European press review

Wednesday's European papers join US Secretary of State Colin Powell in looking at what lies in store for Afghanistan if the Taleban regime falls, but there are worries over a confrontation between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.

Powell looks to the future

Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung believes that the question that should be posed right now is not so much how the Taleban, and with it, Osama Bin Laden, can be destroyed in Afghanistan, but whose blessing can be found for a successor government.

"After two decades of war and civil war it is not just the interests of the various tribes in Afghanistan that have to be satisfied but also those of their respective protectorates in neighbouring countries," it says.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell has displayed great skill on this front during his visit to Pakistan, in the paper's view.

By holding out the prospect of moderate Taleban members participating in a new government, Mr Powell "countered Islamabad's fears of coming away empty-handed in Afghanistan if the Northern Alliance and the venerable King Zahir share power".

For its part, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung calls Mr Powell's suggestion a "disconcerting announcement", reflecting what it sees as "the pragmatic realities of an alliance... whose partners' political interests dovetail only partially".

Pakistan "does not want the Taleban permanently weakened", it notes, "but if the Taleban militia is not considerably weakened, it will... devote all its efforts to preventing the destruction of the Islamist terrorist network at home and abroad".

A future government, the paper says, "ought to represent the interests of all ethnic groups, including the Pashtun from whom the Taleban recruited most of its adherents".

The Spanish daily El Pais also looks to the future and the "New Afghanistan" the West wants to install to stop the country continuing to be what it calls a "hotbed of instability and terrorism".

It praises President George W Bush for "publicly committing himself to the idea" and welcomes the fact that "Washington seems to have learnt from its foreign adventures in the last decade that a political order with the look of permanency is needed to replace the guns and bombs".

It, too, stresses that all the key ethnic and religious groups must be represented in the new government structure, and suggests that convening the traditional council of elders and allowing the former king to return could be "the best hope" for the country.

However, "the decisive role in the Afghan transition falls to the UN", El Pais says.

It argues that the UN is the only institution which can fight poverty, restore government and provide a peacekeeping force.

The Kashmir threat

Vienna's Die Presse says that US Secretary of State Powell's efforts to placate Pakistan and India are crucial in view of the enormous threat Kashmir represents for global peace.

"The collapse of the current government in Pakistan and a fundamentalist take-over in Islamabad could unleash a conflagration which could not be extinguished by any Alliance, no matter how skilfully forged....Then two nuclear powers, Pakistan and India, would confront each other in a war over Kashmir."

However, the paper warns that in a situation where India has already said it would never accept negotiations with "terrorists" over Kashmir, the praise "Powell has been heaping on Pakistan's President Musharraf may be counter-productive".

Germany's Berliner Zeitung says that the "most dangerous border in the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall" runs through the disputed region.

It says it is hardly surprising that Mr Powell has raised the issue on his current visit since "it was above all because of Kashmir that India and Pakistan acquired nuclear weapons. Both have stated that they would deploy them 'if necessary'."

Kashmir is closely linked to the Afghan crisis, the paper points out, explaining that in the early 90s Pakistan helped the Taleban gain power in order to secure allies on its eastern Kashmiri front.

Arafat comes in from the cold

The French Le Monde says that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, on Monday's visit to 10 Downing Street, "got from the British prime minister the words he was hoping to hear".

These words, it explains, were Tony Blair's support for "a viable Palestinian state" and his desire to "help re-invigorate the Middle East peace process".

The visit itself was "a diplomatic victory", the paper adds, considering that the host is "Washington's greatest ally". It heralded Mr Arafat's "return to a state of grace with the United States", a process helped by what the paper calls "the verbal excesses and tactlessness of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon".

Twice in the space of 10 days, it points out, President Bush "publicly supported the creation of a Palestinian state".

"The wind in Washington has suddenly turned in Yasser Arafat's favour," the paper concludes.

Anthrax: No mass panic 'so far'

London's The Independent says that "it does not take much imagination" to assume a link between the 11 September attacks and the cases of postal anthrax in the United States.

"The first symptoms of an international anthrax panic, if not yet the disease itself," the paper adds, "have now been observed... in countries as far apart as New Zealand and Lithuania".

After the Gulf War a decade ago, it recalls, "it was widely predicted that the chief power of anthrax was less the disease itself than the paralysing mass panic that just one case would prompt".

But in fact, "even as anthrax reports proliferate around the globe, it is remarkable that mass panic has not so far ensued".

"In confounding that prediction so far, we have helped to strike a small, popular blow against the bioterrorists of the future," the paper says.

The European press review is compiled by BBC Monitoring from internet editions of the main European newspapers and some early printed editions.