DEBKA Miscellaneous
June 7, 2002
Lurking Behind Washington's Blame Game
Syria
Assad Gives Terrorists More Support, Defies US Ultimatum
Pakistan Hopes to Fight India to a Draw
New US "Hot Pre-emption" Strategy
PFLP Leader Is Safer in Prison than Free
Alert for June 6 - Six-Day War Anniversary
India Vs Pakistan
1. Vajpayee Will Level with Rumsfeld - Up to a Point
US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld may be allowed to inspect India's assault plan for Kashmir, when he arrives in New Delhi over the weekend for a fresh effort to ward off a cataclysmic clash with Pakistan - but he will not be afforded even a glimpse of New Delhi's war plans for the main Indian thrust into Pakistani Punjab, Baluchistan and Sindh.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources in New Delhi report that India's Kashmir offensive is built around a blitz by Indian Air Force Mirage-2000, MiG-27 fighters, of what India calls Islamic militants bases on the Pakistani side of the Line of Control, followed by drops of large airborne units to destroy those bases.
Indian officials may ask politely for an American nod to its Kashmir offensive, presenting it as an element in the modular US-led war against terrorism. In essence, the Vajpayee government will be tendering Washington a take-it or leave-it demand: approve our military plans or we go ahead on our own without prior consultation with Washington. It is also hoped in New Delhi that if the Americans toss India's war plans on General Pervez Musharraf's desk, he will be sufficiently sobered to seek negotiations in order to end the standoff peacefully.
A senior Indian security source told DEBKA-Net-Weekly that in any case each side knows the other's military plans, but neither has a clue as to the secret means of warfare the other means to deploy. "The Americans are just as much in the dark as we are," the source said.
No one in Washington is banking on averting a major flare-up at this stage, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's American sources. Rumsfeld's task focuses less therefore on examining military plans and more on finding common ground between the two nuclear adversaries. He will be looking for a crevice through which to kick off bilateral negotiations before full-scale fighting breaks out or, as second best, after the first round of combat shows which side has the upper hand.
In New Delhi, therefore, Rumsfeld has three premier goals:
1. Preventing the introduction of nuclear weapons into the conflict and its spread to wholesale belligerence.
2. Discovering how long India intends to keep its forces in the Pakistan terror bases they capture; finding out if New Delhi's use of the term "terrorist bases" also applies to Pakistani military installations training Muslim militants, including al Qaeda, and offering them other forms of logistical support.
3. Learning what quid pro quo India wants for not taking the war outside Kashmir's borders.
Helpful responses in New Delhi on these points would provide the Americans with something substantial to work with in Islamabad. For example, India's commitment not to go first with nuclear weapons, and its promise not to hold onto captured Pakistan bases for longer than a few weeks, would be levers in American hands for persuading Musharref to play ball with Washington and limit the range of the conflict on his side too.
One way of defusing the Kashmir controversy called for frequently this week was the creation of an international force to join Indian patrols in monitoring the Line of Control and Kashmir's external boundaries with China and Afghanistan. US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage referred to a possible joint Anglo-American military monitoring force when he talked to reporters in Islamabad on Thursday, June 5, after meeting the Pakistani president.
"We are discussing all sorts of monitoring mechanisms without any prejudice one way or another," he said elliptically.
Echoes of the proposal hung over the Asian security conference meeting in Almaty, Kazakhstan this week, attended also by Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Musharraf; it was also bandied in London, when Rumsfeld met British prime minister Tony Blair en route for South Asia.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources explain that the proposal is realistic only if applied to a post-war arrangement for keeping the peace. Neither Pakistan nor India will accept an international force as a means of preventing the outbreak of war. International peacekeepers might be acceptable in New Delhi to replace the Indian troops occupying Pakistani military bases in Kashmir after purging them of militants - that is if India agrees to a short-term occupation. Even then, the plan would most likely run into Pakistani resistance. Therefore, it does not particularly enthuse the officials traveling with Rumsfeld or the Bush administration in general. Thus far, India is showing no sign of being willing to withdraw quickly from any Pakistani military bases it is able to seize in Kashmir, even at the price of a drawn-out conflagration possibly spilling over into 2003.
However, in Washington, the duration of the Indian-Pakistani war is of less concern than its primary goal of preventing a nuclear war from enveloping the Indian subcontinent. There are few illusions that Rumsfeld's mission is capable of bringing that goal forward.
2. Asian Rivalries Cloud Mediation Attempts at Almaty
The first summit meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) taking place at Almaty, Kazakhstan, this week, was an obvious arena for attempts to pacify two members at each other's throats: Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
Chinese President Jiang Zemin stepped forward smartly as peace mediator, only to be upstaged by another attendee, Russian president Vladimir Putin, who invited the rivals for unscheduled separate follow-up meetings in Moscow. Both their mediation efforts came to naught. Neither Jiang nor Putin was able to persuade the two antagonists to meet, let alone climb down. All the Pakistani and Indian leaders were prepared to do was to trade verbal insults from opposite ends of a conference hall. Finally, General Musharraf walked out after making veiled threats concerning the use of nuclear weapons in any potential conflict. Those hints contradicted his dismissal last week of any fears of a nuclear war, but focused attention to the unconfirmed reports of Pakistan moving nuclear weapons closer to the Indian border and the emergence of a potentially catastrophic situation.
