Fareed Zakaria is a wealth of knowledge about virtually every aspect of the globe, and can provide detailed analyses of political, economic, and social developments. Zakaria is the Editor of Newsweek International. Prior to writing for Newsweek, Zakaria also wrote for the publication Foreign Affairs. Zakaria received a B.A. in History from Yale University and a Ph.D in international relations from Harvard University’s Department of Government. He spoke at the January Series on the topic of “Terrorism in an Age of Globalization. Zakaria was interviewed for Chimes on January 8th by News Editor Christian Bell.

What would happen, in your opinion, if the US were to reduce its aid to Israel by, say, 90%? What would be the political, social, and economic ramifications?

Interesting question. I think at one level, nothing, by which I mean Israel would be able to absorb the loss in aid very easily. Israel is basically now an advanced industrial country; it's in fact somewhat odd that we provide that much aid to a country that is really at the forefront of the technological and industrial revolution taking place around the world.

At another level, though, it would have a very dramatic effect - in some ways good, in some ways bad. In a good sense, it would signal to the Arab world and to the rest of the world that we are moving toward a greater degree of realism or even-handedness or fair-mindedness toward the problems of the Middle East. But I think that that would be overshadowed by the fact that it would do two very bad things. First, it would signal to the Arab world that the way in which to get the United States to change its policy is to engage in terrorism. And the second is it would bring undue attention to the Israel issue, as if solving that problem were going to solve this broader problem of political extremism in the Arab world; and I think that that second view would be a complete misreading of what's going on in the Arab world.

I believe we should work toward a settlement of the problem between Israel and the Palestinians, and I think that in doing so, if it requires that we pressure both sides, I think we should feel free to do that. I think that withholding some part of aid to Israel could be an option, but of course one has to remember we give an equal amount of aid to Egypt, and we should think of that in an even-handed way as well. But fundamentally, this problem is not going to be solved because you came up with a Middle East peace plan. We have empirical evidence of this - Clinton was in the midst of the most ambitious settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian problem in its history, and all the while he was planning this, Osama bin Laden was planning the attacks on the World Trade Center. So it's very important to remember that, and to recognize that the broader problem of political extremism has its roots in something much deeper than the Arab-Israeli conflict.

It seems like the conflict in the Middle East is often polarized between Arabic extremism and the U.S. support of Israel. What do you think is the foundational conflict there? Is it one of differing ideology or...?

I think it's simpler than that. Of course there is a civilizational aspect to this. The Arab world has found it very difficult to adapt to the modern world, partly because it was so successful in the pre-modern one that it cannot come to grips with the loss of that supremacy and the rise of the West, in the sense that in order to become fully modern in today's world, you have to become somewhat Western. It's not an accident that Arabs are among the few countries in the world where some of their leaders deliberately choose not to wear Western dress and Western suits.

But the basic problem in the Arab world has been one of political, economic, and social failure - these countries are moving backward at a time when the rest of the world is moving forward. They have floundered in the modern world rather than flourished, and people in that world are as a result disavowed, disenfranchised, and enormously angry at their loss, and the anger has ended up being directed at their regimes and also at the United States, who they see as supporting these regimes and as constructing this world in which they've failed. And that I think more than some kind of generic clash of civilizations explains what's happened - the clash of civilizations has existed for a thousand years. The question is really: Why are things going so badly now?

I recall you speaking of this quite a bit of this in your article of December 24th, so why then is it that the United States is perceived as causing so much of this problem, if the issue isn't entirely one of the United States' support of Israel?

I don't think people realize the degree to which people in the Arab world see the United States as supporting the regimes under which they live and the world in which they exist and fail. I'll give you one example of how this is true: if you go to Iran today, what is absolutely striking is the degree to which, around the country, most Iranians are fascinated by America, somewhat admiring of it, and interested in it. And all this is because the regime hates America and because they live in a regime that they despise. If the regime hates America, then the enemy of their enemy becomes their friend. In the rest of most of the Arab world, the opposite is true; the regimes are hated but the regimes are pro-American, and so because people live under these unpopular regimes that are allied to the United States, they go after the United States.

Now why so much enmity? Well, part of that has to just with just how big and powerful we are. The sense is, in many ways, that's the real target; [Egyptian president] Mubarak or the Saudi monarchy: these are pawns in a chess game. I realize sitting in America people just say, ``What, me? What, us? We're just not that powerful.'' But to the rest of the world, the United States seems like a Goliath. It seems much more powerful maybe than it even is.

Going back again to your article of December 24th, you seem to suggest that we would do better to pursue diplomatic reforms in the Arab world in attempting to, as you say, modernize them or bring them up to speed with the rest of the world. But many political analysts recently seem to suggest that the United States' next move is a military one against Somalia, Iraq, or one of those countries. I can imagine that in the long term, pursuing a diplomatic solution will yield better long-term results, but would that come at a short term risk to the security of the United States? Or is there some balance between diplomacy and military that the U.S. would be better to pursue?

We have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. You can't do one or the other of these. Of course we have to continue the military operation, though I would caution that the easiest part of these military operations has already taken place; Afghanistan was really the base of this operation. To the extent that it [terrorism] exists outside of Afghanistan, there are very scattered individuals, even to use the word ``training camps'' would be to exaggerate it, the real danger is of the thousands of people who were trained in these camps in Afghanistan and who are now spread around the Western world, and getting them is more a matter of extraordinarily skilled police work, intelligence work, financial intelligence, and cooperation with all these other countries. And that I think we have to pursuer and pursue very, very vigorously. There's a great danger that because that's not as sexy, it will lose priority.

