By BARRY BEARAK

New York Time Magazine December 7, 2003

Maulana Azam Tariq's assassins were of the thorough sort, firing 30 or 40 bullets into their victim, aiming especially at the head and neck. The Sunni cleric died along with his driver and three bodyguards, murdered near a tollbooth in a high-security area of Islamabad, the rich, spacious and usually sedate capital of a poor, crowded and deeply tumultuous country: Pakistan.

Azam Tariq was considered an extreme man even in a nation abundant with extremists. Often accused of ordering the deaths of innocent Shiites, he made his home in Jhang, a robust city in the vast plains of central Punjab. It is a relatively prosperous area, with an occasional tractor to share beastly burdens with the water buffalo. But the greatest portion of the wealth remains with feudal landlords, most of whom are Shiites. Resentment of these landlords helped provoke years of spasmodic sectarian violence. This reciprocal bloodshed joined the other centrifugal forces that always seem to be flinging Pakistan toward bedlam: the religious fanaticism, the ethnic separatism, the political corruption, the four military takeovers, the three wars with India, the two wars in Afghanistan, the inconstant friendship of America.

As it happened, I interviewed Azam Tariq two days before he was gunned down. ''Anyone will know how to find me,'' he had promised in lieu of directions. And indeed, people in Jhang confidently pointed the way through the curvy and narrow lanes of an old neighborhood, where an automobile seemed a clumsy machine amid motor scooters and donkey carts. Maulana is a term of respect for a scholar, one dutifully applied by Azam Tariq's thousands of followers. That morning, the maulana was busy at his small compound, encircled in his office by dozens of supplicants needing help with their unpaid bills and unresolved quarrels. A bespectacled man with a henna tint to his stiff beard, Azam Tariq, 41, was wearing a turban, its long tail hanging over the front of his white linen shalwar kameez. He sat patiently on the floor behind a cloth-covered table, his ministrations repeatedly disrupted by phone calls. Outside were young sentries with machine guns. A closed-circuit TV monitored the mosque across the street.

When Azam Tariq saw he had guests, he excused himself from the office and led my translator and me to a simply furnished guest room. An aide was sent to fetch bottles of 7Up and a plate of cookies. Then, unprompted by questions, the maulana began an enthusiastic self-defense, portraying himself as a reasonable man of virtuous restraint. Rather than killing Shiites, he said, they ''should merely be declared non-Muslims'' and jailed for 10 or 15 years. ''We have never called for violence against anyone.''

These were lies, which was to be expected. Pakistan is a great hub of duplicity, and the maulana was just one of the many chameleon characters who seemed able to operate at both its center and fringe, something like the nation itself, which is one of America's essential allies in the war against terrorism and also one of terrorism's essential incubators in its war against the West. Each time I visit the country, I hope for some blossom of understanding but return with the wilt of confusion. This is a nation of confounding murkiness, where every kind of deception, collusion and outright sham are recurring motifs in the political theater. Rumors and conspiracy theories are as commonly exchanged as rupee notes, the information -- some of it even true -- then twisted, inflated and endlessly rearranged. Much of the trickery is institutionalized. The I.S.I. -- the shorthand name for the military intelligence agencies -- is widely presumed to be an expert puppet master, the great Oz of a manipulated society.

Rumors were the reason I wanted a word with the maulana. I'd heard that he had cut a deal with the military a year ago to spring himself from jail.

Since Pakistan's most recent military coup, in October 1999, the country has been run by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, an often brash former commando. From the first, he professed a devotion to democracy and a loathing for the nation's ample supply of knavish politicians. His deepest belief, however, seems to be in his own indispensability, and he has connived to hold on to power even after allowing national elections. His patriotic campaigns against corruption and extremism have most often given way to the more pressing priorities of mundane self-interest.

The case of Azam Tariq is but a single example. Two years ago, soon after 9/11, the general ordered the jailing of the maulana and several other incendiary mullahs. Months later, in one of his many rousing denunciations of radical Islam, Musharraf officially outlawed Azam Tariq's organization, Sipah-e-Sahaba (Warriors of the Prophet's Companions), saying Pakistanis were ''fed up'' with ''fratricidal killings.''

But these pronouncements, however sincere, meant little in practice. Much like other banned groups, Sipah-e-Sahaba merely had to change its name to go on operating. In fact, when elections were finally held, Azam Tariq was able to win a seat in Parliament from his prison cell. Three weeks later, a court released him. Curiously enough, he then allied himself with the pro-Musharraf coalition in the Assembly, becoming one of many unlikely bedfellows in the governing majority, among them several legislators newly liberated from the distractions of lingering criminal cases.

''No, no, absolutely no deal was made,'' the maulana assured me, insisting that the timing of his release was purely a coincidence. Speaking in Punjabi, he swiftly changed the subject, preferring more familiar topics, like the many fruitless efforts by Shiite extremists to kill him. ''I've had 11 attempts on my life, with knives, guns, bombs, even rocket launchers,'' he boasted, as if these brushes with death verified his importance in life.

