Security forces discovered explosives aboard a fuel truck in the capital yesterday, preventing a potential terrorist attack in the city, state TV said.

Police arrested several people aboard the truck after they stopped and searched it in eastern Kabul, the report said. The driver was released later yesterday, but others remained in custody.

"They wanted to bring it into Kabul for a terrorist action," state TV said of the tanker, giving no other details.

As the president said, the U.N. Security Council needs to decide how to enforce its own resolutions, which the Iraqi regime has defied for more than a decade.

This will require a new, effective U.N. Security Council resolution that will actually deal with the threat Saddam Hussein poses to the Iraqi people, to the region, and to the world. That is the course the Security Council is on, and the United States is engaged in consultations with Council members and other partners in New York at this time.

This is not a matter of inspections. It is about disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqi regime's compliance with all other Security Council resolutions.

This is a tactical step by Iraq in hopes of avoiding strong U.N. Security Council action. As such, it is a tactic that will fail.

It is time for the Security Council to act.

Karachi is Pakistan's main port and premier metropolis, a sophisticated center of international business and commerce that served as Pakistan's first capital until it was moved to Islamabad in 1962.

However, it is also the country's crime center. Violence and the fear that Islamic militants are increasingly targeting Westerners have prompted many Americans, Britons, Germans and others to leave. Foreign consulates either have closed or have scaled down their staffs.

Early this year, the city's doctors staged a series of one-day strikes to demand police protection after 13 doctors, mostly minority Shiite Muslims, were slain in a series of attacks.

Karachi is also a center of Islamic militancy in Pakistan, a place where "holy warriors" on the run can find like-minded people willing to help with safe houses, false papers, money and protection.

The city is also notorious for criminality, especially kidnappings and sectarian murders in which extremists from rival Muslim groups target members of other sects for assassination.

There are presently three concentrations of the International Islamic Front inside Pakistan - the Uzbek and the Chechen dregs have taken shelter in the NWFP and the FATA; the Arabs of al-Qaeda, and some Pashtuns of the Taliban, have taken refuge in Karachi; and the Pakistanis of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ), the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) have taken shelter in Karachi, the POK and the NA. While the LET is mostly based in the POK and the NA, the other four Pakistani components of the International Islamic Front have split themselves into a number of small groups and are operating from sanctuaries in Karachi, as well as the POK [Pak-Occupied Kashmir] and the NA [Gilgit and Baltistan].

Investigations by Sindh police into all the terrorist incidents directed against US and other Western nationals and interests since the beginning of this year on Pakistani territory brought out that all these attacks were carried out by the Pakistani dregs of the International Islamic Front and that the conspiracies were hatched and the planning was done in Karachi, even though in some cases the attacks were carried out in places other than Karachi.

Even though the members of the LJ [Lashkar e-Jhangvi] detained by the Sindh police spoke about the involvement of Yemeni-Balochis in the murder of Pearl, no attempt was made to trace them. The encounter at Karachi on September 11, which led to the death of two terrorists (Mohammad Khalid and Saleh Ibrahim, both reported to be Yemenis) and the capture of one Saudi, one Egyptian and eight Yemenis clearly establishes that the hard core of al-Qaeda has been living in Karachi and operating from there and not from the NWFP or the FATA.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also uses the aliases Abdul Majid, Salim Ali, Ashrai Refaat, Nabith Renin, Khalid Abdul Waddod and Fahd Bin Abdullah Bin Khalid. Police in the Philippines have described him as a Kuwaiti-born and US-educated Pakistani. If he is definitively established to be a Pakistani, this would show that September 11 was masterminded by a Pakistani assisting bin Laden. It may be recalled that Sheikh Omar, who has already been convicted in the Pearl murder case and has appealed against it, was reported to have told Karachi police that during a visit to Afghanistan before September 11 he had come to know of the plans for the terrorist strikes in the US and had immediately informed Lieutenant-General Ehsanul Haq, the present director general of the ISI, who was at that time Corps Commander, Peshawar.

An interesting aspect of the raid in Karachi of September 11 has not received the attention it deserves. The so-called encounter lasted nearly four hours before the terrorists could be arrested. The authorities of the ISI have claimed that this was because the terrorists were heavily armed. Sindh police sources have, however, denied this. According to them, the security forces led by an ISI officer fired about 5,000 rounds as against about 100 fired by the terrorists. The police authorities allege that the ISI officer, who led the raiding group, deliberately kept up heavy firing without any need for it in the hope that this would either kill Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, or enable them to escape. While Khalid Sheikh Mohammed seems to have escaped, Binalshib was caught alive.