Invisible front: War on Terror

By Mark Hanrahan
For most of this year there have been few significant developments or perceived progress in the War on Terror. Iraq is normally blighted with so much small-arms or improvised explosive-device (IED) violence that incidents with a death toll on a par with the London bombings would be lucky to make the news in brief column. The White House has stuck to the same line that has unflinchingly pedalled for the last year and a half, that things are getting better and that as Iraqi troops stand up, foreign forces will stand down. Until this week it was pretty easy to condemn this as hollow rhetoric from an administration desperate to prevent their party from being savaged in November's congressional elections.

However, a week is a long time in politics and this week has seen a flurry of developments in the conflict; many of them, for a change, positive.

Iraq & Afghanistan

The huge security crack-down in Baghdad that followed the death of Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi has, so far, succeeded not only in curbing the violence that occurs regularly in the city, but in preventing (again, so far) the flurry of attacks that were expected in the aftermath of Zarqawi's death.

And today Iraq's national security advisor, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, has been widely quoted as saying that the crack-down is "the beginning of the end for al-Qaeda in Iraq."

While this may be a somewhat optimistic analysis (any analyst of Iraqi affairs over the last few years must struggle to muster any optimism at all), it does represent a significant development. In conjunction with the deployment of 11,000 troops in Afghanistan today to confront remnants of the Taliban regime, the coalition is somewhere it has not been since mid-2003: on the offensive.

The aforementioned Afghan offensive is aimed at curbing the upsurge in violence that country has been witnessing in the last year, and at the forefront of the assault will the British forces stationed in Hemland province. With British soldiers and commanders complaining that they lack sufficient air-support and have restrictive rules of engagement, further casualties (like that of Captain Jim Philippson who was killed in action on Sunday last) may occur; no doubt testing the British electorate's rapidly deteriorating tolerance for it's War on Terror commitments.

Europe and Beyond

The saga of the CIA's extraordinary rendition programme continues to unfold, following the Council of Europe's report that was heavy on blame and light on evidence. After the council's report was issued last week, one could have been forgiven for thinking that teams of Eurocrats were going to be springing into action, plucking the CIA planes from the skies with the very force of their vitriol. However, one week later it appears that no action at all from any European bodies will follow the publication of the council's report.

This has left Amnesty International to step in and fill the breach. They issued a damning report this week labelling the British government "a partner in crime", in the rendition saga and demanding a public enquiry. The British government's reluctance to conduct public enquiries into anything (especially War on Terror related issues) is unlikely to be thawed by this call.

Meanwhile, Australian PM John Howard expressed his country's outrage at the release from an Indonesian jail of Abu Bakar Bashir, the man widely regarded as the spiritual leader behind al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiah, the group that carried out the bombing of a Bali nightclub on 12 October, 2002, killing 202 people most of whom were Australian. Howard told the Australian parliament that he sent a letter to the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono expressing his and his country's anger over the radical cleric's release.

Bashir, for his part, seems to have no intention of maintaining a low profile now that he is once again free (he was jailed for 26 months for his part in the bombings). He warned Howard that he should convert to Islam if he wants to remain safe in the afterlife. The Indonesian government, meanwhile, is in the middle of it's first campaign to discourage militant or radical interpretations of Islam.