But Powell is now going without any new plan to reconcile Palestinians and Israelis. When one senior administration official was asked whether Powell had a new plan with him, the official said only that the secretary brings “the vision that we had put forward previously.”

That Bush administration “vision” includes months of fruitless appeals to Palestinian Authority chief Yasser Arafat to “do more” to rein in terrorists, and for both sides to negotiate a series of failed peace plans known as Tenet and Mitchell, as well as carrying out U.N. resolutions 242 and 338 going back decades.

“The president wanted to review that, to remind everybody of that vision, and to reinforce that vision as the way forward,” the official said.

Even if Powell does not bring anything new to the debate, his presence may have a calming effect. Clearly, the administration felt something had to be done. The Israeli army’s powerful and bloody response to a slew of suicide bombings last week — including one that killed 26 Jews at a Passover Seder last Wednesday — has “started to have a greater effect than just going in and rooting out a few terrorists,” said the official. “We saw a deteriorating situation with some of our best friends in the region, but, more importantly, some of Israel’s best Arab friends in the region with whom they had developed solid relations over the years,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Bush himself said Thursday the situation had spun out of control and was threatening to engulf neighboring Arab allies, whose streets are now full of protesters, tear gas, water cannons and burning American and Israeli flags. Turning away from the burning Middle East — a policy adopted as soon as the Bush administration took office in an apparent attempt to differentiate itself from the Clinton team — was no longer an option.

Egypt, the first Arab nation to make peace with Israel, suspended diplomatic contacts Wednesday and Jordan was under pressure by street protests — spreading around the Arab world — to also cut ties to Israel.

Even if Powell does nothing more than interrupt the fighting for a few days, he will have accomplished an important task. The hope is that his presence will help mute the thousands of demonstrators in Arab cities around the Middle East who have begun to show posters of Osama bin Laden alongside those of Arafat.

Bush’s senior foreign policy advisors essentially decided, in a series of nonstop meetings over the past few days, that Powell must go on a firefighting trip — not a diplomatic one — to prevent the unraveling of everything that Bush’s foreign policy counts as its goals: the war on terrorism and completing his father’s unfinished business in Iraq.

Powell will meet with leaders of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia on the tail end of a previously scheduled trip to Europe beginning Sunday. He’s dropped a visit to Berlin but will meet European Union foreign ministers Wednesday in Madrid. The E.U. has been critical of Israel and called for immediate withdrawal of the tanks and troops Israeli Prime Minister Sharon has deployed across the West Bank.

The Bush administration official shrugged off charges that it has become isolated in support of Israel while allies in Europe and the Middle East condemn Israel for overreacting to the suicide bombings.

“Well, we are often accused of standing alone, and when we think it’s appropriate to hold a principled position, we will do so, whether others agree with us or not. We’re not doing this in response to what the E.U. may be doing or what others may be doing,” he said.

If the Bush administration was alone abroad, it was not at home where polls showed this week four out of five Americans backed Israel in its struggle against the Palestinians. Thursday Bush remained firm in support for Sharon and repeated his belief that the Israelis had a right to defend themselves against suicide bombers.

Palestinian officials said that Bush’s lack of a deadline for an Israeli withdrawal was a green light Israel would use to continue its military operations in West Bank cities — either until Powell arrives next week or even beyond then.

Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi said on CNN that she hoped for an “immediate” pullback of the Israeli forces, blaming them for murder, massacre, starvation and other crimes. But Israeli officials showed little inclination to pull back.

“We welcome the mission of Colin Powell but our withdrawal won’t be automatic and won’t be without an agreement” to rein in terrorism, said Deputy Defense Minister Dalia Rabin-Pelossof in a television interview, also on CNN.

“The official response of the prime minister’s office is we go on with the [military] operation until we get a response from their side,” she said.

A refugee analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity, said today that he is “extremely skeptical” of the Saudi relief effort, noting that previous Saudi aid had been used to build up extremist Islamist groups during the anti-Soviet war. The aid went to guns, shelter, food, mosques and the religious schools known as madrassas where Mullah Omar and his Taliban all studied. Those extremist groups eventually morphed in 1995 into the Taliban — whose leaders were taught to hate the West in madrassas inside refugee camps in Pakistan.

In Afghanistan today, as in earlier conflicts in Cambodia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, the Middle East and during the 1980-1990 anti-Soviet War in Afghanistan, the humanitarian role of refugee camps is being used as a cover for military activity.

In refugee camps, guerrilla groups recruit new fighters — often forcing them to take up arms. The camps also serve as a place for guerrillas to keep their families safe and fed while they go to war, and a place for fighters to retreat to when defeated in the field, to rest and recuperate from fighting, to receive medical care and to top up their food supplies.

