a very selective history." The sense of victimization still runs high and could be addressed by a truth commission like those in South Africa and Central America.
4. Make the talks all-inclusive.
Sir Brian Urquhart, a former under secretary general of the United Nations who worked on early peacekeeping missions in the Congo and the Middle East, said that excluding anyone associated with the Taliban from the meetings in Bonn is a mistake reminiscent of early Mideast policy errors involving the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Taliban, after all, spring from the country's largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns. "You can't have a Middle East peace conference without the P.L.O.," he said. "But that's what we tried to do for 40 years and got into a hell of a mess. It's an old, old story: we don't deal with somebody for supposedly moral reasons, and then we get something infinitely worse. We wouldn't deal with the P.L.O., and now we've got Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Some element of the Taliban should be there in these talks. They were the previous government, after all."
Representatives of Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last Afghan king, will be present, although he has not been in the country since his overthrow in 1973. The Taliban are out because the Northern Alliance, fighting in support of the United States, refuses to entertain their presence. Pakistan, which once supported the Taliban, still argues that the Northern Alliance, which wrecked Afghanistan by infighting and looting after the Soviet Union withdrew and its puppet Afghan government collapsed, should not dictate the country's future. But Pakistan lost this round.
5. Whatever the lessons, they will mean little unless applied by leaders with skill, creativity and wisdom.
The people in any nation being built need to trust the builders. Mr. Goldstone said his own country, South Africa, was fortunate to have had its own political and judicial leadership and institutions that people could trust at a critical moment. For Afghanistan, Secretary General Kofi Annan has chosen two talented and experienced international troubleshooters, Lakhdar Brahimi of Algeria and Francesc Vendrell of Spain. The Bush administration has also sent in pros: Richard N. Haass, the State Department's policy planner, and James F. Dobbins, a career foreign service officer with experience in Haiti and the Balkans.
But there have to be local counterparts, and in Afghanistan, Mr. Goldstone warned, towering symbols of wisdom and strong institutions have been noticeably absent.
---
Northern Alliance says Kunduz captured
USA Today
11/25/2001
By Kirk Spitzer, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/25/kunduz.htm
CHOGAR, Afghanistan - Opposition forces were poised to take over the last remaining Taliban-controlled area in northern Afghanistan on Sunday as hundreds of fighters who had been dug in there for nearly 2 weeks gave themselves up peacefully. "Kunduz is liberated," said Abdullah, the foreign minister of the opposition Northern Alliance. He said there remained a "pocket of resistance" from Taliban fighters in part of the city. Other alliance officials said a final march into the city would come Monday.
Hundreds of surrendered Taliban troops from Kunduz were killed in a prison uprising put down with U.S. help.
The fall of Kunduz came after hundreds of Taliban troops surrendered over the weekend and meant the crumbling of the hard-line regime that had controlled Afghanistan since 1996 and sheltered terrorist leader Osama bin Laden was nearly complete.
The only remaining area of Taliban control was the area around Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, home to Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. Opposition tribes said they had taken control of the road leading to Kandahar from Pakistan, cutting the key supply route.
People arriving in Pakistan from Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city, described a town largely deserted and slipping into lawlessness and desperation as Taliban forces left their posts.
Abdullah, speaking on the CBS program Face the Nation, said Omar and other top Taliban leaders would be treated as war criminals, but amnesty would be extended to Taliban fighters "who have not committed crimes."
The search for bin Laden continued, with particular focus on an area south of Jalalabad where intelligence sources said he was believed to be hiding.
Hundreds of those who surrendered from Kunduz were killed Sunday when Northern Alliance troops, with help from U.S. warplanes and special operations troops, put down a rebellion at a fortress in nearby Mazar-e-Sharif, where the prisoners had been taken.
Witnesses said the Taliban fighters had smuggled weapons into the prison and seized other arms from their guards, sparking a fierce 4-hour battle for control. Speaking at the Pentagon, Lt. Col. Dan Stoneking said the fight involved about 300 "hard-core Taliban" prisoners.
An alliance spokesman said most of the prisoners involved were killed.
Stoneking said all U.S. personnel appeared to be accounted for in the uprising, but Navy Lt. Cmdr. David Culler, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command would not rule out the possibility that CIA officers or other U.S. government personnel or contractors might have been hurt or killed.
Contributing: Vivienne Walt in Quetta, Pakistan, wire reports
---
Hundreds of Marines land near Kandahar
USA Today
11/25/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/25/riot.htm
BANGI, Afghanistan (AP) - Hundreds of U.S. Marines landed by helicopter Sunday near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, the spiritual home and power center of the Taliban, a senior U.S. official said. As many as 1,000 troops could be on the ground there within days. The official, who spoke in Washington Sunday night on condition of anonymity, would not disclose the troops' mission, but their arrival was the largest deployment of U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led war began Oct. 7.
Sending in the Marines marks a perilous new phase of a conflict that until now has been focused on U.S. airstrikes backing up the opposition Northern Alliance, plus limited ground missions by several hundred American special forces fanned out in small units across Afghanistan.
Kandahar, the Taliban's home base and spiritual home, has come under fierce bombardment since the conflict began Oct. 7, and the Taliban have vowed to fight to the death rather than abandon the city. In the last three weeks, they have lost their grip on three-quarters of Afghanistan, plus the capital, Kabul.
Most of the top Taliban leadership is believed to be holed up in and around the city. Efforts by tribal leaders over the past 10 days to negotiate a handover of the city failed to yield results.
Abdul Jabbar, an anti-Taliban Afghan tribal official in Pakistan, said his colleagues in Kandahar confirmed that U.S. troops were on the ground there.
The Marines, numbering in the "low hundreds," were to be followed by several hundred more from Navy ships in the Arabian Sea, the U.S. official said in Washington, on condition of anonymity. The Marines landed by helicopter southwest of Kandahar, the official said.
The fall of Kunduz, which came two days before talks were to begin in Germany on forming a broad-based government, leaves the Islamic militia with only a small share of Afghanistan still under its control, mostly around Kandahar.
Thousands of Taliban troops as well as Arab, Chechen, Pakistani and other foreign fighters linked to Osama bin Laden had been holed up in Kunduz, which the alliance said fell almost without a fight.
Pro-Taliban fighters including foreigners fled Sunday toward the town of Chardara, to the west, with alliance troops in pursuit, alliance acting foreign minister, Abdullah, said by satellite telephone from the north of Afghanistan.
While some chose to make a run for it, thousands of others surrendered by the thousands as Northern Alliance troops moved in. Under a pact negotiated earlier between the alliance and the Taliban, Afghan Taliban fighters were guaranteed safe passage out of the city but the foreigners were to be arrested pending investigation into possible ties to bin Laden.
