The United States' top soldier said on Wednesday that Somalia could be a target in the war against terrorism, but action there would not necessarily involve military force.
General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was responding to a comment by a senior German official that Washington was likely to target Somalia next in its assault on Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
"There are...countries that worry us because they actively support and harbour (terrorists). It's one thing to have a cell in your country, it's another to actively support them," Richard Myers told reporters at NATO's headquarters in Brussels.
"And Somalia is one potential country -- there are others as well -- a potential country where you might have diplomatic, law enforcement action or potentially military action. All the instruments of national power, not just one."
Earlier, US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld noted that Washington needed no new authorisation from the UN Security Council to strike suspected terrorist targets outside Afghanistan. Myers sought to discourage discussion of where the United States might take military action next.
"We are not going to speculate on any next operation other than to say...this is a global war on terrorism," he said.
"The objective continues to remain terrorists and their networks, those that support them and those that conduct research or produce weapons of mass destruction that could fall into terrorists' hands. I don't know why people want to focus on one particular country, I don't think that's useful."
A US diplomat, Glenn Warren, arrived in Mogadishu on Tuesday on the first visit in years by an American official but the US embassy in Nairobi declined to link his talks with Somalia's transitional national government directly to the war on terrorism.
(China Daily December 20, 2001)
