WASHINGTON — With the crisis in Pakistan entering its fifth day, supporters of President Bush’s freedom agenda are divided over the White House reaction to President Musharraf’s decision to impose martial law.

Reacting to the Pakistani leader’s decision to suspend his courts, cancel elections, and impose a state of emergency, the White House launched a review of aid it has disbursed to Pakistan — some $9.6 billion — since 2001. The president and Secretary of State Rice have also called on Mr. Musharraf to reverse his decision and hold elections as soon as possible. At the same time, the Bush administration is also hinting that it is not prepared to take drastic steps and reconsider the post-September 11, 2001, alliance with the Pakistani military leader, who it has praised as a key ally in the war on terror.

The Pakistan dilemma for conservatives pits the competing aims of short-term allies in the war against Islamic supremacists (Osama bin Laden is believed to reside in the northwest provinces of Pakistan) and the long term goal of spreading liberal democratic systems in the largely autocratic Muslim world. It is dividing both intellectuals and Republican presidential candidates.

It is a debate that is not new for neoconservatives in particular. In 1979, a Georgetown University professor, Jeane Kirkpatrick, wrote for Commentary magazine a blistering critique of the Carter administration’s emphasis on human rights at the expense of allied dictators, and in particular President Carter’s abandonment of Iran’s Shah in the middle of the Islamic revolution. The essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” became known as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine and became a key pillar of President Reagan’s early support for Latin America’s dictators, though that support dried up in his second term.

Eighteen years later, another scholar, Robert Kagan, wrote a piece for the same magazine arguing that Kirkpatrick’s doctrine no longer applied after the Cold War, and that American policy should be to support democratic movements in countries of friends and foes alike. Yesterday, Mr. Kagan said he did not think the predicament facing General Musharraf was akin to the revolution against the shah.

“Musharraf is the most worst option,” Mr. Kagan wrote in an e-mail. “We are not in a 1979 moment, and Kirkpatrick was wrong and repudiated by Reagan administration policies in Central America, the Philippines, and South Korea. This is a Marcos moment, if it is anything.” President Reagan ultimately supported the ouster of the Philippine dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, an ally at the time, throwing America’s weight behind his democratic challenger, Corazon Aquino. The vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Danielle Pletka, sounded a similar note. “Last I checked, under Musharraf’s reign, the Taliban and Al Qaeda have taken over a vast swath of Pakistan and are using it as an operational headquarters. He is no Reza Shah,” she said.

Ms. Pletka pointed to recent reports that the Pakistani military exchanged 25 Taliban fighters for 213 soldiers kidnapped in a raid last month in south Waziristan, as well as the cease fire agreements General Musharraf’s government signed with the local governors of the border provinces where Al Qaeda’s senior leaders are believed to be hiding. “He’s been getting a free pass for the last three years and it’s time for Musharraf to make a choice about the future of Pakistan and his relationship with the United States,” she said.

A former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, yesterday said that General Musharraf’s actions were “obviously not helpful to the freedom agenda.” He said he did not like what General Musharraf had done, but also conceded that he did not know the details of the threat he was facing. “Is this just Musharraf wanting to remain in power? Or were things taking shape so he felt he had to act?” he asked.

But Mr. Perle said that supporting democratization in the Muslim world was not an absolute value. “The sad reality is that from time to time there will be urgent situations that make it sensible to set aside the freedom agenda for other important short term exigencies,” he said. “We did this during the Cold War for extended periods. I hope that is not necessary. But if you have a government that is trying to deal with the instabilities and threats of a fundamentalist movement, do you really want to throw the country into chaos by siding against the government when those forces were trying to bring it down?”

The editor at large of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, yesterday said he did not think the events in Pakistan spelled doom for the Bush Doctrine and believed the alliance with General Musharraf was necessary. “I think the alliance with Musharraf was necessary first of all for the invasion of Afghanistan and fighting the war in general,” he said. “I have compared it to an alliance with Stalin against Hitler. You fight one enemy at a time.”

The differing views among conservatives have played out among Republican candidates for the presidency in their reaction to General Musharraf’s decision. Senator McCain, a Republican from Arizona who has supported President Bush on the Iraq war but opposed him on torture issues, said bluntly that the Pakistani leader made a mistake over the weekend. He urged the White House to apply “as much effort as we can to convince President Musharraf that he needs to back off on this and that we need to have restoration of law and order in the country and constitutional government.”

The former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, on the other hand on Monday told an audience in Manchester, N.H., that he would not second-guess Mr. Bush or urge him to cut off financial aid to Pakistan. “What we do with Pakistan is help them to try to remain stable and that’s a very delicate thing,” he said. “Musharraf is sitting on top of a very, very difficult situation. We want him to move toward democracy. But at the same time, we want to keep that government together.”

The vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, yesterday said he did see similarities between General Musharraf’s situation and that of the late Iranian shah. “Pakistan is a great example of watching a slow meltdown for a long time. Now it has come to a point where people cannot ignore it,” he said.

A senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Lisa Curtis, said that popular support for Islamic fundamentalist parties like the Taliban in Pakistan is not as significant as Iranian support in 1979 for Ayatollah Khomeini. “The problem is that Musharraf’s decision to declare an emergency is alienating those very forces that would work with him against extremists,” she said. “He is opening two fronts now. He already had the extremist fronts. The security services will be further distracted from fighting terrorists because they are on the streets of Islamabad.”