Outside the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, 100 miles to the west, hundreds of foreigners who had been captured earlier in the Kunduz area staged a violent uprising at their prison fortress, triggering a fierce daylong battle with Northern Alliance guards. U.S. aircraft helped quash the insurrection.
Hundreds of foreign Taliban prisoners were killed, U.S. and alliance officials said. A U.S. special forces soldier inside the Qalai Janghi fortress was taped by a German television crew saying an American may have died.
But Pentagon officials in Washington later said all U.S. troops were accounted for and none had died. A U.S. government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said later in Washington that a CIA operative was wounded in the uprising.
Dave Culler, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, which oversees the war in Afghanistan, suggested that the uprising was in effect a suicide mission. At least one foreign fighter had killed himself Saturday while surrendering, witnesses said - giving himself up, then setting off a hand grenade when an alliance officer approached.
The fighters had smuggled weapons under their tunics into the Qalai Janghi fortress and tried to fight their way out, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Dan Stoneking said. The Pentagon estimated that fighters numbered 300; the Northern Alliance had said previously there were 700 prisoners in the facility.
Yahsaw, a spokesman for Northern Alliance commander Mohammed Mohaqik, said the prisoners broke down doors, seized weapons and ammunition, and fought a pitched battle with guards that lasted some seven hours.
An Associated Press reporter entering the city Sunday evening heard explosions coming from the direction of the fortress. Stoneking, the Pentagon spokesman, confirmed that U.S. airstrikes had helped Gen. Rashid Dostum's forces regain control of the prison. Dostum brought in about 500 troops to quash the unrest, he said.
International organizations had voiced worry over the prospect of atrocities involving captured fighters. Earlier this month, the United Nations reported the apparent reprisal killings of at least 100 captured Taliban fighters in Mazar-e-Sharif.
Pakistan had appealed without success for some guarantee of protection for any of its nationals captured when Kunduz fell.
The United States had strongly opposed any deal that would have allowed the foreigners to leave Afghanistan. As a surrender accord for Kunduz was being brokered last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he hoped the foreign fighters would be killed or captured, not allowed to go free.
The head of the Northern Alliance, former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, said earlier Sunday there would be no slaughter of foreign troops.
"We will discuss their fate as far as international law is concerned ... They should have no concern for their safety," he told journalists in Kabul.
The capture of Kunduz was reported hours after alliance troops gained a small foothold inside the besieged city, then overran a town on its eastern flank.
Near the town of Khanabad, about 10 miles east of Kunduz, alliance troops spread across ridgetops held by the Taliban a day earlier and fanned out across fields to check mud buildings for enemy fighters. Later, the alliance announced the fall of the city itself.
-------- biological weapons
Bioterror fears lead to plans for quarantine
November 25, 2001
By Steve Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011125-78651555.htm
State legislatures facing the threat of bioterrorism are preparing to tackle the sensitive idea of quarantine, a practice that has fallen off the map as medical breakthroughs eradicated the threat of mass contagion.
Isolation and quarantine are now being discreetly reviewed by state officials across the country. In the wake of recent anthrax attacks - and with concerns of bioterrorism using such deadly diseases as smallpox - a newly issued 46-page model for emergency preparations has been distributed to state health officials and governors by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In a section titled "Isolation and Quarantine," the rules are laid out clearly.
"A person subject to isolation or quarantine shall obey the public health authority's rules and orders, shall not go beyond the isolation or quarantine premises, and shall not put himself or herself in contact with any person not subject to isolation or quarantine," the draft reads.
The action would require a court order to enact the isolation, but a provision also allows authorities to act without the affidavit "if any delay would pose an immediate threat to the public health."
"I am aware that there will be people who will oppose this," said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown law professor and one of several academics who drafted the model. "They will say that it interferes with property rights, which would be a libertarian view. And there are those from the far left that will say it infringes on civil liberties. But the vast majority of people in the middle want to be protected."
The American Civil Liberties Union declined to comment on the CDC plan, with a spokeswoman saying "it is not something we are going to address right now."
The ACLU's stance betrays a post-anthrax awareness that the war on terrorism may mean limiting certain freedoms. Public health laws pertaining to quarantine have been neglected as Americans have lived healthier lives than ever before, free of highly contagious disease, Mr. Gostin said, so the laws dealing with such procedures "suffer from being highly antiquated and confusing."
Smallpox is now considered the most effective biological weapon, a highly contagious virus that is inhaled. One infected person can be the source of a widespread outbreak, and the disease has a 30 percent death rate among people who are not vaccinated.
The scenario for a biological weapons attack using smallpox, as laid out by authorities, is truly one of terror.
Designated hospitals would admit patients, and federal agents, as well as police and military troops, would descend on the location of the outbreak.
"Even one case of smallpox would bring that, because that just isn't a disease you see any more," said Cynthia Honssinger, director of legal and regulatory affairs with the Colorado Department of Health.
----
Anthrax Type That Killed May Have Reached Iraq
Baghdad's Bid to Obtain Microbe Fuels Suspicions
By Colum Lynch
The Washington Post
Sunday, November 25, 2001; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10804-2001Nov24?language=printer
UNITED NATIONS -- In August 1988, two key figures in Iraq's secret germ warfare program attended a scientific conference in Winchester, England, to survey advances in the battle against the anthrax disease.
Professor Nassir Hindawiand a colleague, Abdul Rahman Thamer,attracted little attention at the gathering, which was sponsored by scientists from the British biodefense institute at Porton Down.
But U.N. inspectors who uncovered Iraq's secret biological weapons years later believe that the trip was part of a covert mission to identify foreign suppliers for Baghdad's biological weapons program and to obtain deadly anthrax microbes, including the Ames strain, a highly virulent anthrax bacteria found in letters sent to American targets.
Shortly after the visit, Baghdad's trade ministry telexed an order to Porton Down for samples of the Ames strain and at least two other varieties of anthrax microbes. But the British scientists were suspicious that Baghdad might be seeking to develop biological weapons. "There were requests for anthrax strains, and they were denied," said Porton Down spokeswoman Sue Ellison. U.S. officials and former U.N. weapons experts have found no proof that the Iraqi scientists obtained the Ames strain from another supplier. But Iraq's attempt to obtain the Ames microbes has fueled suspicions among some U.S. and U.N. experts that Iraq may yet be linked to the series of biological attacks against the United States.
"We know that Iraq was very keen on obtaining that specific strain as well as others, and they were contacting many countries of the world," said retired Col. Richard Spertzel,a microbiologist and former head of biological inspection teams in Iraq for the United Nations. "The effort with which they [pursued] Porton Down would suggest that if they thought someone else had it, they would press for it. But we simply don't know."
Porton Down scientists obtained the Ames strain in the early 1980s from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md. The deadly pathogen has been passed to an unknown number of scientists.
Iraq's unsuccessful attempt to secure the Ames bacteria from Britain represented a minor setback in its largely successful campaign in the mid-1980s to acquire ingredients for a massive covert biological weapons program.