Reporters in Spin Boldak camps today reported they saw weapons in the refugee enclosures, a sign that under the guise of humanitarian protection the camps are being used to either detain unwilling refugees or to arm and train fighters for continuing warfare. By detaining refugees, the Taliban gains both future recruits and a meal ticket: The presence of thousands of refugees means tons of food that the guerrillas could skim.

The camps are funded by humanitarian funds provided by donors in the United States, Europe and other countries — but they aren’t open to inspection. “There is no international access to the camps, which were set up as part of an agreement between the Taliban and Pakistan,” said Joel Charny, vice president of Refugees International. That agreement was reached after U.S. bombing began on Oct. 7 and the refugee outflows began.

Charny, who was recently in Pakistan, voiced concern that many of the thousands directed to the camps on the Afghan side are held against their will — whether by the Taliban or by the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis and the Taliban have a mutual interest in restricting the refugees to the camps: the Taliban get a safe military base and the Pakistanis get to keep the refugees out, while simultaneously maintaining a Taliban/Pashtun buffer against Northern Alliance domination.

The Pakistanis sought to prevent an influx of Afghans after the Oct. 7 American bombing of Afghanistan began. There were already some 2 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan left over from the anti-Soviet war. Mr. Charny said RI has called for the refugees to be allowed to enter Pakistan and to be located in camps away from the border — both for their safety and to prevent the creation of a Taliban enclave that could fuel a future conflict.

Ironically, the Taliban are simply doing what America did in the 1980s. To refugee camps located in Pakistan along the Afghan border back then, U.S. CIA agents delivered $5 billion worth of guns, ammunition and Stinger antiaircraft missiles that were quickly hauled across the border to fight the Russians. It was payback time for the Soviet aid to North Vietnamese forces, who killed some 55,000 American soldiers in Vietnam.

The technique worked equally effectively in northeastern Thailand, where 330,000 Cambodian refugees — some of them loyal to and under the control of the genocidal Pol Pot — ate American relief food and enjoyed U.S.-funded medical care and education services. But after the foreign nongovernmental organization workers were escorted from the camps each evening, the wire fence facing the Cambodian interior was opened for the entry of guerrilla fighters. They would forcibly recruit new troops, stock up on fresh food and supplies and be gone by dawn. Foreign doctors next day discovered new patients in the clinics — wounded troops left behind to be patched up at U.S. donors’ expense.

Both guerrilla wars fought using humanitarian assistance were effective. The Vietnamese, who invaded Cambodia in 1979 after Pol Pot killed a million fellow Cambodians and started invading Vietnam, pulled up stakes in 1988. A senior Vietnamese military commander told me in Phnom Penh that he had lost 50,000 troops to the humanitarian-funded conflict.

And the Russians also abandoned Afghanistan in 1989 after losing 15,000 troops to the guerrillas, many of whom were operating out of large U.S. and Saudi-funded refugee camps in Pakistan. But the Afghan victory turned sour, turning the country into a basket case pillaged by marauding warlords and finally taken over by the repressive Taliban extremists — trained in the Pakistani refugee camps and financed by conservative, anti-Western Saudis. The refugee analyst speculated that those same Saudi groups, under the guise of humanitarianism, may be continuing to promote their extremist Wahabbi sect of Islam through their aid program. When I covered the anti-Soviet war, Afghan mujahedin fighters told me with disgust that the Saudis forced them to pray in the Saudi way and told them that the Afghan system of Islam was inferior to the Wahabbi system.

Foreign aid from America and other donors was controlled by Pakistan, which had its own agenda. The U.S. was admittedly quite happy to give its arms to just about any warlord going, so long as they were willing to fight the Soviets. But it would have preferred to give a prominent role to the moderate, Western-educated Afghans who had been the elite before the 1979 Soviet invasion. Pakistan, however, excluded them from the resistance movement and gave U.S. weapons and cash to extremist, militant Islamist groups — especially that of anti-Western warlord Gulbaddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar, who later shelled Kabul into rubble because he refused to share power, satisfied Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, ISI, by renouncing a traditional Afghan claim to greater Pashtunistan, which included portions of northwestern Pakistan.

The Saudis were equally happy that military and refugee aid went to extremist Islamic groups because it meant they were spreading the good word of Sunni Islam. This was a way to trump revolutionary Iran’s spreading Shiite Islam through funding Hezbollah and other groups in the Middle East — as well as placating radical groups at home and deflecting attention from their own corruption and autocracy.

Today the United States faces a situation where the tables are turned. Taliban and al-Qaida forces, which were recruited or trained in the madrassas of the Afghan refugee regions of Pakistan, are now beginning to retreat to those areas. Some are simply dropping their black turbans and crossing the largely unpatrolled border. But they are not dropping their anti-Western ideology or their fervent Islamicism.

