Death of al-Zarqawi is not a cure-all

WASHINGTON -- One can only feel a sorrowful elation at the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq: Elation because the unspeakable monster is gone, and sorrow that such a being could exist among us.
But when one widens one's attention to the region -- and beyond -- one finds changes suddenly apparent almost everywhere, and they are not happy ones.
Start with Afghanistan, which was America's most important target after 9/11 because the al-Qaida terrorists were trained there. Are we at least "winning" there, where so many already hated the Taliban?
To the contrary. Virtually every analyst there points to a dangerous resurgence of the Taliban on the Afghan-Pakistan border this spring. The Afghan government is even considering arming the old tribal groups across southern Afghanistan that the American-backed and supposedly modernized Afghan government was specifically formed to replace. Experts say such armed groups would only become militias commanded by the old warlords, weakening an already fragile state.
The prominent Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, whose writings on the movement are considered definitive, asked recently in The New York Review of Books: "How is it ... that Afghanistan is near collapse once again? To put it briefly, what has gone wrong has been the invasion of Iraq: Washington's refusal to take state-building in Afghanistan seriously and instead waging a fruitless war in Iraq ... Inside the scaffolding, there is still only the barest shell."
Somalia
Then look at Somalia, that essentially stateless mass of people on the Horn of Africa who have lived in anarchy since the disastrous American invasion in the early '90s. Last week, Islamic radicals calling themselves the Islamic Courts Union took over the war-ravaged place, with hundreds of non-Somali and even some non-African insurgents fighting with them.
In the "Can you possibly believe THIS one?" category, the United States has been paying the same warlords who killed Americans and drove us out in 1994 to defeat the Islamists there. Instead, the warlords were defeated.
As John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group, who has studied Somalia deeply and firsthand, wrote recently in The Washington Post: "Now 'our' warlords -- and by extension our counterterrorism strategy -- have been dealt a crushing defeat by the Islamists, as the latter have consolidated control of Mogadishu. Our short-term interest in locating al-Qaida suspects has thus been undermined, and the risk of a new safe haven being created for international terrorists has been greatly increased."
In pro-Western Jordan, the situation is also getting more tricky. Prince Hassan, the brother of the late King Hussein, told me over lunch here in Washington: "The Iraqis and the Palestinians are buying up large pieces of land in Jordan." He indicated that the war was greatly endangering the kingdom.
Everywhere you look in the Middle East, the indicators are negative for America. Far from the Iraq war making the region "safe for democracy," in virtually every major country it is the Islamic radicals who are clearly gaining.
Bangladesh is on the brink of an Islamic takeover. Reforms that were widely broadcast by King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia last year are now seriously faltering -- a stock market crash and a reinvigorated Islamist lobby are the major reasons. In Lebanon, hundreds of Islamist fighters have returned from Iraq and are sure to add to the trouble there.
War on Islam
As Anthony Shadid, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post correspondent, wrote from Lebanon recently: "The war is building a profound legacy across the Arab world: fear and suspicion over Iraq's repercussions, a generation that casts the Bush administration's policy as an unquestioned war on Islam, and a subterranean reserve of men who ... declare that the fight against the United States in Iraq is a model for the future."
Even Muslim women, who might be expected to look to Western values for some freedom for themselves, are turning away from the U.S. influence because of the Iraq war, and also because they perceive the U.S. as attempting, in the old colonial fashion, to impose Western values upon them. That was the finding of a recent worldwide Gallup poll of Muslim women.
And even as al-Zarqawi's remains lie in an undisclosed location, Jordanian intelligence reports that the man had trained at least several hundred fighters in Iraq -- and sent them back to their own Muslim homelands to continue the "jihad."
Universal Press Syndicate