No Taliban

Deposed Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, left, President Vladimir Putin and Tajik President Emomali Rakhmonov meeting early Monday morning in Dushanbe

Excerpt from article describing a meeting in which Russian President Vladimir Putin declared firm opposition to any Taliban presence in a new Afghan government ...

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Less than 24 hours after reiterating Russia's support for U.S.-led anti-terrorism efforts in Central Asia, President Vladimir Putin announced his country's staunch opposition to a U.S.-backed proposal to include Taliban representatives in a future Afghan government.

"We think the Taliban regime has compromised itself by working with international terrorists," Putin said on television Monday.

The remarks followed an unannounced pre-dawn meeting in Dushanbe with Tajik President Emomali Rakhmonov and Burhanuddin Rabbani, Afghanistan's ousted president and the political leader of the Northern Alliance opposition movement.

Putin called the wish of Rabbani's "legitimate, internationally recognized" government to exclude the Taliban from a ruling coalition "well-founded." The president's statement was the clearest sign to date of differences in the way Moscow and Washington see the shape of Afghanistan's future government.

The United States has called for a broad-based provisional government to ensure stability in the region, and has even expressed willingness to include moderate members of the Taliban.

Now Putin has opposed this stance, but it is unclear whether Moscow will have either the resolve or the power to change Washington's mind.

...Putin's statement marked the second time in the past week that Russian officials have insisted that a Taliban presence in any future Afghan government was unacceptable.

On Friday, Russia and India issued a joint statement in Delhi saying: "The obscurantist, malevolent, extremist and violent ideologies on which the Taliban movement is based will pose a substantial danger to the stability of any broad-based, multi-ethnic government."

Iran, which also borders Afghanistan and supports the motley Northern Alliance, shares this view. ...

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Source:

• Moscow Times [link inactive]

Land Warrior

(click for large size image)

Excerpt from article describing an advanced computer system for ground troops that might be pressed into action next year ..

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Pentagon officials are speeding up delivery of a revolutionary portable computer network aimed at giving special forces troops supremacy over low-tech terrorist groups in Afghanistan.

The move is part of a general acquisitions scramble in the US military to secure decisive weaponry in the expanding war against terrorism.

Land Warrior is a 16.6lb portable laptop computer built into the soldier’s uniform, providing detailed digitised information about the battlefield beamed straight to an eyepiece.

Unusually for a piece of military hardware, it works via a commonplace Windows 2000 interface.

It was originally planned for general issue in 2004, but senior military acquisitions officers are accelerating the programme to bring it into active service by next spring to meet new anti-terrorist duties.

... Exercises conducted by the 82nd Airborne Division using Land Warrior in September last year found that the system gave soldiers almost complete tactical supremacy.

By drawing the issue date forward, military chiefs hope that it could do the same in Afghanistan, reducing allied casualties and negating the Taleban’s much-publicised advantage of familiarity with local terrain.

... The features of Land Warrior resemble a soldier’s wish-list.

The Pentium III computer is linked up to a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) monocle over the left eye, through which the soldier sees a digitised plan of the battlefield and receives a stream of tactical information, including

• the geophysical contours ahead of him;
• the position of all unit members;
• the position of enemy forces,
• enemy weaponry information,
• large-scale maps of the area,
• the soldier’s location via global positioning satellite, and
• logistics information.

Using the computer console itself — worn on the chest with a flip-down screen and the mouse located on the soldier’s rifle — e-mails and operational data can be sent silently between soldiers and back-up forces.

Laser sensors and thermal imaging systems on the rifle, connected to the computer, enable the soldier to target an enemy accurately at night or in zero visibility, and even to aim his weapon around corners without breaking cover. ...

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Source:

• The Times [link inactive]

American Fighters Bomb Front-line Forces

Excerpts from an article detailing the latest efforts in the air war and the challenges which lay ahead in forming a new government once the Taliban is ousted ...

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American fighters bombed Taliban front-line positions near Bagram's ruined air base for the second successive afternoon yesterday, but Gen Babajan did a good job of hiding his excitement.

"We hope there will be more. These are a start but they are not enough," said the commander of opposition Northern Alliance troops 25 miles north of Kabul, the closest front to the Afghan capital.

The strategy follows splits within the Bush administration over how much support to offer the fractious tribal coalition of Tajiks and Uzbeks fighting the Taliban regime, which is dominated by the country's largest ethnic faction, the Pathans.