Refugee camps are ideal places to run to because they provide a veneer of victimhood. In the Rwandan genocide, Hutus who slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were able to escape justice when they entered refugee camps in the Congo. They used humanitarian food to nourish their fighters, who proceeded to launch fresh attacks into Rwanda — until the Rwandans crossed the border and chased them out.

Who will clean out the Taliban — or Osama bin Laden — if they try to hide in the refugee camps or in the ethnic Pashto tribal areas of Pakistan along the Afghan border?

Pakistani army officers have said they would welcome a joint operation with the United States to ferret out bin Laden and al-Qaida members who try to hide in refugee camps or tribal areas along the Afghan border, according to Brookings Institution analyst Stephen Cohen, a former U.S. official who has written widely on the Pakistani army. Normally only the Pakistan frontier forces are allowed to enter those regions, which are under the control of tribal chiefs.

Despite the promises of Pakistani cooperation, when it comes to the Taliban, Pakistan continues to have its own interests. It could allow them to regroup in Pakistan to pressure the new Afghan rulers, who may be from the Northern Alliance. Pakistan sees the Northern Alliance as its worst nightmare — an Indian-backed group perched on its western border. Indian officials have confirmed to me that they provided aid to the Northern Alliance for years. In part, this was payback for the Pakistani support for guerrillas operating inside Indian-held portions of Kashmir.

Into this volatile mix of tribes, nationalities, religions — and historical jockeying to control the routes from the sea into Central Asia, for trade, oil and gas shipments — U.N. and other refugee and aid groups are working to prevent a massive humanitarian catastrophe — only to be used as pawns in a new Great Game.

Once the Taliban has a few hundred thousand civilians under its control in refugee camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border, the U.N., Red Cross and other aid agencies — which have not been providing aid to camps inside Afghanistan because of lack of security — will be forced to supply them with food, shelter and aid. A large number of civilians will allow the Taliban to hide fighters and skim aid; it also creates a magnet for wandering Afghans, adding manpower to their guerrilla war. That’s why the Taliban today brought dozens of Western journalists into the camps at Spin Boldak — so that pictures of pathetic Afghan children could be flashed like bait across Western television screens to attract foreign aid.

Short of a military intervention into the camps — which would present nightmarish logistical and tactical problems and could become a bloodbath — the next step is inevitable. Faced with a massive humanitarian crisis in a teeming refugee camp — even one being cynically used by guerrillas — aid groups will have no choice but to step forward. They will thus become unwilling participants in the next round of warfare, as they did in Rwanda, Cambodia and the Palestinian refugee camps since the 1950s. If the Taliban succeed in infiltrating significant numbers of troops into the camps, America’s Afghanistan war could face new challenges in the weeks and months ahead.

Republican Sen. John McCain, for instance, blasted the Saudis on CNN’s “Late Edition” on Oct. 28, charging that the monarchy isn’t doing “what the president asked all countries to do, and that is to take sides” in the war on terrorism.

But earlier that same week, President Bush called Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz “to thank the kingdom for its support in the international war against terrorism,” spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters Oct. 25. Bush reassured the Saudi leader that “press articles citing differences between the United States and Saudi Arabia are simply incorrect,” Fleischer said.

On Monday the top foreign policy advisor to Crown Prince Abdullah came to Washington for meetings with State Department officials, and spoke with rare candor about the desert kingdom’s delicate balancing act.

Adel al-Jubeir said that even though the Saudis are finally cooperating in clamping down on terrorist finances, and even if the U.S. high-tech military command center in Saudi Arabia is involved in the bombing of Afghanistan, it’s best not to talk much about it.

Such talk might make the Saudis “heroes in Washington … but we may suffer consequences in the Muslim world,” al-Jubeir said.

“Our challenge has always been: How do you balance between the two? Given a choice, we’d rather look good in downtown Riyadh than downtown Washington. The senior levels of your government appreciate this, they understand this and they cut us some slack on it.”

Likewise, State Department officials have a balancing act of their own, publicly insisting U.S.-Saudi ties are strong, while privately sketching out worst-case-scenarios in the event of worsening relations. After al-Jubeir met with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, State Department officials insisted that the Saudis indeed remained good friends of the United States, no matter how reluctant they were to show it publicly.

“We’re getting a lot of cooperation in the Arab world,” said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher Monday. “We’re getting a lot of cooperation from the Muslim world. We’ve seen countries that are carrying out arrests. We’re seeing countries that are imposing financial restrictions and seizing assets. And there are a variety of countries that are offering us various kinds of support for the military operation as well — overflight clearances or whatnot.”

Still, others within the State Department say privately that Washington is unhappy with the Saudis’ reluctance to back the U.S. with sufficient and public vigor. Most geopolitical and economic analyses insist that Saudi Arabia’s role as the West’s No. 1 supplier of oil prevents any real unraveling of its close relationship with the U.S. But some diplomats have begun suggesting that the alliance needs serious overhaul — and that there are alternatives to the Saudi stranglehold on the West’s oil supplies. Already U.S. officials, such as Undersecretary of State John Bolton, have said publicly there are proposals under consideration that would shift U.S. oil reliance from Saudi Arabia to Russia — a huge shift in the U.S. foreign policy of the last half-century.

