A SINGLE crisis can be daunting enough. Imagine then a multiplicity of crises, each more serious than the other, all happening at once. Don’t be surprised if the national mood as a result becomes dark and sombre.

Pakistan is experiencing something like this at the moment. Conflict in the tribal areas, strife in Balochistan, our American allies facing defeat in Iraq and frustration in Afghanistan taking out their anger on us, and Pakistan’s military rulers caught between two conflicting demands: pleasing the Yanks and placating public opinion at home.

As if all this wasn’t enough, the military government’s India policy is in tatters, all the concessions and flexibility of the last two years eliciting nothing that could be sold as progress to an increasingly disenchanted public.

The bogey of the Kalabagh dam was meant as a distraction from these pressing difficulties. But even that became an embarrassment when after encountering stiff resistance, some of it from within the government’s own ranks, it had to be abandoned.

To put a brave face on this retreat President Musharraf vows to construct a string of big dams by 2016. There is a well-known Urdu saying, “Who has seen tomorrow?” Who has seen 2016?

Difficult as this situation is, our American friends, oblivious of Gen Musharraf’s difficulties, are making it worse. Not only do they treat Pakistani public opinion with contempt, not bothering to apologize when innocent men, women and children are killed by a missile strike undertaken on the basis of intelligence as reliable as the claims that Iraq possessed WMD. They want the Pakistan army to do more, even if this involves creating conditions of near-revolt in Pakistan’s sensitive tribal areas.

The army is now bogged down in both North and South Waziristan, where anything approximating to ‘the writ of the state’ — always a nebulous concept in those parts — has all but disappeared. Power that was once the political agent’s is now exercised by pro-Taliban elements. Indeed parts of the tribal belt have become for our military what Fallujah is for the Americans: territory to be ventured into only at one’s peril.

Local journalists, fearful of offending the Taliban, have left for the relative safety of places like Dera Ismail Khan. More than a hundred pro-government tribal maliks were killed in South Waziristan last year. Who will rush to the government’s assistance in future?

The army’s forward policy, masterminded by Peshawar corps headquarters, was meant to eliminate the militants. It has only made them more powerful. The CIA did no one any favours when it killed Nek Muhammad, a militant leader, through a Drone-operated missile. Had he been around he would at least have represented a leadership to negotiate with. His place has been taken by more Nek Muhammads, none willing to talk to the military authorities.

Thanks to the CIA attack on Damadola, the Waziristan disease is now spreading to the Bajaur Agency. Indeed, pro-Taliban influence is on the rise all across the tribal belt. But not because of the Taliban or Osama bin Laden. The Yanks with their relentless pressure on the Pakistan military, and the military’s inability to withstand that pressure, have combined to aggravate a problem which was manageable before.

Let’s not forget, Yank interference has been the kiss of death for other countries before. When they helped mount a coup against Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia back in the 1960s, and installed a more compliant regime, they thought they were a step closer to cutting the Ho Chi Minh trail and defeating the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong weren’t defeated but a chain of events was set in motion which ended by destroying Cambodia.

In Iraq too the road to hell has been paved with good intentions — and a sackful of lies. But from this cataclysm at least some good has emerged. Iraqi resistance, the strength of which no one had anticipated, has dealt a blow to American hubris, forcing America to contemplate for the first time what was unthinkable even last year: the spectre of defeat.

In Iraq’s early days the Vietnam analogy was considered far-fetched. Not any more. Iraq is Vietnam revisited, America bogged down in another quagmire. What did Santayana say? Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. We have to thank September 11 and that trio of chicanery unsurpassed — Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz — for refreshing our minds regarding this lesson.

Far from crushing Al Qaeda, America has strengthened it, helping draw more recruits to Osama bin Laden’s cause. Before the Iraq invasion the US was considered invincible. Looking at the arc of unrest spreading from Iraq to Afghanistan, and now touching Pakistan’s tribal belt, more and more bin Laden diehards will think it is not.

This is where Pakistan fits in. Facing the prospect of defeat in Iraq and mounting frustration in Afghanistan, the Yanks are putting pressure on us to do more, in effect, asking us to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.

We are capable of following an independent line on a range of issues: Gwadar (where the Americans wouldn’t be happy with a Chinese presence); the gas pipeline from Iran which we want and the Americans are opposed to; and the nuclear issue where, despite American pressure, we haven’t allowed direct access to Dr A. Q. Khan.

These are commendable steps. But on the most crucial issue of all, the so-called ‘war on terror’, it is getting clearer by the day that the Pakistan army is on a path of suicidal folly out of a wholly misconceived idea of the national interest.

If mainstream America can start having second thoughts about Iraq, it is high time we started having second thoughts about our role in America’s fight against Al Qaeda. By no means should we have any truck with any kind of extremism. But it should be for us to decide how to do this.

On no account should we take orders from America, as we are doing at the moment, and on no account in the tribal areas use our troops against our own people. If there are foreign militants there we should deal with them ourselves according to tribal custom and usage. We need no lessons from America on this score.

We have to be clear about one thing: Pakistani sovereignty is under threat not from Al Qaeda but from the US. We’ve done more than our share for the Americans.

They should realize this instead of making life more difficult for Pakistan and their great ally, Gen Musharraf. The situation in North and South Waziristan and Bajaur Agency won’t improve overnight. But there is no military solution to it.

It can only be handled over the long term by time-tested methods of political engagement (at which political agents used to be rather good) rather than the ham-fisted tactics employed with such disastrous consequences by the Peshawar corps headquarters.

Better sense also needs to prevail as far as Balochistan is concerned. Let’s get this into our heads (and please let us ban the use of the word ‘miscreants’), the struggle there is for oil and gas. The Bugtis and Marris don’t want control over their natural resources, just their due share. (The Marris are hardliners but we can go into these nuances some other time.) In any case, this should be a matter for negotiation, not the use of force.

On how many fronts can an army fight? Napoleon couldn’t fight wars on multiple fronts; Hitler couldn’t; Pakistan’s generals can’t.

There are hawks in the military establishment who adhere strongly to the philosophy of sorting everyone out, the same philosophy which led to such brilliant results in East Pakistan. But there are also sensible elements around the president who believe in a saner course of action. For the sake of Pakistan, their views should prevail.