WWW III ON THE HORIZON-SAYS GENERALS

From AMERICAN FREEDOM NEWS

PENTAGON SAYS--Excerpt:

The prospect of Pakistan being taken over by Islamic extremists is especially worrisome because it possesses nuclear weapons. The betting among military strategists is that India, another nuclear power, would not stand idly by, if it appeared that the Pakistani nuclear arsenal were about to fall into the hands of extremists.

A preemptive action by India to destroy Pakistan's nuclear stockpile could provoke a new war on the subcontinent. The U.S. military has conducted more than 25 war games involving a confrontation between a nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, and each has resulted in nuclear war, said retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, an expert on strategic games.

Having both the United States and India fighting Muslims would play into the hands of bin Laden, warned Mackubin Owens, a strategist at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. "He could point out once again that this is the new crusade," Owens said.

The next step that worries experts is the regional effect of turmoil in Pakistan. If its government fell, the experts fear, other Muslim governments friendly to the United States, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, might follow suit. "The ultimate nightmare is a pan-Islamic regime that possesses both oil and nuclear weapons," said Harlan Ullman, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Ullman argued that the arrival of U.S. troops in Pakistan to fight the anti-terrorism war in Afghanistan could inadvertently help bin Laden achieve his goal of sparking an anti-American revolt in the country.

Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University, said it is possible "that we are sliding toward a summer-of-1914 sequence of events" -- when a cascading series of international incidents spun out of control and led to World War I.

Eliot Cohen, a professor of strategy at Johns Hopkins University, agreed. "We could find ourselves engaged in a whole range of conflicts, from events you can't anticipate now," he said.

Both Bacevich and Cohen are former colleagues of the leading strategic thinker at the Pentagon, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who previously was dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins.

Wolfowitz is said to be the leading advocate within the administration of attacking Iraq as part of an anti-terror campaign. President Bush has threatened to take the campaign to countries the United States accuses of supporting terrorism, but the administration lately has avoided discussing what targets might come after Afghanistan, and whether Iraq might be next.

At the same time, the administration has made it clear it expects the war to extend well beyond Afghanistan. "We will do whatever it takes to defeat terror abroad, wherever it grows or wherever it hides," Bush said in California on Wednesday. "This nation will defeat terror wherever we find it across the globe."

The Air Force already is starting to identify possible targets for air strikes after the Afghanistan campaign, said one person familiar with the thinking of that service's leadership. "We've got targets after this," he said. He hinted that Iraq is next, in light of the recent spate of anthrax attacks by mail in the United States. "Where do you think this anthrax is coming from?"

U.S. law enforcement officials, however, have said they have no conclusive evidence about the source of the anthrax used in the attacks. Talking too specifically about what comes after Afghanistan could reduce support for the U.S.-led campaign and even destabilize Pakistan, one veteran diplomat warned, noting that many Muslim countries backing Washington have said the war should be limited to the Taliban and to bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network. If the Pentagon isn't more careful, he said, "you blow Pakistan sky high, and the mullahs will take over the missiles."

Even if none of those fears about the fates of foreign countries are realized, the new war could impose a high cost on American society, some experts said. If the United States ends up fighting an entire generation of radical Islamic terrorists, predicted Richard Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina, "we'll end up in a perpetual war."

Americans could find themselves living like Israelis and Palestinians do, putting up with "oppressive security everywhere" and limits on personal freedoms that change the tone of everyday life, he said.