The War Will Last Long.

Virtually every high ranking official in the US, from President Bush down, has been reiterating at every opportunity that the war against terror will not end with the crushing of the Taliban or Al Qaida. Speaking in New Delhi on Nov. 5, a couple of weeks after the bombardment of Afghanistan started, Secretary Rumsfeld said: "The US efforts against terrorism are global. The effort against terrorism is a global one and involves terrorists wherever they are. This is much bigger than Afghanistan. Afghanistan happens to be the first problem because al-Qaida is there. It has to be stopped before it kills thousands of people... we will be pursuing terrorist networks wherever we find them".

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed the world. Planned in the Middle East with 15 of the 19 hijackers from Saudi Arabia, it defined a new threat to America in a way that no amount of bombings outside US territory could have. American government officials have since then been saying that the war will not be purely on a military dimension, but will also include diplomatic, intelligence and financial dimensions.

In other words, the war against terrorism now has the full focus of the American political, intellectual, military and economic power. The US plans to carry it to its conclusion, like they did with the cold war against the Soviet Union, at first sight a more formidable enemy. But this time, the US recognises that the "enemy" is different. It cannot be defined as a single country, or even as a straightforward ideology - since it is derived from a particular interpretation of religion. In that sense, the war may be more complex than the one against the Soviet Union (see News Service of this week).

In terms of intellectual, political (i.e. diplomacy) and economic power, it is quite clear what the US is preparing to do. It will make every effort to deploy all its capacities in these areas to ensure that Islamists or any other terrorists never again target the American mainland. This will mean, for the countries where terrorists have safe haven or their ideology is generated, a period of intense pressure until the US is satisfied that these threats are removed.

The diplomatic aspects of the war against terror have been underway since Sept. 11. Economic power will be brought to bear in the form of sanctions, co-ordinated with allies, against countries that fail to fall in the American line in the war against terrorism. The intellectual dimension has also been at work since Sept. 11, along various fronts. On the one hand, the US is clearly lining itself up for a multi-pronged war against terror, which will be directed mainly against countries in the Arab/Islamic worlds. On the other, the war is being identified as not being "against Islam". It is a tricky balance, especially when the terrorist groups are identifying themselves with Islam.

The future military aspects of the war against terrorism remain the most vague. The US has hinted that Iraq may be the next target, but there have been reports that it may target some militant groups in Somalia as well. There have also been reports that its jets have been in action against certain tribal groups in Yemen. Observers believe that the US will not engage in all out warfare as in Afghanistan in the second phase of the war against terror, but that there would be various "pinprick strikes" against targets across the Middle East and beyond.

A critical feature in the war against terror will be the targeting of the financial assets and networks of the terror groups. The assumption is that once the money dries up, many of the recruits to the terror networks, who regard it as employment as much as they do it for ideological reasons, will simply drop out of these groupings and thus render them ineffective. The problem, however, is to target the financial networks. New legislation and multilateral regulations are being planned, and some already have been worked out, aimed at tightening the net on financial transactions. A number of Islamic charities have already been put on the terrorism blacklist of the US.

Yet this process, too, would be long and some observers say, ultimately pointless. This is because such networks do not thrive on formal structures. Islamic charities that have been blacklisted can simply change their names and sponsors, lie low for some time, and then resume their activities. Terror groups tend to use informal financing and money transfer channels - such as the famous "hawala" system of South Asia.

(In hawala transactions, sums of money - both large and small - are sent around the world on a handshake and a code word. Normally, records of transactions are kept only until the deal is completed, then they are destroyed. The hawala system is based on an apparently simple operation, especially because no cash moves across a border or through an electronic transfer system, the places where authorities are most likely to spot the transaction or maintain a record of it).

Bin Ladin's Al Qaida, for instance, is said to have relied extensively on the hawala system, which depends only on the basis of trust and telephone calls. The observers say there is simply no way of fully regulating, or even monitoring all such transactions. But tightening the financial net will nevertheless be one useful component in the war against terror, and this net will extend to the Arab World in general and the oil rich countries of the Persian Gulf in particular.

Such measures are likely to be put in place and become effective over a period of years, not weeks or months. The net will widen to include those in the Middle East who come under any form of suspicion, and not merely those who are considered to be in the process of planning terror strikes.