As Pakistan and Saudi Arabia battle internal Islamic extremists, their struggle presents the US with "broader strategic problems" as significant as Iraq or Afghanistan, the commander of American forces in the region said on Thursday.
The officer, General John Abizaid, also said the ranks of insurgent forces in Iraq were not being swelled by large numbers of foreigners, although he said some have formal ties to al-Qaeda, and some have ideological sympathies to the terrorist network.
And while the US occupation authority in Iraq has set July 1 as the deadline for handing sovereignty to a new government in Baghdad, it appears unlikely that a formal agreement on the status of US military forces in the country would be ready by that deadline, he said.
Abizaid, chief of the military's Central Command, noted that the fight by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia against their own Islamic radicals was critically important to America's global campaign against terrorism, but that their problems could not be solved by American military power.
Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia "are involved in their own fight against extremists that is crucial to the ability of their nations to maintain control over the internal situation," he said during a meeting with military affairs correspondents.
"It's a battle of ideas as much as it is a military battle," he said of Pakistan, where President Pervez Musharraf has survived two assassination attempts.
Of recent terrorist strikes in Saudi Arabia, he noted that this is "not the type of the fight that you're going to send the 82nd Airborne Division to go fight," a reference to the first US troops into Saudi Arabia after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. "It's the type of fight that you need to send the full support and weight of diplomatic, political and social help."
Abizaid said the anti-terrorist struggle in the region would be a lengthy one, and he warned: "Culturally speaking, our patience quotient is not high. Culturally speaking, the patience quotient of our enemies is very high."
Discussing opposition to the stabilization mission in Iraq, Abizaid discounted reports that the insurgency is heavily manned by foreigners.
"I am confident that there is no flood of foreign fighters coming in," he said, and he put their number as "low" and in "the hundreds." He declined to assess the overall number of insurgent fighters.
While the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority is negotiating the path to sovereignty with the Iraqi Governing Council, the US has not yet presented a formal proposal governing the status of US military forces after the hand-over, he said.
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