That argument appeared to have tilted towards an advance on the capital at the weekend when the secretary of state, Colin Powell, said it would be in US interests "and the interest of the coalition to see this matter resolved before winter strikes".

But he carefully refused to advocate the capture of the city, aware that the last time Alliance forces took Kabul, commanders turned on one another and left 50,000 dead.

... Some of the more gung-ho Alliance commanders are calling for an offensive to take Kabul, fearing that the movement will be squeezed out of any post-Taliban settlement. The Alliance remains militarily weak as it awaits supplies of Russian weapons.

Pakistan has insisted that the Northern Alliance, to which it is fiercely opposed, should not be allowed to march on Kabul. However, Russia and Iran both back the Alliance against the Taliban and President Putin yesterday gave his clearest public backing for the movement in talks with its political leader, Burhanuddin Rabbani, in Tajikistan.

A former president, Mr Rabbani, who is still the internationally recognised leader of Afghanistan, is the prime contender to lead a new administration in Kabul. But Washington fears that Mr Rabbani, unpopular among many Tajiks and Uzbeks, would never win the backing of pro-Taliban Pathans.

Russia and the Central Asian states support Mr Rabbani, a man they feel they can control. Washington's decision to increase support for the Northern Alliance is fraught with risks.

The Alliance is split between followers of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated six weeks ago, and those of Rabbani. Based in the Panjshir valley, the Massoud supporters seek the return of Zahir Shah, a Pathan.

Mr Rabbani, by contrast, has established secret contacts with moderate Taliban commanders who he hopes will support his attempt to lead Afghanistan until elections can be held.

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Source:

• News.telegraph.co.uk

Excerpts from an article describing the alarming proliferation of fissionable materials that may be somehow finding their way out of the old Soviet Union and into the hands of Iraq and/or Islamic extremists ...

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Dozens of Russia's nuclear weapons are missing. There is clear evidence that Osama bin Laden's agents have been scouring the world to buy or steal such devices in order to attack the West. Our correspondent investigates how near they may be to succeeding.

... there has been no confirmation of nuclear weapons or nuclear material falling into bin Laden’s hands — nor any firm statement that he has failed to obtain them. But the deeper you look into this information vacuum, which US taxpayers increasingly consider a poor return on their $30 billion-a-year investment in foreign intelligence, the more worrying it becomes.

Bin Laden has said that it is his duty to seek weapons of mass destruction, and the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) in Vienna has confirmed hundreds of instances of nuclear smuggling since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

They litter the map of Eurasia and implicate a gallery of crooks, usually offering small amounts of non-weapons-grade material to buyers with even less knowledge of nuclear physics than themselves.

15,000 and 40,000 nuclear weapons and enough fissile material for 40,000 more, has spent the past decade staggering under the pressure of rampant corruption and criminality with its nuclear stockpile ill-guarded, compared with America’s.

And vulnerable, above all, to the thousands of scientists who built it, but now earn on average $50 a month. The result is what one of Washington’s more moderate non-proliferation experts calls “a nuclear K-Mart”.

Russia’s intercontinental ballistic missiles are not for sale. They are so central to Moscow’s vision of itself as a world power that they remain almost as secure and secret as in the Cold War.

But a black market has existed since before the Soviet collapse for a wide range of lesser nuclear assets — from battlefield weapons to “suitcase nukes” built for Soviet special forces and low-grade radioactive material that could be packed with conventional explosives to make the most basic poor-man’s atom bomb.

In the worst scenario, impossible to rule out with no UN weapons inspectors left in Iraq, Saddam could already have acquired enough fissile material for a warhead and mounted it atop a Soviet-built Scud missile.

...“Bin Laden has been trying to get his hands on enriched uranium for seven or eight years,” Robert Wolsey, the agency’s former director, told reporters a week after the September 11 attacks.

... 1997, when General Aleksandr Lebed, then head of Russia’s national security council, dropped a bombshell by declaring that dozens, possibly hundreds, of suitcase-sized nuclear weapons built in the 1970s were unaccounted for and were “a potentially perfect weapon for nuclear terrorism and blackmail”.

... Aleksei Yablokov, a former environmental adviser to President Yeltsin, said that 84 out of a total of 132 were missing. At a conference in Berlin, Lebed said he believed that most of them had been stationed in border areas no longer within Russia.