As goodbyes were said, he embraced me in the traditional way, pulling me toward him so that our right shoulders touched. Then he apologized for not having provided a full meal. In amends, he ordered his brother to escort us to a restaurant called Kim's. ''Best Chinese food in Jhang'' was the last thing I heard the maulana say.

The Smoldering Fire

To be honest, Pakistan frightens me. Not the being there, despite recent attacks on foreigners, despite what happened to Daniel Pearl. I have visited Pakistan a few dozen times since 1998, most recently for five weeks this fall. Almost always I've found the people warm and generous and protective. Rather, what greatly alarms me is Pakistan as a potential meltdown, a nuclear power with too many combustibles in the national mix.

I am hardly alone in my fears -- and yet this nation rarely finds itself under the American magnifying glass. ''Pakistan is an incredibly important country, but I don't think there's an awareness of that in the United States,'' Richard Haass told me. He had recently left the Bush administration as director of policy planning in the State Department and assumed the presidency of the Council on Foreign Relations. ''If you'd ask most people what are the biggest issues in the world, they'd say the Middle East, Iraq, North Korea, perhaps Afghanistan, a long list. But not a lot of people would say Pakistan.'' He, too, has pondered the dangerous skein of possibilities. ''Sure to be a nightmare is a breakdown in order. They haven't institutionalized succession in any meaningful way. At worst, you could have a loss of control over their nuclear weapons.''

Pakistan has a population (150 million) larger than all but five nations and more nuclear warheads (perhaps 50) than all but six or seven. Since its establishment, it has been in want of a coherent national identity: some there sarcastically call it less a nation than a crowd. Born in 1947, it was awkwardly excised from the British Empire in two separate pieces, an east and a west that happened to be 800 miles apart, with the largely Hindu behemoth of India situated in between. This new nation was meant to be the Muslim homeland of the subcontinent, but the formal role of Islam was left ambiguous and has ever remained an issue. Religion alone proved insufficient glue. In 1971, Pakistan's eastern half went its own way after Bengali Muslims -- with India's assistance -- broke loose and created Bangladesh. Four contiguous provinces remain: Baluchistan, Punjab, the Northwest Frontier and Sindh. Significant numbers of the present citizenry feel their greater bond is to ethnicity -- be it Pashtun or Baluchi or Sindhi -- and would rather not be part of Pakistan at all. Also under Islamabad's control is Azad (''Free'') Kashmir, one-third of a lovely Himalayan territory claimed by both the Indians and Pakistanis. The dispute is the main reason these neighbors continue to kill one another.

Though the British are long gone, the Pakistanis themselves remain colonized by privation. About two-thirds of the population survives on less than $2 a day. Nearly two of every five children are undernourished. Only 44 percent of all adults can read (only 29 percent of the women). The mosques, rather than the government, provide what frayed social safety net there is. Perhaps that is because Pakistan is habitually broke. Barely 1 percent of the population pays income tax. More than half of the central budget goes toward the military and repayment of the national debt.

Politically, Pakistan has been reliably unsteady, with democracy only a sporadic presence. The military has controlled the country for about half its 56 years. No elected government has ever completed a full term, and even when one is in place, it stays there only at the pleasure of the generals. The army -- some 500,000 strong -- is commonly thought to be Pakistan's elite institution. The military doesn't just dominate civilian affairs; its various ''welfare trusts'' are among the nation's largest industrial conglomerates. The Fauji Foundation, linked to the army, has substantial ventures in gas fields, sugar mills, a fertilizer plant, an oil terminal and an overseas employment service. Its corn flakes and other breakfast cereals control 80 percent of the market. Profits supply ex-servicemen and their families the quality schools and health care that most Pakistanis so badly lack.

The great murkiness of Pakistan is largely the fault of this formidable army and the skulking I.S.I., which have pursued furtive alliances with many of the nation's most violent Islamic extremists. For more than a decade, the military has trained and financed civilian jihadis who cross into the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir to create havoc. This guerrilla combat was once an entirely indigenous Kashmiri rebellion against New Delhi, but the Pakistanis quickly hijacked it. Radical groups supplied much of the manpower, often enlisting students eager to enter paradise through the golden door of a martyr's death. The relentless havoc has time and again nudged the two new nuclear powers close to war. The alliance between the army and I.S.I. on one hand and extremists on the other has also led to a contorted set of cross-dependencies. Loyalties are now confused, and many Pakistanis wonder whether fundamentalist elements in the army's officer corps are more sympathetic to the jihadis than to their own superiors.

