EVEN IN A TIME of clamorous tub-thumping for war, the federal government has a think-tank dedicated to giving peace a chance. The US Congress founded the Washington, DC–based United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in 1984 "to strengthen the nation’s capacity to promote the peaceful resolution of international conflict." The USIP’s distinctly nonpartisan cast makes it excellent middle ground for competing foreign-policy notions — such as those at play in the war on terrorism — to receive a clear and level-headed assessment.

The prevailing foreign-policy crosscurrents received a comprehensive airing last week, when the USIP hosted a conference titled "9.11 a Year On: America’s Challenges in a Changed World." The all-day wonkfest attracted a cross section of diplomatic heavyweights (with speeches by former National Security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger and US Senator Chuck Hagel) and a sprinkling of key Bush-administration policymakers with specific regional expertise, including Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

Such gatherings always produce a cacophony of opinion that resists easy summation. Yet the conference did bring home the point that the post-9/11 world is brimming over with crises. All these flash points require close US attention, and all resist easy solutions. The Middle East is the best-publicized hot spot of the bunch, since the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was boiling over for a full year before the terrorist attacks. The second Intifada certainly gets the most ink and airtime in the US — creating an inflammatory effect on public opinion intensified by the images of that conflict beamed throughout the region via Al-Jazeera and other networks.

But the mayhem occurring in Israel’s West Bank and Gaza was only one of the global conflicts that kept the USIP conferees yakking. South Asia had its own "break-out session" to examine the conflict between India and Pakistan. Considering the fact that war between these two fledgling nuclear states was only narrowly averted in June 2002, the standoff might deserve more attention than even Israel’s battles with the Palestinians.

But Pakistan’s dubious political stability and the fact that a million men in arms are still staring each other down in Kashmir didn’t have this panel hitting any panic buttons. Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca seemed just as concerned about two lower-order regional conflicts — the conflict in Sri Lanka and a "violent Maoist insurgency" in Nepal — while former Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbott issued a coolly detached assessment of what was left undone in the previous administration’s nuclear-diplomacy struggles with India and Pakistan.

However, after this summer’s subcontinental nuclear near miss, a less-sanguine assessment seems more appropriate. Pakistan continues to export violence, both from its porous western border (swarming with Taliban and Al Qaeda forces) and eastward into Kashmir. Pakistan’s leader, General Pervez Musharraf, has arrogated to himself sweeping new powers that bar many opposition candidates from the upcoming October 10 parliamentary elections. (Musharraf also won an electoral "endorsement" of his rule via a widely criticized May referendum riddled with voting irregularities, in which he received 97 percent of the vote.) In India, too, a toxic blend of religious violence and nationalism has whipped the country’s politics into a fervently warlike posture.

When these topics did surface in a Q&A period, Rocca stuck to boilerplate diplo-speak, stating, "We believe Pakistan is a stable nation," and "A return to democracy [in Pakistan] is a priority for the United States." Talbott struck an even odder realpolitik note. Responding to a question about the gap between US ideals and policy in the region, he mused about how preferable it must have been during the June nuclear crisis for Rocca and other Bush-administration diplomats to deal with Musharraf — rather than with Pakistan’s elected prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. (Sharif, deposed by Musharraf in October 1999, didn’t "inspire confidence," Talbott said.)

The shambles of Afghanistan, on the other hand, resist such diplomatic bromides. The USIP panel devoted to this shattered state had only one bit of good news to share: Al Qaeda doesn’t live there anymore. The Bush administration’s envoy to that country, Zalmay Khalilzad, used his time to spin out slight and spidery variations on that maxim, largely evading the Bush White House’s current failure to make much headway in rebuilding a country scarred by decades of unceasing war and political oppression.

Fortunately, the other panelists fleshed out just what has gone wrong. Barnett R. Rubin, director of studies at New York University’s Center for International Cooperation, sketched a bleak landscape that includes an increase in Afghan political terrorism, growing resentment of the US presence, a revival of political support for the Taliban, and a loss of faith in the international community’s efforts there. United Nations assistant secretary-general Michael Sheehan underscored the latter point, noting that only 30 percent of the aid pledged to the country had arrived.

Asked to reflect on the current Afghan mess and put a finger on even one way in which the United States could strengthen its ineffective nation-building skills, Khalilzad could offer no concrete suggestions. Sheehan argued that the US should emphasize training and deploying Afghan-led security forces to demobilize the country’s ubiquitous warlords. Both suggestions would require a more robust US presence in that country — more troops, more money, and, perhaps, more US casualties.

SOMETIMES, what’s left unspoken is just as important as what is said. The conflicts engaging US attention at the moment are so numerous that even the USIP conference’s full day of wide-ranging discussion left many other global hot spots entangling the United States completely unmentioned.

Closer to home, for instance, US involvement in Colombia’s war on drugs and the leftist FARC rebels continues apace. Just last week, two New York Times stories on Colombia had an all-too-familiar Vietnamesque flavor. The first article, headlined US IS STEPPING UP DRIVE TO DESTROY COCA IN COLOMBIA, detailed a massive and unrestricted US spraying program directed at that nation’s coca crop, an initiative that has impoverished farmers and may pose substantial health threats. The second (BURDENED COLOMBIANS BACK TAX TO FIGHT REBELS) laid out Colombia’s new tax on companies and individuals with over $60,000 in assets to bolster the country’s military budget. The story dryly noted that the US "has pressed Colombia to spend more money on the military."

And the list goes on. Military operations such as the one in the Philippines, where 1000 US troops were deployed from January to July of this year to help that country’s government fight a nasty war against a Muslim insurgency, have quickly dropped off the radar of the public consciousness.

One also hears little about expanded US military operations in what are popularly known as "the ’Stans" — Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kirghizstan, and Uzbekistan. The US military presence in the latter country, in particular, has helped cement the authoritarian rule of its tennis-loving autocrat, Islam Karimov — who now has his nation’s government up before dawn swinging tennis racquets. (According to the Associated Press, Karimov wants Uzbekistan’s political functionaries to inspire its citizens to tennis greatness.) Even those boring Balkans now face elections in Serbia and Bosnia that will likely sweep hard-line nationalists back into power — and increase the need for a continuing US presence in the region.

The sheer number of troops and military resources involved in patrolling the frontlines already established in the war on terrorism argues against invading Iraq. But the signal lack of US success in the sort of nation-building activities that would necessarily follow even the most successful military outcome in Iraq is an even more compelling reason for putting an anti-Saddam campaign on the back burner.

Despite these facts, the Bush administration is casting about for new frontlines — in Iraq and even elsewhere. After speaking at the USIP’s conference lunch, Deputy Secretary Armitage took questions from the audience. A question about the Lebanon-based terrorist group Hizbollah, which has stayed largely quiet and out of the headlines in recent months, provoked this response from Armitage: "Hizbollah may be the A-team of terrorists, and maybe Al Qaeda is actually the B-team. They’re on the list and their time will come. There is no question about it. They have a blood debt to us, which you spoke to; and we’re not going to forget it and it’s all in good time. We’re going to go after these problems just like a high-school wrestler goes after a match: we’re going to take them down one at a time."

Or a dozen or so at a time, depending on your viewpoint.

Richard Byrne is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. He can be reached at richardbyrne1@earthlink.net