WASHINGTON: One year after President George W. Bush won his first big battle in his “war against terrorism,” the balance sheet looks decidedly mixed.

It was a year ago this week that Northern Alliance forces and their US advisers swept into Kabul, handing Bush his first major victory in the war he declared against Al Qaeda and the regimes that support it in the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

While the Taliban appears to have been thoroughly routed as a military force throughout Afghanistan since then, Bush’s larger short-term ambitions to secure Afghanistan and hunt down Al Qaeda — not to mention to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to the Arab world — remain unrealized.

Last week’s broadcast by Qatar’s Al Jazeera television of a new audiotape of Osama bin Laden threatening the United States and other western nations came as a bitter reminder that the man whom Bush vowed to bring to justice “dead or live” remains at large.

Given Osama’s charismatic leadership, one national-security expert who worked on the Al Qaeda file under former President Bill Clinton described his re-emergence as a “a real moment of triumph for Islamic radicals”. Other experts, including US intelligence officials, said it presaged new and possibly spectacular attacks against western targets.

Almost as troublesome to US officials, have been the mostly pin-prick attacks carried out by Al Qaeda or its sympathizers over the past few months across a huge swathe of territory, running from the southern Arabian Peninsula to the southern Philippines.

Last month’s more-spectacular attacks, including the bombing of a French oil tanker off Yemen and the night-club bombing in Bali, Indonesia that killed more than 180 people, have also naturally raised alarms, even as they helped persuade reluctant governments in San’a and Jakarta to cooperate more closely with Washington.

This week, two US soldiers in Kuwait were seriously wounded by gunshots fired by a police officer who fled into Saudi Arabia, adding to a growing list of anti-US incidents in a country that, aside from Israel, is probably Washington’s closest ally in the region.

Two other US soldiers participating in exercises in Kuwait were gunned down by presumed Al Qaeda sympathizers there last month, increasing US concern about future attacks, particularly as tens of thousands of US forces pour into the emirate in preparation for an invasion of Iraq over the next six to eight weeks.

These incidents, combined with bin Laden’s re-emergence, have emboldened some critics of Bush’s fixation with Iraq, most notably the Democrat who defeated him in the popular vote in the 2000 elections, former Vice President Al Gore.

In a whirlwind series of televised and published interviews over the past two weeks, Gore, who says he has not decided whether to seek the Democratic presidential nomination for 2004, has repeatedly attacked Bush on precisely this point.

Afghanistan “is falling back into chaos”, he told the New York Times. “Osama is back. Al-Qaeda has reconstituted itself and, according to the director of central intelligence, possesses just as severe a threat to us right now as it did during the weeks leading up to Sept 11.”

“Meanwhile, the president has been out on the campaign trail, beating the drums of war against Saddam Hussein,” Gore added.

While the administration has pooh-poohed these complaints as “politics as usual,” it appears that Bush aides are increasingly sensitive about them.

Pentagon officials have stressed to reporters in recent days that they have dispatched US combat troops and civil affairs specialists to key areas outside Kabul to try to extend the central government’s authority beyond the capital and into key areas under the control of local warlords and regional power- brokers who filled the political vacuum after the Taliban’s collapse. They also insist that they have now entered the “reconstruction” phase of stabilising the country.

And it was no accident that the administration chose to tell reporters just before the evening TV news on Thursday — the same day that Gore appeared on several national television talk shows and the Times published his interview — that they had captured Osama’s top Gulf commander, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Although al-Nashiri was actually nabbed three weeks ago, the networks obligingly ran it as their top story.

While al-Nashiri’s capture, and the assassination by a Predator drone missile of another senior Al Qaeda official in the remote desert of Yemen earlier this month mark clear advances in the struggle against that network, more worrisome to some analysts are the signs that the war against terrorism could fuel a broader conflict, especially if the United States invades Iraq.

Spectacular gains by religious parties in Pakistan, Turkey, and Morocco (which also reports an alarming rise in the number of baby boys named Osama) are raising concerns among Arabists here, who point as well to this month’s harsh crackdown against religious leaders by Jordanian forces in the southern town of Maan, close to the Saudi border.

Adding fuel to the fire over the past year are remarks by prominent US Christian evangelists, including several — such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell — closely associated with Bush himself, crudely denigrating Islam and the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH). While Bush himself has denounced such attacks, they have nonetheless contributed to a growing sense that the war risks become a “clash of civilizations”.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.