Musharraf's own dedication to the Kashmir cause is indisputable. In early 1999, just months into his tenure as army chief, he ordered the paramilitary forces of the Northern Light Infantry across the agreed cease-fire line. When the troops were finally discovered, the Pakistanis claimed they were mujahedeen acting on their own, a feeble story belied when the bodies of dead soldiers began to be returned to their families. The Indians responded to the encroachment with air power, giant howitzers and thousands of troops. This semi-war ended only after Nawaz Sharif, then Pakistan's prime minister, made a desperate July 4 trip to Washington seeking diplomatic intervention by President Clinton. In a retelling of the episode, Bruce Riedel, a special assistant at the White House, wrote that there had been ''disturbing evidence that the Pakistanis were preparing their nuclear arsenals for possible deployment.''

Musharraf has since assured the world that Pakistan is a responsible custodian of its nuclear arsenal. Still, pressures for one-upmanship with India are immense. According to American officials, Pakistan began swapping vital nuclear secrets with North Korea in exchange for ballistic missiles in the late 1990's. The dealings apparently continued after Musharraf's coup, but by the time they were disclosed last year, Islamabad was already a front-line warrior against Al Qaeda. The Bush administration responded tepidly, imposing sanctions on a single Pakistani nuclear laboratory.

In the past 25 years, American policy toward Pakistan has largely been devised to fit the events happening next door, in Afghanistan. Immediately after Sept. 11, Washington reinvigorated a waning friendship with Islamabad, employing President Bush's with-us-or-against-us ultimatum. The Pakistanis were ordered to forsake their Taliban associates, avail air bases to American troops and join in the hunt for terrorists. In many ways, Musharraf was pleased to comply. He had been treated warily in the West. Intimacy with America would come with generous military aid, forgiven debt and a new role for him, that of a reputable statesman.

There was precedent for Musharraf's abrupt rehabilitation. An earlier Pakistani ruler, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, hanged his civilian predecessor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and imposed a punitive version of Islam especially harsh on women. And yet however much Zia had fallen into bad odor, the air was freshened by his strategic usefulness after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Throughout the 80's, jihad was a word to be embraced, not abhorred, in Washington. The United States employed Pakistan as the conduit for billions of dollars in arms to the Afghan resistance. The I.S.I., tutored in artifice by the C.I.A. itself, thrived in the role of middleman benefactor to the many mujahedeen groups.

Surely, the defeat of the Soviet Union was beneficial for the United States, but American policy lacked a fuller vision for the region. By 1989, when the Soviets finally fled their misadventure, Pakistan was awash with weapons, the inevitable leakage from the gushing pipeline. It was also an increasingly cordial locale for the heroes of radical Islam, the thousands of Pakistanis who fought in the jihad as well as the many ''Afghan Arabs'' from around the world who, like Osama bin Laden, had come to battle the infidels.

With the Soviets vanquished, they would begin to look for new enemies.

Making Democracy Safe for Musharraf

One evening in Islamabad, I decided to visit a session of the National Assembly, where the same scene had been repeating itself for months. Once the session was called to order, members of the opposition rose from their soft leather chairs and began pounding notebooks and tubes of paper on the curved tables before them. A ritual chant accompanied this arrhythmic drumbeat: ''Go, Musharraf, go! No, L.F.O., no!'' After about five minutes of this noise, the defiant legislators walked out, leaving pro-Musharraf lawmakers behind in a half-empty chamber.

The main grievance was the Legal Framework Order -- the L.F.O. -- Musharraf's unilateral redrawing of the Constitution. He has bestowed upon himself the power to appoint Supreme Court justices and military chiefs, dissolve the Parliament and fire the prime minister. In other words, officials -- whether elected or otherwise -- were free to perform their duties so long as the general did not disapprove of how they did it.

After the 1999 coup, Musharraf promised his countrymen a ''true democracy,'' a way of governance he found hard to define though he openly supposed it would require his continuing guidance. Much the same had been pledged by the three previous military rulers, but the public was again keen for a fresh start, and the coup was widely cheered. Pakistanis had soured on Nawaz Sharif, an opulently wealthy industrialist whose greatest passions were food, cricket, fast cars and then more food.

Musharraf, on the other hand, presented himself as a man who would countenance no corruption. People from some of Pakistan's leading families were arrested on fraud charges without regard to their political connections. The general demanded that bank loans be repaid, a bothersome innovation for many of the rich.

I spent time with Musharraf during these early days. He is a forceful man who expresses himself with such common sense and seeming candor that it is hard to imagine a word being untrue. He favors declarations like ''It's high time we face facts!'' And yet for most Pakistanis, the general has been a disappointment. Anticorruption campaigns gave way, once again, to political vendettas. Farouk Adam Khan had been chief prosecutor during the initial period of crusading. One Sunday night, I found him in his law office, sitting under the dim light of a single desk lamp. ''Pervez Musharraf had a great opportunity,'' he said, ''but he lost it in the pursuit of power.''