When pressed, State Department spokesman Boucher would only say that the United States favors having diverse sources of oil imports and favors diverse pipeline solutions to getting supplies out of Central Asia. No U.S. officials publicly suggest they are preparing for a worst-case scenario: a fundamentalist-controlled Saudi Arabia. But privately, officials and former U.S. officials point to a tectonic shift since Sept. 11 in U.S. -Russian relations. Russia dropped opposition to U.S. involvement in its former Central Asian republics and approved the stationing of U.S. troops in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The United States has softened its human rights complaints about Russian methods of dealing with Chechen rebels and is tending to view them as Islamic extremists linked to Osama bin Laden. The reluctance to allow Central Asian oil and gas to pass through Russian territory en route to world markets has also eased, say former U.S. officials.

The new look at Russia as an energy supplier follows vast new discoveries of oil and gas in Central Asia, especially in the Caspian Sea region in Kazakhstan. The proven supplies remain smaller than those of Saudi Arabia, and they cost more to extract. But they have the benefit of offering an alternative to total dependence on the Saudis.

Until Sept. 11, U.S. policy had been to try to avoid Russian as well as Iranian control over the West’s oil spigots. U.S. governments waged a costly and tedious diplomatic battle to force the Central Asian oil producers to export across Turkey instead. The Sept. 11 attacks — and the realization that Saudi Arabia was implicated in them, thanks to its financing and its embrace of anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Western ideology, changed all that.

Under consideration is a gigantic shift in policy — dropping opposition to Central Asian oil exports through Russia, eventually making Moscow one of the main foreign suppliers of Western oil. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly discussed this when they met in Shanghai recently and are expected to discuss it further when Putin comes to Washington and Crawford, Texas, for a summit meeting Nov. 14 and 15. “We would have tried to minimize further [Caspian] oil across Russia before Sept. 11,” according to Robert Ebel, a former U.S. official currently heading energy studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But it looks like the U.S. relationship to Russia has changed. It’s to our interest that the oil potential of Russia is realized to the extent possible. With minimal exceptions, Russia has been a very reliable supplier.”

Russia is the No. 2 oil producer and exporter in the world, second only to the Saudi’s 8 million barrel per day output. The world consumes 76 to 80 million barrels a day. Saudi oil reserves — at 260 to 290 billion barrels — remain critical to world oil supplies and still dwarf the Caspian oil reserves discovered to date of about 35 billion barrels.

But there are many reasons for the U.S. to be dissatisfied with its partnership with the Saudis. The country’s rulers have refused to cooperate on investigating the Sept. 11 hijackers who are believed to be Saudi citizens. They still have not closed a single bank account, charity or business that the United States says supplies funds to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist group.

In fact, the analysis put forward by Seymour Hersh in the Oct. 22 New Yorker — that the 30,000 members of the Saudi royal family are so frightened by the possibility of popular unrest fanned by Islamic hard liners, they’ve allowed hundreds of millions of dollars to be funneled to bin Laden and similar groups as protection money, so they will leave Saudi Arabia alone — has become fairly widely accepted.

For years the Saudi government has allowed the extreme Wahabbi sect of Islam to control the mosques and education system, which is permeated with strongly anti-Western, anti-Christian and anti-Jewish messages. When I covered the Afghan war in 1988, Afghan mujahedin fighters told me they were furious at missionary Arabs, mostly Saudis, who controlled the funds and the weapons flows and then told them the Afghan style of prayer and belief was inferior to the Wahabbi system. The Taliban eventually agreed to accept the Wahabbi teachings.

Worry about Saudi Arabia increased as its more than $56 billion a year in oil revenues fell below expenditures for much of the last decade. This has cut back the entitlements to millions of young men now unwilling or unable to earn enough to support a lifestyle the country had become addicted to. These young, underemployed and religious-minded youths went to Afghanistan at Saudi government urging to spread Wahabbism and fight the Russians. But they returned with a taste for blood and fanaticism and contempt for the cushy and often intemperate lifestyles of the royal family.

Saudi funds also paid for tens of thousands of other Arabs from Yemen, Algeria and other countries to join the Afghan war against the Soviets. Many of them have returned to their homelands and tried to launch Islamic revolutions — some of them while continuing to receive funding from ultraconservative Saudis hoping to oust secular governments. Former Arab veterans of the Afghan war turned Algeria into a blood bath, leaving perhaps 100,000 dead in an effort to create another Islamic state, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika told me recently. The “Afghan Arabs” have also been fighting in Chechnya, Kashmir, Bosnia, Yemen and against the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.