Iraq sought materials from government and commercial labs in the United States, Europe and Africa.
"The Iraqis had set up this very secret and very sophisticated procurement system so that there would be no chance that outsiders could figure out what they were doing," said Raymond Zalinskas,a former U.N. inspector who is now senior scientist in residence at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
In 1988, Iraqi scientists obtained from a private British business, Oxoid Ltd., and other suppliers, nearly 40 tons of medium to grow anthrax and botulinum bacterium for its biological weapons, according to former U.N. officials and a 1999 U.N. report.
Iraq also acquired at least two other forms of anthrax, the Sterne strain, commonly used in an animal vaccine, and the A-3 strain derived from Spanish sheep, from France's Institut Pasteur.
"There was absolutely no reason to refuse an order from Iraq in the 1980s," said Michael Haynes, a spokesman for Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant that owned Oxoid until 1997. Haynes noted that Iraq at that time was not considered hostile to the West and was under no economic sanctions. "As far as we knew the growth medium would be used for genuine medical, humanitarian purposes," he said.
U.N. inspectors got their first glimpse at Iraq's offensive biological weapons program during an August 1991 U.N. inspection of Salman Pak, one of Iraq's premier biological weapons facilities.
Rihab Taha,the head of Iraq's germ warfare program, provided a team of U.N. biologists with several sealed glass vials containing freeze-dried anthrax spores. The vials included two variants of the Vollumstrain, which had been used in U.S. and British biological weapons programs.
The Iraqi scientist initially claimed that some of the anthrax spores were used in research but had never been weaponized. Baghdad also acknowledged that it had received the two Vollum strains and five other strains of anthrax bacterium from the American Type Culture Collection, a commercial germ bank now located near Manassas, Va.
Iraqi documents later obtained by the United Nations indicated that Baghdad subsequently filled more than 50 bombs and missile warheads with a liquid form of Vollum anthrax.
DNA analysis conducted on remnants of Iraq's Al-Hussein warheads at the Al-Nibai missile destruction site revealed traces of bacteria similar to the Vollum anthrax strain. "I can't say with one hundred percent certainty that they are identical," Spertzel said. "But they are consistent with Vollum."
The U.S. company also sold Iraq several strains of Clostridiumbotulinum, a poisonous toxin that paralyzes the muscles and lungs and kills by suffocation. Iraq acknowledged producing at least 19,000 liters of botulinum toxin, using more than half to fill at least 116 bombs and missile warheads.
Staff writer Joby Warrick contributed to this report.
----
BIOLOGICAL WARFARE
Turner's Foundation to Spend Millions to Fight Bioterrorism
New York Times
November 25, 2001
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/international/25BIOT.html?searchpv=nytToday
Ted Turner, who invented all-news television and is helping to subsidize the United Nations, has taken on a new challenge: reducing the threat of biological weapons.
Spurred by the events of Sept. 11 and the anthrax-tainted letters sent to news organizations and Capitol Hill, a foundation headed by Mr. Turner and Sam Nunn, the former Democratic senator from Georgia, has decided to increase spending aimed at deterring bioterrorism and the threat of germ weapons.
The fledgling foundation, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which began operating only in January, decided months before Sept. 11 to devote some of its planned $250 million in grants over the next five years to combatting threats posed not only by nuclear weapons, but also by chemical and germ weapons. But foundation executives said last week that their emphasis had shifted somewhat following the mysterious anthrax attacks that have infected 18 people, 5 of whom have died.
Foundation representatives said the board approved almost $5 million in initial grants at its October meeting. Ultimately, they said, the foundation would spend about a third of its estimated $50 million in grants each year on combatting bioweapons and bioterrorism.
"Reducing the threat of biological weapons has always been our primary mission, but the events of Sept. 11 have led to new opportunities to address preparedness and consequence management," said Margaret A. Hamburg, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration who heads the foundation's biological projects.
The new grants, which the foundation's representatives discussed in interviews, involve both foreign and domestic threats and private and public partnerships. The largest category is about $2.4 million in initial grants to finance scientific collaboration with scientists who once worked in the former Soviet Union's covert biological weapons program. The investment supplements federal efforts to help Soviet scientists who once made biological weapons find peaceful employment working with American scientists on antidotes for those weapons.
The largest project - $1.3 million for three former Soviet labs in Russia - is intended to help develop a new vaccine against brucellosis, which threatens animals in the United States and throughout the world.
Another project will provide $600,000 to the Vector lab in Novosibirsk, Russia, which once specialized in turning smallpox and other viruses into weapons of war. The grant will finance a study of how Vector can best attract commercial investors in a new vaccine production facility. About $400,000 has also been allocated to helping identify Western drug companies willing to work with former Soviet bioweaponeers on commercial ventures.
The foundation also intends to bring at least 20 former Soviet bioweapons scientists together each year with American scientists in the United States to discuss germ weapon threats.
In Europe, the foundation has allocated $500,000 to help the Geneva-based World Health Organization establish a revolving fund so that doctors can respond quickly to outbreaks of a mysterious illnesses.
In the United States, the foundation has awarded $650,000 to help industry develop standards to reduce the potential for harmful applications of biotechnology and create a group to monitor the standards, and will give $400,000 to help the National Academy of Sciences draft standards to guard against the destructive application of biotechnologies.
Anthrax Inquiry in Chile
SANTIAGO, Chile, Nov. 24 (Reuters) - A Chilean judge has granted the police greater powers to investigate the mailing of a substance believed to be anthrax that has baffled the nation.
Judicial sources said that on Friday, Judge Rosa Maria Maggi issued a "wide investigation order" to detectives trying to find who sent a letter believed to have been laced with the bacteria to a doctor in Santiago. The letter, which bore a Swiss postmark but a Florida return address, was received last week by Dr. Antonio Banfi, who has specialized in infectious diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said it expected to receive a sample for testing.
-------- business
HOMELAND SECURITY
Industry Sees Opportunity in U.S. Quest for Security
New York Times
November 25, 2001
By ALISON MITCHELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/national/25DEFE.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 - Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security, likes to say the home-front battle against terrorism is not just the business of government but of business. Business agrees.
Ever since Mr. Ridge stepped into the West Wing of the White House early last month, corporate executives, start-up companies and industry trade groups have been clamoring for his attention. Already he and his aides have huddled with dozens of corporate representatives.
And after the Pentagon asked entrepreneurs last month to come forward with proposals to combat terrorism and counter weapons of mass destruction, thousands of ideas were submitted.
"We were somewhat surprised by the response," said Maj. Mike Halbig, a Pentagon spokesman.
Some companies contact Mr. Ridge's office only to find out that he does not actually award contracts.
