One clue to how Mubarak would behave in an anti-terror coalition can be found in the way his government responded to the investigation into the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990, which mysteriously plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in 1999 shortly after takeoff from New York’s John F. Kennedy airport. Egypt bitterly objected to the National Transportation Safety Board’s finding that the plane’s co-pilot, Gamil al-Batouti, had probably crashed the plane deliberately. American aviation experts later complained that Egypt had hindered the investigation by refusing to look into the suicide angle. Egypt’s reluctance now seems doubly tragic. It’s possible that al-Batouti’s death was somehow a trial run to see whether a plane could be used as a suicide bomb — and perhaps he decided not to carry it to completion. We’ll never know. But maybe if that incident had been more properly investigated, we would have learned something that could have prevented last week’s tragedy.

As for Saudi Arabia — perhaps the country that bin Laden hates more than any other except the United States, as Cheney noted on Sunday — that country’s willingness to cooperate with America has always been balanced by a consciousness of how such actions will affect the ruling al-Saud family. One would think that if bin Laden hates the Saudi regime so much, the ruling family would do everything in its power to help the United States crush the elusive millionaire. But think again.

Two examples clearly show that the Saudis will probably resist cooperating in a war against terror even if they nominally join a coalition. In 1995, after a US military installation in Riyadh was bombed, the Saudis quickly apprehended four suspects, who confessed links to bin Laden. The suspects were beheaded by Saudi authorities before American investigators had an opportunity to question them — even though US investigators had specifically requested that the executions be delayed until questioning could take place. (This is all recounted in the recent PBS Frontline episode " Hunting bin Laden. " ) In 1997, Louis Freeh, the FBI director under President Clinton, was stymied by Saudi authorities when his agency tried to investigate the bomb attack at Khobar Towers, in which 19 American soldiers died. " We have not gotten everything we have asked for [from the Saudis] and, sure, that has affected our ability " to crack the case, he told the Washington Post at the time. In fact, Freeh was so frustrated with Saudi Arabian authorities that he asked former president Bush to make inquiries into the matter during a 1998 trip to Saudi Arabia, as Elsa Walsh reported in the New Yorker last May.

Even if a broad coalition can get past these fundamental obstacles, there are other problems. The most dangerous? Working in concert with other countries will put US soldiers at risk. Let’s assume that Bush can persuade the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other such nations to participate in an anti-terror coalition. That doesn’t mean everyone in those countries will want the coalition to win. In fact, anti-American sentiment is considerable in those countries — even if the majority of people don’t support terrorism per se. If bin Laden operatives exist within America’s own military, which they do — during the New York trials of those suspected in the African embassy bombings, a member of the US Army Special Forces confessed to being one — then they are surely present in the militaries of countries in which bin Laden enjoys popular support (such as Pakistan, which is already playing a crucial role in trying to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan for bin Laden’s extradition). There’s no question that classified information could be compromised.

America’s tragic experience in Mogadishu, Somalia, shows what can happen. In 1993, the US deployed its Delta Force and Ranger units in an operation designed to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Aidid (something these units may be asked to do with bin Laden in Afghanistan). According to a 1998 Frontline documentary, " Ambush in Mogadishu, " American efforts to capture Aidid were repeatedly thwarted by Italian allies, who were also operating in Somalia under the flag of the United Nations. " The Italians were not happy about the war the Americans were fighting against us, " an Aidid militia commander told Frontline. " We had an understanding with some UN contingents that we would not attack them, and they would not attack us. "

To make matters worse, the Italians were actually in league with the Somalis, writes journalist Mark Bowden in his classic account of the Somalian war, Black Hawk Down (Penguin, 1999). " You had the Italians, some of them openly sympathetic to their former colonial subjects, who appeared to be flashing signals with their headlights out into the city whenever the [American] helicopters took off. Nobody had the balls to do anything about it. " The collusion between Somalia and Italy ultimately played a role in the death of 18 Americans — and the ensuing spectacle of American corpses being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The lesson? You need to worry about your allies as much as your enemies. (Italian defense minister Antonio Martino has already announced that " Italian soldiers will not go " in an anti-terror coalition headed by the United States.)