The CICA was formed in 1992 as a regional forum for enhancing security and cooperation in Asia. Its 16 member states are China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, the Palestinian Authority, Tajikistan, Turkey and Uzbekistan.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Far Eastern expert notes that the organization's failure to make any headway in addressing the Indian-Pakistani Kashmir crisis is one in the eye for a group whose raison d'etre is regional security. It is not surprising. The would-be mediators hardly inspire trust in either Islamabad or Delhi, when the areas of friction between mediators and adversaries are larger and more deep-seated than the Kashmir dispute that has triggered the current crisis.
Some important conflicts between China and India have never been resolved. The two fought a Himalaya war in 1962, in which the Chinese People's Army's prevailed over Indian forces by dint of Chinese intelligence operations. Chinese-Indian border clashes have recurred since then. Despite their ratification in November 1996 of a protocol to mutually reduce border troops and tensions, their 4,000 kilometer "green line" is still contested.
To this day, India refuses to recognize the Chinese-Pakistani agreement cutting off a small slice of Kashmir for China. China, for its part, does not accept India's claim to Sikkim and supports Bangladesh as well as Pakistan against India. Beijing deeply resents New Delhi's granting of a refuge to the Dalai Lama and its residual interest in Tibet.
China directs major electronic intelligence (ELINT) activities against India, in conjunction with the PLA Navy's (PLAN) recent strategic thrust into the Indian Ocean. India cited China, not Pakistan, as its major strategic threat and justification for its development of long-range ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons tests during May 1998.
China is deeply anxious over the increasingly capable Indian military (with major Russian arms imports) - India is undertaking an overall military modernization that includes improvements to various force projection capabilities such as the development of indigenous intermediate-range nuclear capable ballistic missiles. Beijing is also concerned by an economically emergent India that has a growing naval strength, increased interests in Southeast Asia (a traditional area of conflict with China), and a long history of regional rivalry with China.
These developments could well lead to significantly increased military and economic competition and friction between a second Asian nuclear pair, India and China.
India is concerned over Chinese signals intelligence (SIGINT) facilities on the Great Coco Islands in the Indian Ocean and in Burmese locations, in addition to Chinese SIGINT/ELINT trawlers that monitor Indian missile, naval and military activities in the region. China is also reportedly training Burmese military intelligence officials, raising fears in New Delhi that Burma may become a Chinese client state that supports PLAN expansion into the Indian Ocean and China in regional groups such as ASEAN.
Most immediately, China is one of Pakistan's most important arms suppliers. Chinese military exports to Pakistan include the latest version of the J-7MG fighter-bomber, the co-development of the advanced FC-1 fighter-bomber (which has not yet entered serial production), the advanced MBT-2000 tank, solid fuel ballistic missile technologies, and according to some sources direct assistance in the design and development of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. Pakistan has also cooperated with China in security measures against Chinese Islamic fundamentalists, but the sincerity of this cooperation by radical elements within the Pakistani military has always been an uncertainty.
However, as DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Far East expert points out, Beijing opposed a futile Pakistani thrust into the Kargil region of India some 18 months ago, and appears to be cautioning Islamabad against a further conflict over Kashmir.
The PLA's Strategic Missile Force (Second Artillery) undoubtedly has sufficient strength in intermediate range nuclear-armed ballistic missiles (JL-1, DF-3 and DF-20) to pre-empt an Indian nuclear strike against China, but this could only occur if Beijing's Central Military Commission, headed by Jiang Zemin, determined China was immediately threatened. Pakistan itself is simply not considered in the frontline of Beijing's strategic sphere of influence such as Taiwan, Tibet, and the South China Sea, and not worth the potential risk of a strategic engagement with the United States.
3. India Wants More Israeli Radar
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has appointed Major-General Uzi Dayan, head of Israel's National Security Council and a former deputy chief of staff, to lead Israeli military mission in India, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military and intelligence sources.
The appointment is a secret one. Our sources report that Israel-India military exchanges have expanded to the point that a senior general is needed on the spot. His job is to oversee the most hypersensitive aspects of Israeli-Indian military and intelligence cooperation as an Indo-Pakistani war approaches threateningly. For the first time, Israel finds its arms trade and regional strategic interests caught up in a conflict outside the Middle East. Sharon ordered Dayan to stay in India as long as Indo-Pakistani military tensions remain high.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources, Dayan, in an effort to keep his presence in New Delhi low-key, commutes continuously to other Asian countries, returning to India every few days. He acts as regional commander of the Israeli military presence, with responsibility for coordinating Israeli-Indian military and intelligence activities in the event of war. If one erupts, it will be up him to implement the secret Indian-Israeli strategic agreements on assistance in air, naval and ground combat as well as intelligence and electronic warfare cooperation.
The Israeli general will also have to decide whether to evacuate any of the more than 1,200 Israeli military personnel and Israel Military Industries engineers and technicians currently in India or, conversely, to summon reinforcements.