... a former Western diplomat who travels frequently to Central Asia confirmed last week that the suitcase-sized weapons almost certainly exist. “It’s very plausible that a device has been smuggled out and even to Afghanistan,” he adds. “Osama bin Laden is as possible a recipient as Saddam Hussein.”

Compact nuclear weapons offer terrorists an easy answer to the question “Why build when you can buy?” Pakistan’s rush to build an estimated 120 nuclear warheads has given bin Laden yet another option — theft.

President Musharraf insists that his nuclear arsenal is safe, but the US considers the risk of Pakistani warheads falling into the wrong hands so great given the number of Taleban sympathisers in his ISI intelligence service that it has offered to fly in perimeter security for the country’s nuclear bases and install fail-safe mechanisms on its weapons to prevent them being detonated.

So far Musharraf has declined the offer. Pakistan and the West must therefore hope that bin Laden has failed in all his attempts to buy nuclear weapons and material. But even if he has, the risk of nuclear terrorism remains real and serious, thanks to Saddam.

The Iraqi dictator nearly bankrupted his country trying to build nuclear weapons before the arrival of UN inspectors in the wake of the Gulf War. This has not stopped him trying again since their departure.

... The proof, or the closest thing to it, is in the form of a strange order placed with the Siemens electronics giant by the Iraqi Government in 1998 for six lithotripter devices designed to break up kidney stones with highpowered shock waves.

As medical machinery the lithotripters were not covered by UN sanctions. Each used a precision electronic switch, and Iraq ordered an extra 120 of these.

As Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project wrote in The New Yorker: “Iraq’s strange hankering for this particular spare part becomes less mysterious when one reflects that the switch in question has another use: it can trigger an atomic bomb.”

Former UN weapons inspectors in Iraq believed in 1999 that Saddam already had the components for three nuclear weapons, each needing 32 electronic switches.

Whether he has obtained enough fuel for them is one of the critical questions driving the debate in Washington on whether to expand the war on terror to Iraq. Another is whether Saddam sponsored the September attacks.

Hawks in the Bush administration have been scouring the globe for an Iraqi link that would justify finishing the job begun by Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and they may have found it: earlier this month the Czech Foreign Minister, Jan Kavan, flew to Washington with documents showing that Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first jet to hit the World Trade Centre, visited the Iraqi embassy in Prague for meetings with its consul last year.

“Why would they meet?” asks Laurie Mylroie, whose work on Iraqi-sponsored terrorism has a close following among those in the Bush White House pushing for a broad offensive against Iraq. “To have a cup of tea?”

Asked how scared we should be of the possibility of an Iraqi-manufactured nuclear weapon detonating as the conflict unfolds, Dr Mylroie replies: “Scared is not the right word. This is war. It’s like the Second World War. People have to make the right decisions; if they make the wrong decisions tens or hundreds of thousands could die.”

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Source:

• The Times [link inactive]
  

Two Postal Workers Die of Suspected Anthrax

Excerpts from article describing the suspicision that two deaths of postal workers were due the inhalation of anthrax ...

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Two D.C. postal workers have died and "their deaths are likely due to anthrax," Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge told a news conference today. Two more workers at the same Northeast facility have been confirmed as having the deadly inhalation form of the disease.

Although anthrax has not been confirmed in the two dead workers, "our index of suspicion is very high" based on a blood test from one, according to Dr. Ivan Walks, the District's chief health officer. The "clinical course is highly suspicious" in the second dead worker, Walks said.

One of the workers died last night at Greater Southeast Community Hospital; the other died today at Southern Maryland Hospital. Both men worked at the postal service's central processing facility on Brentwood Road NE.

Although neither has been identified, the victim who died at Greater Southeast reportedly was a 52-year-old man. In a statement, the hospital said he came to the emergency room at 5:55 a.m. yesterday and was treated for possible anthrax exposure, but died at 8:45 p.m.

Southern Maryland Hospital officials said the postal worker who died there today was a 47-year-old Prince George's County man. He had been sick since Tuesday, they said, and fainted in church on Saturday.

... In addition to the two postal workers with a confirmed diagnosis of inhalation anthrax, Walks said nine more people had symptoms that could be consistent with anthrax and are being tested.

Of those, he said, "we don't know how many are postal workers and we don't know how many are hospitalized." ...

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Source:

• Washington Post