One company, PointSource Technologies in California, has hired a premier Washington lobbying firm - Akin Gump, Strauss, Heuer & Feld - to find out how to get financing.
"We're trying to feel our way right now, where to go, who to talk to," said Dr. Gregory M. Quist, the company's president, who thinks his firm's research into detecting naturally occurring pathogens in water could be modified to fight bioterrorism.
"It's a confusion," Dr. Quist said. "It's a big maze and we're a new company."
Mr. Ridge says security "will tap the creative genius and resources of both the public and private sector." But others fear that homeland defense could become a special-interest boondoggle with the potential to grow into an industry akin to the military- industrial complex spurred by World War II.
"In response to an immediate crisis, this is all an appropriate unification for the national good," said Gene Kimmelman, the Washington co-director for Consumers Union, speaking of the cooperation between government and industry.
"It starts smacking of the military-industrial complex if it goes on for too long and spreads beyond the immediate national need in responding to a crisis," Mr. Kimmelman added.
Already, the troubled airline industry received a $15 billion bailout from Congress after Sept. 11. The insurance industry is seeking assistance. And in the name of strengthening the economy, some industries are seeking special deals in the economic stimulus legislation that is pending on Capitol Hill.
Mr. Kimmelman said he was concerned about industries using the crisis to seek overly broad relief from regulation or antitrust laws and said it was already happening.
He points to a section of a $3.2 billion bioterrorism bill sponsored by Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, that gives government the power for three years to pre-empt antitrust laws for companies like drug makers.
The drug companies say they need such protection to allow them to share information with the federal government and plot a strategy to produce vaccines against agents of bioterrorism.
Mr. Ridge says he knows the government must be careful not to repeat the 1980's, when the Pentagon was pilloried for the $600 toilet seat. But he is also welcoming to entrepreneurs who want to help develop high-tech security measures.
"Look, part of that entrepreneurial spirit is, `Hey, we make a product; we might make a buck,' " he said in a recent interview, laughing. "We look to American creativity to help solve our problems and to help make a profit in the process. That's what drives them. That's what really drives the research. That's what pays for the research."
He is even considering hiring "special employees" from the private sector to work on homeland defense in 60- to 90-day spurts. Such employees are usually not subject to the same kind of stringent financial disclosure rules and postgovernment employment restrictions as full-time White House officials.
By its very nature, homeland defense requires close cooperation between government and industry because much of the nation's vital infrastructure - from telecommunications networks to power plants to water supplies - is in private hands. And Mr. Ridge likens his drive to spur technological innovation to the government-industry effort that led to the national production boom after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
"It will be an American response to a challenge just like we responded to things in World War II," he said.
Franklin D. Roosevelt brought business leaders into policy-making positions and set up boards that developed manpower policy, controlled distribution of resources and worked with business and labor to bring about an enormous industrial mobilization.
But two decades later, as he was leaving the White House, Dwight D. Eisenhower felt the need to warn of the "acquisition of unwarranted influence" by the arms industry.
Some officials and consumer groups are already expressing concerns that the partnership between government and industry could become too close.
Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, who has tangled with the Bush administration over its refusal to reveal the names of industry officials who advised a White House energy task force, raised some concerns about the potential for abuse in Mr. Ridge's idea for special employees.
"I would want some kind of Congressional oversight to be sure the relationships are not getting too mixed up so that without thinking about it government policy becomes the policy that is in the interest of the private companies rather than the public," Mr. Waxman said.
Many industries used to put their lobbying might into battling against big government. But after Sept. 11, with security measures likely to mean delays in commerce, many companies are suddenly seeking a larger government.
William J. Canary, the head of the American Trucking Associations, has written to Mr. Ridge calling for a "proper infrastructure" to be developed at the nation's ports of entry in order to speed truck traffic.
"This included not only bricks and mortar, but more importantly adequate levels of human resources and investment in systems and technologies that can ensure the efficient movement of legitimate cargo across our borders," Mr. Canary wrote.
In testimony before the Senate, the chemical industry recently called for the Department of Justice to get financing to speed a comprehensive assessment of the industry's vulnerabilities as well as for "significant federal funding" to increase the security of rail transportation.
Frederick L. Webber, the president of the American Chemistry Council, even said in that testimony that the industry's security should come under the jurisdiction of Mr. Ridge.
At a White House meeting last month, about a dozen executives in the pharmaceutical industry offered to send industry scientists to join the government effort to battle bioterrorism and to follow government direction, in exchange for liability and antitrust protections.
Richard J. Markham, the chief executive of Aventis Pharma, according to participants, told Mr. Ridge that the industry needed a road map from federal officials about what the threat is, what vaccines the government was likely to need, and what antibiotics should be made and by when.
"In very general terms, we were discussing a major research initiative," said Alan F. Holmer, the president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. "We need to be advised by the government what the threat is and what the priority is."
-----
[Yes, but where's the money coming from? Oh, yeah. As usual....]
We'll Pay for All This Later, Okay?
By Rob Norton
Sunday, November 25, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8356-2001Nov24?language=printer
"A billion here, a billion there," as the late Sen. Everett Dirksen put it, "and pretty soon, you're talking about real money." Well, these days, multibillion-dollar spending proposals are as thick on the ground in Washington as cherry blossoms in April. We're talking real money, all right -- but nobody's saying much about where it's all supposed to come from.
Barely a week has gone by since Sept. 11 without some new revelation about the staggering costs of the war against terrorism. First came the $40 billion in emergency funds authorized by Congress days after the attacks. Since then, there's been a $15 billion bailout for the airline industry, the estimated $1 billion per month for the direct costs of the military operation in Afghanistan, and billions more promised for humanitarian and economic assistance.
Now we're preparing to spend yet more billions on intensified intelligence gathering, improved security for the postal system, and a new federalized airport security system. As if that weren't enough, plans are afoot for more spending on railroad and nuclear plant security, and aid for everyone from travel agents to insurance companies to farmers. When Congress reconvenes this week, one of its first priorities will be an economic stimulus package costing $65 billion to $100 billion to pull the economy out of the recession that the attacks either caused or worsened.
So how are we going to pay for all this stuff?
Some of the costs are already covered, and some will be met by new taxes and fees. And some of the disaster relief will come from sources other than Washington. But for the bulk of the new spending, the answer is: We're just going to pay for it later.
Simply put, the government will borrow the funds it needs to meet today's unanticipated needs by selling Treasury bills and bonds to individual and institutional investors at home and abroad. There's nothing necessarily wrong with or even unusual about that -- it's called running a budget deficit, to use the local term. But there are both immediate negative consequences of deficit spending, and some potentially serious long-term ones. And inescapably, it means the government will have to make some hard choices in future years.
Not all the costs of the war against terrorism will need to be covered by borrowing. Some -- notably the costs of the property damage caused on Sept. 11 -- are already being paid for, by insurance companies. The nation's trade balance for September showed an unusual inflow of money that surprised economists, until they realized it reflected $11 billion in payments from foreign insurance companies to cover terror-related claims.
