One sign of how things are really going in Arabia will be just how much longer Bandar bin Sultan remains on his own throne in the American capital. For if Bandar is left to work his own will in modern-day Rome then Abdullah will not truly be King and maybe Sultan, with Bandar himself waiting in the wings, will still be somewhere in line, the Americans still hoping to more fully do their will with the Saudi Monarchy as they have done with what remains of the once mighty Hashemite Dynasty still lingering and still important in Amman.

[MiddleEast NewsLine - Washington - 17 October]: The Saudi ruling family find themselves caught in a conflict of epic proportions between their traditional alliance with the United States and their multiple financial and cultural ties with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Western diplomatic sources said members of the Saudi royal family have reduced their public appearances, particularly to Westerners. The sources said this includes such figures as Saudi King Fahd, Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz and Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan.

The royal family, the sources said, has not refused a U.S. request to participate in the war against terrorism. But they said Riyad has not taken any steps requested by the United States and agreed to by other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

This includes freezing assets of Saudi fugitive Osama Bin Laden.

"The Saudis have always been secretive," a Western diplomat said. "But now there isn't really anybody to talk to who can give a straight answer."

The sources said King Fahd has been incapacitated by ill health, which has led to dissension and uncertainty within the royal family. Abdullah has refused to agree to measures against Bin Laden.

"I don't have to please people [in] downtown Washington," Saudi ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar said. "But I must always take into account Saudi people."

U.S. officials said Bin Laden has received millions of dollars in aid from Saudi businessman connected to the royal family. Washington announced that is seizing the assets of Yasin Al Qadi, who heads the Saudi Arabia-based Muwafaq Foundation, which has funneled money to Bin Laden.

In addition, a leading Saudi cleric has refused to end his criticism of the U.S. attack on Afghanistan.

Western analysts said Riyad could remain in turmoil for some time to come. They urged Western allies of Saudi Arabia to closely monitor the kingdom.

"A great deal has been said since September 11 about the lack of human intelligence in the war against terror, and the West would be well served by the development of HUMINT in Saudi Arabia as well," Saudi expert Joshua Teitelbaum wrote in a report by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The Saudi royal family has been thrown into panic. It is facing the most serious threat to its rule since the 1990 Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. The difference is that the Iraqi threat was external. This time, the House of Saud faces an internal threat. What happened? In short, the Saudis have created a monster. It began in 1979 when the Shah of Iran was overthrown by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Saudi kingdom was in panic. The kingdom had a large Shi'ite minority and the new Islamic regime in Iran was openly questioning the legitimacy of Saudi sovereignty over Mecca, the birthplace of the Muslim prophet Mohammed.

From that moment, the Saudis decided to play tit for tat. Riyad would export fanatic Sunni zealotry to combat Iran's Shi'ite militancy. The first test was in Afghanistan, invaded by the Soviets months after the Iranian revolution. Riyad helped recruit thousands of Saudis and other nationals to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, Iran's neighbor.

From the start, the Taliban movement supported by Riyad was anti- Iranian. For the practical-minded Saudi leadership, the fight in Afghanistan was a muted warning to Iran to stay out of Saudi affairs. A key player in the Saudi effort was Osama Bin Laden.

The Saudis were ecstatic when the Taliban helped expel Soviet troops from Afghanistan. But by that time Bin Laden and thousands of Saudi and Egyptian nationals fighting in Afghanistan saw their mission as just beginning. Riyad was never the target. Instead, it would be Egypt, Algeria and Jordan - in other words secular Arab regimes.

Today, the Saudi leadership has been torn by what to do with Bin Laden. The problem is not that of one man: It is that of thousands of Saudis sponsored by their families and leading princes in the kingdom as part of the Wahabi commitment to Islamic zealotry. The feeling is that any move to limit, let alone stop, the Sunni Islamic drive would break up the kingdom - whether from within or without. Wahabi tradition is the only glue that keeps the desert Bedouin loyal to the billionaires princes.

The dispute has pitted Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz against Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan. Both are vying to be the next king of Saudi Arabia. Abdullah has staked out his claim as head of Saudi tradition. Sultan wants to pursue a modernist direction. The result could be chaos as militants in Saudi Arabia will use terrorism in an effort to decide the succession struggle.

[The Independent - 18 October 2001]: Investigators are concentrating on a "Saudi connection" to the 11 September terrorist attacks on America, suggesting that part of the conspiracy was hatched there - to the intense disquiet of Saudi Arabia's ruling monarchy.

Relations were already queasy between America and the world's largest oil exporter - which happens to be both Washington's most important ally in the Gulf and the birthplace of Osama bin Laden.

American investigators soon discovered that up to 12 of the 19 hijackers of the four aircraft used that day entered America with Saudi passports or with visas issued by US consulates in that country. Since then more than 700 people have been questioned or detained by the authorities in America in connection with the attacks -among them an unspecified number of Saudi citizens.

Neither the Saudi embassy nor the Justice Department will say how many of the suspects are Saudi: indeed, so little has been divulged, and so minor are some of the charges on which the detainees are being held that American civil rights groups are asking whether their constitutional rights have been violated.

According to lawyers, two members of Saudi Arabia's ruling family were detained for more than 20 days after being picked up at Denver airport. They were released last week, but will still have to answer for minor infringements of immigration laws.

The Saudi embassy has retained lawyers for all the suspects, The Wall Street Journal reported this week, after personal instructions to counsel from Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the veteran Saudi ambassador in Washington, that "each and every one of them is to be helped as if you have no other cases and nothing else to do". This vigorous stance may be an admirable example of a country helping its citizens who find themselves in difficulty on foreign soil. But it is bound to raise fears in America that, as with the investigation into the deadly 1996 attack on US barracks at Khobar, Saudi Arabia, the kingdom might prove less than fully co-operative with US investigators into a terrorist incident with which it is linked.