While the Saudis turned a blind eye to funding of extremist Islamic groups abroad, at home, the Saudis have been frightened of these fighters, especially Osama bin Laden. The millionaire black sheep of a wealthy Saudi family, bin Laden has been excoriating the royal family for allowing foreign infidel troops to pollute the soil of the holy Saudi land. Some analysts go so far as to say bin Laden’s real enemy is not the West but the pro-American, secular and tolerant regimes in control of Islamic countries such as: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

Saudi officials, who refuse to even acknowledge publicly that U.S. troops are in their country, refused to cooperate with U.S. investigators after the Saudis caught and executed several suspects in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers military apartments, which killed 19 American soldiers. Some believe the Saudis are afraid to unravel the extensive web of Islamic extremists within their own country — so long as it only targets foreigners.

Saudi diplomats don’t seem terribly worried about a possible shift in U.S. policy. They insist their prior efforts to track bin Laden’s funds ran aground when they reached the United States where privacy laws halted the search. Saudi ambassador Jaffar Allagany, chief of the information office at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, pointed out that Saudi Arabia had removed bin Laden’s citizenship after he returned from the Afghan war and began to criticize the Saudi royal family for allowing American soldiers to remain as a protection force following the Gulf War.

And Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington Prince Bandar bin Sultan seemed unflappable in a PBS Frontline show broadcast Oct. 9. He acknowledged that the royal family spent nearly $400 billion to develop Saudi Arabia and added, “Yes, we misused or got corrupted with $50 billion — so what?” Since then he has gone abroad and is absent in Washington during this volatile time.

In public, U.S. officials downplay U.S. concerns about the stability of the Saudi monarchy and its support for the U.S. “The royal family and system of government has more stability than it’s given credit for; every few years there is a wave of stories about U.S. concern for the future of Saudi Arabia,” said one official who has been posted there. He called Saudi Arabia a “pivotal country with a long relationship to the United States.” It is important for its oil exports — to Western allies such as Japan and Europe as much as to the United States — and for keeping oil prices in check through its ability to increase production at will. Saudi Arabia also imports many American products, including high-tech jet aircraft and other weapons, and recently signed a major contract with U.S. energy companies to develop its gas fields.

And it is a comparatively moderate influence in Middle East politics. While the Saudis consistently back the Palestinians in their struggle with Israel, for instance, they have not opposed the peace process the way Iran and Iraq have. Ambassador Allagany told me that if the Palestinians decide to make peace with Israel, the Saudis will support them.

Ultimately, U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia is not based on news reports or oil companies’ investments or worries about the country’s religious tolerance, but on the U.S. national interest at a given moment in time. A dozen U.S. administrations from Franklin Roosevelt onward have kept cozy ties with the Saudi royal family because it has remained pivotal for the United States. President Bush’s phone call of reassurance to the crown prince two weeks ago is simply the latest such example. The fact that both countries are the targets of bin Laden makes it even more important to cling together.

Although the Saudis have not publicly endorsed the bombing of Afghanistan, and they have publicly said U.S. forces cannot use Saudi soil to launch such attacks, the U.S. administration has said it is content with the fact that the Saudis have not publicly condemned the U.S. war on bin Laden in Afghanistan.

It appears that whatever help the United States gets from Saudi Arabia in fighting terrorism, shutting off finances and damping the tide of anti-Western Islamic extremism sweeping much of the Muslim world, it will have to be done behind the scenes — in secret. U.S. officials say that is the best that can be hoped for right now. Unspoken is the fear that anything more could widen domestic Saudi discontent over corruption and the shrinking economy and fuel the main outlet for such frustration — the desire to spread orthodox Islam throughout the world.

So U.S. policy proceeds on two levels. Publicly, Bush praises the Saudis, and pretends the United States doesn’t care if they deny U.S. forces the use of American bases there. No one complains about the way the nation’s leaders allow anti-American groups to rail against America and to raise funds for mosques and spreading Islam around the world — some of it a cover for extremist groups such as bin Laden.

In private, U.S. officials are both preparing for a possible rupture of Saudi oil supplies and searching for a replacement for that oil. The warming of U.S.-Russian ties points to the Caspian basin as the likely stash of oil for a rainy day.

It’s tempting to ask where those hawkish voices have gone, now that Powell has become the reassuring, firm voice of reason to a frightened, angry nation.

But Powell’s apparent ascendancy shouldn’t be overstated. Just as rumors of his diminished role before Sept. 11 were somewhat exaggerated, the extent to which he’s won the internal war over how the U.S. responds to Osama bin Laden may also turn out to be temporary. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld left Wednesday for a diplomatic tour of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Egypt and Uzbekistan — nations vital for deployment of U.S. forces against Afghanistan’s terrorist camps directed by bin Laden — it was hard to know whether Rumsfeld’s departure meant that Powell is too important to U.S. planning to leave Washington, or that the hawkish defense secretary is firmly in charge of an impending military offensive.

