Washington ? On a brilliant autumn Saturday the heavens created expressly for hiking or football, Donald Rumsfeld was once again at his desk piloting the unwieldy Defense Department along the runways of his mind. Three wars intersect there, and Rumsfeld was thinking through the shifting of gears that is occurring in all three conflicts.

The most palpable moment of transition is in Afghanistan, where American forces have almost stopped finding al-Qaida and Taliban bands to kill or capture. Suspects are so scarce there has been no net gain in prisoners during the past month: roughly a dozen were picked up, a dozen others released.

Rumsfeld says the “generally stable security situation” in three-quarters of Afghanistan will let U.S. troops become more involved in civil-military projects that will create conditions for “people to come home, to rebuild and resettle.”

The politically sensitive term “nation-building” did pop into my mind at that point. But fencing over words with the mega-articulate Rumsfeld would have consumed our hour. Instead, I registered the indication that U.S. forces will be in Afghanistan for an indefinite time with new, more diverse goals and then moved on.

The change of emphasis in Afghanistan also reflects new needs in the second, broader war the one on global terrorism. Increasingly U.S. forces are expanding into “ungoverned” areas of the Third World where al-Qaida and its allies have regrouped for action or sought refuge.

“The task for us is to connect the dots before the fact and avoid another Sept. 11 or worse,” Rumsfeld said. The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies must “look around corners and disrupt or prevent things from happening. It is hard for society to wrap its head around the new security environment that we’re in and to get comfortable with it.” But the ongoing debate about pre-emption and national security “has been helpful.”

This conversation was a moment for olive branches rather than lightning bolts from the secretary of defense. Rumsfeld made a point of talking about the need to “accept the reality” that Europeans “live in a different part of the world and they look at things somewhat differently than we do, including foreign affairs.” It was important, he added, for allies to talk, listen and analyze because “over a period of time people begin to operate off the same set of facts.”

This is precisely what many European leaders accuse the administration of not doing. They argue that a third concurrent military campaign in Iraq will overload the circuits and undercut the war on terrorism. That is a set of facts off which Rumsfeld does not operate.

The administration’s attempts to get resolutions from Congress and the U.N. Security Council authorizing military action against Saddam Hussein are “part of the global war on terrorism,” Rumsfeld said.

“There will be people with different perspectives on Iraq and that’s fair. But the thing that has worried me has been this nexus of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism,” he said, answering affirmatively when I asked if a U.S. invasion of Iraq would be part and parcel of the war on terrorism.

State sponsorship of international terrorism may have statistically declined in recent decades, he said, but states like Iraq are more likely to “have long-term programs for development of chemical, biological and nuclear capability and delivery systems” that could be passed on to surrogates. This makes their relationships with each other and with terror groups “vastly different” when “measured by potential lethality.”

Rumsfeld predictably was not ready to discuss planning details on Iraq. But this ex-Navy pilot is above all a problem solver. Others confirm that he and his staff have quietly but systematically put into place the infrastructure for an attack that now seems only weeks away.

Dan McNeill, a well-respected three-star general, has been put in charge of the increasingly nuanced U.S. joint task force operations in Afghanistan. This frees Tommy Franks, the commanding general of the Middle East and Central Asian theater, and his staff to run the campaign in Iraq.

The studied transition explains why Saudi Arabia’s on-again, off-again threats to bar U.S. operations out of Prince Sultan air base do not particularly ruffle Rumsfeld and aides. They have made sure the sophisticated and vital Combined Air Operations Center at Prince Sultan has been duplicated, down to data links for AWACS and esoteric support for Predator attack drones, at Qatar’s al Udeid field.

War plans go out the window when real fighting starts. But Rumsfeld has so far adroitly balanced three different military campaigns at the policy level. He now faces the moment of truth in merging them into a single effective shield for the United States.

Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.