In the case of the 11 September attacks, pointers to such connections continue to grow.

American investigators believe that several of the hijackers were recruited by al-Qa'ida cells operating in Saudi Arabia itself. The inquiry is focusing on the town of Abha in the south west of the country, where four hijackers are believed to have originated. People from this region have also been linked with the attack on the USS Cole in Aden last October, in which 17American sailors died.

These allegations, and others that Saudi-based charities and companies have channelled finance to Mr bin Laden and his network, have placed the kingdom on the defensive, and increased resentment of America in Saudi Arabia -the very outcome that the Bush administration is seeking to avoid.

In a television interview last month, Prince Bin Sultan, who has been ambassador since 1983 and is very well connected to the White House, acknowledged that some people in Saudi Arabia supported Mr bin Laden, but said their numbers were few. "When you say 'so many' you have to put it relatively," he told his questioner. "Relative to what? Are there sixteen, twenty, one hundred?

"Bin Laden - what he represents, and people who preach like him or support him - yes, they don't like my government. Yes, they don't like my political system. But they don't like it for the wrong reasons, not for the right reasons you think of. They want us to go back 1,000 years. We want to move forward."

But these arguments have not stilled public criticism. A recent editorial in The New York Times declared that the "deeply cynical and cold-blooded bargain" at the heart of the Saudi-US relationship - Saudi oil in exchange for American military protection -was in urgent need of updating. "Decades of equivocation and Hobbesian calculations have left US-Saudi relations in an untenable and unreliable state," the paper said. "These deformities must be addressed before they do further damage to both nations."

[The Guardian - Tuesday October 16, 2001]: Relations between the US and two of its core allies in the war against terrorism, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, approached crisis point yesterday after the Saudi interior minister, Prince Naif, attacked the assault on Afghanistan while Pakistan pressed Washington to ensure that its bombing campaign would be short-lived.

In the latest and most public of a series of disagreements that have evidently taken the US by surprise in the five weeks since the September 11 attacks, Prince Naif told the official Saudi Press Agency that the kingdom wanted the US to flush out the terrorists without bombing. "This is killing innocent people. The situation does not please us at all."

Officially, the state department in Washington remains "very satisfied" with the Saudi approach to the crisis, but this masks increasing alarm not merely about the governmental response but about potential insurrection that could endanger theSaudi regime.

Prince Naif's comments add to the diplomatic pressure being felt by the US in its attempts to maintain support in the region for its policies.

The secretary of state, Colin Powell, who holds talks with General Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad today, took further steps yesterday to bolster Pakistan's support for the war, promising military-to-military contacts.

The sanctions imposed after Pakistan's nuclear test in 1998 still prevent the US selling the country any weaponry or equipment, but by moving towards direct military relations Mr Powell was clearly holding out the prospect of future rewards if the Musharraf regime continued to play ball.

But with strikes ordered across the country by Islamist groups in protest at Mr Powell's visit, Mr Musharraf is aware that his support for the US action can go only so far. "The prolongation of the campaign will be a source of concern to us," the Pakistani foreign ministry said last night.

Further underlining the tension that now racks the region, Indian troops broke a 10-month ceasefire with Pakistan last night when they fired shells into disputed territory in Kashmir, killing a woman and wounding 25.

A clearly worried President George Bush upbraided the two nuclear powers when he said: "I think it is very important that India and Pakistan stand down during our activities in Afghanistan and, for that matter, for ever."

In the most extreme language to emerge from Tehran since September 11, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, said that the US air strikes were "dragging the world into a war".

The warning was in stark contrast to a New York Times report today which revealed that Iran sent a secret message to the Bush administration on October 8 agreeing to rescue any US military personnel in distress in its territory.

At the top of Washington's in-tray of anxieties relating to its coalition partners, analysts now believe that Saudi Arabia - where few western journalists are allowed - may be turning into the gravest challenge.

"It's unbelievable how the feeling here has changed from sympathy to anger in such a short time," a Riyadh-based westerner quoted by Reuters said yesterday. Another resident compared the mood there to that of Iran before the overthrow of the Shah.

Since September 11, Riyadh has refused to allow attacks on Afghanistan from its bases; Prince Abdullah, the country's crown prince and day-to-day ruler, has avoided meeting President Bush; Muslim clerics within the once-monolithic country have issued fatwas against the Americans; and, beneath the bland assurances of amity, there has been growing US frustration about the extent of Saudi cooperation with this investigation too.

US feeling was expressed in a powerful editorial in Sunday's New York Times, which described Saudi behaviour as "malignant" and said the "deeply cynical" bargain between the countries, which for decades had offered American protection for the regime in return for an uninterrupted flow of oil, was now "untenable".

David Wurmser, director of Middle East studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said yesterday: "The US's entire foreign policy structure in the region has been anchored in the strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia. If everything we're hearing is true, then we're facing a total meltdown.

"The whole war as currently conceived would have to be reconsidered, because Pakistan won't hold if Saudi support starts collapsing.

"You can't really separate Bin Laden from the Saudi establishment," Mr Wurmser said. "There are conflicting forces there, and part of the establishment has been working with the Bin Laden faction to embarrass the other half."

However, the state department spokesman, Philip Reeker, yesterday repeated the "very satisfied" mantra that his colleagues have been using for some time. He noted that Prince Naif had said the situation did not please the Saudis.

"I think that quite reflects the attitudes we've been expressing for five weeks now. This situation, clearly, doesn't please us. We would certainly rather be able to focus on other things in our foreign and defence policy."