The general learned the ins and outs of politics, best defined as how to keep the outs from getting in. In May 2000, the Supreme Court validated his coup. This occurred after the 13 justices were ordered to sign a loyalty oath to the new regime -- and the 6 who refused had been replaced. The court then recovered some of its dignity by setting an October 2002 deadline for parliamentary elections. At the time, Musharraf was referring to himself as Pakistan's ''chief executive,'' though the title of president later became his preference. He won a five-year term at the job in a national referendum with only his name on the ballot and a simple choice of ''yes'' or ''no.'' The reported tally showed 98 percent in the affirmative, a vote considered implausible by most observers -- even if no campaigning against Musharraf had been allowed. Within months, the new president, swept along by his landslide, issued the Legal Framework Order.

The parliamentary elections posed some difficulties for Musharraf, but not insurmountable ones. To have a malleable National Assembly, he would need support from a political party. Pakistan had plenty of those, but the two main ones relied on the cult of personality -- and their esteemed personages had long been on the lam. In an odd secret deal, Nawaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League, traded prison in his homeland for exile in Saudi Arabia. Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the hanged Zulfikar, had herself twice been prime minister, inheriting the Pakistan People's Party. Educated at both Harvard and Oxford -- and charged with corruption by both Pakistan and Switzerland -- she now lived in both London and Dubai.

Neither Benazir Bhutto nor Sharif could have run again anyway. Musharraf had installed new rules for public office. Some were laudable, like reserving a quota of seats in Parliament for women. Others were quirky, moralistic or simply cunning. A college degree was required, disqualifying all but perhaps 4 percent of the population. Accused bank defaulters also could not run, nor could their relatives or business associates.

Yet however unusual these rules, it was their selective application that was most disturbing. In a detailed criticism of the election, observers from the European Union said the inconsistency was the ''result of a government strategy, in certain cases through the enforcement of person-specific provisions.'' Politicians allying themselves with Musharraf were often given ways around legal obstacles, the report noted. A few of the more ambitiously recruited were then rewarded with posts in the cabinet.

As might be expected, many Pakistanis believe the I.S.I. was shoulder-deep in election mischief. Intelligence agents may well have intimidated more than a few. Stories of such threats are common if difficult to confirm. ''They handcuffed me, put a black hood over my head, threw me in a car and put a blanket over me,'' Ahsan Iqbal told me. He was once responsible for economic planning under Nawaz Sharif and had refused to switch sides. ''They took me to one of their safe houses.'' There, he said, he was entombed in darkness for 16 to 18 hours until the abductors pushed him back into the car and abandoned him in a remote area. ''They were letting me know that if I misbehaved, something worse could happen.''

With Benazir Bhutto absent, I instead visited her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who once bore the unfortunate nickname Mr. 10 Percent, a reference to the money he supposedly took off the top while his wife ran the country. For the past eight years he has been in prison, and the only way to see him was during one of the hearings in his continuing legal saga. ''Come here, right next to me,'' Zardari said affably. He was sitting in the side yard of a courthouse in Rawalpindi, relaxing under a tree. He pinched my arm and nodded to his left. ''The I.S.I. is posted there. Better put away your tape recorder.'' I had been expecting the dashing man I had seen in photos, a playboy polo player known as much for his dalliances as for his marriage. Instead he appeared pasty and bloated, a fidgety guy in a wheelchair with back problems and diabetes. His eyeglasses hung on a band around his neck; his cane rested against a tree stump. During his first years of captivity, he was tortured, he said. He stuck out his tongue to show me a groove excavated from the center.

Our conversation rambled, and he was emphatic in denying any wrongdoing. He himself brought up the matter of a $180,000 diamond necklace his wife is said to have bought with dirty money. ''She doesn't need more jewelry,'' he said, as many a husband would. And her family was wealthy. ''Benazir has more jewelry than she can count.'' To him, their legal troubles were part of some conspiracy. ''The world is not Camelot,'' he said, as if summarizing some philosophy's central truth.

An old air-conditioner was rattling in the background. When it unexpectedly stopped, Zardari sent a man into the courthouse to restart this camouflage of noise, again nodding warily toward the I.S.I. agents. ''Musharraf is basically a wolf in sheep's clothing; he's playing footsy with the world,'' he said ruefully. But he seemed to envy the president more than dislike him. Musharraf had dumb luck on his side. ''If it wasn't for 9/11, we would have won the election hands down. He couldn't have kept Benazir from coming back. He couldn't have changed all those laws.''

He couldn't have kept Asif Zardari locked away.

The Mullahs Are Coming!

Even without Benazir, her party got slightly more total votes than the one loyal to Musharraf, but his side won the most individual seats in Parliament.