Still, it’s clear that for the last three weeks, Powell has carried the day. Although he was quick to call the attacks “war,” he also warned the American public almost immediately that what was needed was not a series of explosive military attacks on Afghanistan or other nations suspected of harboring bin Laden, but a broad military and diplomatic coalition that would isolate those who supported terrorists.

In those same early days after the attacks, Rumsfeld and his hard-line deputy Paul Wolfowitz argued for a more forceful approach — including swift military action against Afghanistan and even Iraq as sponsors of terrorism.

“The assumptions that went into military plans on Sept. 10th just don’t apply any more, and one has to think about, if necessary, larger forces,” Wolfowitz told PBS Sept. 14. “One has to think about accepting casualties. One has to think about sustained campaigns. One has to think about broad possibilities.”

And on Sept. 16, Rumsfeld himself said in a television interview, “The reality is that a terrorist can attack at any time in any place using any technique, and it is physically impossible for a free people to try to defend in every place at every time against every technique. Now, what does that mean? It means that the president is exactly right, that we have to take this battle, this war to the terrorists, where they are. And the best defense is an effective offense, in this case. And that means they have to be rooted out.”

Other hawkish Rumsfeld allies denigrated Powell’s diplomatic approach. “It’s wonderful to have the support of our friends and allies but our foremost consideration has to be to protect this country and not take a vote among others as to how we should do it,” ultra-hawk Richard Perle, who directs the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, said in the days after the attack. But Powell held firm. “The kinds of things that will probably be most successful in the campaign against terrorism are intelligence-sharing, controlling people going across our borders, financial transactions,” he told NPR Sept. 27. “You can’t do this, America alone. You need coalitions.”

Now Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz seem to be reading from the same script. Leaving a NATO meeting Sept. 28, Wolfowitz sounded much less aggressive than he had at first. The NATO allies “appreciated that we don’t believe there’s a single magic bullet, that we don’t believe it’s primarily military, and that their support is very important for maintaining the long-term resolve and patience that’s required here,” he said.

And on Wednesday Rumsfeld told reporters the war against bin Laden was more likely to rely on intelligence than military might. “It’s not going to be a cruise missile or a bomber that’s going to be the determining factor,” he said. “It’s going to be a scrap of information from some person in some country that’s been repressed by a dictatorial regime … that’s going to enable us to pull this network up by its roots and end it.”

But it was Rumsfeld, and not Powell, who left Wednesday for a tour of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Egypt and Uzbekistan. U.S. forces are already based in Saudi Arabia and British newspapers have reported the arrival of American spy planes in Oman at a British air base. Uzbekistan has agreed to allow U.S. forces to use former Soviet bases there which were once used in the failed occupation of neighboring Afghanistan from 1980 to 1990.

Bush said Rumsfeld was “the appropriate person to send” for consultations, but the decision to deploy the defense secretary, not the secretary of state, could be read two ways. It may be that Rumsfeld still holds vital sway over America’s foreign policy and is setting up the allies and forces needed to smash bin Laden and the Afghan Taliban regime, which continues to harbor him. Or it could be that Rumsfeld is doing the field work while Powell remains at the helm of policy in Washington, receiving leaders from India and Greece Tuesday, Qatar and Portugal Wednesday and from other nations as coalition remains the weapon of choice in the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks.

A senior administration official glossed over any differences between the hawks and Powell. “This administration shows it knows how to work together and to decide the right policy,” he said, because “the president says ‘do it’ and they do it.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official added: “I was not happy to see journalists write that Powell is being undercut by hawks in the administration and I’m not happy to see you now write that Powell is winning out over the hawks. The task is not just to blow up some rocks in Afghanistan. If you are to pull up the roots of terrorist networks you don’t just pull them up militarily. You’ve got to get countries to shut down financing, bank accounts. You can’t do it with guns.”

But it wasn’t long ago that the administration seemed ready to rely more heavily on guns in its response to the Sept. 11 attack. It was Powell who quickly went to work on a diplomatic response, building a worldwide coalition aimed at cutting off financial, logistic and communications links that enable terrorists to recruit, train, equip and dispatch thousands of terrorists against American and other targets.

Starting with NATO and then Pakistan — the only country still recognizing the Afghan Taliban regime that is sheltering bin Laden — Powell won the backing of key countries willing to host U.S. forces and join an anti-terrorism coalition.

And his success does seem to have him riding higher in Washington. Rumors of his struggles within the administration, in its early months, were not entirely exaggerated. Earlier this year he was humiliated when just one day after he said the United States would continue talks with North Korea initiated by the Clinton administration, he had to reverse course when Bush gave in to hawks and ordered a cutoff of all talks pending a review. (Later the talks were approved, but the peace process has been seriously set back.) Powell also faced criticism over being soft on China back in April, when a U.S. surveillance plane was downed there, although the State Department was ultimately successful in getting the crew returned safely.

