New York Times
Few leaders have a tougher balancing act these days than Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. Since January, he has built an impressive record of going after groups linked to terrorism. But because of the continuing ability of terrorists to strike back with such actions as the recent attack on a Protestant church in Islamabad and the murder of Daniel Pearl, General Musharraf sometimes appears not to be doing enough. President Bush continues to support the general and credit his efforts. For now, that backing seems justified. But the United States must be alert to possible backsliding and keep pressure on the general to return democracy to Pakistan.
General Musharraf's plan to try to legitimize his military rule with a referendum this year is unacceptable and should be discouraged by Washington. He needs to hold free and fair elections.
Since its independence and partition with India in 1947, Pakistan has been ruled mostly by military dictatorships. As a result, its political system has never been allowed to mature. Instead, it has been corrupted by organized criminal groups, extremist Islamic organizations financed from overseas and a powerful but covert military organization known as the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or I.S.I. In the 1980's, the United States did business with all these groups, as the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia poured billions of dollars through Pakistan into the anti-Russian rebellion in neighboring Afghanistan. In some respects, the United States is now facing deformities in Pakistan that it helped create. ...
President Bush has bolstered General Musharraf's regime by relieving Pakistan of some debts and opening American markets for Pakistani textile exports. An urgent order of business is to equip Pakistan's law enforcement agencies with computers and other tools to keep track of extremists. General Musharraf should also be encouraged to fulfill his promise to hold parliamentary elections this October. Standing with Pakistan now is the best way for the United States to root out terrorist groups and bring stability to the nation and the region.
Boston Globe
Mass murderers who rule nations invariably have many collaborators. These include not only the inner circles that surround a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Pol Pot but also the leaders of other countries who, for reasons of state, pretend not to notice or not to be able to stop the massacres and the genocides.
So it has been with Saddam Hussein. The world knew about his use of poison gas to murder 4,000 Kurds in the northern Iraqi village of Halabja in 1988. It is less well known that Halabja was but one of many Kurdish villages that were systematically attacked with chemical and perhaps also biological weapons.
These atrocities were part of a genocidal campaign against Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s, a campaign Saddam called Al Anfal, a cynical allusion to a Koranic verse about plundering an enemy. In that campaign, men and boys were rounded up and transported to the western desert of Iraq, where they were exterminated. Forty thousand Kurdish villages were then bulldozed and wiped off the map. Estimates of how many Kurds were killed vary from 50,000 to 180,000.
Since genocide cannot be over-reported, The New Yorker deserves praise for an article in its March 25 issue by reporter Jeff Goldberg, who recounts the horrors of Saddam's chemical weapons attacks and the massacres of Al Anfal. The story has been told before in books and human rights reports and Senate committee reports but to little avail.
The same article describes a terrorist group known as Ansar al-Islam that has perpetrated massacres in the Kurdish safe haven of northern Iraq and is allegedly backed by both Osama bin Laden's al Qaida network and Saddam's security services. Composed of both Kurdish Islamists opposed to more secular Kurds and Arabs from al Qaida camps in Afghanistan, Ansar al-Islam raises the nightmarish possibility of opportunistic cooperation between bin Laden's religious fanatics and Saddam's secular police state.
This is a link the Bush administration needs to investigate, but the true danger of allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power has less to do with one shadowy terrorist group than with the meaning of Kurdish women and children bleeding from the eyes and expiring from nerve gas in their villages. If the Arab leaders who gather Thursday for a summit meeting in Beirut keep their shameful silence about Saddam's genocidal regime, they will be serving as his collaborators.
Washington Times
After decades of war over diamonds, oil and ideology (or its pretexts), Angola seems to be poised for peace. Sadly, the Angolan government was unwilling to advance this goal until it could do so over the corpse of UNITA rebel leader Jonas Savimbi. Now that the government has reached its publicly-stated goal of mortally wounding its opposition by killing Savimbi, it is finally prepared to de-escalate hostilities.
This week, the Angolan army and UNITA rebels agreed to begin cease-fire talks. Hopefully, the two sides will soon pledge to stop the killing that has ravaged a country that otherwise has rich prospects for economic development. The international community should cheer and spur on progress in negotiations between the ruling MPLA and UNITA, the military and political group Savimbi once headed. It would also behoove the large oil companies doing business in the country to voice their desire to see Angola establish the enduring stability needed for making large-scale investments.
But countries in the region and beyond must be wary of the MPLA's penchant for repressive crackdowns and should offer help in establishing monitoring safeguards that could verify both sides' compliance with agreements reached. Also, UNITA must soon state unequivocally that it is committed to pursuing its goals through democratic means. The government, meanwhile, should quickly establish immunity for all of those individuals involved in Angola's civil war, which has lasted more than 25 years. It should also integrate former UNITA fighters into Angola's military for a transitional one or two years.
The MPLA can no longer scapegoat Savimbi for the country's war and economic woes. And, given the government's recent peaceful overtures, UNITA has little justification to continue its military struggle. Angolans have seen enough war and misery. They deserve a share in the fruits of their country's riches.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Foreign aid has always been a neglected stepchild in the world of public policy. It receives a fair amount of rhetorical support from politicians in Washington. But when it comes time to vote on money for the foreign aid account, that support quickly evaporates, with the result that U.S. foreign aid programs have been, and remain, grossly underfunded.
This month, President Bush took a fresh look at foreign aid and outlined a strategy for making it a lot more effective. And if Bush succeeds in making foreign aid more effective, he can't help but make it more popular, too.
Too often, aid has been doled out to countries not in a position to spend dollars wisely; the countries didn't have effective or honest leaders, bureaucratic systems to dole out the money efficiently, roads or rivers to get the aid to where it was needed, telephones to help coordinate the relief effort or accounting systems to keep track of where the money went. ...
But in spite of years of effort by the United States and others, half the world's population still lives on less than $2 a day; for billions of people, especially in Africa and the Islamic world, poverty is spreading and per capita income is falling.
It will require a truly heroic effort for the administration and Congress not to use foreign aid as a political favor and to distribute it, instead, to economically deserving countries strictly on the basis of objective criteria. But that is what Bush is promising, and he should be given whatever help he needs to make good on his promise. He aims to replace a form of charity that is too often naive and futile with a foreign aid strategy that is tough-minded and effective.
(Compiled by United Press International.)