More than half of this number are stationed in the troubled Kashmir province. One group instructs Indian officers in the operation of the Arrow intercept missile's Green Pine radar (see additional details in DEBKA-Net-Weekly No. 28, September 7, 2001), the most effective system in India's arsenal for detecting the launch of a Pakistani nuclear-tipped missile.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources say India's defense minister George Fernandes recently asked General Dayan to find out if a third Green Pine system was available, even on a year's loan, for deployment south of New Delhi, across from Pakistan's Baluchistan and Sindh provinces. This confronted Israel with a dilemma. While eager to become India's top supplier of advanced weapons systems and enthusiastic about the developing bilateral relationship, Israel will be hard put to find a spare Green Pine system in its emergency anti-missile arsenal - even for tens of millions of dollars - given the perilous Middle East situation, current and potential. Israeli defense chiefs must prepare for a possible US military offensive against Iraq in the coming months bringing forth an Iraqi reprisal against Israeli targets. This radar system was developed as a vital component of Israel's anti-missile defenses.
Israel will make its decision after checking first with Washington.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Washington and Jerusalem expect Sharon, when he meets President George W. Bush in the White House next Monday, June 10, to explore how far Israel may go with US consent to meet India's military needs, in view of the fact that the wanted radar instrument is a component of the jointly developed US-Israeli Arrow missile interceptor.
If a third Green Pine delivery is cleared, Israel will have to assign another 150 to 250 engineers and technicians to accompany it to India, bringing the total number of Israeli military personnel in that country to more than 1,500.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources note that this group numbers, aside from the Green Pine operators in Kashmir, several dozen Israeli army electronic warfare experts, who are helping the Indian army set up six monitoring centers along the Line of Control for picking up movements of military forces, armed men and explosives on the Pakistani side and jamming Pakistan's electronic surveillance instruments trained on Indian territory.
Across the border, Chinese electronic warfare experts are instructing Pakistani officers.
Indian and Israeli military experts, questioned by DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources, say some of those Chinese specialists received their electronic warfare training from Israeli instructors in China. The sources rate Chinese electronic equipment as far inferior to India's.
The Israeli presence in Kashmir also numbers a group of air force personnel who operate Israel-manufactured drones, as well as several dozen counter-terrorism experts. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources, India is the only country to which Israel has sold drones capable of firing missiles and trained local operators in their use. The pilot-less aircraft can stay aloft for surveillance and interception missions up to 36 hours and penetrate as far as 800 km (500 miles) into Pakistan.
At air bases in western and northern India, Israeli air force flight and bombing instructors are teaching Indian pilots, especially reservists called up for duty, how to use smart bombs and advanced weapons systems correctly and effectively. India recently bought a large stock of "smart" air-to-ground missiles from Israel as well as from other countries, for the carpet-bombing of terror bases and Pakistani military bases in a full-scale war.
This heightened Israeli military presence in India is stoking one of Pakistan's deepest forebodings. Recalling how Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor to extinction in 1981, Pakistani leaders fear the Israeli air force will impart to a select group of Indian flight crews the most advanced methods for destroying atomic reactors and weapons depots. The Pakistani supreme command and military intelligence are in no doubt that Indian aviators have already received such training in Israel and from expert Israeli pilots spending long periods in India.
Iran appears to share this concern.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources say that, in mid-May, Iranian military intelligence asked Pakistan to verify information received that an Israeli bomber squadron had arrived in south India and may have been assigned to knocking out Iran's nuclear reactor at Bushehr, now in the last stages of construction by the Russians. According to this information, New Delhi may have given the Israeli squadron permission to take off from India on surveillance flights over Iran in exchange for Israel giving Indian pilots courses in special weapons and electronics systems for bombing a reactor.
Israel naval officers are also to be found in naval bases on India's Arabian Sea coast. Under top-secret naval cooperation accords (see one of the most exclusive and detailed reports on this subject in DEBKA-Net-Weekly 12, May 12, 2001), Israel has supplied Indian with ship-to-ship and cruise missiles, along with instructors, that can hit strategic targets deep inside Pakistani territory. Another secret military cooperation agreement provides for a joint Indian-Israeli naval presence in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean approaches to the Persian Gulf.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources can disclose that Israel has secret naval, air and electronic surveillance bases in the Eritrean Red Sea Dahlak archipelago, with long-range Boeing 707 AWACs planes based there, as well as a world-class Dolphin submarine or two. Our military sources believe Israel will put its aerial and naval intelligence capabilities at New Delhi's disposal if a war contingency calls for Indian naval action in the northern Arabian Sea, where it has concentrated the bulk of its fleet.
Intelligence
Lurking Behind Washington's Blame Game
Most foreign intelligence and counter-terrorism experts looked at first on the guilt-shoving antics of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress as moves in an in-house Washington power play. They did not believe for a minute that US Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were ignorant of any hint of the impending terrorist attacks, and had not been forewarned of some aspects of al-Qaeda planning for its deadly attacks in New York and Washington on September 11.
