The reason would be that although Iraq is the crucible where the military decision is being molded, or at least its first major campaign is being fought out, Pakistan more nearly represents the complexities of the problem longterm.

Nowhere are the incongruities and countercurrents more obvious. And nowhere are they more dependent on understanding, aid and comfort from the West – but with “tough love” – than in this critical arena.

Then there are the critics of the Iraq engagement who talk about addressing “fundamental issues” – that Inside-the Beltway code for the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio and, generally, the accusation that American policy in the Mideast is tied to Israeli coattails. If only the Israelis would make enough concessions to the Arabs, the whole problem would go away goes this simplistic reading of our dilemmas, the argument runs.

But it is in Pakistan were we face the essential problem of how the modern world brings Moslem societies into the 21st century.

Contradictorily, just as the leadership of Al Qaida and its franchise operations has been largely with at least superficially “Westernized” Moslems, most of them longtime residents in the West, so Pakistan’s elite is largely secularized and antagonistic to radical Islam.

But no society has a monopoly on hypocrisy and that explains the nominal allegiance of that leadership to “Islamic” causes, often ridiculous ones such as ranting against the knighting recently of Salman Rushdie by the British Queen. In the present environment, those same Pakistanis take public positions they would never acknowledge privately. Furthermore, terrorism goes a long in any society in silencing the great silent majority who simply want to live in peace and prosperity.

It is in this light that the growing crisis of the regime of President-Gen. Pervez Musharraf must be seen.

Its imperfections are legion. But what has to be considered, as always, of course, is what the alternatives might be and the unforeseen consequences of further dislocation and violence in a very troubled society with Musharraf’s overthrow.

It is casting no aspersions to acknowledge that we are dealing with backward societies – where the great mass of the population is living in the pre-modern world, illiterate, and impoverished.

I remember a conversation with a young crusading American professor teaching in a South Korean university in the late 1950s who called himself a political scientist [which to borrow an old and tired cliché, is so often neither politics nor science]. I reminded him – to his consternation – that John gave the Magna Carta to the Barons, not to the Yeomen. Representative government and what we today call human rights came over a long period in the West with much disputation and bloodshed. The universal secret ballot may be a test of democracy, but it is not democracy. Neither is representative government by itself.

None of this is to be seen as an argument for prohibition against extending personal freedom – as Bush has proclaimed from the rooftops – as a universal human value to those societies that have never enjoyed it. But we have seen so many times, in more sophisticated societies such as 20th century Germany and Italy, how fragile it is. And to expect its maximum imposition in areas which have never had the intellectual revolution that produced the industrial revolution is to flirt with catastrophe.

Hindsight, of course, tells us that American leadership was not able to make that kind of distinction in two important relatively recent crises: in the fall of Muhhamud Rezza Shah Pahlevi in Iran, and the murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam.

In each instance, American policymakers yielded to that old temptation of the reformers/utopians to try to change the nature of the game rather than winning it on terms long dictated by our opponents. And they aided and abetted, in the case of Vietnam, a period of chaos and discontent in both countries which led to the eventual American withdrawal and betrayal of America’s friends, and in the case of Iran, facilitating the installation of hypocritical tyranny masquerading under religious reform. In both cases, the mistake became almost instantly apparent but the remedy was nowhere to be had.

I remember after John F. Kennedy’s completed orders for the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem a discussions with a USIS CIA agent [requiescat in pace] discussing the local scene. It was in the Givral coffee shop in the center of Saigon where a not so secret agent of the Communists was peddling his usual afternoon lecture on the local scene to a highly receptive group of mostly American reporters. “It was more complicated than we thought”, he said, to which I wearily replied, “Yes, more complicated than we [pause] thought.” In Tehran, of course, the U.S. almost immediately saw its embassy violated and its citizens imprisoned, and the relationship has been downhill ever since with the increasing threat of a nuclear clad aggressive Iran.

The damage both failures of American prudence inflicted on a wide range of other issues and relations with other countries is still not widely appreciated. [Were that not so, much of the more ridiculous statements made in the current and necessary debate in the U.S. Congress and before the 2008 elections would not be heard.] The breaking of the American army in Vietnam after its 54,000 casualties which seemed to have gone for naught dogged the American polity for a generation. The influence of the revival of religious fanaticism in Iran swept through the Moslem world and had much to do with reviving old and ugly manifestations of that religion’s past. [It comes as a great surprise to many of the new found experts that Shia Iranian maniacs are aiding Sunni Al Qaida lunatics!]

