Mideast peace must now top agenda

Martin Woollacott, Guardian News Service, London

The contrast between the American bombs that are falling around Kandahar and the Israeli missiles which have battered Gaza is a sharp one. In the first case, the use of force is hastening the end of the war in Afghanistan and, as a provisional government emerges, also helping toward a political solution of that country's difficulties and divisions. In the second, force is clearly counter-productive, extending the war in the territories and making a political solution ever more difficult.

The contradictory images from the two wars, played in real time on television throughout the Arab and Muslim world, no doubt engender some perplexity. But no doubt, too, of which way the balance is likely to tip, as between what some Arabs will agree is Afghan liberation and what few will see as anything other than Israeli oppression.

And it may be that Afghan liberation will be viewed as an incidental benefit of the use of American military power for its own interests, while the Sharon government's actions will be understood as the direct consequence of America's complicity with Israel in denying Palestinians their national rights.

There is a serious question about whether the U.S. was pushed by the weekend's suicide bombings not only into discarding a calibrated policy on terrorism which allowed it to take a different attitude to extremist groups whose operations were national rather than global, but also into uncritical support of the Sharon government. The advantage of that calibrated policy was, first, that it reflected reality, second, that it avoided provoking Muslim anger across a broad front, and, third, that it did not put American policy into the Sharon government's pocket.

The arguments in Washington about whether to wage war on all forms of terrorism without distinction overlapped with arguments between lobbies for and against the Sharon government, with its urgent demand that its enemies be placed at once in the same category as al-Qaeda.

The pro-Sharon lobbies may have won the day. It is also possible that the policy may have been designed to help Arafat by demonstrating to Palestinians that this time the hard choice for him is between the destruction of the Palestine Authority and an attack on the militant movements.

If Arafat does make the arrests and take the other actions which Israel has demanded, then the Americans will bring equally formidable pressure on the Sharon government, forcing it into the substantive negotiations it wishes at all costs to avoid.

This moment may not only be, as Sharon would have it, the last chance for Arafat, but also the last chance for Sharon.

So how would a sensible American -- and European -- policy be shaped from now on? Its end would be to get those negotiations going and, if Sharon bulked at that or obstructed talks after they began, to help bring about a situation in which a more sensible government would be in charge in Israel.

Those who know Israeli politics well shake their heads, but it is at least possible that if Labor left the government and if the Americans announced a clear peace plan not too far from the Taba principles, and perhaps also if an international interpositional force was in prospect, then the election which could not be too far along the road might be fought on those issues.

If so, it would not necessarily bring Benjamin Netanyahu to power, which is what the polls suggest. Failing such a chain of events, admittedly based on somewhat wishful speculation, there might emerge a more powerful constituency in Israel for separation from the Palestinians.

The alternatives are quite terrible -- a conflict mixing international and civil war in the territories and the collapse of anything recognizable as government there. That would have a devastating effect on Muslim opinion. Any turn to a fairer and more realistic view of western purposes, among Arabs in particular, would be reversed by the prospect of endless suffering in the territories. And this is the context in which new acts of terror would become more likely, because those who plan such acts do pay some attention to the state of that opinion, and because they will be able to attract more recruits and helpers.

The two tasks of trying to create the conditions for normal life in both Afghanistan and in Israel and the occupied territories are very different. But each is vital to the larger campaign, and each involves an ambitious effort from the outside to change societies that are very resistant to intervention. Israel's splintered politics consistently produce governments which, through appeasing a variety of contradictory constituencies, including extreme ones, gravely constrict their own room for maneuver. Or, as now, Israelis find themselves with governments which they do not want but nevertheless support.

The situation in Israel and the territories is so desperate that the risks of quite forceful intervention ought to be taken. In Afghanistan, after the military effort, caution is in order.

There is an easy assumption in some quarters that Afghanistan can now be transformed into a "modern" society with, for instance, Western-style equality for women. But Afghanistan is a traditional Muslim society, even if much damaged. The attempt to modernize it at high speed was one of the main reasons that it fell apart in war.

Apart from its ethnic divisions, Afghanistan was also marked by a division in values, between those of a partly westernized middle class in the capital and a few other towns, and those of the bulk of rural society. The middle class itself was split between secular and religious tendencies.

The idea that the outside world should line up its assets in Afghanistan -- the United Nations hierarchy, the aid agencies, the international force -- with secular Afghans, including returned expatriates, to form a "progressive front" against warlords, Islamists, and reactionaries is an attractive one.

But, if such an alliance does come into being, it will have to be an extremely informal and subtle arrangment. Attaching aid, for instance, to conditions about democratic rules or the equal employment of women, could have the opposite effect.

After Sept. 11, Afghanistan is the qualified success that many thought would be far more elusive than it has proved to be, while Israel and the territories are the unqualified disaster that some believed we would be able to avoid. Whatever the earlier arguments about priorities, it has surely become undeniable that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians ought now to be at the very top of the agenda.