The biggest surprise, however, was the success of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (M.M.A.), or United Action Forum, an odd coalition of six religious parties never before known for mutual harmony or strength at the polls. It won the third-largest block of seats. More stunningly, it did well enough in provincial races to control the assembly in the Northwest Frontier and become a major partner in a ruling coalition in Baluchistan. Government by ''the mullahs'' has long been a dreaded prospect by the vast majority of Pakistanis with less doctrinaire views, and the M.M.A.'s unexpected victories intensified fears that ''Talibanization'' was creeping its way across the land.

Seven months later, extremists -- shouting the all-purpose invocation ''God is great!'' -- inflamed those anxieties by marauding through the city of Peshawar. As police placidly looked on, the crowd confiscated CD's and tapes from stores and burned music and movies in a bonfire. They blackened the faces of women on billboards. In the meantime, politicians in the new government spoke of plans to not only enforce their version of Shariah law but also compel its obedience with patrols of religious constables.

Conspiracy theorists and others reacted to the M.M.A.'s election success with a frenzy of suspicion. They began to call the coalition the Military-Mullah Alliance, speculating that the wily Musharraf had backed the religious parties to scare the gullible Americans into meting out more aid. (''The mullahs are coming! The mullahs are coming!'') To them, it seemed the M.M.A. had received an unfair leg up. Degrees from madrasas (religious schools) had been accepted to fulfill the educational requirement for candidates. On the ballots themselves, where each party was denoted by an emblem, the M.M.A. was granted the symbol of a book. In a mostly illiterate country, some people were then easily persuaded that their choice was to vote for or against the Holy Koran.

Before leaving Islamabad for Peshawar -- one center of religious extremism -- I discussed this hypothesis with a crafty political operator named Mushahid Hussain. He had been minister of information under Nawaz Sharif and endured 440 days of house arrest after the coup. But Hussain has a very agile mind, capable of elaborate spin moves. Once freed, he joined Musharraf's party and was now serving in Parliament's upper house. By his reckoning, the M.M.A.'s strong showing owed more to the other parties' disarray and the mullahs' savvy use of anti-Americanism. ''India-bashing has been replaced by America-bashing,'' he said. We chatted for about an hour, but what I recall most was a friendly warning as I left his house. ''Let me know if you want to talk anything over, but not on the phone,'' the former information minister told me. ''Remember, all the phones are bugged.''

Peshawar, capital of the Northwest Frontier, is just east of the winding canyons of the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan. The province is largely Pashtun. By custom, women are kept hidden away. When outdoors, they are usually secreted beneath the billowy cloth of a burka. Among most Pashtuns, sympathy remains high for the Taliban, if not as models of Islamic behavior, then at least as ethnic brethren. Religious bullying was nothing unusual in the city, and it was easy to find new instances. Musicians were no longer able to find work. ''Now, even at weddings, some mullahs come up and say this is not allowed, this is against Islam,'' Sher Muhammad, an old man who plays the harmonium and drums, said with despair. ''If I play my music to feed my family, does that mean I am not a Muslim?''

Such complaints aside, what seemed most remarkable to me was how little of any religious agenda the M.M.A. had put in effect. Inexperienced at government, the coalition partners were a disparate bunch. A few powerful mullahs wanted to flip the calendar back 1,400 years to the days of the Holy Prophet, but others were content enough with the present. Mufti Ghulam-ur-Rehman, the white-bearded man in charge of the Council for the Enforcement of Shariah, entertained visitors while sitting cross-legged on the floor, but there was a fax machine on the cabinet behind him. ''It is a modern world,'' he said cheerily. ''TV has become a necessity of life.''

Malik Zafar Azam, the M.M.A.'s minister of law, is a green-card holder who owns an Italian restaurant in Arlington, Va. ''I'm a good chef of spaghetti and pizza,'' he claimed. He still goes back and forth to America, though not so often since the bank foreclosed on his Virginia townhouse. He recalled appearing on a Pakistani TV show: ''They said to me, 'Oh, my God, you are the law minister; you're making all men wear beards and do all these things.' I said what the hell are you talking. I have no beard, and I wear short pants.''

There are Talibanizers at work, no doubt -- and more all the time. But the Taliban in Afghanistan was originally welcomed more as sheriffs than mullahs, their stern theocracy considered an antidote to plundering warlords and social chaos. Pakistan does not have the predicate of such pervasive lawlessness. Indeed, the M.M.A. may well have its hands full simply staying in power. As always, I heard rumor upon rumor, hard to fully believe, hard to fully discount. In one story, the I.S.I. was buying the nine votes needed to topple the religious coalition in the provincial assembly. This would provide a heavy hammer over the M.M.A., which has been stubbornly opposing Musharraf on the Legal Framework Order. The cost per politician was said to go as high as 10 million rupees, about $160,000.

Talibanizers have other resistance to overcome. Fundamentalism provides a powerful pull, offering purpose to the otherwise ignored. But it is not the only magnetic force. Even in largely Pashtun Peshawar, the masses are being tugged in multiple directions, including toward modernity and the West. Internet cafes, which the Taliban would never have tolerated, are opening one after the other. Training in English is a chief selling point of private academies. Music and movies are sold openly. Pinups of Indian actresses are marketed side by side with those glorifying Osama bin Laden. More than 200 cable-TV operators are collecting a $4 monthly fee from tens of thousands of subscribers; even more people are stealing the service.