Again, in Pakistan, the U.S. faces a series of poor choices. [That, one might add, is not an unusual event in the real world, in life, for those of our younger readers, hopefully, who have for the moment turned away from Itune.] But we have all the makings of the ambiance which created the earlier disastrous decisions:

The ghoulish media Listening to two British voices on CNN discussing the current situation in Pakistan brings back an incident in a cocktail party at my office/apartment in Saigon during the Vietnam War. Suddenly over the din of the conversation, I hear an old friend, an Australian soldiers of the New Guinea jungles in WWII, the Burma campaign against the Karens in the early 40s, The Malaysian Emergency, and then, Vietnam, say to an eager, young American, “Young man, I will give you a list of books to read about Vietnam. When you have read them, please come back to me and we will have this discussion. Because, right now, it’s as though we are playing a game of singles, but I have to keep jumping back and forth across the net to keep the volley going!”

The two CNNers obviously knew little if anything about Pakistan or its history. In fact, they exemplified that old adage the nastier French throw at the U.S.: “Americans believe that history begins when they arrive.”

Contrary to the conspiracy theories on the American right, the media misreporting lies less in prejudice from ideology than it does from simple ignorance of the issues and a lack of professionalism. And it derives from, what the French, again, call “deformation professionelle” – a professional deformity which always demands that any story be presented in its most dramatic and, generally, worst possible light to make it more dramatic and interesting to a reader.

In the past, such press campaigns – Vietnam was the perfect example – have overly influenced the electorate back home in America and, therefore, their elected representatives. That could be happening today with the reporting from Iraq but certainly from Pakistan where there is not even the intermediary of large American presence, no Green Zone bubble from which the media may view the locals.

The strange Pakistani hybrid In a country created out of British India on the basis of its population being a Moslem minority which it was argued could never find justice in a majority Hindu country, its leadership has rarely been more than formally religious Moslems. Until the current outbreak of Islamofascism throughout the Moslem world, election after election – however wanting – has thrown up a tiny politocreligious Moslem minority.

Musharraf, after taking power in a military coup d’etat, and depending on the military as his power base, has permitted a modicum of free speech and press. His attack on the judiciary –a hamhanded removal in March of the Chief Justice who has just been reinstated by the court – was as much to defend a program of privatization and economic reform, as the pressing political issues. Obviously a judge who had the temerity to declare a privatization package corrupt – and it might well have been – would feel his oats and might take on Musharraf on other equally crucial issues. Musharraf’s accusations of nepotism and corruption against the judge might also be part of the scene. Whether the chief of state and government should also be able to continued as the military commander [which Musharraf might well want to do to preserve his hold on power] could be the next issue down the road. So could the government’s role in the disappearance of dissidents and the imprisonment of terrorists without access to trial [Guantanamo East?]

But these are not simple issues and not to be interpreted in the context of the ACLU’s Skokie defense of the American Nazis.

The concerns of U.S. strategy Washington has more important bilateral issues as well. Musharraf’s effort to use the old pukha Calcutta weapons of money, tribal rivalries, and minor shows of force to bring the tribal areas to heel and avoid casualties has not worked. But one cannot blame Musharraf for trying: he has now learned bitterly that the Paks are not the raj and their army has had the same kinds of losses there the British suffered in the 19th century when it tried frontal assault.

How to work out more cooperative efforts to wipe out the sanctuary Al Qaida apparently has created in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas with the Americans and not further feed the forces of xenophobia in the country is the problem. And it is one that must be addressed with dexterity and sophistication -- and quietly with a little less “localitis” bombast from NATO commanders and President Hamid Karzai in Kabul.

The “democratic alternative” But to believe that the so-called democratic opposition, headed by Benazir Bhutto, is the answer to Musharraf’s failings is to believe in the tooth fairy. Going back to her family’s origins, where there were few Moslem landlords in The Sindh in British India, and certainly not with the wealth of her family, the Bhuttos were notorious for their treatment of the peasantry. Indicted in Swiss courts for corrupt practices, Bhutto hangs out in “:the New Switzerland”, Dubai, on the Persian Gulf, between facelifts and trips to London and Washington to court the naifs. Nor should one forget it was on Bhutto’s side trip to Pyongyang during the kowtow to Beijing for the alliance with China that the deal was made to swap North Korean missile for nuclear weapons technology of Pakistan. Nothing could be worse? Dont count on it.