The examples are overly abundant as one looks around Asia in 2007:

Pakistan — Washington has been pressing for a “democratization” of the Musharraf regime in Pakistan. Although it has been under military rule more often than not during its half century of existence, today’s Islamabad regime is very much a duck’s egg hatched by a chicken. President Gen. Musharraf took power by a military coup. He remains in power in no small part because he retains his second hat as the head of the military. But, as few other military dictators in recent history, he has bent to a suzerain court and its leader the chief justice. [It is all the more ironic since, although my old Indian friend Minoo Masani always insisted the discussion of the Indian constitution in British India leading up to the bloody Partition always assumed American judicial supremacy, both countries have a strong heritage of the British parliament having the last word, and one can argue judicial supremacy came to the U.S. almost by accident of personality.]

But would it really? The problem lies, largely, in the border regions facing Afghanistan where 19th century British politicians drew lines cutting through ethnic and tribal groupings. But neither they nor their successors have figured out how to control the always fractious and isolated communities who live in the foothills of the Hindu Kush and for whose primitive life Islam's Sixth Century sharia [religious law] is not so foreign.

And not least of Musharraf’s problems are that his army, like the U.S. military who went into Iraq, are not really trained to fight the kind of low intensity warfare against the terrorists but for fighting the Indians [three and a half wars] on the plains of The Punjab.

The effort to pursue the remnants of Osama Bin Laden and his ilk has been costly, damaging in blood and reputation to the military that is, ultimately, the basis of the regime. Its stability is at risk with a crippled economy left by the so-called socialism of the father of Benazir Bhutto, the leading candidate for “broadening the regime”, whose reputation for corruption matches her parent. That, that is continuing the modest growth of the economy, was much as the issue of the legitimacy of Musharraf’s wearing two hats is what spurred “The Lawyers’ Revolution” which has created one more crisis for a beleaguered government.

As this is written, just as Washington midwifed an agreement between Musharraf and Bhutto to let her return and form some sort of coalition between Musharraf’s moderate Muslim following, his ethnic “cousin-brothers”, the Mohajir [former UPwallahs, refugees and their descendants from present day India, now called Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM], and the military, the supreme court threatened to strike a Musharraf promulgation of amnesty for corruption. The deal had been the trigger for the most ambitious Pakistan army push since 2003 against the Taliban-cum-Ben-Laden remnants and new recruits [many from Western Europe] in the border areas.

Ah democracy!

South Korea — Prosperity and long simmering complaints, legitimate and illegitimate, about the presence of large American forces in Korea, have produced a decade of wretched leftwing government. Its nationalist backlash after foreign, much of it American, capital rescued its economy after the 1997-98 East Asia Financial Crisis has put a crimp in the world’s twelfth largest economy by slowing direct foreign investment and its attendant technology.

Relations with the Korean military governments which preceded them were never easy with Washington constantly whispering in the ear of the soldiers for reform with little or no effect. The presence of an acknowledged enemy to the north, however, united Washington and Seoul in its determination to preserve the independence and integrity of the South — which only a few short decades ago seemed to be falling behind the determination of the Stalinist North. Nor could the bloody North Korean invasion and long war be forgotten, however much a new generation of young xenophobes tried to blame the U.S. for its origins.

That has meant that in the delicate negotiations to try to halt the progress of Pyongyang’s Communist monarchy toward nuclear weapons and to end its proliferation of missile [and possibly nuclear] technology to pariah regimes around the world, Washington has had to coddle Seoul.

Now poised delicately in a hoped-for agreement with the North, aided and abetted one must hope along with the Foreign Service Officers at the State Department, by the Chinese and the Russians, but certainly by the Japanese, Washington has to constantly keep its outriders alert to machinations of its ally in Seoul. At the moment, it looks as though in its dying months the Roh Moon Huyn presidency would be succeeded by a conservative government more attuned to American priorities in dealing with the North. But the recent “summit” of Roh with the North Korean Dictator Kim Il Jong and reported offers of tens of billions in economic aid are not conducive to locking vague agreements in place, a deal which was primarily squeezed out of the North by putting the economic squeeze on the bankrupt regime.

India — It’s not much of a secret that after almost half a century of a tacit alliance of new Delhi with a Soviet Moscow, almost all the strategists in Washington of whatever political persuasion see warming relations with India as a building block for peace and stability in Asia. But, again, the proponents of the India-Japan-Australian-U.S. effort to contain — even if all participants scream at the mention of such a strategy — against a still unknown “rising China” are going to have to deal with a very volatile domestic political situation in what many regard as India’s “vibrant” democracy.

The cornerstone of the new Washington-new Delhi relationship was supposed to be [along with a booming trade] the breaching of some of the U.S. red lines on weapons proliferation. Washington was to have accepted India’s emergence as a nuclear power despite its refusal to play by the legacy rules of the older members. But whatever difficulties the proposal encounters in the Congress [where there are still vague memories of longtime nuclear fuel difficulties with the Indians], Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has to rely on his own fragile coalition.

