Rumsfeld on mission to shore up support

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON, OCT. 3. In what is interpreted as final preparations for a strike against Afghanistan, the U.S. President, Mr. George W. Bush, has dispatched his Defence Secretary, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, on a four- nation tour of West and Central Asia. Mr. Rumsfeld is on a three- day visit to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman and Uzbekistan.

On the one hand, the Bush administration wants to shore up the wobbly coalition which is still not sure if the U.S. should resort to a military strike against Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network in Afghanistan.

On the other hand, there is the growing impression that Washington is now not very inclined to lean heavily on Pakistan for staging military strikes against Afghanistan.

The apprehension is on political grounds - potential destabilisation of a country with nuclear weapons.

Politically, the administration has been turning on the heat on a daily basis with the Taliban being warned of the dire consequences of not handing over Osama bin Laden and disbanding the terror networks.

And in terms of an alternative to the Taliban militia inside Afghanistan, the Bush administration, even while more than just flirting with the Northern Alliance, has been calling for a broad-based representative Government at the bidding of the Afghan people.

The hope here is that the ``moderate'' elements within the Taliban would break away and come to terms with a coalition of sorts.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post in a major story, said U.S. efforts to capture Osama bin Laden had been foiled several times in the past few years.

It said that in 1999, for instance, the Central Intelligence Agency secretly trained about 60 commandos of the Pakistani Intelligence Agency for killing or capturing Osama.

The operation which was arranged by the then Prime Minister, Mr. Nawaz Sharif, was abandoned when he was ousted in a military coup later that year.

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Section  : International
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