But this week, the affair took an ominous turn when foreign agencies joined the blame game, threatening to start an international slugfest that could destroy the relations of trust developed among the various intelligence services battling world terrorism.
Bush, during a visit on Tuesday, June 4, to National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Mead, tried his best to gloss over the crisis. He acknowledged the lack of communication prevailing between the CIA and FBI before the September 11 attacks, but quickly added there was no evidence to indicate the administration could have prevented the suicide-hijackings. He went on to say: "What I am concerned about is tying up valuable assets and time and possibly jeopardizing sources of intelligence." He said he believed the finger-pointing came from "level 3 staffers trying to protect their hides - I don't think that's a concern. That's just Washington. DC."
Bush's comments coincided with some extremely odd disclosures.
The first, appearing in the United States, claimed the CIA had set up a super-secret paramilitary unit that aims to capture wanted terrorist leaders outside the United States. The unit is to operate under the command of the CIA's counter-terrorism center. The number of its members, the types of weapons they will use and the location of their base remains a tightly guarded secret.
A senior official in Washington said: "In effect, it will be an anti-terror paramilitary force that will concentrate on operations against terrorists."
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terror sources are hard put to explain this report. The CIA's counter-terrorism center is known to be running one or more of this type of anti-terrorism field unit for some time past. The anonymous official may have been hinting at a new framework established specifically to nab Osama bin Laden and his right-hand man, Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader Iman al-Zawahri. Still, it is hard to believe that the CIA had no paramilitary groups before and had not used them to stage covert operations to snare terrorists overseas and bring them to the United States.
Then, on June 5, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak claimed in an interview given to The New York Times ahead of his weekend talks with Bush at Camp David that he and Egyptian intelligence had warned Washington before 9/11 that al-Qaeda was about to carry out terrorist attacks inside the United States.
In separate statements, the White House, CIA and FBI promptly denied knowledge of any such information. This step was most unusual in that it cast doubt on a world leader's veracity on an immensely important security-intelligence issue, just before his arrival in Washington for friendly talks.
A day later, The New York Times reported exclusively that US intelligence suspects for the first time that a 37-year-old Kuwaiti, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- a name almost unknown to the US public although it appears on the FBI's list of its 22 most wanted terrorists -- had a more central and decisive role than previously thought in organizing al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11. It also said US intelligence recently concluded there had been a direct link between the first attempt to topple the World Trade Center in 1993, an attack carried out by Ramzi Yousef, an Islamic extremist group's plot to hijack 11 passenger planes in the Far East in 1995 and crash them into main US cities, including Washington, and the 9/11 strikes.
Mohammed, whom the article said was related to Yousef, was connected to all these episodes, according to The New York Times. Most of the US media, including national networks, picked up the report in one form or another.
However, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism and intelligence sources report that a major furor broke out over this disclosure in some of the counter-terrorism and intelligence agencies that have been most cooperative with the United States in the fight against al Qaeda. They recall angrily that between 1994 and early 2000, they repeatedly advised the White House, CIA and FBI to home in on Ramzi Yousef's associates if they wanted to prevent more al Qaeda and Egyptian Jihad attacks in the United States. US officials were also warned in the 1990s that Islamic extremists, such as Yousef and his Kuwaiti cousin, were conspiring to try again where they failed in Manila in 1995, and hijack planes for crashing into American city buildings.
Their warnings unheeded, these outside agencies nevertheless persevered from March 1997 to January 2000 in their efforts to wake Washington up to the peril, even buttonholing insiders with access to the appropriate intelligence and law enforcement authorities. As a result, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources have established that high US political and intelligence officials were apprised as far back as 1997 and 1998 of the menace posed by Ramzi Yousef and his kinsman, were aware of their connections with al-Qaeda, their dependence on its funds for their operations and their complicity in the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and the failed hijackings of 1995. Most importantly, their determination to make a second attempt was brought to the attention of those officials in good time.
Members of these agencies warn that toying with information it refused to hear five years ago as a counter in the blame game is no way to fight terrorism. If this goes on, US intelligence will continue to trip over its own feet in its pursuit of terrorists.
Syria
Assad Gives Terrorists More Support, Defies US Ultimatum
Some months ago, the US government gave Syria and its client state, Lebanon, until June 2002 to unstitch their close ties with, and patronage of, terrorists or face retribution, either from the United States or an ally, in the framework of the US-led war on global terror.
This ultimatum has been ignored.
Certainly, Syrian president Bashar Assad, acting on a political agenda set by Saudi Arabia, is thumbing his nose at Washington successfully enough to take its seat on the UN Security Council unchallenged.
Syria has openly flouted US demands to cut off its military and intelligence links with Hizballah, the Lebanese guerrilla group classified by the State Department as a terrorist organization; it has done nothing to choke off the flow of Iranian arms reaching Hizballah through Syria's military airfields, or moved to close the group's accounts in Syrian banks through which transfers totaling an estimated $200-300 m are made every year. Least of all, has the Assad regime shut down the Damascus headquarters of such virulent Palestinian and Islamic terrorist groups as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. These groups and their leaders remain as free as birds to operate in and out of the Syrian capital.
