Before his meeting with US president George W. Bush at the White House on November 27, all that president Abdullah Ali Saleh was prepared to do to accommodate Washington’s concerns about “anti-US terrorists” in Yemen was to expel a group of ‘Arab Afghans’ allegedly allied to Usama bin Ladin, and to take steps to prevent fleeing al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters or supporters from entering his country.
In the two-month period from October 7 to December 7, the Taliban’s world has been turned upside down; from controlling more than 90 percent of Afghanistan’s territory they were forced to surrender their last stronghold of Qandahar to tribal elders on December 7.
It is often alleged, both in Pakistan and in the west, that “Islamic fundamentalists” wield too much influence, grossly out of proportion to their actual support in Pakistan. It is further alleged that the ‘virus’ of fundamentalism has even infected the military in Pakistan.
Muslims are justifiably angry about the lynch-mob mentality that has been generated and encouraged by the American authorities since the attacks. It has caused hundreds of Muslims in America, Britain and other countries to be attacked in the streets, harrassed by the authorities, prevented from flying by airlines, and otherwise treated as though all Muslims are guilty of the crimes of September 11.
Tens of thousands of people may have died in the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on September 11.
The US has demanded that the Taliban in Afghanistan hand the Saudi mujahid Osama bin Laden over to them fro trial by November 14, or face international sanctions.
The US is presently engaged in an intensive witch-hunt against Islamic movement activists all over the world, on the grounds that they are part of an ‘international terror network’ controlled by Osama bin Ladin and responsible for the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and numerous other ‘terrorist acts’ against US installations and interests around the world.
Fears of US action against Shaikh Osama bin Laden were further raised on August 9, when US military aircraft carrying commandos were reported to have landed at Islamabad and Quetta airports. Speaking at a rally later the same day, Maulana Fazalur Rahman, head of the pro-Taleban Jami’at Ulama-e Islam (JUI)...
That the claimant to sole superpower status should feel threatened by one frail man living somewhere in the barren mountains of Afghanistan is strange indeed. American obsession with Osama bin Laden, the Arab mujahid, borders on paranoia.
US foreign policy has been reduced to a three-point agenda in the post-cold war era: unquestioning support of Israel, daily bombings of Iraq, and chasing Osama bin Laden
The US suffered what should have been a major international humiliation on May 3, when it was obliged to unfreeze the assets of Salah Idris, the Sudanese owner of the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum which the US bombed in August
Following last month’s attempt on the life of Osama bin Laden, the famed Arabian mujahid residing in the mountains of Afghanistan, he moved with his family to Qandahar on April 4.
