St. Louis Post-Dispatch September 11, 2004
U.S. must learn from Russia
By Jon Sawyer
Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau Chief
WASHINGTON - The third anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks passed with assurances from President George W. Bush and top administration officials that America today is safer by far.
But those assurances came against a disturbing drumbeat of ominous developments - Thursday's car-bomb at the Australian embassy in Indonesia, a videotape released the same day from Osama bin Laden's top deputy threatening new attacks, the seizure of a school in southern Russia that ended with at least 350 dead.
The Indonesian attack came just days before that country's Sept. 20 presidential elections - a reminder, like the election-eve terrorist attack last March in Spain, that terrorists might attempt a similar attack in advance of the U.S. elections Nov. 2.
Among outside specialists on terrorism, what prompted greatest concern was the attack on the school in Beslan - because of its horrific targeting of children, because of the gaps it exposed in Russia's internal security procedures, and because of America's continued vulnerability to the same sort of attack.
"We will strike the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home," Bush told rallies last week in Missouri. That line has become a standing one in his stump speech, as has the confident assertion that "our strategy is succeeding."
Yet U.S. borders, especially with Mexico, remain porous. Fewer than half of American cities have received the first-responder aid that had been anticipated after 9/11, surveys show, and in virtually no cities do police and fire departments have the capacity for direct radio communication during crises.
Russia, meanwhile, remains the repository for 90 percent of the nuclear bomb-grade material not located within the United States. Funding for the purchase or destruction of such material remains virtually unchanged since before 9/11. Bureaucratic snags have stymied action further, including the destruction of some 4,000 potential plutonium weapons that Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin had pledged to eliminate in early 2002.
Risk reminder
Graham Allison is an assistant secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton and a professor at Harvard University and author of the new book, "Nuclear Terrorism." He said that to him Beslan was a dramatic demonstration of how vulnerable Americans are.
"Immediately after the school was seized the Russian government dispatched troops to secure nuclear facilities all over Russia," he said. "The Russian government took the message of this very sophisticated seizure of students as a reminder that whatever the security at these facilities was the day before was inadequate the day after.
"It's a reminder to us, as well - that there are lots of nuclear facilities in Russia, at which there are weapons and material from which weapons can be made, and that would be plausible targets for action by the same sort of groups who seized that school."
Putin was quick to associate the Beslan attack with international terrorism and announced that he was moving toward a Bush-style response - from color-coded threat alerts to assertions that Russia was prepared to move "pre-emptively" against terrorists anywhere in the world. The U.S. response has been ambiguous, with expressions of sympathy and solidarity mixed with statements linking Russia's recent wave of terrorist attacks to Putin's often brutal suppression of the separatist movement in Chechnya, the mostly Muslim region not far from Beslan.
Wesley Clark, a former Democratic presidential candidate now supporting John Kerry, said at a Washington forum Thursday that Chechnya is at the heart of Russia's battle with terrorists.
"Unlike the people who attacked us on 9/11, those fighting the Russians in Chechnya really do have political demands," said Clark, a retired Army general. "They've asked for their freedom. That's what they want. There's a fundamental difference between that and the international terrorists al-Qaida whom we are struggling against."
That's not the view of Putin himself, as expressed during a meeting last Monday at his official residence with a small group of western academics and journalists.
"He insists that this is not about Chechnya only," said Nikolai Zlobin, a Russia specialist at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information who attended the meeting, "but about the entire north Caucasus," a region that includes Christian areas like North Ossetia, where Beslan is located, and the mostly Muslim region of Ingushetia that lies between North Ossetia and Chechnya.
Zlobin said that Putin had described the region as "a big time bomb that can explode at any moment." Zlobin said he concurred with that assessment and also with two other Putin views - that al-Qaida is deeply involved in the region and that it looms as a major front in a global struggle.
"What Americans don't understand is that this will probably be the most difficult front to fight with al-Qaida," Zlobin said. "The north Caucasus is much more difficult, much more complicated than Iraq - ethnically, religiously, culturally. If the northern Caucasus explodes then Iraq will be like a kindergarten."
Focusing abroad
The al-Qaida videotape released on Thursday featured bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. There was no reference to the Beslan attack, at least in the initial excerpts released by the al-Jazeera news channel, but there were taunts about alleged U.S. setbacks in Afghanistan and Iraq and the threat of additional attacks to come.
"Bush, reinforce your security measures," the statement read. "The Islamic nation which sent you the New York and Washington brigades has taken the firm decision to send you successive brigades to sow death and aspire to paradise."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, addressing the Beslan attack during a speech Friday at the National Press Club, acknowledged the possibility of a similar strike here.
"I don't suppose there is a mother or father in America - or anywhere - who dropped a child off for the first day of school who did not wonder, could that happen to them?" he said. "The answer is it could, which is why it is so important to win the global war on terrorism. We recognize that we have to fight this battle where the terrorists are, rather than waiting for them to force us to fight, God forbid, in our own schools." Critics say the administration has been so insistent on taking the battle abroad, to places like Afghanistan and Iraq, that it hasn't done enough at home - from the protection of borders, ports and critical infrastructure to improvements in communications among local and state law enforcement and emergency agencies.
A survey of 192 cities last June by the U.S. Conference of Mayors said 46 percent had received the first-responder aid promised as part of the post-9/11 homeland-security funds. Even in most big cities the "inter-operability" capability of the communications equipment of police, fire and EMT services is limited at best.
Gene Stilp, a Pennsylvania volunteer firefighter and a coordinator of First Response Coalition, a group pressing for federal help on the communications issue, said a Beslan-type crisis would be beyond the emergency-response capacity of all but the largest American cities.
"Very few jurisdictions in America would be able to respond to anything like that," he said. "We certainly aren't. If we had to provide medical assistance, fire, EMT and police at the same time, that inter-operability capacity just doesn't exist."
John Pike, a nuclear weapons specialist at globalsecurity.org, a Washington-based think tank, said Beslan was a reminder that an attack on a similar "soft target" here - a school in a smaller town - "would not be that hard to do."
Such an assault, should it come before November, would not necessarily be intended to tilt the election result, he said. "You're not doing it to throw the election one way or the other. You're doing it for sheer consternation - to abate the pride of the Great Satan."
That sort of logic "is why one might be apprehensive that Beslan is just a curtain-raiser," Pike said, "a premonition of things to come."
Washington Bureau Chief Jon Sawyer writes about national politics and foreign policy for the Post-Dispatch.
© Copyright 2004, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