Some of the new spending will be pay-as-you-go such as the new airport security measures, to be funded by a $2.50per-flight tax. Why not pay for it all as we go? The weakness of the U.S. economy -- now in its first recession in more than a decade -- makes that impossible. Nearly all economists agree that raising taxes during a downturn is a bad idea.
States and localities will get stuck with part of the bill. By extension, that means that -- you guessed it -- we taxpayers will be shouldering part of the burden right away. New York City, for instance, is already complaining that the $20 billion promised from Washington is insufficient to cover its terror-related losses, and that the money isn't being disbursed fast enough. State and local governments, already suffering revenue shortfalls because of the general business downturn, will be further stressed by rising expenditures for such things as law enforcement and unemployment claims. Unlike the federal government, most states are prohibited from running budget deficits, meaning much of these increased costs will be paid for by rising state and local taxes.
Part of the costs of the war against terrorism will even be paid by foreign governments. Some U.S. allies -- most notably Britain -- have been contributing military assistance from the start, and others, including France, Germany, Italy and Turkey, are now helping. In addition, a much larger group of nations is pledging money for humanitarian aid and reconstruction. The United Nations and international aid organizations will also chip in. The United States maywell recover many of the direct costs of the war from its allies. Though it's neverbeen well publicized, it's a fact that Uncle Sam collected $54 billion of the $61 billion in direct military expenditures for the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War from other governments.
But there's no question that many billions will come straight from the federal government. If this had all happened a year earlier, the impact on the U.S. budget might have looked very different. Back then, the United States was riding the end of the longest economic expansion in history, and the federal government was ringing up a budget surplus for the fourth year in a row. The total budget surplus in the fiscal year that ended in September 2000, for example, was $236 billion, and the 2001 surplus was projected to be more than $300 billion.
The Bush administration's tax-cut package, however, took a huge bite out of federal revenues, which were further shrunk by reduced tax income caused by the business slowdown already underway. The 2001 surplus turned out to be only $127 billion. And most analysts are certain there will be a budget deficit in 2002.
Budget deficits are the way we have always paid for wars -- beginning with the Revolution. There is no practical limit on how much the United States can borrow. The size of the deficit is customarily measured as a percentage of gross domestic product (or GDP, the nation's total output of goods and services). During some years of World War II, for instance, the government borrowed as much as 30 percent of GDP. A similar level of borrowing today would be more than $3 trillion -- real money indeed, and vastly more than any plausible estimate of terror-related spending.
The federal budget has also been in deficit during most post-World War II recessions. In 1992, for example, the year after the last recession, the budget deficit was $297.5 billion, equal to 4.7 percent of GDP. Partly, this is the natural effect of a business slowdown: Tax revenues fall and government expenses tend to rise. Nearly all economists think that deficit spending during a recession is acceptable; most even think it's desirable, since both lower taxes and more government spending inject more money into the economy.
Nevertheless, the prospect of a return to deficit spending worries many economists and policymakers. Their concern, as expressed on Oct. 25 by the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group led by former U.S. senators and administration officials advocating fiscal responsibility, is: "If there is a budget deficit in 2002, will it be a one-time event caused by the events of Sept. 11 and a slow economy? Or will it signal the beginning of a new era of deficits as far as the eye can see?"
The answer will be written over the next couple of years, but an early indication of whether it will be yes or no may become evident in the next couple of weeks, as Congress debates the fiscal stimulus package. The idea of fiscal stimulus is to help haul the economy out of a slump by cutting taxes (to encourage consumer spending and business investment) or by boosting federal spending (to put money into the economy) or both. One immediate effect of a stimulus plan is to -- whoops! -- increase the federal budget deficit. But in theory, a stimulus package could pay for itself over time by boosting future economic growth, which in turn will result in higher tax revenues.
The partisan wrangling over the current stimulus plan has already been intense, with Democrats accusing Republicans of including excessive tax giveaways for corporations and wealthy individuals, and Republicans accusing Democrats of including wasteful new spending. If the parties settle on a modest compromise, such as the $75 billion plan suggested by a bipartisan group of Senate moderates, it will be a good omen for future fiscal responsibility. It would be bad news, however, if each party insists on including its own pet provision, and the total starts climbing into the $100 billion range.
The prospect of a 2002 budget deficit is already having more immediate negative impacts. One is that new programs that seemed affordable a few months ago will surely face more scrutiny, if they're not scuttled entirely. Prescription drug coverage for the elderly, for instance, already seems to have fallen by the wayside. More importantly, the return of the deficit means that the government has stopped setting aside enough money to fund America's future Social Security and Medicare needs. After many years in which it looked as though these programs were headed toward bankruptcy, the surpluses from 1997 through 2000 had finally begun to push them back toward solvency. But the reduction of last year's surplus wiped out all the money earmarked for these programs, and the likely 2002 deficit means that these long-term goals will continue to go unmet.
Once the war and recession are over, the administration and Congress will need to bring a quick end to deficit financing and begin to set aside surpluses for Social Security and Medicare. If it looks as though increased spending for anti-terrorism and homeland security will be permanent, they will have to figure out how to pay for it, as well, without borrowing.
None of that will be easy. There are times, like those in which we now live, when running a budget deficit is the right thing to do. But cutting taxes and boosting spending is always politically attractive. Raising taxes and cutting spending, on the other hand, is always ugly. After the smoke clears in a year or two, though, that's almost certainly what Washington will need to do.
Rob Norton is a columnist for Fortune.
-------- germany
German Greens Patch Rift and Support Use of Troops
New York Times
November 25, 2001
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/international/europe/25GERM.html
ROSTOCK, Germany, Nov. 24 - Members of Germany's Green party defied their pacifist roots and voted overwhelmingly tonight in favor of sending German soldiers to Afghanistan.
The vote, which came with a seemingly easy show of hands, patched over an agonizing internal debate that had threatened to break apart Germany's governing coalition between the Greens and the Social Democratic Party of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
Mr. Schröder has adamantly insisted that Germany offer to send 3,900 troops in Afghanistan, and he had the full support of Joschka Fischer, the Green party leader who is Germany's foreign minister.
But many rank-and-file Greens were bitterly opposed and wanted to force the Green leadership into quitting the government.
On Nov. 16, a slender majority of Green members in Parliament fell in line behind Mr. Schröder after he called for a vote of confidence.
But party leaders still needed support from the delegates who assembled here today for a party congress, and the leaders had to labor mightily to stifle a rebellion.
"I ask for your trust, and I would like you not to leave me in the cold," Mr. Fischer told delegates meeting at this resort town on Germany's northern coast.
What he got, however, was more like grudging acceptance. Party leaders pushed through a resolution which merely says members "accept" rather than "support" the Green's position in Parliament.
