Life is like a box of chocolate. If I sound like Forrest Gump it’s because I’ve been thinking about him, and about ping-pong-team diplomacy, since traveling to Islamabad and inviting President Musharraf to meet with the leadership of the American Jewish community. I’ve been pinching myself for months as General Musharraf accepted (I thought he would turn us down); as the news broke (I feared he would panic in the face of massive street protests by religious extremists that never materialized); and as he stepped up to the dais at the Marriott Marquis on September 17, flanked by leaders of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, World Jewish Congress, Anti-Defamation League, and B’nai Brith – what in the Muslim world is all too often derided as the Elders of Zion.

As events unfolded, my passage to Pakistan last May (along with two colleagues, Jack Rosen and Phil Baum) felt more and more like ping-pong diplomacy. Within weeks of the news that the leader of the only nuclear-armed Islamic republic would meet with American Jewry, the generally positive reaction in Pakistan encouraged General Musharraf to step up public engagement with Israel. The Israeli foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, met for a photo op with his Pakistani counterpart, and President Musharraf shook hands with Prime Minister Sharon. Receding now in our rear-view mirror, these steps may appear smaller than they did at first blush. But there is no assurance that hindsight is, in fact, 20-20.

Everything, after all, is relative: If Mr. Sharon was reduced to securing a hand shake from President Bush and nothing more, it would rightly be considered a colossal diplomatic failure. Coming from Mr. Musharraf, these symbolic steps amounted to a declaration that Pakistan was ready to accept Jewish political existence.

Thank you very much, some readers are probably muttering to themselves about now. We have been doing quite well without it.

But have we really? Israel has a steady policy of insisting on the universality of diplomatic relations. It is not in anyone’s interest to hand Islamic terrorists an undeserved victory – exclusive ownership of the Muslim past and of Muslim hopes for the future. True, some scholars are utterly pessimistic about the long haul; but that warning must not become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Mr. Musharraf’s Jewish demarche decoupled the religious issues from the national political ones. Thus, while he failed to go beyond the Arab League consensus that relations with Israel can only follow a settlement with the Palestinians, and bluntly shared his opinion that Israel should do to the West Bank what it had just done in Gaza, namely leave it, these were not presented as theological problems but were shrunk down to almost manageable size.

From his perspective, the Pakistani general cum president could use some good publicity in this country, where he is identified with the military coup that brought him to power in 1999 and Islamabad’s pre-September 11 support for the Taliban who spilled out of madrassas in Pakistan’s tribal areas to cross the mountains and seize power in Afghanistan. He is blamed for the continuing failure to apprehend Osama bin Laden; attacked for a dismissive attitude toward the problems of rape (a problem endemic to the Muslim world and not specific to Pakistan); for failing to ease restrictions on religious liberties; and (as if that list wasn’t sufficiently exhaustive) for refusing to allow American interrogation of A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist who was the Johnny Appleseed of nuclear proliferation.

I must add that religious as Pakistan may appear, an American diplomat I met in Islamabad told me that given the things he had witnessed, if he ever wrote a memoir of his time there he would title it, “Pakistan – the Islamic Republic: Who knew?”

The darkest view of Pakistan comes from those who accept the thesis in Bernard Henri Levy’s book, “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?” The author asserts that Pearl was slain not simply because of his American and Jewish identity as was previously assumed, but because he had uncovered information about the exchange of nuclear arms secrets between Al Qaeda and “the most violent and most anti-American faction in the Pakistani intelligence services.”

But on the single, and to me compelling, issue of relations with modernity and with the West, and with Israel and the Jews and Judaism, Mr. Musharraf appears to be cut from a different cloth than his extreme Islamic opponents. This is not some woolly headed idealism: American power is indispensable to further progress but it must be accompanied by other initiatives.

Anyone waiting for a conversion to Zionism by Mr. Musharraf was left disappointed. What the Jewish leaders – and the Israelis – heard was a frank assessment of the more moderate view in the Islamic world. As distinguished from those who refuse to grant Israel any legitimacy as a nation-state under any conditions, Mr. Musharraf insisted on the Arab league precondition – the establishment of a Palestinian state. Those who have bucked the league’s position include Egypt, Jordan, and Mauritania, and, among non-league Islamic nations, Turkey.

While he said he had seen the film “Schindler’s List,” Mr. Musharraf had clearly not switched sides. But he drew sharp distinctions between his position and that of the extremists in the Islamic world. He condemned terrorism but also put a heavy burden on Israel by arguing that the Palestinian dispute is “exploited by terrorists to justify their criminal actions,” and that “the Israeli-Palestinian problem … lies at the heart of terrorism in the Middle East and beyond.”

Of course, the Israeli-Palestinian problem does not account for much of Islamic terrorism, including especially Sunni extremism in Iraq and Al Qaeda extremism around the world. But I have no doubt that there is at least some connection between the Israeli-Palestinian problem and the terrorism that plagues Israel. Arguing (as some did in a criticism of Mr. Musharraf’s speech) that the root cause of Palestinian terrorism is anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews is ahistorical: Palestinian terrorism against Israel, against Jews, does not precede the beginning of the Zionist movement more than a century ago.

As Daniel Pipes wrote in these pages, Mr. Musharraf did mention the Holocaust, which for a Muslim leader is a significant step. And he did not mention the 1967 borders (specifically, he said, “We hope Israel will also soon withdraw from the West Bank,” which by today’s standards is hardly radical).

Most significantly, Mr. Musharraf presented a usable past. As against the mythological past invented by the extremists, he summoned a history full of Muslim-Jewish collaboration and harmony.

All this was said from a Jewish platform in front of Pakistani and Arab television cameras (including al-Jazeera). Any evaluation must include a consideration of what Muslims saw on their TV screens: the legitimization of Jews and Judaism and of Israel.

Pakistan remains a difficult and dangerous place. But then, nobody said trying to distinguish the difficult from the impossible would be like opening a box of chocolate.

Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of the New York Sun and director of the American Jewish Congress’s Council for World Jewry.