Nonetheless, the United States topped its original ultimatum to President Assad with three fresh demands :
1. He must stop al Qaeda's use of Damascus international airport for the safe transit of operatives on their way to Gulf and other Middle East destinations, Balkan ports in Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia, and the Central Asian countries of interest to the terror network, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
US authorities charged that these peripatetic al Qaeda operatives travel on Saudi passports newly issued in Riyadh and new identities provided by the Pakistan embassy in Damascus. They offered to hand Syria the names the CIA and FBI have collected of these roving terrorists, if that is what it takes for Damascus to shut them out.
2. He must deny landing permission in Syria and Lebanon to Lebanese-Iranian terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, one of the top operations officers of Osama bin Laden and his partner, Iman al-Zawahri, the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
3. He must shut down forthwith the Mediterranean ports made available to Iraq for unloading hundreds of tons of weapons delivered every week from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Croatia and Bosnia. The arms are either purchased there, or transshipped through those countries to disguise their sources of supply in West Europe.
Washington had separate demands of the Lebanese government:
1. To disarm Hizballah, impound its weapons and hand them over to the United States.
2. To dismantle Hizballah's operational bodies and paramilitary functions, forcing it to transform itself into a non-violent political-religious grouping.
3. To ban all terrorist groups based in Lebanon, especially the Palestinian militias.
4. To enact banking laws prohibiting Lebanese banks from serving Islamic institutions in the Muslim world as their most convenient channel for underwriting al Qaeda and receiving operating funds for its terror campaigns.
Whereas Syrian banks serve Hizballah, Lebanese institutions thrive on al Qaeda business, processing an estimated $600-800 m a year. Roughly one-third of the monies passing through the two banking systems budgets terrorist activity.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Middle East sources report that Syria and Lebanon have deliberately ignored all those demands. Indeed, the Syrian ruler, who sets the pace for Lebanon, has intensified his commitment to Islamic, anti-Israel terrorist groups, lending them his support in completely new ways.
His brief interruption of the Iranian airlift to Hizballah was misleading; instead, Syrian military airfields have reopened to a much-inflated airborne influx from Tehran of all sorts of weapons systems and ammunition for the Lebanese Shiite group.
Furthermore, from mid-April, the Syrian ruler ordered his army chiefs to furnish the Lebanese guerrillas with heavy weapons - 220mm Katyusha rockets, heavy artillery and ammunition - as well as chemical warheads for the group's short-range missiles. On May 21 or 22, the presidential palace gave Hizballah leaders a green light - plus Syrian logistical and military support - for its operatives to carry out terror operations inside Israel, concurrently with Palestinian terror attacks.
According to our intelligence sources, between seven and eight Hizballah cells have been planted across the border. In the Gaza Strip, they operate in conjunction with "popular resistance committees", Islamic groups and Muhamed Dahlan's security apparatus; in the West Bank and among Israeli Arabs, they are partnered by the Jihad Islami and the Israeli Islamic Movement under the overall command of West Bank general intelligence and al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades chief Col. Tawfiq Tirawi.
Syria approved continuing Hizballah infiltrations into Palestinian and Israeli areas, as well as the disposition of thousands of its missiles in battle array along the Lebanon-Israeli border, from Mount Hermon in the east to the Mediterranean in the west.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources say that Assad further underlined his support for the Lebanese group's war against Israel by pledging a Syrian air force and anti-aircraft umbrella against a potential Israeli air, sea or ground reprisal.
Lastly, Syrian Military Intelligence instructed Syria's protege, Ahmed Jibril, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, to send Gaza Strip Palestinians a supply of motorized parachutes and gliders made in Spain, Italy and Germany to facilitate incursions across into Israel for mega-terror operations. The vehicles were delivered in disassembled parts in the second half of May by a Lebanese vessel that stole through Israel's naval blockade of Gaza ports.
The Syrian president, as disclosed now by DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism sources, has opened his frontier with Iraq to the entry of al Qaeda Kurdish, Yemeni, Pakistani and even Chechen fighters, allowing them to use Syria as transit-point before moving on clandestinely to other destinations. These men, on the run from Afghanistan for Pakistan, are allowed passage through Iran before heading on to northern Iraq for their crossing into Syria. Some stay there; others head to Lebanon or the Balkans.
American leaders were perplexed by Assad's defiance, not completely understanding what drives him to back terrorists so wholeheartedly. After he allowed Mughniyeh free passage through Damascus airport en route for Lebanon and the Gulf Emirates, Washington decided to find out where the Syrian president was finding the financial and political clout to give him the confidence to stand up to a world superpower. A Syrian delegation was accordingly invited for an informal visit to discuss Middle East trends at the James Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Texas, which is headed by Edward Djerejian, a former U.S. ambassador to Damascus and Israel. Its real purpose was to sound the Syrian visitors out on the question, but the American hosts came up empty.
