Kabul's fall is no mark of US success

The "success" in replacing the Taliban with the Northern Alliance in Kabul, even if followed by the capture of Osama bin Laden and his al Queda associates, almost certainly will make no difference to the security threat to the US and the West from terrorism. It may do the reverse.

The scale of the threat to America and its allies is documented again and again in a multitude of reports from official US commissions and organisations over the last few years. These reports describe the nature of the terrorist organisations that pose these threats - the absence of hierarchical structures, the loose connections between them, the spread of these organisations throughout the world and within America, the lessening of reliance on state sponsors, and the danger that one or more of these groups may acquire nuclear or biological weapons. They also emphasise the vulnerability of the US to attack from these organisations.

In Countering the Changing Threat of International Terrorism, a report by the National Commission on Terrorism, published in June of last year, the following observation is made: "If al Queda and Osama bin Laden were to disappear tomorrow, the United States would still have potential terrorist threats from a growing number of groups opposed to perceived American hegemony."

The same report stated: "Because groups based on ideological or religious motives may lack a specific political or nationalistic agenda, they have less need for a hierarchical structure." It says these groups operate in the United States as well as abroad. "Their funding and logistical networks cross borders, are less dependent on state sponsors and are harder to disrupt with economic sanctions. Their objectives are more deadly (than terrorist groups of a decade or two ago)."

The US Commission on National Security, co-chaired by former US senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart, stated in a report published on February 15th of this year: "Attacks on American citizens on American soil, possibly causing heavy casualties, are likely over the next quarter century. These attacks may involve weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass disruption."

A report in January of this year on the US Department of Energy's non-proliferation programmes with Russia, chaired by former US senator Howard Baker and former presidential counsellor Lloyd Cutler, is the most alarming. It says the old Soviet Union had a nuclear arsenal of 40,000 weapons, over a thousand metric tons of nuclear materials, vast quantities of chemical and biological materials and thousands of missiles. The quantity of remaining highly-enriched uranium (HEU) is enough to make more than 4,000 additional nuclear weapons.

The US and Russian governments engaged in what is known as the "contract of the century" to destroy a great deal of this material and to bring the remainder under secure control. But a great proportion remains in insecure conditions. Worse, those "guarding" this material are given a strong incentive to give some of it to terrorists because of inadequate pay - often no pay at all for months on end - and chaotic military control arrangements. The report records a number of scary episodes:

In late 1998, conspirators at a Ministry of Autonomic Energy facility in Chelyabinsk were caught attempting to steal fissile material of a quantity just short of that needed for one nuclear device.

In early 1998, the mayor of Krasnoyarsk-45, a closed nuclear city that stores enough HEU for hundreds of nuclear weapons, wrote to the governor of Krasnoyarsk warning that a social explosion in the city was unavoidable unless urgent action was taken to pay nuclear scientists and other workers, who had been unpaid for several months.

In December 1998, an employee of Russia's premier nuclear weapons laboratory in Sarov was arrested for espionage and charged with attempting to sell documents on nuclear weapons designs to agents of Iraq and Afghanistan for $3 million.

Former US Senator Sam Nunn, who is co-chair of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on September 5th this year: "I am convinced the threat of a biological weapons attack on the Untied States in as urgent as it is real." He pointed out that the former Soviet Union engaged in a massive programme of biological weapons manufacture, at one time employing 870,000 scientists. They manufactured 22 tons of smallpox, a tiny fraction of which, if unleashed on the United States, would have devastating effects.

A report by the advisory panel to assess domestic response to capabilities for terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction says: "The United States has no coherent, functional national strategy for combating terrorism."

Aside from a single sentence in the Gary Hart report, there is no attempt in any of these documents to decipher why terrorists might want to attack America and what America might do to address the reasons for the hostility. This seems all the more surprising given the scale of the threat and the vulnerability of America to terrorist attack.

And the reasons appear straightforward: the presence of American troops in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia; the historic injustice perpetrated on the Palestinian people, an injustice reinforced daily with the might of American arms; the sanctions on Iraq and the frequent bombings of that country; and, above all, the perception that America is at war with the Islamic world. That perception will have been reinforced hugely by the bombardment of Afghanistan. Even after the fall of Kabul, America seems more vulnerable.

vbrowne@irish-times.ie