Other cleavages divide Pakistan. Water itself sunders the provinces as each one vies for the precious flow of the Indus. Human rights activists struggle against death sentences in blasphemy cases and laws that sometimes make a woman the guilty party in her own rape. In the chaotic megalopolis of Karachi, thousands of terrorist murders have taken place during the past decade, the mayhem caused by two warring political factions. While this feud is presently at an ebb, sectarian killings keep the quotient of disquietude high with a particularly senseless touch, the targeting of doctors. An estimated 70 are dead. ''I was tipped off that I was No. 2 on a five-person list set for execution,'' Dr. Shafqat Hussain Abbassi told me. He is a Sunni, but the Hussain part of his name had caused him to be mistaken for a Shiite. For days, he desperately tried to get word to the proper terrorists. Finally, he reached a maulana with jurisdiction. ''He apologized that they were mistaken.''

Internal nationalisms have troubled the country from its first days. Nawab Khair Bakhsh Marri is head of the Marris, one of the largest of the Baluchi tribes. His loyalty is to a greater Baluchi nation, not some British mapmaker's creation called Pakistan. Befitting his status as a nawab, or ruler, he lives in Quetta in a large compound with armed guards stationed at the gate. His hair is white, his beard neatly clipped. He gave his age as ''well over 70,'' and he spoke the fine English of a well-educated man. His feelings about Islam were hardly reverent. ''In our part of the world, a mullah is someone who washed the dead, not a job you'd much admire,'' he said with wry contempt. Neither has he much use for America, the ''leading shareholder'' in world imperialism, and wondered how a nation great enough to produce Noam Chomsky could also deliver George W. Bush.

His worst scorn, however, was reserved for Punjabis, the largest ethnic group in Pakistan and the dominant one in the army. He recalled fighting them over the years. In 1974, some 80,000 troops were deployed against a Baluchi insurgency. Even today, Government forces are ambushed in the mountainous Marri lands east of Quetta. ''Why must Punjab be in my destiny?'' he asked. Destitute tribesmen would benefit from a road the government wants to build. But the purpose of development is merely to exploit his people's mineral resources, the nawab said disdainfully. ''So we fight on with the pen, the mouth and the gun.'' He paused to scoff at the sad irony of the storied Baluchis being part of an artificial nation. ''Religion is only one aspect of life. It's not enough for a country.''

"You People Are Offensive"

Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, is just 50 miles from the Afghanistan border. This city may once have been Baluchi, but now it is also very much Pashtun. One poor neighborhood of high walls and narrow lanes is even called Pashtunabad. Most of its residents are Afghan refugees, including many easily identifiable as Taliban by their turbans. Some are merely students. But others are soldiers, going back and forth to their homeland to fight against American troops and the Karzai government. Their favored means of transportation is the motorcycle. One rumor is that the bikes are furnished by the I.S.I. If true, this raises one of the more popular sets of questions. Has Musharraf approved it? Or do rogues in the intelligence services have their own foreign policy?

While wandering through Pashtunabad, I asked to enter a small, dark room where young Taliban men lived. They were suspicious of an American, but with customary Pashtun hospitality, a cushioned seat was offered and tea was poured into clear glasses half full with sugar. ''We study in the madrasa,'' said Abdul Baqi, a 27-year-old who seemed the leader. I wanted to know if he was learning any subjects beyond Islamic teachings, and when he said yes, I asked him if he could name any planet besides earth or multiply five times seven. He could not, but he had a question of his own: ''When will America be satisfied? When it kills every Muslim in the world?''

This question might just as well have come from a Pakistani. As I have fears about an unhinged Pakistan, Pakistanis have fears about a wanton America. The parallel apprehensions have much the same vocabulary: a nuclear power, prone to irrational behavior, too eager to go to war, a penchant toward duplicity.

Sometimes, there is even the part about religious extremism. ''George Bush is a mullah; he is a fundamentalist, too,'' Abdul Hakim Baloch, a writer in Quetta, told me. ''I don't know how history will treat the Americans, but you are committing one of the greatest crimes of all time. Bush thinks he must destroy Babylon as the verses of his Scripture tell him. But you cannot conquer the world based on superstitions.''

As an American in Pakistan, I was on a lecture tour where I was the one being lectured. Some decisive juncture had been passed, and people were erupting with accusations. Whomever I saw, extremist or not, educated or not, they told me they had finally lost patience with America, which in their eyes had grown hateful toward Islam and hypocritical about democracy.