Another attempt was made by William Burns, US assistant secretary of state for the Near East, when he called on top Syrian officials in Damascus last week. He too was baffled by the evidence of Assad's determined support for the Hizballah and Palestinian terrorist groups. Burns was surprised to find that the Syrian president had thrown all his weight behind the Yasser Arafat, despite past antagonisms, and was egging him on to a harder line against Israel and US pressure to back away from violence.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Washington, a recent combined CIA-military intelligence-national security council analysis concluded that the Syrian president was faithfully adhering to the path of fostering mutual interests with Iraq and Iran that he charted for himself shortly after he came to power two years ago. This was turning out to be much more than what the Americans first assumed was a self-serving device to replenish Syria's empty coffers in Damascus with its cut from the multi-million dollar flow through Syria of illegal Iraqi oil sales to Europe. The wake-up call for Washington came early last year, when Syrian-Iraqi military agreements were signed and reflected Damascus's deep commitment to a comprehensive strategic alliance.
By mid-2001, US analysts had concluded that the Syrian ruler was one of a foursome at the helm of a new radical, anti-American political-economic-military grouping, joining Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran, Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
They realized that he derives the courage to disregard the US ultimatum from the quiet political and financial largesse coming his way from Riyadh. To all intents and purposes, the Saudi rulers keep their hands clean of abetting Islamic terrorists; instead, they pay the Syrian leader to perform this function on their behalf.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources report US analysts as deducing, therefore, that Assad is acting as Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's proxy, pushing his Saudi patron's real agenda in the Middle East while the crown prince shows Washington a blameless fa?ade.
Three examples support this finding:
A. The Syrian ruler's partisanship for Yasser Arafat cannot be explained unless it is at Riyadh's behest, given the historic antipathy evinced for the Palestinian leader by the Assad clan and the Alawite sect of Islam which it represents in Damascus. Because of this dislike, Bashar like his father and predecessor as president, consistently refused to invite the Palestinian leader to Damascus. Yet he is backing Arafat to the hilt on behalf of the Saudis.
B. In dealing with the moderate Arab rulers, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah, the Syrian president is given clear guidelines from Crown Prince Abdullah. Here too, while the Saudis overtly line up with the Washington-oriented anti-radical line in the Arab world, they use Assad to make sure it always falls flat.
C. Providing Damascus as a way station for al Qaeda terrorists and letting Lebanese banks serve as the network's repository for funds are additional ways in which Syria takes the heat off the Saudi royal family. The princes labor under two kinds of pressure: powerful Saudi interests, including religious bodies, urge them to support al Qaeda and preserves its ties with the terror network, in defiance of Washington's demands. Damascus gives Abdullah his back door solution for keeping both off his back.
Lebanon's government is bound to follow Syria's lead. President Anton Lahoud and Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri have quietly informed Washington that they dare not challenge Damascus as long as it gets away with disregarding US demands. Not only in Beirut, but around the Middle East and among terror chiefs, US president George W. Bush is being closely watched to see if he presses home his ultimatum to Syria and Lebanon as regards harboring terrorists. His final response will have a far-reaching impact on the global war on terror and the region's crises.
Washington may opt for a way out of the impasse by allowing Israel to counter a mega-terror attack with a hard-hitting assault against Syria and Lebanon as co-patrons of this attack. (See article in the last DEBKA-Net-Weekly Issue No. 62 on Mega-Terror). Israeli would thus act on its own behalf while also punishing Syria and Lebanon for defying the Bush ultimatum. In the event of a large-scale strategic terror strike, Israel would in any case have no recourse but to retaliate by destroying Syria's industrial and strategic installations in Lebanon and Syria, as well as wiping out Hizballah and Iranian Revolutionary Guards bases in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley.
Israel's role in America's plans to discipline Assad for his barefaced patronage of terrorists will certainly figure in the Sharon-Bush talks in Washington next Monday, June 10.
1 June: Three primary causes are driving India and Pakistan towards a major confrontation:
A. The Kashmir dispute above all. The Vajpayee government is under popular and political pressure to teach Pakistan a lesson for what is seen as cross-border Islamic terrorism plaguing Kashmir with backing from Pakistan's Inter-Service-Intelligence agency. For Pakistan, the escalating combat is a legitimate Muslim Kashmiri national war of liberation against the oppressive Hindi Indian occupiers.
B. DEBKAfile's exclusive Asian sources report that both see the US-led war in Afghanistan and its impending offensive against Iraq as carving out an opportunity to settle their fifty-year old conflict once and for all. The Vajpayee government believes its quantitatively superior army - 1.2 million troops against a Pakistani army half that size, and an air force and navy standing in the same quantitative ratio to Pakistan's - can seize large parts of Pakistan and go on to take out Pakistan's nuclear weapons capability, enfeeble the Musharref military government and disarm its army as a threat to Kashmir - or even topple the central government in Islamabad.
The Musharref government believes its superior nuclear weapons, missile technology and guidance systems from China can cut India down to size at last after half a century of trying.
Military experts say that while both nations acquired nuclear weapons in 1998, Pakistan's arsenal is not thought to contain more than 30-50 nuclear warheads of 20-25 kilotons each, while India has at least three times that number. Whereas Pakistan's delivery systems are limited to missiles, India's air force MiG, Jaguar and Mirage planes can deliver nuclear bombs. Both sides are capable of inflicting millions of deaths. But for full strategic effect, Pakistan must exhaust its entire arsenal, while India can hold a portion back in reserve.