He also lost his battle to allow Iraq greater access to civilian goods while tightening sanctions on access to weapons — a move hotly opposed by hawks on Capitol Hill and eventually scotched by Russia and China in the United Nations. And the secretary of state was overruled when he tried to soft-pedal missile defense plans in Europe — Defense Department officials simply told the allies they had no choice but to accept the American plan.

Certainly Powell continues to have his hawkish critics, who still don’t forgive him for his restraint during the Gulf War, when, their line goes, the U.S. had an opportunity to go after Saddam Hussein but did not, largely due to Powell’s caution. The so-called Powell Doctrine on when to use military force — as a last resort, and only when U.S. or allies’ vital interests are at stake, after clear military and political objectives have been defined, and the mission has the support of the American people and Congress — has come in for new attack in the last three weeks.

“Ten Years On, Powell Gets it Wrong Again,” was a headline for an op-ed by Mark Steyn in the London Sunday Telegraph Sept. 30 that typified this line. “Ten years ago Powell was the only guy in the inner circle who didn’t want to fight the Gulf War,” wrote Steyn.

Conservative William Kristol, former advisor to Vice President Dan Quayle and now editor of the Weekly Standard, complained in the Washington Post Sept. 25 that all major political figures supported President Bush in his response to the terror attacks, “except for his secretary of state. Colin Powell revised or modified many of his boss’s remarks.”

After Bush told the armed forces and the American people to “be ready” for war, Mr. Powell said “let’s not assume there will be a large scale war,” Kristol wrote. Powell also went too far, according to Kristol, when he said the overthrow of the Taliban was not a U.S. goal.

“Eleven years ago then-President bush overrode Powell’s resistance to fighting Saddam. Bush was vindicated in doing so. Will the current President Bush follow Powell’s lead? Or will Bush lead and demand that Powell follow?” Kristol wrote.

But Rumsfeld and Powell have been careful not to contradict each other in public. And in fact their approaches may not be contradictory in private, at this point. Although apparently Powell’s arguments for restraint have been heard by Bush, it’s also true that the nature of the U.S. enemy — hidden in caves in a remote and hostile land — is forcing both the hawks and the diplomats to reach some common conclusions.

Above all, the religious justifications for the attacks used by bin Laden and Islamic extremists threaten to turn any U.S. response into a conflict between the West and Islam. The entire Bush administration — already well versed on the delicacy of winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world, thanks to the Gulf War — fairly well understands the need not to fall into a trap set by bin Laden.

Powell’s approach has been to shore up commitments by Muslim countries and to allow each of them to contribute whatever they can to the effort without setting off domestic instability. The key to winning the war on terrorism may lie in supporting moderate elements inside a slew of countries from Pakistan to Egypt. Powell’s work in that direction has become the national agenda, even as Rumsfeld dispatches thousands of troops, planes and ships to prepare to strike once the diplomatic work is complete.

And there may well still be differences between them. Rumsfeld has warned that the U.S. response would not be toned down to accommodate any fainthearted members of a coalition. “In this war, the mission will define the coalition — not the other way around,” he warned in a briefing last week.

The U-2 spy plane of Francis Gary Powers, shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, took off from a Pakistani airfield. When President Nixon and Henry Kissinger broke the ice and visited Mao Zedong in 1972, Pakistan paved the way. And when the United States gave $500 million a year in arms and supplies, including Stinger missiles, to help Afghan mujahideen guerrillas defeat the Russian army in the 1980s, the rebels were based in Pakistan.

But in the last decade, India opened up to foreign trade and investment, shifted away from central planning to market economics and launched a giant software industry, manned by English-speaking graduates of superb public technical universities. Some had feared that since Democrats had traditionally leaned toward India and Republicans toward Pakistan, that George W. Bush would end the India tilt. But so far, the Bush team has continued a pro-India policy. Apparently at the heart of that decision: a mutual fear of China.

India is furious that China supplied Pakistan with ring magnets and other high tech equipment to build both nuclear weapons and guided missiles. That proliferation continues to take place according to recent intelligence leaks. When Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Hindu nationalist party took power in 1998, and quickly set off its five nuclear blasts, the Indian defense minister said it was to deter China, not Pakistan.

Now, according to State Department and foreign sources, U.S.-Indian military cooperation is increasing and the Bush foreign policy team is trying to find a way to lift the mandatory sanctions on India imposed over its nuclear blasts. India seeks advanced weapons and joint military training with the United States. But India remains a thorny potential ally. For half a century, it has been accustomed to being the big boy on the block, dominating its neighbors in South Asia with an often heavy hand. The United States must be sure India will not use its new American connection to further bully its neighbors. And the United States will not find India as compliant an ally as Britain or even France.

Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution, who is a former State Department Asia expert, says the issue of nuclear proliferation has been a major stumbling block in improving U.S.-India relations. The nuclear blasts shattered the nuclear weapons monopoly by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and obliged the United States to take action. A long series of discussions between then Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and his Indian counterparts failed to push the nuclear genie back in the bottle as the Americans wanted. But it at least alerted the Americans to India’s deep-seated confidence and patience.

“In the past, India has been a less-than-great-power attempting to act like a great one,” writes Cohen in his new book “India, Emerging Power.” He believes a new generation of Indian officials is moving away from “hectoring,” which will lead to improved ties with the United States. “India is not a great power … however in a transformed international order its assets and resources become more relevant to a wide range of American interests than they have been for the past fifty years. They cannot be safely ignored in the future as they have been in the past,” he writes.

American leaders seem to agree and continue to court India. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld attended talks July 30 in Australia that aimed at possibly merging U.S. allies Japan, South Korea and Australia into a new alliance.

Powell carefully did not say who the alliance would be aimed at — China is the only credible candidate for a threat. And Powell did not mention the other Asian power needed to complete an arc containing China’s power and protecting America’s allies — India.

A likely U.S.-China conflict, say many military planners, could begin in the South China Sea, which China claims as its territorial waters but which is also claimed in part by Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei. The United States sees the sea as international waters, through which flow most of Japan’s Middle East oil supplies. China has already clashed with Vietnam and the Philippines over the disputed Spratly Islands since 1988, and China briefly detained a U.S. aircrew and surveillance plane after it collided with a Chinese chase plane in April over the disputed sea.

India and Japan recently held blue-water naval exercises in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean, ostensibly aimed at search and rescue or combating piracy. Meanwhile Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Henry Shelton visited New Delhi recently amid talks of closer U.S.-Indian military ties. President Clinton also made the first U.S. presidential visit to India in 23 years in March 2000, winning over a normally skeptical Parliament. Clinton spent just a few insulting hours in Pakistan calling for a return to democracy.

Even if the United States is only waking up to the potential power of India, which set off nuclear weapons in 1998 and is building its own guided missiles, China has long been wary of its natural rival for dominance in Asia. The two fought a bitter border war in 1962 that China basically won, seizing large tracts of land. It continues to claim still more Indian land and until recently refused to even agree on the lines of actual control. But India is just emerging from decades — one might say centuries — of stagnation and isolation. And jut as it tries to raise its head beyond the Indian Ocean to become a world power, it is being dragged back down by its death-struggle against neighboring Pakistan.

India is expected to pass China as the most populous nation on earth around the year 2020, but remains hobbled by a guerrilla war in Kashmir sponsored by its vastly smaller neighbor — a neighbor, which Indian and U.S. analysts are quick to note, that has been able to develop atomic bombs and guided missiles through the largess of China.

Closer to home, Indian political clout has increased. More than 100 congressmen have joined what has become the second most powerful ethnic-American caucus on the Hill. “We are not so well organized as AIPAC[the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee],” said a congressional source linked to the India lobby. But when Pakistan invaded Kargil in 1999, the Indian-American lobby “flooded congressional offices” with impassioned calls for American intervention. That led to the first, clear-cut U.S. tilt in 50 years away from Pakistan and towards India.

Pakistan is also blamed for backing the radical Muslim fundamentalist Taliban movement which rose in the madrassas or religious schools of Pakistan and took over 90 percent of Afghanistan and shelters accused terrorist Osama bin Laden. So Pakistan is increasingly seen as a crossroads for terrorism, with armed militants heading to Kashmir or to Afghanistan where training camps prepare Muslim fighters from all over the world for battles in Chechnya, the Philippines, Uzbekistan, Kashmir, Algeria and even the bombing of buildings in America.

Pakistani journalists recently told me they were shocked at the negative coverage of their country in American newspapers. But after they listed their own grievances with their government — “corrupt, military run, no transparency, press is intimidated, the mullahs are gaining power, the feudals control the economy” — we agreed they were tougher on their country than the American press. Only they could not write it in their newspapers. But even if the United States has in recent years given up on Pakistan as unstable, corrupt and radicalized, before the United States can fully enlist India as an ally in Asia, a parting of the ways with Pakistan is needed.

“The tilt towards India should have happened at the end of the Cold War, but a lot of old habits on both sides prevented close accommodation and the Pakistanis were able to get U.S. policy to still treat the two countries with parity,” said James Clad, a former correspondent in New Delhi for the Far Eastern Economic Review and currently professor of Asian Studies at Georgetown University. “Pakistan was loyal in the Cold War and loyalty matters. But speaking of India and Pakistan in the same breath foreclosed opportunities. Now the disproportionate power and opportunity of India has become clear.”