Placards outside the conference center showed caricatures of Mr. Fischer in full combat dress, armed with a bazooka and carrying the slogan "fight for peace."
Nevertheless, the vote today was an important turning point for the Greens, an often unruly party that came perilously close to violence two years ago when members battled about providing military support for the war in Kosovo.
At that congress, dissidents denounced Mr. Fischer as a war- monger and splattered him with red dye. The Greens evolved from the environmental and pacifist movements of the late 1960's and early 70's, and one of the party's cardinal principles has been that German soldiers should never take a combat role in other countries.
Today, Mr. Fischer's critics were subdued and even polite. "An effective campaign against the terrorists is not through the kind of war now being led by the United States," pleaded Hans Christian Ströbele , a delegate who urged Greens to leave the current government.
More surprising, Mr. Fischer received a standing ovation after he finished his speech.
Numerous veterans of the party's left wing gave him their full support, with some saying their own views had been jolted by the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.
Banners over the stage carried the slogan "Argumentative, Open and Ready for the Future."
"We are and remain an antiwar party," said Claudia Roth, a top leader of the Greens. "But I think that under certain circumstances it must be possible to engage militarily in order to stop violence."
Ms. Roth herself struggled with Mr. Fischer when she suggested several weeks ago that the United States take a "pause" in its bombing.
But the tenor of the debate over military activities has changed markedly since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. In recent days, even party veterans with deep roots in the left-leaning and often anti-American wing of the party have argued that the Greens need to abandon their categorical antimilitarism.
Antje Radcke, who was a co-chairman of Green Party last year and a Green political leader in Hamburg, described herself as a person with left-wing roots, but she said the party now needed to accept the general principle that military force is sometimes necessary.
"Pacifism is not a means to anything," Ms. Radka said today. "People need to make a distinction between their own personal views on nonviolence and the broader goal of actually achieving peace."
Ms. Radka admitted that she was surprised at her own change in thinking. Before Sept. 11, she said, she would not have considered pushing the Greens for a general change in position.
Despite the vote, many political experts believe that the Greens are not likely to remain in the ruling coalition after general elections next fall.
Though Mr. Schröder's strength seems greater than ever, the Greens have been losing popularity. Pragmatists in the mold of Mr. Fischer have lost patience with the party's ideological feuding, while many traditional activists feel that it has sacrificed too many principles in order to remain in the government.
The weekly magazine Stern summed up those who think that the Greens' time has passed. "Thank you Greens," said its headline. "You were wonderful."
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan's Anxiety Grows as Taliban Collapse
New York Times
November 25, 2001
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/international/asia/25STAN.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 24 - A senior Pakistani official watched in dismay today as the television in his office showed Taliban fighters, streaming out of Kunduz, Afghanistan, to surrender to the Northern Alliance.
"I am sorry to put it in this way," he said, switching off the set, "but Rumsfeld's been extremely callous."
For two weeks, Pakistan has been mesmerized by the situation at Kunduz. There were reports that as many as 1,500 Pakistanis were with the Taliban garrison at Kunduz, and that extremists in the Taliban were threatening to execute any who tried to surrender. People across Pakistan feared a blood bath that would reverberate in every mosque in this nation of 140 million Muslims.
Pakistan's worst fears appear to have receded with the news tonight that many of the fighters surrendering were Pakistanis. Now, the concern will shift to the safety of prisoners in the hands of the alliance, which Pakistan has never trusted.
Still, few here seem likely to forget that when Pakistan appealed for American intervention to work out an arrangement in Kunduz, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld responded, in effect, that the Pakistanis would face the choice of all defeated soldiers in war, surrender or death.
The Kunduz drama has captured the frustration and anger of many Pakistani officials who entrusted their interests in Afghanistan to the United States after Sept. 11, when the Bush administration demanded that Pakistan join in the war against terrorism.
The corollary, as stated and repeated by President Pervez Musharraf, was that Washington would see to it that all of Pakistan's essential interests in Afghanistan were protected.
From the American perspective, the war has gone a long way toward achieving its objectives, with the Taliban driven from power in all but one city, Kandahar, and Al Qaeda terrorists on the run. But from the Pakistani perspective, things have gone badly wrong, and the Americans have not delivered.
Only 10 weeks after General Musharraf pledged his "full support" to the United States, enraging Islamic militants in Pakistan and Islamic hard-liners in the army, the sense that the United States has failed to keep its side of the deal is rife, from the bazaars of cities to the offices where senior aides to General Musharraf ponder how to extricate Pakistan from the problems the war has caused.
Pakistan's gains have been substantial, especially financially, with the removal of American economic sanctions and the giving of fresh aid and help in debt payments. But strategically, the war has been a disaster in the minds of most Pakistanis.
Two weeks ago, when President Bush and General Musharraf met in New York, Mr. Bush pressed the Northern Alliance not to capture Kabul. But when the general returned home days later, he arrived just in time to see alliance troops pouring into the Afghan capital.
Northern Alliance leaders are contemptuous of Pakistan for supporting the Taliban before the Sept. 11 attacks. Another division is that the alliance draws its support, including its arms and much of its financing, from three countries regarded as potentially hostile to Pakistan: India, Russia and Iran.
Next Tuesday, the United Nations will convene a conference in Germany at which Northern Alliance leaders will sit down with opposition leaders from the Pashtun tribal group that dominates southern and eastern Afghanistan. The Pakistanis have low hopes for that meeting, believing that alliance leaders will begin a process of endless negotiation that will leave the alliance as the de facto government in Kabul.
Ever since Pakistan came into being in 1947, a primary goal has been to ensure that it keeps a friendly government to the west, in Afghanistan, since it already faced the unfriendly state of India, to the east. With the alliance in Kabul, the risk of having unfriendly governments on either side look real.
With the German meeting coming up, General Musharraf has said little about the situation, other than repeating his "expectation" that the talks will begin the process of establishing a provisional government with strong Pashtun representation that would be friendly to Pakistan. But privately, Pakistani officials say, the general is deeply skeptical that alliance leaders will keep their promise, especially to cede military control of Kabul to a force comprising Pashtun units.
General Musharraf has bitten his tongue, hoping that the Bonn meeting will prove his worst fears wrong, Pakistani officials suggest. He does so knowing that his own standing in Pakistan would be seriously undermined if he were to say that the United States has broken a promise to him.
"But the fact that he's not saying anything right now does not mean that he's calm," one official said. "Privately, he's telling people that if the alliance hold on Kabul is not broken, his position could become untenable."
President Musharraf took a considerable risk supporting the Americans, letting them use Pakistan's airspace, providing them with intelligence and leasing several airfields for use by American spacial operations troops.
