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Inter Press Service
December 3, 2001
US Seen Resisting Cooperation On Terrorism, Arms
By Jim Wurst
Despite appearances that Washington is working with the international community in its war against terrorism, experts say this and another defining foreign-policy issue - nuclear-arms talks with Russia - are still dangerously wedded to the idea that the United States can pursue its goals without regard for others.
As evidence of this unilateralism - and its potentially disastrous consequences for South Asia - Columbia University scholar Yogesh Chandrani points to the George W Bush administration's conduct of its military campaign in Afghanistan.
Washington is putting Pakistan - and by extension India and the rest of South Asia - at risk of further violence and destabilization, Chandrani warns. This is because it has failed to meet Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf's conditions for supporting the US war against Afghanistan's Taliban rulers. Musharraf had urged Washington to halt its bombing campaign during the holy month of Ramadan and to prevent the Northern Alliance from entering Kabul and Kunduz, he adds.
Denying the Pakistani leader's requests has served to undermine his government. "The war has been a strategic disaster for Musharraf," Chandrani says, because Washington's actions have further exposed Islamabad to violent backlash by Pashtun extremists in Pakistan who share ethnic identity and kinship ties with the Taliban.
On nuclear-weapons talks with Russia, retired General Vladimir Dvorkin of the Academy of Military Sciences in Moscow says Washington's insistence that bilateral arms-control agreements with Moscow are not legally binding - and are therefore subject to abandonment at any time - will "lead to an international legal vacuum".
Dvorkin says permanent resolution of the balance of nuclear weaponry between the two powers "needs a framework agreement binding on both parties. It will be difficult, if not impossible, if we do not have a binding document in our hands."
Michael Klare, a US academic and author of the book Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, says Washington's stance suggests that the US goal remains "permanent unipolar dominance".
The US and Russian analysts are critical of the arms-control agreement that came out of Bush's talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin at Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. While they welcome the commitment to cut long-range nuclear forces to about 1,700 warheads, from about 6,000 each at present, they note that the 10 years it will take to reduce to this level show that the two sides feel no sense of urgency. The reduced figure could have been set even lower, they add.
Rather than look at the Crawford summit as a victory of cooperation, they argue that the decisions were framed by the ongoing Bush administration insistence that it not be bound by any international rules.
Pavel Podvig of the Moscow Institute of Physics calls it "a disturbing sign" that Bush also has refused to destroy the warheads that will be removed from the weapons. "What's more important: You see warheads dismantled or you have the capacity to build up to 2,500 warheads?" he asks, further noting that no independent verification of actual reductions is envisaged.
In Klare's view, the United States has "no incentive to negotiate equal reductions". Rather, it desires "only to sign accords that perpetuate its overwhelming superiority".
"The US will only doom itself if it does not become a part of the international community," he warns.
Some observers acknowledge at least one bright spot in US-Russian arms control, however: the Cooperative Threat Reduction, a project started in the mid-1990s both to safeguard and destroy some of the nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet Union.
Paul Walker, of the non-governmental group Global Green USA, says the US$4 billion that has been spent so far has eliminated 500 warheads plus missiles, missile launch silos and bombers, as well as chemical weapons and production facilities.
Nevertheless, US unilateralism on arms control and the war against terrorism evince an official mindset in which the only worthwhile international cooperation is that which is controlled by Washington, says Michael Ratner, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a civil-liberties group. Ratner describes the US administration's moves since the September 11 terrorist attacks here and at the Pentagon as "a continuation of old policies: war as a solution, superpower dominance, little regard for international institutions such as the UN, and no compromising sovereignty in the name of international security".
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