Aitzaz Ahsan, a prom-inent politician and lawyer, opposes Musharraf. ''Here again is another dictator the Americans are willing to sit in their laps as if they have run into a long-lost loved one,'' he said in exasperation. ''We are back to Square 1, except this time, while attempting to demolish the demonic mullahs that we created ourselves, we are actually fueling their responses on a much wider theater.'' That theater is Iraq -- and perhaps beyond. A common suspicion is that an unquenchable America is after territory, after oil, after blood.

The sympathy that poured forth after 9/11 is spent. For many, the winning of two wars has turned American sorrow into vulgar triumphalism. ''You people are offensive,'' I was told sternly by Salima Hashmi, one of Pakistan's leading artists. ''I don't care who your enemy is. You don't kill two of his sons and then show them off on TV.''

These were feelings I could understand. They were reasoned criticisms. I might disagree with some of the thinking, but it all fell within the arena of legitimate debate.

Much of what I heard, however, seemed to come from an inverted world, the axis spinning backward, all the essential story lines turned inside out. There is no polling data to cite, but it seems that most Pakistanis, including a great many of the college-educated, continue to believe that the World Trade Center was attacked as part of a Jewish conspiracy -- and perhaps one that involved high-level cooperation from the United States government.

''Who gained from these happenings?'' I was asked by a 35-year-old man named Haroon. ''Not Islam, not America, only the Jewish people.'' He demanded an investigation: Why had no Jews come to work at the World Trade Center that day? Why had Jewish businessmen withdrawn all their money from banks ?

There were multiple variations to this conspiracy theory, including a few that had Osama bin Laden acting as an Israeli hireling. When I responded with incredulity, I was pitied as a naif. Qazi Hussain Ahmad, the well-traveled, highly educated leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's largest religious party, even patted my hand. ''This required a very sophisticated infrastructure,'' he said of the trade center attacks. Hadn't I read the analyses on the Internet, he wanted to know: the Arabs involved lacked ''the capabilities to do all the planning'' for such a complicated operation. He suspected Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. He thought they might have been assisted by the United States military.

Gen. Hamid Gul, the retired head of the I.S.I., tendered a similar theory. ''The longest it would take for a U.S. Air Force aircraft to be on the tail of a hijacked plane is seven minutes,'' he told me, blaming collusion between the White House and ''Zionist intellectuals'' for the attack. He easily connected the dots. The same Zionists had recruited Monica Lewinsky, he said. ''She keeps the dress for two years and doesn't talk about it?'' He threw his head back in laughter. ''The American people are so gullible!''

The Feudals and the Ghost Schools

Most every village has a mosque. It is easy to happen upon the austere music of Muslim prayers. Harder to find are the chalkboard scratchings of an everyday school.

Pakistan's education system is a mess even by the sorry standards of South Asia. According to the World Bank, more than a third of the nation's 10-year-olds have never attended class. According to the United States Agency for International Development, Pakistani boys average less than two years of attendance, girls less than one. ''Ghost schools'' are a strange aspect of the problem. There are perhaps 10,000 of them: solid buildings, missing only the bodies and souls of teachers and students. Villagers often use the vacant classrooms to store grain and the courtyards to pen livestock.

Parents want their kids in school. If there were teachers, there would be students. But Pakistan's education budget as a percentage of gross domestic product is puny, according to a Unesco estimate, smaller than most of the Muslim world, smaller even than most of sub-Saharan Africa. And of those teachers who are paid, many simply fail to show up, relying on an inept bureaucracy to ignore their truancy. In a place called Masterano Kallai, I witnessed the reanimation of a ghost school. Some of the village's few literate men had volunteered to teach. Rooms were swept free of fodder and dung. A small blackboard was hung from a nail to the cement wall. More than 100 children arrived in the afternoon, some of them barefoot, many coming after a morning of hard lifting at a nearby brick kiln.

Families with enough money send their children to private schools while many of the poor take advantage of the free education offered by the madrasas, some of which provide a reasonably full curriculum, and some of which provide only rote memorization of the Koran, and some of which provide the combatants for jihad. General Musharraf has repeatedly promised to reform the madrasas, requiring them to teach from an approved syllabus. But to do so would be an expensive, meddlesome task, and despite some boasts to the contrary, the government has yet to make even an approximate count of the madrasas, let alone change their lesson plans.

The want of schools reflects the want of democracy. However many ruptures there are in Pakistani society, the greatest gulf is that between the rich and poor, and the poor are easy to ignore in a nation controlled by generals and landlords.

