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US says it's ready for further strikes

The US has signaled it will take pre-emptive action in the next phase of its war on terror, ratcheting up the rhetoric that has set off alarm bells in Iraq and Iran.

In Afghanistan, interim leader Hamid Karzai yesterday scrambled to put a stop to bloody clashes between tribal rivals that have thrown the authority of his fledgling, UN-backed government into question.

Russia's defense minister accused his Western allies of double standards for failing to condemn Moscow's Chechen enemies as "terrorists" with the same vigor as they have pursued Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on the US in which some 3,100 people were killed.

The fate of the Saudi-born militant is a mystery.

US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, speaking at a security conference in Munich, elaborated on a theme set by US President George W. Bush in recent days when he called Iran, Iraq and North Korea the "axis of evil."

"The best defense is a good offence. ... Our approach has to aim at prevention and not merely punishment," said Wolfowitz, a hawk in the Bush administration. "We are at war."

He said the US had made no decisions about specific targets, "but the president has made clear where the problems are."

"What happened on Sept. 11, as terrible as it was, is but a pale shadow of what will happen if terrorists use weapons of mass destruction," Wolfowitz said.

Iraqi newspapers condemned "the dwarf Bush" as savage and aggressive and Iranian parliamentarians called him a threat to world peace and security.

In Afghanistan, a team of peacemakers appointed by Karzai arrived in the eastern town of Gardez to try to settle a conflict between his nominated governor and tribal rivals after dozens of fighters were killed.

In another eruption of violence as old rivals jockey for position in post-Taliban Afghanistan, about 40 men were killed in clashes in several parts of the northern province of Balkh, political sources in the area said.

The clashes are seen as a setback for Karzai as he attempts to stamp his government's authority on a country long riven by tribal and ethnic hostility and battered by more than two decades of war -- including the US-led campaign to crush the Taliban and the al-Qaeda members they sheltered.

But more of his loyalists might soon be taken to a prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the US military said it had finished construction of a temporary prison and can now more than double its population of Taliban and al-Qaeda captives.

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