WASHINGTON — Under pressure from America and his own domestic constituents, Pakistan’s president is backing away from an earlier promise to impose a state of emergency.

A government spokesman in Islamabad told Western wire services yesterday that speculation about the imminent enforcement of emergency rule and the cancellation of presidential elections scheduled for September was premature.

The reversal is likely due to a phone call that Secretary of State Rice placed late Wednesday evening to President Musharraf. A State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, declined to go into detail about that conversation. But at a press conference yesterday, President Bush said America has an interest in seeing free and fair elections take place in Pakistan.

“So my focus, in terms of the domestic scene there, is that he have a free and fair election,” Mr. Bush said, referring to the Pakistani president. “And that’s what we have been talking to him about, and I’m hopeful they will.”

Pakistan’s domestic politics is a top concern for Mr. Bush, in part because the unelected General Musharraf, who seized power in a military coup in 1999, is a strategic American ally against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, groups Islamabad’s intelligence service supported before September 11, 2001.

Earlier this month, General Musharraf began talks with a former premier of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, on a possible power-sharing agreement. Any imposition of emergency law would likely have scuttled such an arrangement, which the State Department has quietly encouraged.

Although General Musharraf pledged after September 11 to end his regime’s support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and he began working closely with American special forces in subsequent years against Al Qaeda targets in Pakistani territory, the latest American intelligence consensus is that those groups have reconstituted their infrastructure and training in Pakistan.

In June 2006, the Pakistani military signed the first of several agreements with local rulers in the provinces bordering Afghanistan, known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas; as a result, Al Qaeda has been able to re-establish its safe havens and training camps there. The group’s infrastructure and leadership structure has been rebuilt to levels it maintained prior to September 11, according to the latest National Intelligence Estimate, and Al Qaeda’s senior leaders meet regularly in the Pakistani provinces abandoned by the Pakistani army and eastern Iran.

Yesterday, Mr. Bush said America would coordinate attacks on Al Qaeda in Pakistan with General Musharraf. “I’m confident that we — both the Paks and the Americans — will be able to work up a plan, based upon actionable intelligence, that will bring the top Al Qaeda targets to justice,” he said. “I meant what I said. We spend a lot of time with the leadership in Pakistan, talking about what we will do with actionable intelligence. And the question was: Am I confident that they will be brought to justice? And my answer to you is yes, I am confident.”

Whether America will act with or without Pakistan has become a hot political topic over the last week. Senator Obama, a Democrat of Illinois who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination, has promised to act on Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, even if General Musharraf does not. “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” he told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations on August 1.

Pakistan’s intelligence service does not “provide top to bottom cooperation against Al Qaeda,” the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Danielle Pletka, said. “They feel they can have it both ways. There is no doubt the United States has never learned the lesson about Pakistan: If you give them rope, they will take it. They have allowed the Taliban to flourish. They have not gone after Al Qaeda as decisively as they need to. And now they are in trouble at home and abroad,” she said.