Insurgency pattern spans Islamic nations

Just as the United States has focused attention on how to reach the publics of Middle East countries, the governments of three countries with close US ties - Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan - are engaged in their own struggles with extremists to win hearts and minds.

The three cases are not the same: Fledgling governments in Iraq and Afghanistan are struggling to establish legitimacy in the face of destabilizing violence, while the Saudi royal regime battles to retain a public legitimacy that is eroding.

But when Secretary of State Colin Powell said earlier this week that Iraqis must be prepared to kill their own people - Iraqi insurgents - to establish a new government, he was painting a stark scene that broadly applies to all three countries across an arc of violence.

With the battle for the public's heart at the crux of each case, those working to undermine both old and new regimes are trying to limit the public outcry that may result from indiscriminate violence. In many cases, that means they're shifting tactics.

"The government needs the support from the public to do anything against the perpetrators of violence, and the extremists realize this, which is why we see them changing tactics from indiscriminate bombings to very targeted attacks," says Matthew Levitt, a former FBI counterterrorism official and Saudi expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Noting that recent attacks in Saudi Arabia have shifted from large-scale bombings to assassinations and kidnapping, often against foreign targets seen as supporters of the ruling regime, Mr. Levitt says, "These attacks may be just as terrible, but not necessarily to the average Saudi."

Of course, there are dangers of oversimplifying and blurring crucial distinctions when the three countries are lumped together. Afghanistan is different in that its case includes the resistance of long-mighty warlords to relinquishing power. And the pairing of Iraq with Saudi Arabia could bolster the Bush administration's argument that invading Iraq was an essential part of the war on terror - a view that some experts reject.

But James Phillips, a Middle East expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, says that at this point all three countries are clearly facing violence perpetrated by Al Qaeda and related groups seeking "to drive a wedge" between the governments and the population.

Even observers who reject Iraq's importance to the war on terror see a common theme in these cases of regimes struggling to establish or maintain legitimacy while highly dependent on a foreign presence.

"Each of these regimes has an American problem," says Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army officer who is now director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. "From the perspective of the bad guys, all three regimes are tainted by their involvement with the US. The people in each case are weighing that involvement, and the insurgents or whoever are capitalizing on that."

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