Fundamental problem.

`ALGERIA no longer exists!' proclaims a bearded Muslim guerrilla manning a roadblock just five miles from the frontier with Morocco, which is officially closed. He has just examined our passports and is pointing his Kalashnikov rifle at us with one hand, gesturing at us with the other to head back. `They usually don't shoot foreigners,' says the Moroccan riding with me as we quickly shift into reverse, `But if they stop an Algerian, they may give him the choice of joining their movement or being killed on the spot.'

The brutal civil war in Algeria, which has cost over 40,000 lives and some $2 billion in economic losses, threatens to spill over into the rest of the Maghreb region of northwest Africa. Already, the guerrillas, trained in the Sudan in camps financed by Iran, roam at will through much of Algeria, infiltrating through routes provided by Libya. And Islamic terrorism is beginning to trickle into Europe; Algerian-connected armed cells have been broken up in Germany, Belgium, and Spain. In France, where the immigrant Arab population has reached two million, mosques are systematically placed under surveillance. In several French cities, Muslim preachers are followed by plainclothes agents. One officer of the National Gendarmerie points to a drab apartment block in a working-class suburb of Paris. It is inhabited by Algerians, and he says, `To us it's an enemy fortress.'

French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua almost openly favors aiding Algeria's unsavory military government in its war against terrorism. In Algeria, secular intellectuals, journalists, and other educated segments of the population are systematically killed by Islamic terrorists. Five hundred registered Algerian journalists have been forced to leave the country, and many of those who remain live inside a high-security military compound. Homes with satellite dishes, a telltale sign of affluence and social status, are targeted with extortion demands and assassination threats. Apartment blocks housing military families are blown up with car bombs, and teenaged girls refusing to wear the traditional veil get their throats cut.

Facing an insurgency of an intensity that members of Algeria's arrogant bureaucratic class admit they never expected, the army has recently redoubled efforts to contain the terrorists. `The eradication program has begun,' says a French diplomat with long experience in the region. Whole villages are simply razed with artillery and French-supplied helicopter gunships. During midnight operations in suspect neighborhoods, blackhooded teams of special forces, the ninjas, round up all able-bodied young men. Lines of cadavers appear in surrounding empty lots the next day. Some of the ninjas grow beards and dress up as Islamic fighters, setting up roadblocks to trap guerrilla sympathizers.

`What is happening in Algeria is so violent that it's a kind of vaccination for us,' says Tayeb Ben Chikh, Morocco's former minister of planning. He expresses the belief of most Moroccans that Algeria's politico-religious self-immolation will not spread to the Maghreb's second-largest country, from which one can see the southern tip of Europe across the Straits of Gibraltar.

Ben Chikh points to economic differences. The Moroccan government has followed free-market policies, encouraging private-sector investment, particularly in agriculture. Such measures as exempting farmers from taxation have discouraged large-scale migration to the cities. Algeria's centrally managed industrialization program, on the other hand, created large concentrations of unemployed youngsters whose frustrations have turned into fuel for radical Islam. Morocco's policies of deregulating prices and cutting public deficits resulted in GDP growth that topped 12 per cent in 1994. Algeria's socialist economy, meanwhile, has been steadily declining.

Furthermore, Moroco is led by King Hassan II, who, far from being an enemy of Islam, is among its most respected leaders. Among the Arab world's longest-reigning monarchs, Hassan is the only one who can claim direct ancestry from Mohammed through the Great Prophet's only daughter, Fatima. `For Islam he is the closest thing there is to a Pope,' says a former cabinet minister. `King Hassan was given a modern French education,' he explains. `But at the same time he was deeply schooled in the Koran and Muslim religion. He is capable of holding theological debates with the most fundamentalist clergymen.' Even Iran's fire-breathing ayatollahs recognize Hassan's leadership of the World Islamic Conference.

The 68-year-old Hassan has an uncanny ability to balance opposing forces, and most Moroccans believe in the King's baraka, a form of luck or holy blessing credited with his surviving several attempts against his life. He had a truly miraculous escape in 1972 when three Moroccan Air Force fighter jets fired on his royal Boeing. They failed to shoot it down, and he landed safely as the airport runway was being bombed; he promptly drove back to his palace and dismantled the coup effort.

As the cauldron of radical fundamentalism begins bubbling beneath Morocco's tranquil surface, the king's special powers are being tested again. The number of unofficial Islamic organizations, operating through independent or underground mosques, has more than doubled during the past few years to at least seventy. Their adherents expound a violent and radical kind of Islam, the opposite of the religious moderation and tolerance Hassan tries to foster.

In a Moroccan newspaper these days, a woman doctor and a Muslim preacher can openly debate the merits of female orgasm. Government-approved plays and TV soap operas depict Islamic religion as a banal part of everyday life. But Islamic radicals are now in control of the Moroccan National Students' Union. At the fundamentalist-controlled University of Ouijda on the border with Algeria, stricter religious codes are now enforced. There, unlike in the rest of Morocco, a majority of women wear veils, and many students profess sympathy for the Algerian guerrillas.

Hassan's main challenge is preventing an independent Islamic party from developing as he negotiates constitutional changes with the traditional opposition groups to allow for more representative government. He is encouraging established left-wing parties like the Socialist Union of Popular Forces and the populist Istiklal to incorporate Islamic militants into their ranks in order to defuse an organized fundamentalist challenge. The threat to Hassan's religious authority is taken seriously enough to cause the recent detention of a dissident cleric who refuses to conduct prayers in the King's name. The Imam Yassine, who sermonizes about the `Westernized debauchery' of Moroccan society, is now under house arrest.

For fear of alienating his own Islamic fundamentalists, Hassan refuses to close ranks with other governments seeking to coordinate policies against radical fundamentalism. Morocco didn't send representatives to a meeting of European and Maghreb security ministers that France tried to organize in Tunisia last February. Hassan strongly criticized NATO's Secretary General Willy Claes, who called Islamic fundamentalism a `new threat to European security' after the Algerian Armed Islamic Group hijacked a French jet last Christmas.

Morocco itself was the target last year of coordinated attacks by Islamic militants. Two European tourists were murdered in Marrakesh, and one terrorist was caught with a submachine gun preparing to attack a synagogue. It was only through the last-minute discovery of a major arms cache in an abandoned farm that Moroccan authorities prevented an assault on the wedding celebrations of the King's only daughter in the ancient Medina of Fez.

But evidence of local support from underground cells of Moroccan sympathizers has been covered up by Moroccan officials, who openly speculate that the effort to destabilize Morocco was actually set up by Algerian military secret services.

`Hassan may ultimately have to acquiesce to a stricter Islamic culture in Morocco,' says a veteran politician in Rabat, `but he will arrange it so that the pertinent legislation gets introduced by established parties. His strategy will be to adapt to religious pressures and try to ride the wave of radical Islam.' It is a measured strategy in a region where moderation is becoming scarce.

For now at least, Morocco remains an oasis of relative calm. If it went radical, the Straits of Gibraltar would look narrow indeed.