Today's Friends, Tomorrow's Mess

• Share

If Hitler invaded hell," Winston Churchill proclaimed during World War II, "I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil." Replace Hitler with Osama bin Laden and you have the sense of the current moment. The order of world devilry changes—and with it the alliances between good and evil, black and white, which make up the gray world in which we actually live.

It was said of mercantile Britain that it had no permanent friends, only permanent interests. The U.S. is a power pursuing a mission it considers moral. Nonetheless, even the most principled fight must take advantage of unpredictable changes in the balance of national interests. My enemy's friend one day is my enemy's enemy the next—and that opens the door to an opportunistic friendship or alliance. The problem is that such overnight love affairs can lead to big sorrow in the future.

George W. Bush has already gone on record warning that countries who aren't with him are against the U.S., a flashback to the 1950s and '60s, when the West was confronting "evil" communism. That shouldn't be the bottom line: for many countries, such as Indonesia or Malaysia, staying out of the fray is simply the national interest. The U.S. must also be wary of abandoning liberal and democratic principles in the name of solidarity against its new enemy, terrorism. Washington must be careful not to give free reign to a regime just because it joins the alliance. In recent years, Uighurs, Kurds, Tibetans and Chechens have all resorted to bombs to protest oppression. The bombs may be wrong, but their struggles for self-determination, once much applauded in the West, may be legitimate. Likewise, should the ex-communist thugs who rule over Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan be given carte blanche to deal with opponents as though they were all card-carrying bin Ladenists? And how is the U.S. now to reward China for its support, however tentative? These are—or should be—real dilemmas.

Even with hindsight, it can be hard to determine whether a particular alliance of convenience has done more good than harm. The rise of the Taliban is one of the thorniest examples. Massive American and Saudi supplies of arms and money went to various mujahedin groups in the 1980s, making Afghanistan the U.S.S.R.'s Vietnam. (It also created the conditions for armed and militant religious movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan.) When the Russians left, Pakistan fostered the rise of the Taliban, which was viewed with equanimity by the U.S. Washington hoped the group would end Afghanistan's civil war and bring enough stability to enable exports of gas from Turkmenistan—in which U.S. companies had big interests—by routes other than through Iran or Russia. The Taliban's hostility to Tehran was more important than its medieval ideology or oppression of women.

Today, this appears to be as big a blunder as the West's sales of weapons to Saddam Hussein in the 1970s, which enabled him to invade Iran. That war gave Tehran's faltering clerical regime a nationalist legitimacy that only now, almost 20 years later, is fraying. And then Saddam invaded Kuwait, leading to America's last war.

On the other hand, support for the mujahedin, from whom the Taliban rose, did prevent the Soviets from gaining control of Afghanistan. Their military failure helped precipitate the downfall of the Soviet system and the collapse of the Russian empire. That probably would have happened anyway—but Afghanistan brought it forward by about 10 years.

By contrast, few good words can be found for the decade of Chinese, Western and Thai support for the Khmer Rouge following Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia. Compared with Pol Pot's regime, the Taliban is a model of humanitarianism. And at the start of a global war on terrorism, the U.S. won't want to remember its sponsorship of the contras in Nicaragua; or, as it's courting support from the most populous Muslim country on the planet, Indonesia, to be reminded of its 1958 support for the rebellion against Indonesia's infuriatingly nonaligned President Sukarno.

In the days of the cold war, it was better that the big powers fought proxy wars rather than engage each other. But in the multipolar era the danger of states' losing control of the insurgents they sponsor has soared. It is a reminder of Bismarck's forecast 20 years before the outbreak of World War I: "If there is another war in Europe, it will come out of some damn silly thing in the Balkans." The lesson: don't take Churchill's quip literally. Choose your friends and enemies with equal care, for today's easy way out can create tomorrow's nightmare.