The terrorist twist

THE BRAZEN ATTACK on a warship, USS Cole, at the port of Aden in Yemen last week appears to bear the hallmark of a terrorist operation, although the political signature of the suspected ``suicide bombers'' has not been deciphered. The incident, which occurred while the destroyer was still at anchor for refuelling on its journey to the Persian Gulf for deployment on a routine operational alert against Mr. Saddam Hussein's Iraq, deserves to be condemned. Tragic as the loss of the lives of 17 U.S. military sailors was, the latest flare-up of utter ferocity in the historic Israeli-Palestinian war may complicate not only the search for clues but also the process of bringing the unidentified perpetrators to book. It was while making comments on the current brinkmanship in West Asia that the U.S. President, Mr. Bill Clinton, first took note of what the American naval officials described as an external blast that damaged a portion of the guided-missile destroyer. If this seemed to place the Aden episode in a specific regional context, the U.S. will certainly look beyond West Asia, too, in tracing the suspected terrorists and holding them ``accountable''. In the absence of an authentic word on Mr. Clinton's prescription of accountability, a precedent is that of the missile strike that Washington carried out against the suspected bases of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the wake of the bombings of the U.S. diplomatic missions in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Osama bin Laden is transparently regarded by the U.S. as an international terrorist whose moorings are not necessarily traceable to the near-archetypal West Asian milieu of Arab- Israeli divide. His rise as a wealthy Saudi dissident and the political lore about his links with the fundamentalist Taliban of Afghanistan can pose new questions if, as expected, the U.S. seeks to evaluate the suspicions of his possible role in the Aden episode. The Taliban, of course, is hardly a factor of real significance to the West Asian mosaic of militancy at present. The current phase of the Jewish-Palestinian war has not also been defined by any official activism by Saudi Arabia, and this is an aspect that could arguably suit the alleged anti-American purposes of a militant dissident of that country. In any case, the U.S. military has had the mortification of an explosion at one of its facilities in Saudi Arabia in the mid-1990s. However, more to the point now are the reports of competing claims by obscure or new outfits - ``Mohammad's Army'' and ``Islamic Deterrence Forces'' - about their having targeted a U.S. warship at this time. In the absence of a proper establishment of the identities of these groups, the investigative spotlight may be turned on the entire gamut of anti-U.S. groups and interests.

A political riddle of relevance to the current initiative by India for a comprehensive international convention against terrorism is the definition of circumstances in which an assault on a military vessel can be deemed a heinous act of terror. The USS Cole was not actively engaged in combat duty at the time of the suspected attack. However, the ongoing process of spelling out war crimes in a new international ambience must be matched by a careful updating of the meaning of terrorism in regard to military resources and interests as well. On a different plane, the international efforts to roll back the spiralling religious- political passions in West Asia need to be intensified at this juncture. The U.S. is taking the lead once again and there is a point in Mr. Clinton's assertion that Israel's vision of ``a final peace'' with ``true security'' and the hopes of the Palestinians for sovereign statehood were in the first place made possible only by negotiations and not war.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Opinion
Next     : Bringing bribe takers to book