analysis
Ewen MacAskill
There could hardly be a worse place for military action. Draw up a list of the world’s most volatile regions and the Pakistan-India-Afghanistan triangle would be at the top or close to it. Add the Middle East and, as Britain’s Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has said, there are the makings of “the most frightening situation since the Cuban crisis in the early 1960s”.
United States foreign policy-makers in the 1960s and 1970s loved the domino theory: allow communism to gain a grip in one country and its neighbour will also fall. It never happened, but an Islamic variation of it is possible now.
The danger is that a US military strike will not be confined to Afghanistan but have a knock-on effect, destabilising governments from Islamabad to Beirut.
The first and biggest risk is that the already unstable military regime of General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan could be overthrown by a coup or in a civil war fought by Islamic fundamentalists angry that the government is cooperating with the US.
This opens up the prospect of the first Islamic fundamentalist government with access to nuclear weapons, and it would be pitched into the ongoing conflict with India, also armed with nuclear weapons, over the future of the Muslim majority in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
That is alarming enough. But the US crusade, as President George W Bush described it, goes beyond the Indian subcontinent. The US has said repeatedly that the aim is to attack terrorism at its roots and the states that harbour it. If the US was to apply this criteria rigorously, almost every state in the Middle East would be a target. Egypt harbours, though unwillingly, Islamic Jihad, an offshoot of Osama bin Laden’s empire, and Yemen is home to two similar Islamic fundamentalist groups. And there is Syria and Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority.
Iran sponsors two of the main Middle East guerrilla organisations: Hizbullah, which operates almost exclusively in southern Lebanon, and Hamas, which operates in Gaza and the West Bank. Syria too supports Hizbullah and some of the Palestinians groups, as does the Lebanese government.
Any move by the US against groups such as Hizbullah or Hamas is full of risk. They are not regarded in the populations where they reside as terrorists but as warriors engaged in a legitimate fight against Israel.
Countries such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, rich in oil and close to the US, are already uncomfortable with the level of US support for Israel. These countries have big Islamic fundamentalist groups that are at odds with the government.
These groups share Bin Laden’s line that US soldiers should not be stationed in the land that contains Islam’s holiest shrines, and they will not be happy when the Saudi government severs its links with the Taliban under US pressure, and worse still when the US attacks fellow Muslims, the Taliban.
There are other states in the Middle East that could end up as casualties of what Bush has called a broad and sustained war. Jordan, with Palestinians making up almost 50% of the population and pressing for a more pro-Palestinian line from its monarch, has long been the most fragile of the countries in proximity to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
If all this was not worrying enough, there is also Iraq. Some of the US hawks see the remit of dealing with states that harbour terrorism as a chance to finish off the Gulf War by toppling Iraq’s President, Saddam Hussein. Others, such as US Secretary of State Colin Powell, are resisting such action.
Iraq, and the impact of sanctions on its population, is one of the reasons why the US is so unpopular among Arabs. An all-out attack on Baghdad will not help. The US fears, though, that if he is left alone, Saddam, emboldened by US focus elsewhere in the region, might feel like an adventure of his own.
The war against terrorism could have a lot of unpredicted and unwelcome outcomes.