President Bush's emissary to the rival Afghan political groups, James F. Dobbins, met with alliance leaders this week and later said he had told them that the West would withhold billions of dollars in reconstruction aid for Afghanistan until a "broad- based government" was set up. "It's a big carrot," he said.
But many Pakistanis with experience of dealing with Afghanistan have concluded that American policy is naïve, or else cynical. Those holding the latter view contend that the Bush administration sees itself within reach of accomplishing its goals in Afghanistan and cares little about accomplishing Pakistan's.
In this view, the United States will accept a Northern Alliance government in Kabul if it has to, because the only means of removing it would be to go to war with the alliance. But if the alliance is left in control of Kabul and other cities, these Pakistanis say, the United States will have set the stage for a new civil war.
"If Sept. 11 was a tragedy, there is a bigger tragedy ahead,", said Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, who was director- general of Pakistan's military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, when the withdrawal of Soviet troops in Afghanistan gave way to a civil war and who is regarded in Pakistan as having strong sympathies for Islamic militants.
Even among aides to General Musharraf, there are officials who agree, and one senior policy maker said Washington could witness a devil's choice of a new civil war against Pashtuns or taking back the capital from the alliance.
"If the Americans are not very careful with that ambitious little lot, they will find themselves in an unholy mess," he said. "Right now, peace in Afghanistan hangs by a thread."
-------- israel
America Tries, Again, to End the Endless Conflict
New York Times
November 25, 2001
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/weekinreview/25SCHM.html
RARELY has there been such an urgent, unanimous sense among the world's powers that the long, violent impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle must now end.
This is not because the conflict somehow precipitated the Sept. 11 terror attacks; Osama bin Laden's hatreds had plenty of other sources. But the attacks were stark reminders of a major irritant in a highly unstable region, and of the Bush administration's disengagement.
Among Arab and Islamic countries called on by President Bush to assist in the war on terrorism, it was almost an article of faith that the administration had to reciprocate by getting back into the Middle Eastern fray. That perception seemed universal at the United Nations General Assembly, too, where over the past two weeks virtually every speaker, while declaring support for the American campaign, also referred to the need to resolve the conflict.
Meanwhile, the Europeans felt so strongly that American inaction in the Middle East was undermining support for the war that they invited the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, and Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister, to meet with European Union leaders in Brussels earlier this month.
So when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell announced last week that the Bush administration was at last plunging into the Middle East, declaring that "We will push, we will prod, we will present ideas," there was the sense that a major effort was underway. Against the backdrop of a global war on terrorism, and after a period that saw the two sides come right to the edge of agreement, and then fall back into destructive violence, there was a sense that this must be the final round.
An agreement in the past has seemed so imperative, so close, that some veterans of the process have voiced the wish that a solution could simply be imposed. The two sides had gone as far as they could go by themselves, and the end result was known and inevitable. So why not, some on both sides of the negotiatons have wistfully asked, just present both sides with the blueprint of a solution?
This was almost certainly not what the administration had in mind. There were indications that the White House remained highly reluctant to follow Bill Clinton into the Middle Eastern morass, in which he shed so much prestige only to watch the region go up in flames. And with the campaign in Afghanistan looking ever more successful, there was the chance that the need to mollify Arab and Muslim leaders would diminish.
While General Powell asserted that "the goal can be nothing less than an end to conflict and a resolution of outstanding claims," the concrete steps he announced were focused on the more immediate goal of securing a cease-fire and restoring limited talks.
The plan was one proposed earlier this year by a commission headed by former Senator George Mitchell, which also called for a "cooling-off" period of six weeks, a Palestinian crackdown on militants, and an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements on occupied lands.
Even that could prove difficult after 14 months of intifada and the collapse of mutual trust between Israelis and Palestinians. Yet the very fact that General Powell was dispatching a tough retired Marine general, Anthony Zinni, along with a State Department envoy, William Burns, to the Middle East while fighting raged in Afghanistan created expectations far beyond a cease-fire. The extraordinary difficulty of their mission was underscored Friday when missiles from an Israeli helicopter killed the senior West Bank leader of Hamas's military wing, virtually insuring retaliation by the group and threatening a new cycle of violence.
But the background to the mission remained: However haltingly and despite enormous suffering on both sides, the Israelis and Palestinians had made remarkable strides since they agreed to the Oslo process in 1993. The Oslo agreement was based on the premise that by first taking gentle steps toward peace, the two sides would build the strength and stamina to tackle the big issues. Though both sides failed to live up to many of their obligations, and most deadlines were missed - including a goal of reaching final agreement by May 1999 - it did elicit the recognition that both sides would have to live in neighboring states.
BY the time President Clinton summoned the two sides to Camp David in July 2000, it was already with the understanding that the time of interim agreements was over.
There is a fierce, ongoing dispute over what led to the failure of Camp David. But the fact is that the great taboos of refugees and Jerusalem were breached, and that the Camp David talks and the subsequent, secret meetings between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in Jerusalem and finally in Taba, Egypt, that continued through last January sketched the outlines of a comprehensive settlement.
Though nothing was translated into formal agreements, and though Mr. Sharon has rejected many of the concessions made by the Israeli negotiators, who were from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, those talks defined what each side expected of the other, and what outside mediators - the United States included - would consider the basis for future negotiations. Mr. Arafat made clear in his recent speech to the United Nations that he no longer trusted any process that did not declare a final settlement as its sole purpose. What the process required, Mr. Arafat said, was that the United States join with other countries "to introduce immediately a comprehensive framework for a permanent solution."
That framework already exists. According to published reports and interviews with some participants, it would probably include the following elements:
•Israel would withdraw from all of Gaza and the West Bank, except three concentrations of settlements north, east and south of Jerusalem, and a temporary presence in Hebron. In exchange for the lost territory, the Palestinians would get some additional desert land adjacent to Gaza or the West Bank. Each side could claim victory - Israel would say that the large majority of the settlers would not be displaced, and the Palestinians could claim to have recovered 100 percent of occupied territory.
•A sovereign Palestinian state would be proclaimed, but would agree to remain demilitarized. Israel would retain three early- warning stations in the Jordan Valley, eventually in conjunction with an international military "presence."
•The issue of Palestinian refugees would require more legerdemain. Israel would acknowledge that refugees had suffered and would agree to a one-shot compensatory payment, but would accept no responsibility for their plight.
The refugees would be given several options: to stay where they were, to settle in a third country, to settle in the new state of Palestine, or to settle in Israel in numbers to be agreed on. At Taba, the Palestinians reportedly said 400,000, the Israelis 20,000.
•And finally Jerusalem. There could be some form of international stewardship over the holy places. Or the Temple Mount/Haram al Sharif could be shared, with the Palestinians controlling the surface plateau and the Israelis holding sovereignty underneath, as well as over the Western Wall. The rest of the Old City would be divided up, as it already is, and the outlying portions of the city divided roughly along the lines of who lives where now.