More recently, the problems of working militarily with an international coalition became apparent in 1999, when the United States joined the war in Kosovo in order to save the lives of Albanian Muslims — a fact now seemingly forgotten. General Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander, tells the tale in his recently released memoir Waging Modern War (Public Affairs, 2001). America’s European allies in the war against Milosevic required that Clark’s bombing targets be approved in advance, which greatly increased the risk that the information would be leaked and the lives of NATO soldiers put at risk. Clark feared that some of his " allies " were providing information to the enemy. " Back in October, one of the French officers working at NATO headquarters had given key portions of the operations plan to the Serbs, " he writes. Later in the war, the Europeans objected to Clark’s desire to bring in Apache helicopters, use ground troops, and bomb a troublesome Serb airbase in Montenegro. " This was a matter of protecting our American and NATO forces, " according to Clark. After Clark ultimately ordered air strikes, France protested.

If these examples all show the strategic complications of working with an international alliance, the 1991 Gulf War demonstrates that a coalition can actually hinder the goal of a mission itself. In 1991, the first Bush administration was careful about bringing together a broad coalition. Bush even persuaded Egypt and Syria to contribute troops to fight Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. When American forces had Saddam Hussein on the ropes in January, Bush had to decide whether to wipe out the Iraqi forces as they retreated to Baghdad. Some military experts believe that if the Gulf War had continued for one or two more days, Hussein would have been toppled. It was not to be. Mindful of the Arab leaders in his coalition — who would have faced serious heat from their own populations if the Americans had slaughtered thousands of near-defenseless Iraqi soldiers — Bush allowed General Norman Schwarzkopf to sign an armistice with Saddam Hussein. The decision haunted the Clinton administration and is now haunting the new Bush administration.

All that said, the alternative to an international coalition is for the United States to wage a war against terrorism unilaterally, perhaps with some assistance from allies such as Great Britain and Israel — a smaller, less ambitious alliance of the type that formed around the US during the Cold War. Of course, such a plan would mean that the United States would have to take on not only bin Laden but also the suicide bombers within Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, which has praised these terrorists as " heroes, martyrs, and stars. " " It’s a short road from blowing up a pizza place to taking an airplane and crashing it into the World Trade Center, " says one Washington foreign-policy expert, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Given the probable cost in lives and money of the go-it-alone scenario, it seems an unlikely path for Bush to take.

To be sure, moving ahead under any plan won’t be easy. Even beyond the question of whether to work with an international coalition is the question of how, physically, to fight the war. Bin Laden is based in Afghanistan, a country of uniquely hostile terrain. It is a country of towering mountains, where each valley is inhabited by a different warlike group. More than 2000 years ago, brutal fighting in Afghanistan prompted Alexander the Great to stop his campaign of world conquest and return to civilized Babylon. When the British first ventured into Afghanistan by way of India, in 1839, Afghan tribesmen massacred them to a man. They tried again in 1878, with similar results. And in 1897 the British needed 40,000 soldiers just to regain control of the Khyber Pass, which marks the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Soviets met with similar difficulties just a decade ago. When I asked one publicity-shy scholar — himself a staunch opponent of Islamic fundamentalism — about the possibility of invading Afghanistan, he chuckled and asked, " Have you ever been to Afghanistan? "

Even if the United States could somehow succeed in eradicating bin Laden and his Al Queda organization in Afghanistan, that wouldn’t solve the problem. In the past decade, bin Laden has gained followers in the former Soviet Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, as well as the Muslim sections of China, according to a July 11, 2001, report from Interfax News Agency. Eliminating bin Laden’s base in Afghanistan wouldn’t begin to deal with the total number of his operatives — up to 35,000 around the world.

So where does that leave the United States? With a lot to think about. Given the horrific consequences of last week’s attack, the United States must do something. Our very way of life is at stake, just as it was in World War II; if America had stayed out of that war, Nazism and fascism might still be functioning political philosophies instead of history-book curiosities. Now the stakes are just as high, and it’s just as well that we face up to the truth: September 11, 2001, marked the first time in centuries that a non-Western military force was able to strike at the heart of a Western nation. If Osama bin Laden is the mastermind behind the attacks — as many believe — he is the first to turn the West’s tools against it. Bin Laden’s statements suggest that he views his struggle against America in the same light as the Muslims viewed the battle with the Crusaders hundreds of years ago. If that’s true, we probably haven’t seen anything yet.

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.com