The two Indian Communist parties, which from outside the government give him his parliamentary majority, threaten to torpedo the Bush-Singh deal. That could be more talk — and blackmail for concessions on other fronts, not the least Singh’s No. priority of liberalizing the economy. But as in all the democracies, nothing, not least the fickle nature of the electorate, can be taken for granted.

Iraq — Ralph Waldo Emerson said it: be careful of what you wish for, you may get it. Washington has been consistent in its pursuit of a representative government in strife-torn Baghdad. But the very nature of that government, cobbled together as it is among regional, ethnic, and religious constituencies, makes achieving the kind of consensus on such monumental issues as splitting up the oil resources or creating a federal system enormously difficult and time consuming. And five years into the toppling of a one-man dictatorship, the creation of national consensus is not easier reached than in …Washington?

Turkey — Once the very model of the Westernizing pre-industrial society, Ankara had lagged for decades with a state capitalist system and a military always ready and often able to step in to take over from failed civilian politicians. The second landslide victory of Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party in mid-summer despite opposition efforts to portray his pro-business Islamist-rooted party as a Trojan horse set to turn Turkey into an Iranian-style theocracy means Ankara is feeling its oats.

Erdogan’s victory has come on a wave of anti-Americanism from right and left, criticism of Washington’s effort to topple the Sadam Hussein dictatorship in Iraq and replace it with a democratic regime. [Shades of the German Socialists’ strategy!]

Granted that like the rest of the world, Ankara worries about the continuing dysfunctional regime in Baghdad and, worse, the possibility the Kurdish ethnic minority in the north of its neighbor might one day become the nucleus for a pan-Kurdish movement attempting to unite the long oppressed minorities in Iraq, Turkey [perhaps 20 percent of the population], Iran and Syria.

When the Greek-Armenian Lobby in the U.S. [in fact, the vaunted American Israel Political Action Committee might take some lessons] threatened to force through a resolution on the alleged Armenian genocide in World War I by the Ottoman Empire, Erdogan was threatening Washington with dire consequences even including the very profitable — but essential to the U.S. -- transit of U.S. military equipment and supplies through Turkish ports and airports for Iraq.

Furthermore, there seemed to be no fallback positions this time around since the Turkish military has not only been shorn of some of its power but was making nationalist noises as loud as their civilian opposition about the American refusal/incapacity to reign in Kurds using northern Iraq as sanctuary for terrorist attacks across the border inside Turkey.

Japan — The youngest prime minister in Japan’s postwar history, Shinzo Abe, grandson of two and grand nephew of one of three of the most successful of Japan’s postwar prime ministers, turned out not to be able to fill the shoes of his vedette predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi. Where Koizumi was audacious and gambled, Abe was reticent and indecisive and his government developed a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease.

The fall came, perhaps as a result of a serious ailment, but from pressure particularly from those in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party who had opposed Koizumi’s reform revolution. So an old school candidate, or so it seemed, himself the son of a successful former prime minister, pushed by the leaders of the LDP factions, Yasuo Fukuda, has taken over with the blessing of Japan’s generally leftwing mainstream media.

Neither the China “problem” nor relations with the U.S. had much to do with it, the Japanese and their American copycat media notwithstanding. Fukuda is hardly a leftwing maverick nor is he any more likely than Abe to discontinue fostering the closest strategic relations with the U.S. for two reasons: North Korea and China. But also seemingly lacking Koizumi’s charisma, he too, may have his difficulties with a host of problems as Japan continues the revolution Koizumi set in motion to marketize its economy and “democratize” its political system.

Yet Seiji Ozawa, an old LDP dinosaur but a great tactician, broke the hold of the LDP of Japan’s less important upper house in elections in September. Ozawa’s Democratic Party of Japan is the elephant in that old story about the group of blindfolded professors examining a pachyderm and each getting quiet different and strange results; i.e., one handling the trunk and suggesting a snake, the other a hoof, and suggesting a big horse, etc., etc. It combines old LDP rejects like Ozawa himself and some of Japan’s perennial postwar opposition without hope, the old socialists, some of whose leftwing had relations with the North Koreans better forgotten in this time of crisis.

Their chances of becoming a substitute government even were Fukuda to take the poisoned chalice of snap elections — he has a comfortable majority in his coalition in the lower house which runs the country — are virtually nil. But their sniping at such things as the playing out of Koizumi's economic reforms and the delicacies of constantly reinterpreting Japan’s still unamended “Macarthur/peace” constitution will make for burning much midnight oil in Foggy Bottom. At issue, at the moment, is the Japanese Navy’s logistics support of NATO and U.S. anti-terrorist efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan from the Indian Ocean.

When George Bush announced he was setting democratic values as one of the aims of his aggressive foreign policy after 9/11 — living with reactionary regimes, particularly in the Middle East, had neither produced stability nor security for the U.S. — he never promised us a rose garden, as the saying goes. Nor will the problem fade into the glimmering of election promises whoever takes over in January 2009, ex-President Jimmy Carter notwithstanding as they say in the Canadian constitution.