Military

DATE=05/27/02

TYPE=BACKGROUND REPORT

TITLE=WIDENING WAR ON TERRORISM (2)

NUMBER=5-51694

BYLINE=ED WARNER

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

CONTENT=

VOICED AT:

INTRO: One of the major problems of the U-S war on terrorism is disentangling it from other wars that could divert or undermine it. The India-Pakistan conflict is one such threat; the Israeli-Palestinian another. Many countries have used the occasion to crack down on internal opposition. In the second of two scripts on the war on terrorism, V-O-A's Ed Warner offers some views of these complications.

TEXT: While fighting the war on terrorists, you have to make sure they are the right terrorists, says Paul Henze, a veteran U-S government analyst of foreign affairs:

/// HENZE ACT ///

Everybody jumps on this bandwagon and labels the people that they particularly do not like or that they are oppressing or that are causing them some difficulty - terrorists. We have to be very careful not to be drawn into that. We have to be particularly careful these days not to support Russian oppression of Chechens and Russian maneuvers against other countries such as Georgia and some of the Central Asian countries.

/// END ACT ///

Robert Higgs, a senior analyst of the Independent Institute -- an economic and political research organization in California -- is not sure the United States is exercising suitable care:

/// HIGGS ACT ///

Clearly, governments such as the Philippines are happy to have U-S money and perhaps happy to have U-S assistance in suppressing some insurrectionists within the Philippines, but one must doubt that this has any important connection with terrorist threats against the United States.

/// END ACT ///

But some U-S involvement in other struggles is inevitable, says Robert Litwak, director of international studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center. In building support for the war on terrorism, the United States must accommodate the needs of its allies; for example, Spain:

/// LITWAK ACT ///

The Spanish concern has been on Basque separatists, and I note that that United States recently froze accounts of some Basque-related groups. This is good in and of itself, but it is also of assistance to the Spanish government and will perhaps increase their willingness and their motivation to cooperate with us.

/// END ACT ///

No nation is more important in this cooperation than Russia, says Paul Henze. And what a change! Moscow was entirely uncooperative during the cold war - a haven for terrorists who were beyond reach there:

/// HENZE ACT ///

You do not have Moscow as a place where people can run off to if everybody else rejects them. For a long, long time, if an authoritarian leader or an oppressive regime did not like what the United States or the West in general was saying or doing, it always tried to run off to Moscow and very often got a hearing there and sometimes got very massive support. That is not happening any more.

/// END ACT ///

With all its complications, this war is winnable, says Mr. Henze. Who knows? We may be winning against the terrorists in ways not yet revealed:

/// HENZE ACT ///

We have tracked many down. We have caught some. We have alerted our friends and allies who are paying much more attention to these problems than they were before because they realize they are in jeopardy themselves if they do not. You have to wait a while to see the full effect of what you are doing. Often, it is only in retrospect that you realize how much you have accomplished.

/// END ACT ///

In the meantime, says Mr. Higgs, keep terrorism, as menacing as it is, in perspective:

/// HIGGS ACT ///

This threat really does pale in comparison with others that the American people lived under for decades when the Russians had thousands of nuclear warheads targeted at us. Yet we learned to have a certain amount of composure in the face of that terrible threat, and I believe it would well serve us to regain our sense of composure and our appreciation of the real proportions of the terrorist threat we face currently.

/// END ACT ///

We can live with this threat, says Mr. Higgs, and we will live. (Signed)

NEB/EW/SAB