THE news that Bill Clinton will visit India and Bangladesh while skipping Pakistan has come like a stinging slap in the face.

To be excluded from an American president's first visit to the region in a quarter century is a decision that will no doubt be greeted with disguised disappointment in many quarters, while others will pretend insouciance, and say, "So what?" So plenty. Like it or not, Washington is more pivotal than ever before in the global shape of things. Anyone who thinks differently is living in a fool's paradise. Unless we want to be relegated to the Afghanistan and Rwanda category of failed states, we have to engage the United States constructively. The alternative is to sulk on the sidelines and watch the rest of the world move on.

With the demise of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a unipolar system where the US calls most of the shots, ideological considerations no longer sway decision-makers in Washington. Where earlier the Americans were happy to do business with dictators like Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan and Pinochet in Chile, now they are no longer concerned about a communist threat and therefore use different criteria to decide which countries to support.

Having comprehensively defeated the Soviet Union and buried communism, policy-makers in Washington now seek to establish stability and secure smooth and friction-free global trade. This is aimed at ensuring a continuous expansion of the American economy and the well-being of the American people as well as shareholders in USA, Inc. As multinationals - mostly American - merge and expand, they seek new markets as well as cheap raw materials and labour. Anybody threatening the health of the American economy does so at his own peril. Had Saddam Hussein invaded an empty desert instead of oil-rich Kuwait - thus also threatening an even oil-richer Saudi Arabia - there would have been no desert Storm and the subsequent (and continuing) pounding of the Iraqi people.

Many Pakistanis are of the opinion that the American refusal to intervene in South Asia over Kashmir is somehow 'unfair'. While welcoming them to the real world, let me remind them that life itself is grossly unfair. How fair is life for the have-nots of this world? When faced with a larger predator, animals do not ask for justice; they just run. The fact is that Islam and Muslims have a very serious image problem in the West. Some of it is an atavistic response to the stereotypes generated during the Crusades, but the real damage has been done by Muslims themselves during the latter part of the last century. Palestinian militants, Iranian hostage-takers; Taliban holy warriors; and now Kashmiri hijackers have all contributed to building a composite picture of hirsute fanatics killing innocent bystanders for distant, incomprehensible causes.

I am not suggesting that these images are necessarily accurate; nevertheless, they have been etched on the retinas of the American public by a mass media that is more concerned about instant sound-bites, newspaper sales and television ratings than about accuracy and fairness. Also, we are so consumed by Kashmir that we assume that the issue looms just as large on everybody else's horizon. The reality is that most Americans would be hard-pressed to point to Kashmir on a map of the world.

As far as policy-makers at the State Department and the White House are concerned, if a choice has to be made between antagonizing India or Pakistan, obviously the latter will suffer. India is a huge market; tens of thousands of American tourists visit it every year; it has no image problem with the American voter; and now that it has embraced economic liberalization as its guiding mantra, there is no longer an ideological gap between the two countries. Pakistan, by contrast, carries some heavy baggage: we are no longer a democracy; we support the Taliban who are viewed in the West as a fanatical rabble that oppresses women; we are seen as arming and training Kashmiri guerillas who have taken to killing innocent civilians as well as kidnapping and killing western tourists; and we have been bullying western businessmen who had invested in Pakistan.

Indeed, over the years, military dictators, religious zealots, heroin smugglers and illegal emigrants have chipped away at Pakistan's image abroad to the point that the Kenyan High Commissioner in Islamabad cannot issue a visa to a Pakistani without clearance from Nairobi. Visas for most countries are extremely difficult to obtain as far too many Pakistanis do not return once they are abroad. A green passport is one of the worst travel documents around.

Currently, Washington is leaning on us over several issues. The foremost among them is the demand to ban the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen as it is alleged to have been behind the Indian Airlines hijacking. Secondly, the Americans would like us to press the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, the bete noir of the American establishment. Thirdly, they want us to sign the CTBT. Next, the State Department wants some kind of timetable for a return to democracy. And finally, they and the World Bank want the Pakistan government to sort out the Independent Power Producers' mess.

This, broadly speaking, is the American agenda for Pakistan. So far, we have refused to engage them on any single point. But it is high time we got real: we live in a world inter-connected at many levels, and most of the nodes are in Washington, whether we like it or not. Take, for example, the Indian campaign to persuade the Americans to declare Pakistan a terrorist state. The "so what?" school of thought is naively convinced that this would not affect us. The reality is that our limping economy would be shattered, and we would be virtually isolated by crippling sanctions. Even oil-rich countries like Libya and Iran have suffered huge deprivations after being put on the list of terrorist states.

While Clinton's visit would be largely symbolic, it would signal to the world that we are not (yet) a pariah nation. Presidential visits are usually accompanied by a flurry of agreements, and our ravaged economy could do with any boost it can get. On the other hand, if Clinton skips Pakistan on his South Asian junket, our diplomatic isolation would be virtually complete.

But quite apart from addressing American concerns, the fact is that all the items on the agenda are things we should be doing because they are good for us, irrespective of Washington's demands. Cracking down on reactionary militias is something that should have been done long ago; signing the CTBT, too, would bring us back into the mainstream of nations without weakening our defence in any way; we need to settle the outstanding problems with foreign investors; and we must distance ourselves from the obscurantist Taliban. And as far as a return to democracy is concerned, this demand is already being made within Pakistan, and will only become louder with time.