Europe's newspapers Monday tempered approval of the US-led air strikes against Afghanistan with widespread concern at the possibility of terrorist counter-attacks.
"Britain -- through its lead role in last night's bombing -- will inevitably be a possible target," wrote Britain's left-leaning Guardian of the missile and air strikes carried out by forces from US and Britain, Washington's main ally in the assault.
London's Financial Times stressed that humanitarian efforts were vital as well as military action.
"In emphasizing that this would be a sustained campaign, the US president showed he understood that the shooting war must be followed by a long and difficult political and humanitarian engagement," the FT said.
French media also gave wide support for the assault on suspected terrorist networks and their supporters in Afghanistan, but worried about civilian casualties.
The left-of-center French newspaper La Liberation wrote: "Yes to strikes against the Taliban, yes to everything that can help isolate the bin Laden network."
But it warned: "Let us not say that a devastated country like Afghanistan has thousands of targets that call for sustained, massive bombings that would clearly victimize a people that have held been held hostage for too long, both by foreign powers and the country's own warlords."
The conservative newspaper Le Figaro praised US President George W. Bush: "In less than a month ... George W. Bush, who some said was elected unjustly, drab, even narrow-minded, has asserted himself as a strong and capable president."
But the Communist daily L'Humanite was critical of the attacks.
"Is it not the Afghan people, already reduced to slavery and martyred by the odious Taliban regime, and at war for some 20 years, that will pay the price?" it asked.
There was concern in the German media that the international coalition against terrorism might not hold up under the strain of the US-led assault.
"This will not be easy for the 'frontline state' Pakistan. And the Arab countries, too, will have to keep a sharp eye on potential stirrers of unrest in their own countries," warned the conservative Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung.
The liberal Sueddeutsche Zeitung expressed concern about the future of Pakistan -- once the main backer of Afghanistan's radical Taliban regime but now a cautious ally of the US action -- saying it had the choice of being "a developing, secular, democratized state which respects the Muslim identity of its people", or "an Islamic republic with all its consequences."
Italy's newspapers pondered a possible counter-attack promised by Osama bin Laden, the prime target for his alleged role behind the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
The Corriere della Sera said new attacks on US targets and elsewhere were considered a certainty, while the liberal broadsheet La Repubblica warned that bin Laden's followers would continue their work "as long as Americans violate Muslim territory and Israelis occupy Palestine."
"Terrorism is not finished. Other men will repeat actions like those of Manhattan and Washington," it said.
The center-left Swiss newspaper 24 Heures said the elimination of the Taliban regime and Bin Laden's training camps would doubtless prompt sighs of relief in the west.
But it warned against an "anti-Western wave that the war has started to create among the disinherited of the Muslim world."
In the former Yugoslav state of Croatia, the independent newspaper Vjesnik noted: "Bin Laden achieved almost everything he had planned with 500,000 US dollars and 19 people. What if he had invested 20 million dollars and trained 300 suicide commandos, turning them into "sleepers" ...?"
The conservative Austrian newspaper Die Presse wrote approvingly of the US attacks, saying "The West would have been giving in if it had passively accepted terrorist provocations without at least trying to get a hold of those behind them."
In the Netherlands the center-left newspaper Volkskrant said: "The military campaign that has just begun ... is not vengeance, but an act of legitimate defence."
But a Greek newspapers feared what it called a return to the Middle Ages. The left-wing Eleftherotypia predicted the war would cause "a tragic impasse, with thousands of victims. It will not hit terrorism, even if it wipes out Afghanistan."
Turkey's Islamist press described the air strikes as an all-out onslaught by the Christian West on Islam, with the hard-line newspaper Akit speaking of a "war under the leadership of the Great Satan."
They also criticized their government for supporting Washington. Turkey is the only Muslim member of NATO.
Mainstream Turkish newspapers did not question the legitimacy of the strikes, but underlined the need to minimize the loss of civilian lives -- PARIS (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
