At first it seemed he was mainly pointing at Kashmir where the bloodshed rate is steadily rising. The Times' headline was Clinton urges Pakistan to go easy on Kashmir. But a look at the larger picture shows that presidential concern went beyond Kashmir. A major White House foreign policy is facing final collapse even as Clinton, at the convention, hailed the many successes of his eight years in office.

The dying policy was directed towards Afghanistan. During the last century the British, who ruled India and feared Russian expansion, were fond of saying "who controls Afghanistan controls the world." At the time the Anglo-Russian rivalry centered on Afghanistan was called the "Great Game." In the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union the term made a comeback. It appears that Clinton, voracious reader that he is, agrees that poor, war-ravaged but fiercely Islamic Afghanistan is at the center of today's Great Game.

In 1525 Babur Shah, descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, launched his conquest of India from Kabul. Now there is fear in Moscow, New Delhi, Beijing, Islamabad and, of course, Washington that the reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Omar, styled Commander of the Faithful, could become another Babur, or worse, the Caliph Omar, the second to bear the title Commander of the Faithful. From 634 to 644 Omar's new Muslim soldiers brought down the Persian and gravely weakened the Byzantine empires.

Like the early Muslims a millennium and a half ago the Taliban hold that there are no nations, races or tribes, only those who believe in one God and those who do not. Many people in the region and beyond see this "fundamentalism" as a source of hope. It also enabled the Taliban to take over 90 percent of the country with minimal loss of life. Whenever the Taliban showed up the enemy troops deserted their warlord commanders and joined them.

What the American public most knows about Afghanistan is that the Taliban have given refuge to Osama Bin Laden, billed in the Western media as the world's number one terrorist. Last year the Clinton administration adopted a new Afghanistan policy based on one key premise: there was a way to pressure the ruling Taliban to hand him over to the US.

Osama Bin Laden comes from a prominent Saudi family. When he joined the Afghan Mujahideen to fight against the Soviet occupiers he was regarded as a hero throughout the Islamic world but also in Washington. When the Russians left, the Mujadhideen leaders turned into warlords battling each other. Osama left Afghanistan and sought refuge in fundamentalist Sudan. When the Taliban succeeded in routing all but one of the warlords and taking 90 percent of the country Osama was given refuge by Mullah Omar.

Washington's new policy centered on so isolating Afghanistan from the world community that simply to survive, feed their people and give them jobs that they would have no choice but to hand Osama over. But if they did that Commander of the Faithful the Mullah Omar would be shown as a pious fraud. The spirit would go out of Islamic revolutionary movements all over the world.

The one warlord who remained was Ahmed Shah Mas'ud. He held the strategic Panjsheer Valley only some 50 miles from the capital Kabul. From time to time he would lob shells into Kabul to show he was still a threat. What made him a credible threat was an Afghan "Ho Chi Minh" trail that went down to the Panjsheer from Tajikistan, now an independent nation but whose borders are still guarded by Russian troops. As a result Russian weaponry and supplies kept coming down the trail to Mas'ud's stronghold.

So confidant was the Clinton White House that Mas'ud could not be defeated that recently an official of the State Department upgraded the amount of terrain Mas'ud held from 10 to 15 percent. "There is no way Mas'ud can be defeated," he said publicly, a statement prominently cited in media serving the sizeable Afghan communities in the US.

If Mas'ud indeed had been in unshakeable control of that 15 percent the Taliban would have been in terrible straits. People are starving. There are no jobs. The great powers have cut one international Afghan link to the outside world after the other.

The Taliban are already besieging his stronghold on two sides. He cannot use the Russian-built tunnel leading to the north. That leaves only the trail. But now the Taliban have overrun the trailhead areas in the north leading to the Tajik border. And it is highly unlikely, given their disastrous defeat in Afghanistan, their "Vietnam," Russian soldiers will be sent in to reopen the trail.

The last of the warlords is on the ropes. Mullah Omar has asked Mas'ud to join the Taliban, the only condition being that he accept the Mullah as Commander of the Faithful. Without Mas'ud, the Clinton policy on Afghanistan is dead.

The Taliban's final victory will lead to even more bloodshed in Kashmir. A Central Asia wide Islamic movement is operating out of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Most worried is the region's biggest country, Uzbekistan. China is equally worried about Islamic fundamentalism in its far western Xinjiang province. The authorities recently carried out public executions of Muslim "separatists." And not only are the Russians once again bogged down in Islamic Chechnya but war is spreading to neighboring Islamic Dagestan. More and more Russians are worried about terrorist acts like the recent Moscow subway bombing.

In 1918, right after World War I, a powerful movement, atheistic Communism, spread out like a prairie fire from revolutionary Russia. In 1917 there were no communist parties anywhere. In 1919 scores were sprouting up all over the world. They preached there are no nations, races or tribes, only those who are workers or peasants and those who are not. In 1840 there was no Christianity in China. In 1850 a movement called the Taiping, the Great Peace, conquered two thirds of the country led by a man who considered himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ. The Taipings too preached absolute equality of all people.