President Musharraf of Pakistan can thank his lucky stars that precious few Middle Americans read the Washington Post – especially over the weekend. In an interview with the newspaper’s editorial board, the “indispensable ally” opined that Osama bin Laden was still alive and that the American-led coalition bore a major responsibility for the failure to find the Al Qaeda leader because it had not deployed sufficient troops in the border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He added, for good measure, that the training of the new Afghan army was not proceeding nearly fast enough to make up the shortfall of Allied boots on the ground.

In common with a lot of folks out there in the heartland, I find myself just a little confused. I thought that the problem was too many infidel troops in Muslim lands, not too few. It seems like we’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t. For those of us who grew up in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Musharraf’s comments echo the complaints of continentals about successive American administrations’ dealings with the Soviets. When presidents stood up to the Reds, our NATO allies feared nuclear confrontation. When presidents sought detente with Moscow, they bellyached about new Yaltas and superpower deals cut behind their backs.

As White House press secretaries used to say of Ronald Reagan in his less precise moments, General Musharraf has something of a penchant for “mis-speaking.” While visiting America in 2002, he declared on CNN that the Al Qaeda leader was probably dead because he could not obtain treatment for a kidney ailment – thus raising eyebrows among his own officials. General Tommy Franks recalls in his memoir “American Soldier” that the Pakistani strongman reassured him that the day bin Laden comes into Pakistan, “my intelligence people will know.” Now he avers that he cannot always be sure who exactly his forces are engaging within his own country.

Bush administration sources are a little miffed about this characterization of events. They point out that the most senior Al Qaeda operatives have not been rolled up in the frontier areas, but in the great cities of Pakistan such as Rawalpindi, to which they decamped long ago. Even if the entire 120,000 strong American force in Iraq was dispatched to Afghanistan tomorrow, there would still not be enough troops to cover the border zones.

General Musharraf’s comments shed renewed light upon the concept of “hammer and anvil” that coalition forces and the Pakistanis were meant to enact as they squeezed Al Qaeda from both sides of the border. If there aren’t enough American hammers, as the Mohajir caudillo suggests, then it’s also fair to say that the Pakistani anvil hasn’t been around as often as the Americans would like. Even the action by Islamabad earlier this year against terrorist elements in remote Waziristan was conducted for the most part unilaterally, rather than in detailed coordination with substantial numbers of American troops.

General Musharraf has always been sensitive about excessively overt cooperation with his superpower partner on Pakistan’s doorstep, let alone the kind of “hot pursuit” operations into his own country that American Army Special Forces seek. At the same time, the Pakistani leader craves such tokens of esteem as the Oval Office meeting that Mr. Bush granted him on Saturday. It represented a signal to skeptics in the Pakistani military that he still enjoys the favor of the Americans in the president’s second term.

No less significant is what wasn’t discussed in depth on Saturday. Mr. Bush went easy on the vexed question of General Musharraf’s recent decision to remain as army chief of staff as well as head of state. The Bush administration’s view is that he should be allowed to make his way to full democracy at his own pace. In that sense, the bilateral relationship has something of a taste of “Zia Redux” about it. Just as American concerns about nuclear proliferation, narcotics, and human rights yielded pride of place in the 1980s to the need to eject the Soviets from Afghanistan – resulting in a decision by Washington to soft-pedal the shortcomings of the then Pakistani leader, Zia ul-Haq – so political development is now treated as secondary to the war on terrorism.

Much the same criticism was also directed at Mr. Clinton, who elevated the atomic issue above all others. Cynics contend that when it comes to Pakistan, successive administrations resemble Lyndon Johnson’s quip about Gerald Ford: unable to walk and chew gum at the same time.

It comes back to one of the oldest dilemmas for superpower patrons and their clients. Just how far do you push a vulnerable strategic asset? Critics of realpolitik contend that failure to coax the Shah of Iran sufficiently to reform brought about the nightmare of the Islamic Revolution; its practitioners contend that holding Third World linchpins to absurdly high platonic standards undermines them without having anything better to put in their place.

As of today, General Musharraf has done just enough to ensure that it is the latter grouping who have the upper hand. Administration sources are still grateful to him for making a historic decision to side with America after September 11, for showing restraint with India and above all for one of the key breakthroughs in the history of nonproliferation – the decision to roll up the activities of A.Q. Khan, founding father of the Pakistani bomb. In the words of Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary tale “Jim,” they appear to have decided to “keep a-hold of nurse/ For fear of finding something worse” – at least for now.