"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go." - Cromwell to the Long Parliament when he thought it was no longer fit to conduct the affairs of the nation.

Terrible words which fitted the gravity of the hour. The same words were thrown at Neville Chamberlain, Britain's prime minister, in the House of Commons soon after the outbreak of the Second World War. They were said to have shattered him but he held on to office. It took the fall of France to make him finally hand over the seals of office to Churchill.

We need to get the dialectics of our present predicament right. We don't face the threat of war. Not when one side has decided to suffer every provocation without taking offence or offering any resistance. Fears of the subcontinent being vapourized are therefore a bit premature.

What we do face is a Chamberlain situation: a weak and bumbling leadership whose very weakness is inviting Indian belligerence and foreign pressure. First the capitulation to American threats. Now the helplessness before Indian threats.

It is a measure of our diplomatic ineptitude that no one believes us. We are being painted as liars and supporters of terrorism while India, which has yet to live down the infamy of the communal carnage in its state of Gujarat, is coming off as the aggrieved party in Kashmir.

The bankruptcy of the line we've been following since September is thus complete. Helping America in its war on Afghanistan was supposed to furnish us with ironclad guarantees for our security. Used and abandoned by the Americans before, we were told it would be different this time.

It has been different this time in the sense that after having been used we are now being pummelled by a combination of American pressure and Indian threats. As India mounts the moral high horse, everyone, from Bush downwards, is hectoring us.

In any defensive battle the Pakistan army is more than a match for the Indian army. What do the textbooks say? That, in order to gain a decisive victory, an attacking force should have a 3-to-1 superiority over the enemy (at least at the point of attack). With the scales about evenly matched along our eastern frontier, India does not have this kind of advantage. So why is Pakistan so fearful of a conventional war?

Saying the above does not amount to beating the drums of war. Pakistan has already lost the propaganda battle so completely that even within the country any reference to military statistics is read as evidence of jingoism and of disregard for the consequences of a nuclear war. Who is talking of a nuclear exchange and why should things come to that pass?

Some of us are confusing the issue and thereby becoming the apostles of appeasement. Appeasement does not pave the way to peace. It encourages more bullying as is happening these days. When the uprising in Kashmir was at its peak India never made an issue of "cross-border infiltration". Why is it doing so now? Because of Pakistan's weakness and its susceptibility to external pressure. But we have to realize one thing. Even if we accept all of India's demands, even if we accept Mr Vajpayee's proposal of joint Indo-Pakistan patrols along the LoC, more demands will follow.

Which doesn't mean both states should live in a state of perpetual hostility, pursuing an arms race which mocks the poverty of their people. It only means that for an enduring peace between two hostile neighbours there has to be an element of give-and-take. At the moment, given the weakness and bumbling of the military rulers, that element is missing. India wants all the take while giving nothing in return.

So what should Pakistan be focusing on? On the symptoms or the root causes of the present crisis? The tension with India is a symptom of our weakness, not the cause of it. The cause lies in the nature of our present leadership. As long as this fundamental problem is not addressed, confusion followed by humiliation is destined to be our reward.

Without the military easing its stranglehold on power and politics there is no way of getting out of this mess. It is perhaps fair to say that the army as an institution has lost any appetite for further mismanaging the nation's affairs. Unless it is more thick-skinned than it is generally supposed to be, it is also perhaps cognizant of the loss of prestige it has suffered because of over-involvement in civilian affairs.

But against institutional sentiment we must balance the weight of individual ambition. Even when institutional advantage lies in one direction, vested interests can often pull in the other. This is the problem we face today: the country made hostage to the whims or, more charitably, the limited vision of a few individuals.

Seen in this light, the referendum was a gift from the gods for the people of Pakistan for it achieved the impossible: reducing the level of arrogance and cockiness flying about in Islamabad. Referendum say pehlay (before the referendum) and referendum kay baad (after the referendum) are two different stories.

Who could have imagined a military overture to the political parties before the referendum? Now as former heresy becomes present necessity, a certain desperation is perceptible in the invitation to the political parties to come to Islamabad.

So what is to be done? The political parties must reach out to the men now in control for the sake of national unity. But the military rulers must also reach out to the political parties for the same purpose. Ruling in isolation, as we have all too vividly seen, has been a prescription for disaster and a source of sustained embarrassment for the Pakistani nation. We were beggars always. But today, insulted from all sides, our cup of humiliation is full.

None of the above means we should have been on the side of the Taliban or exported 'jihad' across the LoC. These policies should have been re-examined a long time ago, much before September caught up with our delusions. But failing to do the needful on our own, we have been arm-twisted and pushed into falling in line.

We thought in September, soon after receiving Powell's famous telephone call, that by becoming an American satellite for the duration of America's onslaught on Afghanistan, we were putting India in its place. As events have shown, this turned out to be our biggest fallacy.

By delivering a defiant speech on May 27 Gen Musharraf seemed to be giving the impression that he had finally drawn a line in the sand beyond which there would be no more retreating. But events since have dispelled this impression. The very defiance of the speech was a smokescreen behind which Pakistan continues to receive insults and lectures from other countries.

With such a record of failure any dispensation would lose the Mandate of Heaven. This is what has happened with the Musharraf regime whose ability to govern stands impaired with the conjoining of two fatal circumstances: (1) the folly of the referendum and (2) the perception of weakness in the face of Indian threats.

But we have to be mindful of realities. No one surrenders power voluntarily and Gen Musharraf is not about to set an example in this regard. Taking Pakistan into safer waters has to be a joint undertaking. Reaching out to each other, the military and the political parties must cover common ground in preparation for the October elections.

Let the people choose whom they will for the task of running the country while all concerned can agree to keep Gen Musharraf as president: safely out of harm's way in the vast spaces of the presidency and in no position to do more harm to the country.

God knows Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif were epic disasters in their own right, blowing their chances and ruining the prospects of democratic rule. But if the truth be told, their excesses pale before the achievements of military rule. The military then should not be reinforcing failure, a cardinal violation of military strategy. "They also serve who only stand and wait..." said Milton. In like manner, often the highest patriotism is to know when to quit.