June 14, 2002	Friday	Rabi-us-Sani 2, 1423

WASHINGTON: There are wishful thinkers, some of them government leaders around the world, who seem to believe that the ‘war of terrorism’ will end when Osama bin Laden is captured or killed.

For those people, Robert Oakley has some bad news. He is a former US ambassador to Pakistan (1988-1991) and head of the US State Department’s Office of Counter-terrorism (1984-1988). Oakley said he thinks that the ‘war against terrorism’, in some ways, will be more difficult than World War II and might last longer.

He bases that assertion on his assessment that Osama bin Laden’s real genius lies in corporation-building. Oakley, in a meeting with Washington correspondents, said Osama has erected a global organization by managing a series of mergers with other disaffected Islamic groups and moulding them into his corporate empire.

As chairman of the board, Osama supplies the general direction and inspirational drive, but, if he were captured or killed, the terrorist corporation would continue, just as any corporate empire endures after its chairman resigns or dies. The war, therefore, would not end with Osama’s demise, Oakley said.

It is becoming clear to government and former government experts that the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington were the result of a massive, continuing failure of intelligence on the part of the United States and its allies. The United States bears the largest share of the blame because, according to these experts, the US government in the past decade has deliberately but mistakenly blurred its own vision in the Middle East.

Beginning with the Clinton administration in 1993, the State Department and other government agencies systematically began purging their ranks of experts on the Arab world, the so-called Arabists.

There were vague accusations that the Arabists were suffering from clienteles, being unduly sympathetic or romantic about the Arab world and culture. There were even charges that the Arabists, as a class, were inherently anti-Semitic, or at least insensitive to the dangers that face Israel in a hostile Middle East.

The Arab experts in the US government were replaced by political appointees who had close links to the Israeli lobby in Washington.

As a result, according to Oakley and other experts, the United States lost the people who had the feel for what was going on in the Middle East.

The intelligence agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency replaced the Middle East intelligence analysts with electronic wizardry — satellites that could eavesdrop on thousands of radio and telephone conversations around the world.

But there was nobody left in government in Washington who could put all of that information together into some kind of coherent whole and draw some kind of conclusion about what was going on and how that would affect the United States and its allies.

As the process was going on in the American media, especially television, the major US networks closed down nearly all of their overseas news bureaus as a money-saving move. In case of a major breaking story overseas, US — or London-based correspondents take a few days to do a couple of reports and then fly home again.

There were no resident Third World correspondents to serve as local experts, a kind of informal early warning system that would alert the nation’s leaders and citizens of the subtle change in climate where a global corporate terrorist entity was created and flourished.

That single-minded entity operated in total secrecy for about four years around the world, raising and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and training suicide pilots in flying schools.

All of this went on without anybody in the US government having much of a clue until the terrible wake-up call on September 11.—dpa