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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Afghanistan: the End (or Endless?) Game By Antonio C. Abaya November 19, 2001 Only five weeks after the start of the American bombing of Afghanistan, the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda are in full retreat, having lost almost all major cities in the country to the opposition forces, with the exception of Kunduz in the north and Kandahar in the south, as of this writing. It is possible that by the time this article sees print, even those two strongholds will have fallen. However, it would be folly to believe that the war against Islamic terrorists has been won. No less than Mullah Muhammad Omar, the reclusive, one-eyed cleric who leads the Taliban, ominously warned in an interview with the BBC last November 16 that �the destruction of America� remained the priority goal of his organization and that �with God�s help, this will happen within a short period of time � keep in mind this prediction.� Add to this the statement of Osama bin Laden to a Pakistani journalist last November 8 that �we have chemical and nuclear weapons as a deterrent. If America used them against us, we reserve the right to use them, too�..All Americans are responsible for the massacring of Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir and Iraq and Muslims have the right to attack, in reprisal�� These threats have to be taken at face value, especially in view of the many manuals, notebooks, scribbled notes and sketches found by journalists in a number of buildings hastily abandoned by their Taliban and al-Qaeda occupants, indicating a very keen interest in, and possibly the actual possession of, weapons of mass destruction of the ABC types: atomic, bacteriological, chemical. The Times of London reports that its correspondents found in an al-Qaida safehouse in Kabul instructions for the manufacture of the biological chemical ricin, an untraceable poison that is twice as deadly as cobra venom. Ricin, a powder produced from the seeds and pods of the castor bean plant, may be inhaled, ingested or injected. There is no known antidote to ricin. Victims of ricin poisoning, says the Times, suffer, in chronological order: vomiting, stomach cramps, extreme thirst, bloody diarrhea, throat irritation, respiratory collapse, and then death from shock as a result of massive fluid and electrolyte loss. Iraq is known to have a stockpile of ricin, according to UN weapons inspectors. A single kilo of ricin powder, when thrown into a city�s water supply or blown into the heating/air-conditioning ducts of a building, can kill thousands. Equally worrisome would be the so-called radiation bomb, a poor man�s nuclear bomb, which does not involve the explosive release of nuclear energy, as in a nuclear bomb, but the release of deadly radiation from a concentration of radioactive or fissile material through an ordinary, non-nuclear chemical explosion; a deliberate Chernobyl-type �accident� that will release radioactive particles into the atmosphere, to be carried by prevailing winds over hundreds of square kilometers of, say, the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area. And then there is smallpox, a highly contagious disease (anthrax is not) easily spread in crowded environments such as a subway. A recent BBC feature revealed that New York City has had a contingency plan for several years even before September 11, 2001. Under this plan, at five o�clock every morning, the official in charge has been getting a report on deaths in the city during the previous 24 hours. If and when the mortality rate rises above a certain threshold, an alarm will be sounded to alert government agencies that there is an incipient epidemic .In which case, the city will be closed: no one will be allowed to enter or leave. An island in the East River has actually been chosen for a mortuary in which the bodies of all victims will be incinerated, to contain the outbreak. What this means is that a deliberately induced epidemic of, say, smallpox will not be detected until two or three days after the bacteria have been released in the subway, by which time tens of thousands of people will have become carriers of the disease.. Several years ago, when North Korea was the villain-of-the-year, I tried to conceptualize how a relatively poor country, without a sophisticated weapons delivery system, can still carry the war into the heartland of its adversary. I wrote then that the most vulnerable part of a rich country would be the subway lines in its mega-cities as they would be totally indefensible against a chemical or bacteriological attack. A radiation bomb or even a crude nuclear bomb can be stored in the hold of an ordinary freighter loaded with widgets and detonated in, say, the port of New York or Los Angeles with a timer mechanism or by remote control. The only deterrent to this scenario would be the ability and readiness of the rich victim country to retaliate in kind and many times over against the attacker country. But what if the attacker is not a nation-state but a multinational organization with no fixed address? It is in this light that Mullah Omar�s and Osama bin Laden�s ominous threats have to be taken. Neither Omar nor Osama and their people are swayed by appeals to active non-violence, and they are not impressed by the sight of pacifists �standing in a circle and singing kum ba yah.� They are determined to bring about the �destruction of America�.within a short period of time� even if it is the last thing they do before they go to Paradise to collect their just rewards promised by the Quran: �abundant fruits� gushing fountains� jeweled couches� cups of purest wine� and bashful virgins untouched by man or jinee, reclining on green cushions and fine carpets�� Beats a filthy cave in Jalalabad anytime. As the war enters the end game, there is a real danger that it can become an endless game, if Omar�s and Osama�s threats become self-fulfilling. US and British commandos are scouring the mountains in the south of the country looking for the two, but even if the commandos were to chance upon the right caves, their prey will almost certainly commit suicide rather than be taken alive. And that would be just as well since the last thing the world needs right now would be two high-profile prisoners-of-war who will whip up frenzied mobs to a catatonic state, from Algiers to Zanzibar. Better that the two die anonymously in some anonymous caves, even if that has to be staged. The risk, of course, is that as the two prepare to meet their bashful virgins, orders will have been given to detonate the radiation bomb or to release the smallpox bacteria or to spread the ricin poison, assuming that the threats were for real. Slammed with yet another, even more catastrophic attack, the Americans are not likely to hesitate about retaliating in kind, many times over, and immediately. But against whom? Well, for a start, frenzied mobs whipped up to a state of catatonia are not difficult to spot from intel satellites, unmanned Predator aircraft and the transmissions of the Al Jazeera cable network�..In the macabre calculus of borderless war in the 21st century, the rule of thumb will likely be: if you kill hundreds of thousands of our civilians, we will kill millions of yours. If, however, as we all fervently hope, nothing happens as Omar and Osama lead their bashful virgins from their green cushions, then we will all heave a collective sigh of relief that we have waken from our most horrible nightmare since�well, �since we dreamt that we were all required to wear beards. ***** This article appeared in the December 10, 2001 issue of the Philippine Weekly Graphic magazine. |