But there is also this issue of: What do you with the heart of the problem, which is that these countries are churning out people like this, that they are breeding people who have such a Messianic worldview that they're willing to die for it? If you don't do something about this, it seems to me, you're really putting a band-aid on the problem. Because Western societies, and the United States in particular, are such open societies, that there's no way you can protect against determined adversaries who simply hate you and want to inflict damage on you and would give up their lives willingly in doing that.

So the heart of the problem, it seems to me, are the dysfunctions of the Arab world. If you don't deal with those, you will only have delayed your eventual problem.

So, would further military action be frivolous, would it be chasing after an enemy that's not there?

If we were to go after the places people are talking about, I think we should by and large do it with the support of the governments, because first, the groups and movements we're talking about are quite small. There's a danger of exaggerating them, and we would lose focus on the real problem, which are these thousands upon thousands of undercover operatives who are operating within the Western world. But, if there were evidence that there are genuine cells and training camps in places like Somalia, absolutely, we should destroy them.

I was very much in favor of the military action in Afghanistan; I still believe we have a long way to go there. I think it's very important that we, to the extent possible, destroy every al Qaeda cell, operative, and cave that we can find. You want to send the signal that terrorism does not pay, and a large part of that is militarily destroying terrorists.

We should recognize that the easiest part of locating these terrorists has happened, and that we're now into a much more nitty-gritty, long, drawn-out process in which we're going to really have to spend a lot of time locating these people. Once we locate them, absolutely, take them out. The trick is going to be locating them.

Back to the diplomatic end, it looked for many years like we were making a good deal of progress in the Middle East, and President Clinton looked like he was going to make the most impressive changes ever there in history. But within the past year or two years it looks like almost all our diplomacy over there has failed. So, do you think given the fact that the peace accords between Israel and Palestine have collapsed and the September 11 attacks, how effective can the United States really be over in that part of the world?

That's a very good question. I think what it highlights is that as long as you're dealing with a political background of dysfunction and tyranny, there's only so much progress you're going to be able to make. At the end of the day, you're dealing with thoroughly illegitimate regimes that buy legitimacy in all kinds of nasty ways - from the Saudis in effect supporting and paying off extreme Islamic movements to the Egyptians engaging in massive police crackdowns that have effectively turned it into a police state - and all of them using the anti-American and Anti-Israeli card as part of their rationale for being in power, that they are the great defenders of their people against the terrible Americans and the Zionist entity, as they call the Jews. As long as you have that political atmosphere, diplomacy can only do so much.

If you think about the peace plan you mentioned, it is important to remember that Arafat turned it down, but more importantly that Arafat was advised to turn it down by both the Saudi monarchy and the Egyptian president. When he went to his Arab allies, they told him, ``No, don't give in. Stand firm.'' And the reason is, of course, is that maintaining this kind of heroic, unyielding position helps the Egyptian and Saudi regimes - it gives them a certain kind of legitimacy. They have always been willing to fight for the Palestinian cause down to the last Palestinian.

I want to turn the focus to a different part of the world. Does the recent focus around Afghanistan have any major effect on the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan? The timing seems very coincidental that given especially the recent escalations, the nuclear escalations, that world focus should suddenly hit that section of the world.

It's not coincidental at all. Remember in Pakistan, the military was divided on the issue of the American war. The president of Pakistan took a very brave position and ended a decade-long support of the Taliban from the Islamic extremists operating within Afghanistan. Now what happened, I think, was that many of these people, many of these extremists, and many of these people within the Pakistani military decided that, ``Fine, if we can't do this in Afghanistan, we'll redirect our focus toward Kashmir,'' where Pakistani supported and trained militants had been operating anyway. So they were reinforced, and that movement got some new energy.

As a result of that, probably one or two of these groups decided to try something dramatic, which involved an attack on the Indian parliament. And I think there is a great danger here, that in trying to feed the elements within the Pakistani military, an establishment that have supported the Taliban, the Pakistani government will turn a blind eye toward terrorism in Kashmir.

It's a real problem very simply because the Indians take a very, very dim view of this, and in my opinion would be quite prepared to go to war over it. They're intensely frustrated by the fact that because Pakistani and India have nuclear weapons, there is this sense in which they're both stuck in a stalemate where they can do nothing.

So I think that the president of Pakistan is doing the right thing, this time. Again, he's begun to crack down on some of these militant groups. The real question in Pakistan is whether or not he will be able to take the entire military political establishment along with him.

About that, do you think he has done something that's going to change the way Pakistan conducts itself in the world political theatre, or has he committed political suicide by doing this?

It's a very interesting question. A couple of weeks into the whole September 11th period, when he had made those big decisions to ally himself with the United States, I was wondering the same question, and commissioned a poll in Pakistan. Now, polls in Pakistan are not quite the same as polls in the United States, to begin with, 60 percent of the country is illiterate, but you can still get some feel for it.

The interesting thing that I found was that 80 percent of the people polled supported the Taliban versus the United States. But, 50 to 60 percent of the people supported President Musharraf and supported his decision to ally with the United States.

So what I think that's saying is that while people had many of the same kind of resentments about America and anti-Americanism that countries around the world often have, they respected and admired the president for steering a shrewd and clever course; and I think that the success of the American operation will probably raise that figure of 50 to 60 percent substantially.

So my sense is that now he has a real moment where he could use this political capital that he has developed in a way that makes it possible for him to really change Pakistan's role in the world. But in order to do that, I do think he would have to fundamentally deal with this problem that Pakistan has, which is that it has within itself, at the highest levels, people who are true believers in this kind of violent Islamic extremism.