In new fight, shades of cold war

Force alone is unlikely to completely stamp out Al Qaeda, much less all terrorism of global reach. Experts estimate that Al Qaeda has cells in 50 countries.

But draining sympathy for Al Qaeda's aims, while chipping away at the willingness of nations such as Afghanistan and Sudan to be terrorist safe harbors, can contain the threat, and perhaps begin to reduce it. "The feeling in the cold war was if we could stop their expansion, the communists would collapse from the weight of their system," says Mr. Mead. "This is more of a criminal containment, with the mission being to keep incidents at an acceptably low level."

The importance of the terrorist fight also means that henceforth much of what the US government does will be seen through a single lens. Thus, budget planning now revolves around the billions presumed necessary for new military spending, as well as attack recovery.

As in the cold war, this also has meant a sudden and strict reordering of US relationships with other nations.

It is not quite a judgment of "either you are with us or against us," to paraphrase Mr. Bush. But it is close. Suddenly, the world is being divided into two camps. On one are those with the US and those, such as Iran, that the US hopes might be of some help in the future.

On the other side are nations in the crosshairs - Afghanistan being the most obvious and notable among them.

"The effort the Bush administration is trying to launch is like the cold war in that we have an organizing principle for foreign policy," says James Lindsay, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "But the strategies we use will be different."

That can be seen clearly in the allegiances that have already been pledged. Most notably, Russia has decided that embracing US aims in this regard serve its national interest. Only weeks ago, for President Vladimir Putin to agree to the deployment of US forces in former Soviet republics that border Afghanistan would have been virtually unthinkable. But Mr. Putin has clearly thrown in his lot with the West - and in doing so, perhaps gained some respite from US criticism of Russia's own human rights abuses in its war against Chechnya.

Pakistan has similarly already seen a quid for its quo of signing up in the US effort. The US has moved to lift economic sanctions on Pakistan that were part of the US nuclear-nonproliferation effort. For the risk Pakistani officials are taking of angering their own population's many bin Laden sympathizers, they are further expecting millions in US aid.

Cold-war containment was ultimately successful - but it had its excesses, too. McCarthyism spawned by the fears of the early years of communist confrontation robbed many Americans of their basic liberties. The US overlooked the thuggishness of many of its allies in the war against what many officials perceived as a communist tide. The US won the cold war - but it paid a "high price" along the way, says Mr. Lindsay.

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