Time for Bush to back up his "with us or against us" vows

  • Jim Hoagland / Washington Post columnist
  • Wednesday, October 3, 2001 9:00pm
  • Opinion

WASHINGTON — Improvised in the horror and shock of the September 11 terror attacks on America, the Bush administration’s initial diplomatic strategy bought valuable time and space for the more serious and sustained response to come. So let us praise that strategy and prepare to bury it as soon as its limited utility is exhausted.

Napoleon warned that nothing lasts as long as the temporary. The first risk of building a broad strategic coalition is that the construction becomes an end in itself — that photos of parades of foreign ministers shaking hands and expressing sympathy get defined as success and overtake effective action as the ultimate goal.

That is a temptation President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell should resist without great trouble. Less obvious but equally dangerous are the future risks involved in reaching out too broadly now — the long-term peril of recruiting and rewarding nations that do not share U.S. values and interests. Some countries sign up primarily to stall and limit U.S. action, not to facilitate it.

There’s the rub of the coalition Bush and Powell have assembled in all necessary haste. They have recruited to fight terrorism regimes that practice or tolerate terrorism as a matter of policy. The inclusion of such states at the center of the coalition undermines the sweeping and noble war aims enunciated by Bush, who has promised not to divide terrorists into bad and good camps.

The difficulties of keeping that promise — and the huge stakes this still-developing campaign has for South Asia — were blasted home Monday by a car bomb and guerrilla assault that wrecked the state assembly in Srinagar in Indian-administered Kashmir. At least 38 people were killed in a gruesome attack on a building that, for Kashmir inhabitants, matches the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in symbolic value.

You would think the radical Islamic guerrillas who claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack — the Pakistani-based Jaish-e-Muhammed group — might deserve to be at least called terrorists. India implored the United States to put the group on its terrorist list for earlier outrages. But Washington declined out of fear that such action would undermine the regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf and complicate U.S. diplomatic goals.

This is diplomacy without vision and without the roots needed for a long, difficult struggle against terrorism. It is delusional to think that the United States can reform the Musharraf regime or elements in the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan into responsible partners to fight terrorism.

This is the lure of the quick fix. Previous administrations pursued it in building up Saddam Hussein to protect the Arab world against Iran, in counting on the Iraqi army to take care of Saddam in the wake of the Gulf War, in betting that Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform communism could keep the Soviet Union together and in dozens of other instances of short-termism.

Washington knows full well that Pakistan actively supports Jaish-e-Muhammed and other guerrilla organizations that see terror as the only effective tool they have against India. Members of these groups freely tell Western journalists that they have trained in camps in Afghanistan run by Pakistani intelligence services and then been deployed into Kashmir. These terrorists are creatures of Musharraf and the Taliban and soulmates of Osama bin Laden.

Theoretically it should be possible to set them against each other. But Musharraf sees the Taliban’s opponents in the Northern Alliance as agents of India working for his mortal foes. Survival for him means seeming to go along with U.S. goals while making sure they do not actually get carried out. As a bonus, stroking Musharraf so openly makes the stronger relationship Washington should be creating with India more difficult.

American cooperation with Stalin in World War II is frequently cited as an example of the necessity of dealing with the devil in times of crisis. But the United States did not make the Soviet Union a strategic ally while Stalin was still cooperating with Hitler. There has yet to be a serious tangible act by Pakistan to break its alliance with terror and earn the kind of trust the administration has ostensibly extended.

Short-term goals of initial positioning, both military and political, have largely been met. American policy will now drift into incoherence if it continues to aim at assembling the broadest possible coalition and cooperating seriously with regimes that are broken beyond repair.

With us or against us, the American president warned the world two weeks ago. Others will believe those words only if Bush shows he meant them.

Jim Hoagland can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or hoaglandj@washpost.com.

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