Kaiser Bengali, a noted economist, told me that 4 percent of Pakistan's rural households own 50 percent of the land. ''It is something like 16th-century feudalism,'' he said. In many farming areas, the biggest landowners are actually called ''the feudals,'' and some are powerful enough to make their own laws and operate their own jails. In the cities, a feudal is more likely to be a thug who runs a land mafia, falsely staking claim to property and forcing people to pay rent. Karachi, one of the world's 10 biggest cities, has sprawling squatter settlements that far outstrip every electrical line, every sewer pipe, every water tap. I spent a morning in Ibrahim Hydri, a fishing village outside the city. Boats were returning from three days at sea, and the crew was shoveling out the storage bins of fast-aging shrimp and pomfret. A grim fisherman named Saleh Muhammed said sale of the catch would barely cover fuel costs and dock fees. His family lived in a hut of scrap wood and thatch. A ''feudal'' was threatening to burn him out unless he could come up with 3,000 rupees (about $50).

These were despairing days for small fishermen. Prices had plunged after the sea itself became tainted. On July 27, an oil tanker ran aground just outside Karachi's harbor and, after bewildered authorities allowed the cracked vessel to languish for 18 days, a massive rupture opened, disgorging 30,000 tons of crude. The fish kill was immense.

This oil spill was nearly as big as the Exxon Valdez incident in 1989 off the coast of Alaska. But with no terrorism angle, the event was mostly ignored by the foreign news media. As the oil washed onto Karachi's best-known beach, it sullied the marvelous vista of an affluent neighborhood's high-rise apartments. Three months later, when I stood on the shore, the hapless ship was still marooned, its bow at an odd angle like a broken bone. A top layer of oily sand had been scooped from the beach itself, but some of the spill had seeped a full 20 inches down. Waves were dumping more dirty water on the dirty beach.

Patches of foamy brown stained the sand where the sea rolled in. ''Is that oil?'' I asked Brian Dicks, a British expert, who was standing beside a backhoe.

''Oh, no,'' he answered, ''That's raw sewage. Comes in streams from the big apartment buildings. Some people take care of their waste, some don't.''

In this case, the sea's use as a latrine was actually an advantage, he explained. Nitrogen and phosphates from the sewage were helping break down the oil.

America's Great Ally

Pakistan is tough on prognosticators. Each time I am there, people tell me the place is about to spin apart. And yet for all the gyrations, it remains in one piece. Some would argue that despite its mischief, the military is the tie that binds. But the generals are also to blame for so much of what has set the country reeling in the first place.

Cynicism is a contagion in Pakistan. Musharraf is not only criticized for selling out to the Americans; he is also excoriated for selling out too cheaply. After all, this may be a limited window. Historically, the United States is all too forgiving when it needs Pakistan and then smugly reproachful when it does not.

Nevertheless, for now Pakistan is on the payroll. In June, George W. Bush proposed a $3 billion aid package to be dispensed over the next five years, half for military use, half for economic aid. He and Musharraf presented the news together in Camp David. The two presidents appeared pals that day, looking relaxed as they walked shoulder to shoulder. Bush said America has ''had no better partner in our fight on terror than President Musharraf.'' Still, it is hard to imagine that these men altogether trust each other. Bush surely remembers that the general had befriended the Taliban until the day he was drafted into the war on terrorism. And Musharraf undoubtedly recalls that Pakistan's last military ruler, General Zia, met an untimely end in a plane crash. A good many Pakistanis again see a conspiring hand, supposing that the C.I.A. did away with an ally after his usefulness had run its course.

Shaping American policy toward Pakistan requires a prolonged balancing act on a particularly high wire. Nuclear misbehavior must be discouraged, but economic sanctions would only push a volatile country toward bankruptcy and disintegration. Human rights should be stressed, but perhaps not if it keeps Al Qaeda suspects from being immediately handed over. Big infusions of economic aid are vital for development, but how can the money be kept from religious radicals and the hopelessly corrupt? A full return to democracy ought to be demanded, but past civilian governments have been kleptocracies. Sadly, no oasis is visible ahead. There is no obvious Mandela figure, no Walesa, no Havel waiting in the wings. There can be no Velvet Revolution to inspire the Pakistani masses. Between the Koran and the Kalashnikovs, too many people covet too many incompatible things.

But if elected governments have been disappointing, military ones have been disastrous. And the eventual bridge to cross is more than Musharraf. It is the army itself -- and its dominance, whether onstage or behind the scenes. Some way or another, Musharraf's time will pass. The great fear in the West has been that the next general will be much harder to deal with, someone with a long beard and no taste for whisky. But the greater likelihood is that after Musharraf simply comes another Musharraf, a slightly different model but still a man with the same loyalty to military pre-eminence.

Idealists in the world believe there is no substitute for democracy. It may be hard work, but it must be tried, and if it fails, it must be tried again. The will of the people should not be forsaken for expedience, the body politic not sacrificed for Realpolitik.

Such sentiments have rarely been better expressed than in an eloquent address last month at the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. The main topic was democracy and Islam, and President Bush said, ''The daily work of democracy itself is the path to progress.'' For emphasis, he repeated the thought with new phrasing. ''It is the practice of democracy that makes a nation ready for democracy.''

Bush singled out two recalcitrant Muslim allies: Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Pakistan went unmentioned.