Allies With Agendas

By Jackson Diehl

Monday, September 17, 2001; Page A27

As America's foreign policy is rebuilt around the cause of counterterrorism in the coming weeks, one of the many new characters we may hear about is an Arab warrior and veteran of Afghanistan known as Ibn ul Khattab. Khattab, like Osama bin Laden, is good at raising money in the Persian Gulf and using it to fund training camps for Islamic militants. And like bin Laden, he is accused of having organized and bankrolled terrorist bombings that killed hundreds of innocent civilians.

But Khattab doesn't target Americans. He lives in Chechnya, and his war is waged against Russia and its 80,000 troops in the predominantly Muslim republic. Khattab operates autonomously within a rebel movement dominated by Chechens and headed by an elected government. But for Russian President Vladimir Putin, this holy warrior overnight has turned from a secondary menace into a prized political asset -- living proof that his brutal and unpopular war in the Caucasus is at one with the coming U.S. assault on terrorism. "We have a common foe," Putin proclaimed last week, even as the Kremlin's security and intelligence chiefs bombarded the White House with suddenly friendly phone calls.

Such maneuvering is underway, though usually more subtly, in governments all over the world. Behind the outpouring of sympathy for the United States and vows of support for a new alliance against terrorism are cold calculations by European allies, would-be rival powers such as Russia and China, and in-betweeners of all kinds. The common goal is to use the crisis to forge an advantageous partnership with a world power that, under Bush, so far has been alarmingly elusive, prickly and unilateralist.

Europeans, says German Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger, see "a huge opportunity" to find an all-embracing mission with the United States, rather than continuing to quarrel over issues such as missile defense and the Kyoto treaty. "This country is at a crossroads," he said. "The question is will this event lead the United States to believe that it is an exceptional country, and so those who advocate unilateralist solutions are right, or are you going to conclude that this kind of attack necessitates multilateral responses and a common strategy with allies in Europe and Asia. Needless to say I'm in favor of the multilateralist outcome."

For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon clearly believes the Bush administration now will support a stepped-up war by his government against Yasser Arafat's Palestinian authority -- last week, under cover of the American crisis, his troops invaded two West Bank cities, and he canceled planned talks with Arafat. But a number of Arab governments, too, may see an opportunity to arrest what has been the steady cooling of relations with the United States and make common cause against Islamic militants who also threaten them. Even Arafat -- whose televised donation of blood wins the prize for last week's most shameless pander -- may seize the opportunity to suppress the Palestinian extremists who fight his battle against Israel but also aim to supplant him.

All of this offers the Bush administration some large opportunities. Tragic as its cause, the adoption of counterterrorism as an organizing principle for U.S. foreign policy will provide a larger mission that has been missing for a decade and should prove far more workable than the Bush impulse to subordinate all to missile defense. What's more, a foreign policy team that by its own account mishandled early approaches to Europe, and retreated in confusion after recent failures in the Middle East, will have what amounts to a fresh start on alliances and strategies.

But there will be some tricky new passes to cross as well -- with Pakistan, with China, but perhaps most of all with Putin's Russia. Following last week's flurry of phone calls, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage is leading a delegation to Moscow this week to begin talking substance: how Russia and the United States can share intelligence about Afghanistan, and what they might be able to do jointly about the twin threats of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban government. In fact, Russia has a lot to offer: abundant intelligence about people and terrain, extensive ties to the opposition alliance fighting the Taliban from a northern corner of the country and what amounts to a staging base in neighboring Tajikistan, where as many as 25,000 Russian troops are still posted.

Driving bin Laden out of Afghanistan could be far easier with Russian help; if the mission expands to overturning the Taliban and constructing a new Afghan order, Moscow's collaboration will be essential. For now, Putin couldn't be more eager to team up: For him the prospect looms of forging the partnership with America that is vital to his strategy for attracting Western investment in the Russian economy, while perhaps slowing or deflecting Bush's drive to scrap the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Even better, Putin now can hope to convince the West that his war-crime-ridden crusade against Chechnya is justified. After all, aren't Ibn ul Khattab and Osama bin Laden equally on the wrong side of Bush's "war between good and evil?"

No, say some administration officials, we know it's more complicated than that. We know Putin wants to use this to escalate his dirty war against the Chechens and maybe spread it to Georgia. But, says the Bush team, Russia is offering us real help against people who killed at least 5,000 Americans. We have to pursue it while preserving our underlying principles.

Can they strike that balance with Russia and with others? How much of the standing U.S. agenda abroad must be submerged for counterterrorism? That may be the toughest test of America's new foreign policy.