Powell: It’s time to redouble efforts against terrorism
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former terrorism adviser Richard Clarke has touched off a furor by suggesting that President Bush, both before and after the Sept. 11 attacks, was inexplicably focusing on Iraq instead of al-Qaida.
In response, the administration says Clark is a grandstander, a disappointed office seeker and a fellow who really wasn’t in the loop during his service in the Bush White House.
The debate over decision making during the crucial period 2 1/2 years ago is important because of the way it could shape election year politics. But, as diplomats point out, what really matters is not so much whether Bush has had his priorities straight but the outcome of what he has wrought.
Secretary of State Colin Powell last week visited some of those places that everybody is talking about this week, including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.
No one doubts that the stakes for the United States in these countries are huge. Failure in Afghanistan could mean a return to the unstable situation that allowed al-Qaida to establish a foothold there in the first place.
It’s almost mandatory in such a situation for a visiting secretary of state to accent the positive, as Powell did last week.
“A lot has been done since my last visit two years ago,” Powell said, standing on the tarmac at the Kabul airport after his seven-hour visit. “I think we’re bringing hope back to the people of Afghanistan.”
But significant economic gains for those people, not to mention a security environment free of fear, still seem a long way off.
Powell’s message of hope was repeated the next day in Pakistan. There, a friendly leader, President Pervez Musharraf, is in place. He is the almost indispensable partner for the United States in the war on terrorism.
Powell may have lowered the boom in private with Musharraf about the country’s undemocratic ways but there was not a whisper of discontent in public, not when Pakistani soldiers are risking their lives in a new offensive against suspected Taliban and al-Qaida hideouts along the border with Afghanistan.
A month ago, the State Department rated Pakistan’s human rights performance as “poor.” The closest Powell came to raising that sensitive issue was in an opinion piece published in an Islamabad daily in which he pledged to continue working to “promote human rights and the rule of law.”
Two assassination attempts against Musharraf underscore Pakistan’s potential for instability. His country and its security services are awash with people whose sympathies lie with the Taliban, the deposed rulers of Afghanistan.
America’s worst nightmare is that in the event of Musharraf’s ouster, Pakistan would fall into the hands of Islamic militants who then would seize control of the country’s nuclear weapons facilities. To help avoid any such calamity, the United States plans a $3 billion assistance program over five years.
Next on Powell’s itinerary came Iraq, where almost a year after the war that removed Saddam Hussein from power, the question persists: Was the war justified? Clarke, who served as a terrorism adviser under four presidents, doesn’t think so.
Bush “launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide,” Clarke wrote in his book, “against All Enemies.”
Powell, of course, disagrees, noting that terrorism was a problem well before the Iraq war. As for the U.S.-led invasion, he said, it rescued a country from “under the thumb of a dictator who filled mass graves.”
He believes U.S. assistance to Iraq is making a difference. “Town councils are being formed. Schools are being rebuilt. School books are being distributed to children. The hospital system is being repaired. The sanitary system is being repaired. The water system is being repaired.”
Powell is worried that the spike in terrorism in Iraq and its sudden appearance in Spain could lead to a loss of resolve.
“This is not the time to say let’s stop what we’re doing and pull back; this is the time to redouble our efforts in every way. … (Otherwise) it will come and get us.”
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EDITOR’S NOTE — George Gedda has covered foreign affairs for The Associated Press since 1968.