The outside powers' attempts to avert the conflict have been lackadaisical.
The United States: For the Bush administration, Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is just as much a worry as that of Saddam Hussein and Iran's potential, because of the possibility that it may in some circumstances pass into terrorist hands, particularly al Qaeda and other Muslim extremists. It would therefore welcome the elimination of Islamabad's nuclear option, even if this came about as a result of a full-scale Indo-Pakistani war.
Russia: Most of the Indian army's weapons systems are made in Russia. Its battle tank is the Russian T-90. A full-scale war would be an economic bonanza for Moscow's military and heavy industries, which would be called upon to produce massive re-supplies of arms and ammunition. An Indian victory would also strengthen Russia's standing in Central Asia and South Asia.
The way this and other international crises are going, DEBKAfile's military experts do not rule out the possibility of three full-scale wars raging concurrently in the fall months of September and October 2002: between India and Pakistan, the US and Iraq and Israel and the Palestinians.
2 June: In a speech to West Point graduates Sunday, President George W. Bush articulated a shift in his war on global terror. The familiar threats to "rout them out" or "hunt them down wherever they are" were replaced for the first time by a warning to Americans "to be ready for pre-emptive action to defend our liberty and to defend our lives". Warning of the continuing danger, he said, "We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt its plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge."
Last week, the former secretary of state George Shultz spoke of a war that is "not just one of hot pursuit, but of hot pre-emption". Shultz defined terrorists, as distinct from freedom fighters, as practicing "random violence on as large a scale as possible against civilian populations to make their points or get their way," he said. The battle must be taken to such forces before they strike, he added.
New definitions for the war on terror are all the rage in Washington these days. A semantic barrage is filling an urgent need to clear minds on ways and means of combating terror and, no less urgently, to clear away yesterday's truisms cluttering up today's tactical terrain.
Jim Hoagland, senior Washington Post strategic analyst, referring to the war buildup between India and Pakistan, wrote Sunday, June 2: "In two years - the time it has taken to go from Bill Clinton, Israel's Ehud Barak and Colombia's Andres Pastrana to Bush, Ariel Sharon and President-elect Alvaro Uribe Velez - key governments have shifted to fighting instead of trying to co-opt and legitimize Ôthe hard men' who organize bombers, shooters and arsonists to force political change through bloodshed.
"The US Air Force and Israel's Defense Forces have already written out Shultz's suggested strategy in steel and fire in Afghanistan and on the West bank. Uribe suggests he will do the same against Colombia's narco-terrorists. And Pakistan, which professes to support America against the "terrorists" of al Qaeda while silently giving tangible support to the "freedom fighters" of Kashmir, has provided India with a golden opportunity to join the club of hot pre-emptors." In the view of this columnist, India can no longer be deterred from hitting back in Kashmir.
Hoagland has rightly drawn a line between the India-Pakistan conflict and the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation as a new spate of Middle East diplomacy fills the airwaves.
Part of this scene is the running argument between Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and Israel's security leaders, chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz and the Shin Beit director Avi Dichter. Ever since the completion of Operation Defensive Shield a month ago placed Israeli forces outside Palestinian West Bank towns, the IDF has adopted the tactic of short incursions into those towns whenever a fresh batch of terrorists formed up for action - with limited success. Forty terrorist attacks were foiled, but half a dozen slipped through at the cost of 30 Israeli lives. Whenever the troops enter their strongholds, the terrorists freeze. They spring into action again as soon as the IDF withdraws.
Mofaz is pressing for the Israeli army to reoccupy those towns and stay there till Yasser Arafat is gone for good. Dichter wants them on the inside until buffer zones are in place. Sharon and defense minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer defend the present tactic of sending the army back into Palestinian territory for brief spells - and only on the basis of solid intelligence pinpointing a strike about to take off.
DEBKAfile's military analysts argue that Sharon's formula is far from foolproof; solid intelligence data cannot be guaranteed in advance of every single strike. However, the prime minister is following the Bush lead: preemption, yes; reoccupation, no.
The Clinton way of "co-opting and legitimizing the hard men" is patently history, except for some Eurocrats and parts of Israel's self-styled peace camp. If the Middle East conference wanted by the State Department ever takes off - DEBKAfile's Washington sources reports that September is the earliest time - the Bush agenda is scarcely to "legitimize" Yasser Arafat, but rather to use it as a litmus test of Egyptian and Saudi intentions regarding America's hot pre-emption of Islamic terror.
The test will come in the form of an economic cooperation program between the Arab world, led by Saudi Arabia, and Israel. If Crown Prince Abdullah spurns this program, Bush will take it to mean continuing Saudi bad faith in the pursuit of Islamic terror.
As for Egypt, the White House regards the peace plan President Hosni Mubarak is bringing to Washington on June 7 as yet another Clinton-era device to legitimize Arafat and co-opt one of his top terror guns, Muhamed Dahlan to a mock process of reforming the Palestinian Authority.
