Could the next targets be closer to home?

By GREG ANSLEY

Untill this week Australian security planners regarded the most likely threat to the leaders who will next month gather in Brisbane for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting to be the wide coalition of protesters gathering under the banner of anti-globalisation.

But the attack on America has notched security concerns considerably higher as the implications of the horrendous bombings strike home a hemisphere away.

Australia has already committed itself to provide whatever help the United States needs to track down and exact vengeance on the organisers of the kamikaze attacks, and is a staunch American ally: among the first to commit to the Gulf War - twice - and one of the few to support Washington's plans for a missile shield.

"It's terribly important for us to make it very clear that we stand shoulder to shoulder with the US," said Defence Minister Peter Reith.

"This is an attack on not only the basic freedoms in the US but an attack on freedoms everywhere, and there can't be any shadow of doubt about Australia's commitment to courses of action to bring these criminals to justice."

While Australia and New Zealand are considered to be well down the list of potential terrorist targets, new security meetings were rapidly called in Canberra and Brisbane this week as Washington prepared for a worldwide assault on terrorism.

Terrorism experts said the United States was in effect declaring war against all terrorists - and particularly against the Islamic fundamentalists suspected of being behind this week's atrocities - and as in any war the enemy could be expected to score some hits.

CHOGM looms as a target of opportunity and, while Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson said the conference should not be cancelled, its future will be high on the agenda for the Australian Cabinet's national security committee.

Even apart from CHOGM, there are concerns that in a global confrontation with terrorism, and especially with the intense security that has been clamped across most of the Western world since Tuesday, the war could move to softer targets.

Terrorists have used this option before: the twin bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in August 1998, killing more than 300 people, and the attack on the American destroyer USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden last October.

There have been other attacks in unsuspecting countries by extremists from a range of causes.

In our region, the Filipino Islamic separatists of the Abu Sayyaf Group have kidnapped and killed tourists from Malaysian resorts. Elsewhere, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad bombed the Egyptian embassy in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad and tried to destroy the US embassy in Albania, and Algeria's Armed Islamic Group conducted a series of bombings in France and planned to attack last year's Paris-to-Dakar road rally.

The Turkish Kurdistan Workers Party operates across Europe and the Middle East, Lebanon's radical Hizbollah attacked the Israeli embassy and cultural centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Iran's Mujahideen-e Khalq Organisation has raided Iranian embassies in 13 countries.

Australia has not escaped.

A bomb planted outside the Sydney Hilton during CHOGM in 1978 killed three men, Palestinians bombed a Jewish club and the Israeli consulate, and Kurdish separatists bombed the Turkish consulate and assassinated the consul in Sydney.

New Zealand was attacked by state-sponsored terrorism in the French bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland, and last year was drawn into the peripheries of the global war waged by Islamic extremists.

Last year an operation by police and the Security Intelligence Service uncovered evidence in Auckland of a plot to bomb the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney during the Olympics.

Yossef Bondansky, director of the US Congressional task force on terrorism and unconventional warfare, later told the Herald that New Zealand was being used as a staging post by terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden.

A report by terrorism expert Kenneth Katzman of the Library of Congress' Congressional Research Service, which was completed just before the latest events pointed to "a rise in the scope of threat posed by the independent network of exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden".

Katzman said it is "highly likely" that bin Laden and his followers have acquired some of the shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that the United States provided to Muslim militants who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

He said bin Laden was estimated to have about $300 million in personal financial assets with which he funds his network and as many as 3000 Islamic militant operatives.

Cells of bin Laden's Al' Qaeda (the base) network have been identified or suspected in countries throughout the Middle East and Africa, in Asian nations like Malaysia and the Philippines, in Ecuador, Bosnia, Albania, Britain, Canada and "allegedly inside the United States itself", the report said.

"All the other groups have their own local targets," said Canberra-based terrorism expert Brigadier Malcolm Mackenzie-Orr.

"The IRA hate the English, the ETA hate the Spanish, and the Kurds hate the Turks.

"But this lot, the Islamic jihad, they'll take on anybody who offends them - and they're very touchy."

Dr Rod Lyon, a lecturer in terrorism at the University of Queensland, believes this week's tragedy has put America on a war footing, setting aside the legalities of criminal investigation and treating it as an issue of international security demanding a military response.

"I think you're going to see a war waged in some ways in asymmetric form," he said.

"On one side will be an international coalition using high-technology regular troops but pulling behind it much of the legitimacy of the international community as it can find.

"On the other will be the nebulous, multi-headed structure of an organisation that specialises in covert terrorism, never meeting the enemy in direct battle if it can avoid it, taking its reprisals on civilians rather than soldiers and seeking publicity rather than victories on the battlefield."

Even by siding with the US, New Zealand and Australia are not considered to rate highly as hard targets, although the possibility of attacks on US bases, installations, diplomatic posts and businesses in both countries has led to dramatically increased security.

Last week, after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the US State Department warned its citizens of increased worldwide danger, urging all Americans abroad to keep low profiles and to take such precautions as varying routes and distrusting any mail from unfamiliar sources.

In Australia a security blanket was wrapped around US and Israeli embassies, consulates and other facilities, with similar precautions taken in New Zealand.

Nowhere, a CIA analysis of the global risk to Americans said, is entirely safe now.

"The newer breed of terrorist literally circles the globe and hatches plots as far apart as Manila and New York," it said.

"The larger, more established terrorist groups have developed vast transnational infrastructures which (they) use for logistical, financial and other forms of support."

Bin Laden's Al' Qaeda group already has connections in this region, through links with Islamic fundamentalists who either fought the Russians in Afghanistan or who have associations with others who did.

There are known links between bin Laden and Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, and concern is growing that Indonesia's porous borders, large Islamic population and a growing flow of Afghani refugees may be creating a new staging post for terrorism.

While most Afghani asylum-seekers are fleeing the tryanny of the fundamentalist Taleban regime, there are fears that others may use their desperation as a cloak.

"That's the way they do it," said Mackenzie-Orr.

Lyon said that the movement of terrorists had also become easier with globalisation.

More open borders, easier and electronic movement of currency and huge volumes of trade had made it easier to slip men and materials through customs and immigration.

"The large flows are where you hide," said Lyon.

Two weeks ago in Jakarta Jim Kelly, US State Department assistant-secretary and No 2 to Secretary of State Colin Powell, warned that loose control over the movement of people into and out of Indonesia was creating a potential staging post for extremists.

This, said Australia's Reith, was also a major concern for his nation.

And analysts warned that in an international war against terrorism the enemy will be both harder to find and more lethal.

New York showed that the pool of fundamentalists prepared to kill themselves had extended beyond the poor and desperate to embrace intelligent, articulate and educated people who were ready to penetrate the West, and who possibly already lived there.

"Bin Laden's group is so amorphous," said Lyon, "and the connections within it so nebulous, that you're always going to to be hard-pressed to point the full finger of responsibility."

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