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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (42870)	9/9/2002 12:49:06 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Oops speaking of India/Pakistan KARGIL, India — Indian and Pakistani border troops exchanged intense artillery fire Sunday in the divided Kashmir region, as Pakistan's president said relations between the two countries were at their "lowest ebb" in years. In a speech at Harvard University, President Pervez Musharraf said that India's and Pakistan's "forces confront each other eyeball to eyeball with most dangerous possibilities of the eruption of conflict by accident." The two nuclear-armed nations have massed hundreds of thousands of troops at the border since India blamed Pakistan-based Islamic militants for a deadly attack on India's Parliament late last year that threatened to push the neighbors into war. India's army alleged that Pakistan started the Sunday shelling and said that it was an attempt to sabotage state elections in India's Jammu-Kashmir state, the epicenter of five decades of hostilities between the nuclear-armed rivals. Pakistan said there was no escalation, saying the exchange was no greater than frequent low-level artillery fire in recent weeks. It denied it was interfering in the elections, set to take place in September and October. Hundreds of people huddled in their homes or watched in fear from rooftops Sunday as up to 200 shells landed at frequent intervals around the small mountaintop town of Kargil, located close to the Line of Control — the disputed frontier between India and Pakistan in Kashmir. Some residents said it was some of the closest shelling to Kargil town since 1999, when India and Pakistan fought an undeclared war in the area. Musharraf, who is in the United States for the start of the annual debate at the U.N. General Assembly, accused India of "intransigence" in his speech in Cambridge, Mass. "Indo-Pakistan relations today are at their lowest ebb," he said, without elaborating. A 17-year-old road laborer, Ratan Chand, died Sunday outside Kargil in the shelling, the first shelling death since 1999, said police superintendent T. Namgyal. In nearby Dras district, a soldier died after he was hit by artillery fire, said Shabir Kambay, a doctor in the government hospital. Pakistani shells hit an army garrison building and at least 10 houses were damaged in the border area of Pandras, an official in the area said on condition of anonymity. Some villages near Dras were on fire after being hit, Kargil administrator Ashok Parmar said by telephone. "It's like a war situation. An undeclared war where the shelling goes on all day," said Mohammed Abdullah, a teacher in Dras. "This shelling is aimed at disrupting the election process," said Namgyal. "The main targets are roads and bridges, to prevent election officials from coming here." Across the border in Islamabad, Pakistan army spokesman Saulat Reza called Sunday's exchange of artillery "routine," and said low-level firing had been going on for several weeks. He had no information on casualties. The polls are seen as crucial to ending 12 years of insurgency in Kashmir. India says Pakistan is trying to sabotage the elections by sending in Islamic guerrillas to wage terror attacks in Indian territory. Pakistan calls the elections a sham and says it has nothing to do with the violence in Jammu-Kashmir, which has killed more than 60,000 people since 1989. Away from the border, three members of the state's ruling National Conference party were gunned down by suspected Islamic rebels in two separate attacks in Jammu-Kashmir overnight, police said. The shelling is the latest conflagration in five decades of hostility between the nuclear-armed South Asian neighbors, which have fought three wars since gaining independence from Britain in 1947.

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (42870)	9/9/2002 12:52:23 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Our Insane Focus on Iraq By William Raspberry Syndicated Columnist The Washington Post Monday, September 9, 2002 One sign of maturity is the ability to suffer outrage and gut-wrenching grief without going nuts. Days before America's saddest anniversary since Pearl Harbor, Americans remain clearly -- and justifiably -- outraged, and our grief is palpable. But must we go nuts? The administration's monomaniacal focus on Iraq's Saddam Hussein as the fount of all terrorism was starting to sound like a clinical case of transference until, in recent days, the White House seemed to take a deep breath. Wouldn't any clinician worth her salt observe that Hussein (without having done much of anything since last September) has become immensely bigger and more menacing precisely as Osama bin Laden (remember him?) has become less available? To say such a thing is, I know from hard experience, to invite the incredulity of those who wonder if you are proposing to wait until Hussein does something before you take care of that weasel. Well, actually, yes. It isn't as though the "something" the Iraqi president could do would change our way of life. We're not talking about Hitler (though the name keeps coming up). We're not talking about the Soviets, who did threaten to bury us. Hussein's military has been both decimated (by us) and exposed as unmenacing. What threat has Iraq uttered against us to justify the war talk that permeates Washington these days? Ah, but don't forget his weapons of mass destruction. I don't. But it strikes me as a little weird that we are willing to take lethal, potentially globally destabilizing action on our surmise that he (1) has such weapons and (2) intends to use them against us, when, as far as I can tell, we took no useful action in the face of pretty firm knowledge before last September. This point is made by Dennis L. Cuddy, a historical researcher, in one of the 150 or so books timed for publication at the 9/11 anniversary. Says Cuddy ("September 11 Prior Knowledge"): As early as the mid-1990s, more than 8,000 former Iraqi soldiers were settled around the United States by our government. Might some of those be terrorists? The CIA was monitoring hijacking leader Mohamed Atta in Germany until May 2000 -- about a month before he is believed to have come to the United States to attend flight school. Does it make sense that the monitoring stopped when he entered this country? "Relevant to the atttacks of Sept. 11," Cuddy says, "Vice President Cheney acknowledged that the government knew something big was going to happen soon, but they didn't have the details. Even if that were true, why was no preventive contingency planning done? Why was it not considered that the World Trade Center might be the target, since terrorists had already tried to blow it up once?" Cuddy's point is that we had sufficient prior knowledge to have prevented 9/11. Mine is that the knowledge Cuddy adduces shows how difficult it is to prevent terrorist attacks. Should we have shut down U.S. airports in light of the pre-9/11 threat? And for how long and at what cost to the U.S. and world economies? Maybe the difficulty of preventing the random acts of terrorism is another reason for our focus on Hussein. That's frustration. This is insanity: to believe that Saddam has chemical and biological weapons and, in addition, has murderous sympathizers around the world -- and to believe that his last order wouldn't be to unleash those weapons and those sympathizers on America and American interests abroad. That we are the principal target of his weapons of mass destruction is, as far as I can see, shakily based speculation. That we would be the principal target after an attack on Baghdad is beyond doubt. How then would such an attack reduce the threat of anti-American terrorism? But doesn't that amount to defending the Iraqi butcher? No, it is a call for a return to sanity. Alfred L. McAllister, a behavioral science professor at the University of Texas, Houston, did a survey on how Americans think of war and enemies pre-9/11 and post-9/11. He found significant increases in the numbers of those who, post-attack, believe that military force is needed when our economic security is threatened, that terrorists do not deserve to be treated like human beings and that in some nations, the leaders and their followers are no better than animals. Oh, and he also found a significantly increased tendency to substitute euphemisms for "ghastly events." Perhaps like "regime change" for "premeditated murder?" © 2002 The Washington Post Company washingtonpost.com