(Part of UPI's Special series of Reports
reviewing 2002 and previewing 2003)
By Martin Sieff,
UPI Senior News Analyst
WASHINGTON (UPI) -- Do you feel safer than
you did last year? Perhaps you do. But you shouldn't.
It was the Year of the Lull before the Storm. The year when the
world appeared to settle back to normal after the horrors of the
Sept. 11, 2001 mega-terrorist attacks that destroyed the World
Trade Towers and mauled the Pentagon and killed 3,000 Americans.
But it was also the year when the great tectonic plates of global civilizations and popular movements groaned and creaked building up tensions rather than releasing them. And as the year ended, the likelihood of a full-scale U.S. military assault on Iraq appeared imminent.
There were plenty of positive developments during the year, if only because of the absence of worse ones.
First, the United States succeeded with its allies in setting up an interim government in Afghanistan, after toppling the fundamentalist Taliban and driving out the al Qaida terrorists cozily based there at the end of 2001. In a highly positive example of transatlantic cooperation, some 10,000 German soldiers were serving in Afghanistan by the end of this year.
Second, tensions between India and Pakistan grew less, not worse. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage succeeded in little-heralded and widely unappreciated shuttle diplomacy in helping avert a full scale war between the two giant nations of South Asia that could have all too easily escalated to the level of nuclear exchanges. In the last few months of the year, Pakistan at last seemed to be making a serious effort to rein in Islamic guerrilla groups operating out of their controlled territory from making major terrorist strikes across the contested Line of Control against Indian targets.
Third, at the Prague Summit in November, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization carried out the largest expansion in its history, adding all three Baltic states, Slovenia and other nations to its number. The move was widely acclaimed as continuing the stabilization of Central Europe since the collapse of communism in 1989-91.
Fourth, al Qaida was unable to follow up its Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks with any more major ones against the U.S. mainland. And certainly, they failed to pull off anything comparable in scale or intensity. This gave Americans an urgently needed breathing space to psychologically recover and tom prepare against more assaults in the future.
However, in all too many areas, the tale of the year was one of drift toward distrust and disorganization between the major industrialized democratic nations while rogue states and extremist terrorist organizations were left in peace to regroup and plot new devilry.
After America's dramatic military victory in Afghanistan in late 2001, the U.S. drive against al Qaida stalled as a result of miserable intelligence and genuine confusion at the highest levels of the Bush administration about what to do next.
The decision that was finally taken was to put the prime U.S. emphasis on toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and stripping Iraq of its quarter century long drive to acquire its own weapons of mass destruction. But this distracted the primary attention of the U.S. armed forces and intelligence community from hunting down al Qaida, the group that actually had killed 3,000 Americans in the fiery immolations of "9/11."
Instead, al Qaida took every advantage of the breathing space. At least 10,000 core al Qaida cadre members escaped the bungled U.S. attempts to trap them at their Tora Bora complex and then in Operation Anaconda in eastern Afghanistan.
They almost all succeeded in fleeing to the sanctity of Pakistan, next door across the 1,000-mile border between the two nations.
There, as UPI Editor at Large Arnaud de Borchgrave has reported, al Qaida was able to reorganize at leisure. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, was able to nurse his ailing kidneys with dialysis treatment in the city of Peshawar, before heading south to Karachi, Pakistan's teeming megalopolis.
There, the kidnap and decapitation -- recorded on video -- of Wall Street reporter Daniel Pearl gave sobering notice that ferociously anti-American Islamic extremist groups could operate all too freely in Pakistan, the sixth most populous nation in the world and the one Islamic nuclear power so far.
And toward the end of the year, communications claiming to be from bin Laden warned of new attacks that would be even more devastating and widespread against U.S. targets than the 9/11 ones had been. U.S. government leaders made clear the warnings were being taken seriously.
In October, nearly 200 people, including more than 130 Australian holidaymakers, were slaughtered when al Qaia destroyed four discotheques enjoying peak Saturday night business on the famous "paradise island" of Bali.
The attacks grimly confirmed the warnings U.S. intelligence agencies had previously given -- in vain -- to both Indonesia and Australia that al Qaida was organizing for new attacks in Indonesia, the 17,000-island archipelago of 210 million people that is the world's most populous Muslim nation.
It was a year of grim developments and gloomy deterioration in other world crisis zones as well. North Korea in October startled the world by admitting, in the face of U.S. allegations, that it had willfully defied a 1994 undertaking and pushed ahead with nuclear development programs capable of making nuclear weapons. The virtually certain conclusion was that it already had some in its arsenal.
In striking contrast to its aggressive stance toward Iraq, the Bush administration reacted cautiously and -- many observers around the world felt -- indecisively to the news.
Relations between the United States and its major allies around the world quietly declined precipitously through the year. Only Britain, under Prime Minister Tony Blair, remained a strong and committed supporter of the moves for a military strike against Iraq. And even Blair faced strong and growing opposition from within his own ruling Labor Party for his stand.