So why not plop these ideas down on the table, with "United States of America" stamped across the top?
One reason is that however far Mr. Sharon has come in accepting the notion of a Palestinian state, there are elements that the conservative military veteran would never accept, such as the partitioning of Jerusalem, which to many Israelis is their "eternal and undivided" capital, or the abandoning of so many settlements or some of the security arrangements. Moreover, if he rejected proposals put before him by Americans, the left would quit his government; if he accepted them, the right would bolt. Either way, his government would fall, and his successor would likely be another conservative, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Nobody expects Washington to challenge Mr. Sharon or Israel so openly. But the United States has exerted painful pressure on Israel in the past and may this time, too. Moreover, Yossi Beilin, a leading left-wing politician who was involved in the Taba negotiations, said it was as wrong to presume that no agreement could be reached with Mr. Sharon, as it was for the Israelis to presume that Mr. Arafat was finished as a negotiating partner.
DESPITE widespread distrust of Mr. Arafat, Americans and Israelis with a long experience of dealing with the Palestinians believe that waiting for him to die or be deposed poses too many unknowns, and that it is better to deal with the one leader likely to have the authority to make an agreement stick.
"Giving up on Arafat is something we cannot afford," Mr. Beilin said. And as for Mr. Sharon, he noted that other right-wing leaders had been led to major concessions by the Americans - Menachem Begin on Sinai, Mr. Netanyahu in the West Bank.
"Since they did that, you can't exclude the possibility that Sharon could do it," Mr. Beilin said. "I don't think he can easily ignore an American wish to pacify the Middle East."
Many on the right would disagree. Natan Sharansky, the housing minister, was among those who bristled at the notion that General Powell would press Israel to drop some of its conditions for peace talks, which included seven days without violence. "It's clear that America is not going to impose on us its own approach, if we feel it endangers our security," he said.
As for Mr. Arafat, there are indications that senior members of the Palestinian Authority are increasingly frustrated with Mr. Arafat's chronic indecisiveness, and increasingly concerned that they are losing control over the Palestinian population because of it.
PEOPLE close to Palestinian affairs say Mr. Arafat's senior lieutenants confronted him earlier this month and told him he needed to move against terror organizations immediately, that the longer he delayed a crackdown, the higher the cost at home and abroad. The confrontation led to a shouting match with Muhammad Dahlan, the chief of security in Gaza and one of the most powerful men in the leadership, who then left on an indefinite "vacation."
Egypt and Jordan would be no more tolerant of Mr. Arafat if he further complicated their relations with a newly assertive American giant. And Europe, Russia and the United Nations seem willing to pitch in if Mr. Arafat finds it difficult to accept the United States as the sole go-between. Terje Larson, the United Nations coordinator in the area, has already formed a "quartet" of the local ambassadors of United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations, to press for an end to violence.
Of course, this is still the Middle East, where the greatest strides toward peace have often provoked the greatest resistance. But with the world now seriously anxious to end the fray, and with the United States rampant, there is a sense that something must give. As General Powell put it, "History, fate and success have combined to compel American leadership in the Middle East and around the globe. We welcome the challenge."
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Japan Ships Depart to Join War Against Terrorism
New York Times
November 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Japan.html
TOKYO (AP) -- Three Japanese warships left port Sunday to support the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan under a new law that loosens post-World War II restrictions on Japan's military.
The supply ship Towada left the Kure military base in southern Hiroshima state carrying some 130 troops, while the minesweeper Uraga with 110 sailors aboard departed from Yokosuka base just west of Tokyo. The destroyer Sawagiri carrying about 200 sailors left from southern Sasebo base.
Teary-eyed relatives waved Japanese flags as the ships departed for the Indian Ocean.
The deployment marks the first time since World War II that the Japanese military has been used to support forces engaged in combat. Ten years ago, Japan sent minesweepers to the Persian Gulf War, but they arrived only after fighting was over.
The vessels are restricted to a non-combat role by Japan's pacifist constitution. They will link up with three other warships sent earlier this month to scout shipping lanes.
Because the ships deployed earlier in November were only doing reconnaissance, they were not dispatched under the new law, approved on Oct. 29, that allows the military to provide non-combat support for the U.S.-led strikes.
The Japanese mission is to last no longer than six months. It focuses on transporting supplies to and from Diego Garcia, a British island in the Indian Ocean serving as a base for allied operations. Japanese aircraft will also conduct airlifts between U.S. bases in Japan and staging areas overseas.
The new law was written by a Japanese government determined to show its commitment to battling terrorism but constrained by the anti-war constitution and bitter memories of Japan's aggression in Asia during the first half of the century.
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U.S. wants Russia-NATO ties
November 25, 2001
By Pamela Sampson
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011125-87367741.htm
MOSCOW - The U.S. ambassador to Russia said last week that the United States wants Russia and NATO to establish closer relations, and that common threats facing the West overshadowed differences over missile defense.
Ambassador Alexander Vershbow said the United States is prepared to consult with Russia over allowing Moscow to coordinate joint activity with NATO, the 19-member military alliance formed to counter Moscow during the Cold War.
"The members of NATO and Russia are increasingly allied or acting as allies against terrorism and other new threats," Mr. Vershbow said at a news conference in Moscow.
His comments followed a summit meeting between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which the two leaders formalized a series of agreements, including one to strengthen Russia's ties to NATO.
During his U.S. visit, Mr. Putin said Russia feels closer relations with NATO would help deal with the threat of terrorism, and he pledged to work with the West to deny terrorists nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Also Monday, the ambassador expressed hope that Washington and Moscow would be able to bridge differences over Mr. Bush's desire to scrap the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to proceed with plans for a U.S. anti-missile shield.
"We, for our part, are committed to continuing to work on a new strategic framework for the future - whether or not we find a compromise on the short-term question of testing under the ABM Treaty," Mr. Vershbow said.
"Missile defense could be an area for close U.S.-Russian collaboration since both of us face and will face these new threats in the future," Mr. Vershbow said.
The ABM Treaty allows each country to protect one area with missile interceptors, but bans nationwide defense. It is based on the assumption that the fear of retaliation would prevent each nation from launching a first strike.
Washington says the planned limited missile defense is needed to protect the U.S. territory from missile threats posed by such nations as North Korea and Iran. But Moscow dismisses such threats as hypothetical and says the national missile defense would tilt the strategic balance in the U.S. favor.
Regarding the conflict in Afghanistan, Mr. Vershbow indicated the United States has "no desire for a long-term presence either in Afghanistan or in the republics of Central Asia."
Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic that borders Afghanistan, has allowed U.S. troops to be stationed there in support of military operations; Tajikistan, also a former Soviet republic that borders Afghanistan, has given approval for U.S. overflights and U.S. officials were evaluating several air bases for possible use by U.S.