4 June: CIA director George Tenet knew - even before he talked to Yasser Arafat Tuesday, June 4, on ways of de-terrorizing and reforming the Palestinian tangled security apparatus - that he would be going back to Washington empty-handed.
After five years, Arafat finally signed a Palestinian Authority juridical system into existence, supposedly as an independent arm of authority. In its first ruling, the three-member bench meeting in Ramallah, ordered the release of Ahmed Saadat, who as secretary general of the Damascus-based radical Palestine Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is accused by Israel of engineering the assassination last year of the Israeli minister of tourism Rehavam Zeevi.
Saadat, holed up with Arafat by Israeli troops in Ramallah for more than a month, was sent to a Palestinian prison in Jericho in May in the custody of American and British guards, under a deal Israel and the Palestinians signed for the lifting of the IDF siege around Arafat's Ramallah compound.
Under this deal, Israel waived its immediate demand for Saadat's extradition, together with that five other wanted terrorists incarcerated with him.
No sooner had the new "reformed" court handed down its first ruling Monday, June 3, when it was overruled by the Palestinian cabinet on Arafat's orders.
So much for an independent judiciary. It showed Tenet, if he did not know already, that all the "reformed" Palestinian institutions, whether the courts, a security force streamlined from twelve organs - all heavily engaged in terror - to four, or a government whittled down from 32 ministers to 19 or 20, would come out of the overhaul unchanged; Arafat, like all totalitarian rulers, may pay lip service to the trappings of democracy, but he will never loosen his grip on authority or allow anyone to hire or fire appointees in his regime. Neither will be renounce terrorism. DEBKAfile's military sources expect the flames of Palestinian terrorism to rise high again as soon as all three US officials shuttling through the Middle East, the State Department's William Burns, the Pentagon's Douglas Feith and Tenet, have gone home to make their reports to the White House's top team.
4 June: America has finally taken off the gloves to Arafat. This time, when CIA director George Tenet called on Yasser Arafat in Ramallah Tuesday, June 4, he gave it to him straight from the shoulder, according to a high-placed DEBKAfile source.
America, he said, expects the Palestinian leader to drop the double game he has been playing for two years, turn away from violence and sack his terror-mongering security chiefs. No other reforms would satisfy. If Arafat refused, Tenet hinted he risked being treated by the US government as a terrorist, standing alone against Israel's military might.
Aside from Arafat himself, the senior dispensers of terror on the Tenet list are pretty much the same as those DEBKAfile has often named: Col. Tawfiq Tirawi, the West Bank general intelligence chief and secret commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the suicide arm of Arafat's own Fatah. Another leading light is Muhamed Dahlan, head of Gaza Strip preventive security, who is credited with refining terrorist techniques, one being the use of cell phones to detonate explosives; another, extra-powerful bombs adapted to blowing up Israel's Chariot tanks.
As to the flood of reports in the last ten days claiming that Dahlan was the preferred candidate to head the security bodies post reforms, some emanated from Israel defense minister and Labor leader Binyamin Ben Eliezer, whose choice he was for the new post and as de facto heir apparent to Arafat. Ben Eliezer laid his arguments in Dahlan's favor before the CIA director on Monday, June 3 - to no avail. Dahlan is viewed in Washington as an out-and-out terrorist and therefore ineligible for any post in the reformed Palestinian Authority. In any case, the last thing Arafat wants is an heir apparent; he has no intention of stepping aside in the foreseeable future. To emphasize this point, Arafat announced he would head the security force in person, as he has always done. He also flatly turned down the CIA chief's demands to purge the Palestinian Authority of terrorist chiefs.
Tenet went into his meeting with Arafat furious over another of the Palestinian leader's actions. Over the last weekend, an official Palestinian Authority delegation, headed by minister of posts Imad Falouji, was dispatched from Ramallah to the Palestinian terrorist summit convened in Tehran under the auspices of Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Present were the leaders of all the radical Palestinian groups, including the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-General Command, Hamas and Jihad Islami, as well as the Lebanese Hizballah.
The CIA chief took it for granted that, prior to their interview, Arafat had aligned his positions with the most extremist leaders of the Arab-Muslim world - Ayatollah Khamenei, Hizballah's Hassan Nasrallah, Syrian president Bashar Asad, all of whom reject any diplomatic transactions with Israel.
Tuesday, June 4, Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres put in a panic call to UN secretary general Koffi Anan, calling for something to be done to avert the mega-terror disaster, "before the entire Middle East falls apart". He was under the impression of a warning delivered a few hours earlier by Israeli army intelligence head, Maj.-Gen. Aharon Zeevi, to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, that the Hizballah was planning an imminent series of mass attacks against Israel - both across the border from Lebanon and inside Israel. Zeevi noted that the Hizballah had arrayed thousands of different types of missiles along the frontier, pointing them at Israel's cities and strategic facilities.
The mega terror threat to Israel, the IDF's potentially massive retaliation in Lebanon and Syria, as well as the coming US offensive against Baghdad, will dominate the discussions in the White House between the US president and his Egyptian visitor, president Hosni Mubarak, over the weekend and with Ariel Sharon next Monday.
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