As US staging ground, Pakistan a powderkeg

Choose your weapon. Hand-held rocket launchers with armor-piercing ammunition, homemade Kalashnikovs, replicas of German Mausers, or authentic Remington shotguns. Pakistan's northwestern frontier offers an arsenal that could satisfy any "holy warriors" who might try to thwart US attacks on neighboring Afghanistan.

The ready supply of weapons, increasingly angry locals, and Afghan fighters slipping over the border could create a combustible mix of opponents to US forces based in Pakistan.

All indications are that the US is pulling together its coalition and inching closer and closer to launching attacks against bordering Afghanistan.

• A US Defense Department delegation is now sharing evidence with Pakistani authorities implicating Osama bin Laden in the Sept. 11 attacks on the US.

• Saudi Arabia yesterday broke ties with Afghanistan, leaving Pakistan the lone country to recognize the Taliban regime.

• Russia has offered the US support in terms of airspace and weapons shipments to rebels fighting the Afghan government.

• NATO leaders are meeting today to hear the evidence President Bush has gathered linking Mr. bin Laden to this month's attacks.

The Pentagon so far has kept secret its plans to launch attacks on Afghanistan, as well as its strategy to deal with the pressing issue of protection for US troops likely to be stationed in the region. Still, Pakistan's arsenal of small arms, as well as the threat of car bomb and suicide attacks - especially in light of bin Laden's call on Monday for a Pakistani uprising against the US - present challenges that can't be ignored.

From the hills above Islamabad to the narrow side streets around Peshawar's main military airbase, Pakistani authorities are already rushing to establish new police and military checkpoints. The moves are geared toward preventing what authorities expect to be a "terrorist backlash," should the United States launch attacks from here. Officials say the security measures are being put into place to prevent possible attacks on both US installations and Pakistani government offices.

"We have mobilized all our resources," a senior security official said yesterday. "The situation here is under control - but it is tense, very tense."

The proliferation of small weapons is a major concern. Pakistan's deadly mix of arms production and explosives expertise is likely to make the country the most difficult theater of military operations faced by American forces in decades - at least since Vietnam, experts here say.

In the town Dara Adam Khel, about an hour's drive from Peshawar, some 10,000 locals are directly employed in the arms industry. Local gunsmiths, whose forefathers supplied arms crucial in the ouster of British colonialists, now manufacture replicas of Russian, Chinese, and American arms. Machine-guns, hand grenades, rocket-launched grenades, and even small missiles are produced daily.

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