Were South Asia strikes a response to 9/11?

As an immediate response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, a senior Pentagon official had proposed hitting targets like Iraq or launch strikes in South America or South Asia.

This strange proposal, revealed in a footnote to the 9/11 Commission report released last month, went unnoticed until author David Ignatius dug it out for his book The Book On Terror, published recently.

US Undersecretary of Defence Douglas Feith, who made the suggestion in a draft memo, on Friday in an article in The Washington Post termed the revelation as a 'misinterpretation' of ideas.

The commission report footnote said Feith had 'expressed disappointment at the limited options immediately available in Afghanistan and the lack of ground options.'

'The author suggested instead hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq. Since US attacks were expected in Afghanistan, an American attack in South America or Southern Asia might be a surprise to the terrorists.'

Feith defended the suggestions saying, 'The draft memo took up points made by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a memo he wrote the previous day to General Hugh Shelton, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that said initial US war plans should emphasize, among other things, the worldwide nature of the conflict.'

'First of all, there was President (George W) Bush's insight that September 11, 2001 revealed that the United States is at war, and that terrorism can no longer be treated primarily as a law enforcement problem. This may seem obvious now, but it wasn't then.

'Going to war against terrorism meant going to war against this network.

"Obviously, those most directly responsible for September 11 -- we soon understood them to be the Al Qaeda group based in Afghanistan -- were primary targets.

'But that did not necessarily mean that attacking Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan had to be the first order of business. The timing and nature of US military and other actions had to be designed to serve US strategic purposes and to take into account what we could or could not expect to achieve militarily,' Feith wrote.