US risks losing coalition if it expands war targets

Afghanistan's Taliban government was a friendless regime before the United States commenced airstrikes against it this week, and that hasn't changed as American bombs and missiles continue to hit targets there.

Yet, while the international coalition the US has assembled is holding firm, that could change once the US moves beyond a reviled regime to other countries it accuses of harboring terrorists.

The test case that will try the resolve of countries is Iraq, many experts believe.

The US has hinted at no specific action beyond its current mission in Afghanistan, but a letter it presented to the United Nations this week, warning that military action against other countries may be necessary, was enough to touch off speculation.

Military action against Iraq would be a very different story, leading many observers to dub the initial air campaign in Afghanistan the easiest chapter of a long and complex war. Furthermore, some of the hottest anti-US demonstrations in the wake of this week's strikes are in Indonesia - the world's largest Muslim country, where terrorist groups linked to the Al Qaeda organization, the US's prime target, are known to operate.

Yet Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries with Islamic extremist groups - including the Philippines and Malaysia - are friends of the US, which means counterterrorist action there would be very different from what is hitting Afghanistan.

For now, even Britain, America's closest ally in the war's initial phase, is hinting the fight should stick to Afghanistan and its terrorist-guest-in-residence, Osama bin Laden.

As the military campaign sets in, a coalition that is global but actually very thin when it comes to military action is indicating that the Bush administration's design for international support was right on target, some experts say. That design has essentially been to leave most countries on the sidelines as moral cheerleaders, while the US carries out the search-and-destroy missions almost alone.

"This is a coalition of variable geometry, where at the outer limits nothing more is expected than broad political approval and where for the moment only the US and Britain are involved in the actual military operations," says John Chipman, director of the Institute for International and Strategic Studies in London.

This construction makes the coalition very different from the one assembled for the Gulf War a decade ago, Mr. Chipman says, where more than 30 countries participated to some degree in the military campaign.

"In that case, the US was coming to the assistance of many countries in the [Persian Gulf] region who were aggrieved parties," he says. "Here, the US is appealing for support from many of those same countries as it comes to its self-defense."

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