Report: Quarter of World in Conflicts

Posted on Mon, Dec. 30, 2002 NEDRA PICKLER Associated Press

WASHINGTON - About a quarter of the world's countries struggled with armed conflict this year, mostly low-intensity battles against terrorists or guerrillas, the kind of conflict that poses the greatest threat to global stability, according to a report released Monday.

It says the U.S. military is ill-equipped for such warfare.

The report, issued by the conservative National Defense Council Foundation, found 53 countries struggled with conflict during 2002, six fewer than last year. But F. Andy Messing Jr., the author, said an even deadlier threat is posed by potential foes of the United States secretly developing chemical, nuclear and biological weapons.

"Right now the Pentagon is fighting wars that have morphed over the past few years," said Messing, executive director of the Alexandria, Va., think tank and a former Army Special Forces officer. "But they still have a predominance of conventional warfare thinking, and that's just not satisfactory."

The foundation annually surveys 193 nations.

Its report suggests the United States should enhance intelligence activities with pre-emptive special operations, thoroughly vetted assassinations and psychological and anti-guerrilla operations. Messing said the goal should be to use the lowest amount of force to put an end to a conflict.

"The reason this is important is the proliferation of nuclear weapons; you don't want to trip the nuclear trip wire," he said.

Christopher Hellman, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information, a more liberal research group that has issued reports skeptical of increased military spending, agrees that the United States is not equipped to deal with low-intensity conflict. He said, however, that pre-emptive action, especially the assassination of political figures would set dangerous precedents.

"We have studiously avoided assassinations for a very simple reason: by and large, our political leadership is way more vulnerable to that type of activity than the Saddam Husseins of the world," he said.

The report said sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East remain the most war-prone areas. War in Afghanistan spilled over into other South-Central Asian countries "like a cancer in the region" to create growing unrest there.

Iraq is considered the site of the most dangerous conflict because development of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons "is almost a foregone conclusion," the report said.

The foundation's report added 10 countries this year to its list of conflict zones, including Jordan, Kuwait, North Korea and Venezuela. It removed 16 nations from the list, including the United States, Malaysia, Macedonia, Sierra Leone and Yugoslavia.

Its criteria for conflict include political, economic and social unrest as well as military.

The report said the "stupidest conflict" occurred in Nigeria, where a newspaper reporter wrote that Islam's founding prophet Mohammed would have approved of staging the Miss World pageant in that African nation and might have wanted to marry a contestant. The story sparked Muslim rioting and Christian retaliation in which more than 200 people were killed. The pageant was relocated to London.

On the Net: National Defense Council Foundation: www.ndcf.org