Such is the air of unreality which grips our governing classes that every Pakistani leader who goes to Washington carries with him the hope that from there he will receive the kiss of life or the seal of immortality.
Why this hope should at all be entertained is somewhat hard to understand. The United States has considerable influence in Pakistan, no doubt about it because we have a habit of sucking up to foreigners. Nevertheless, Pakistani leaders have stood or fallen on the strength of their own performances.
The US may have been happy to see Bhutto go and indeed its agents may have speeded his departure. Yet the US was not the author of his misfortunes. Bhutto mishandled the domestic scene and raised enemies all around. It was this which did him in rather than any international conspiracy.
The US did not destroy Yahya Khan. Yahya and his team of generals destroyed themselves. In fact, Nixon's sympathies were on Pakistan's side and not India's. He even sent parts of the Seventh Fleet for an ineffectual display of gunboat diplomacy. But what could he do if the gods themselves had abandoned an incompetent junta?
Benazir Bhutto was the darling of the West and the western media, getting the kind of attention and coverage no Pakistani leader has ever had (not even Musharraf).
On her first trip to Washington, with the honourable Zardari all togged out in Balochi headgear, she got to address the US Congress and made the then famous remark that it was a time for miracles in Pakistan. We know the miracles she and her husband wrought.
When her time was up, and Ishaq and General Beg moved in for the kill, none of her American support could save her. The same was true of Nawaz Sharif. To all appearances Clinton seemed genuinely fond of him. When Sharif's relations with the army command came under strain after Kargil, the US issued a strong declaration of support for Sharif. But when the army moved on October 12, it sought no American approval for its action.
On his five-hour visit to Pakistan a year later Clinton got his own back by giving a tongue-lashing on TV to Pakistan's military rulers by pointing out how Pakistan was out of step with the modern world. But his performance did not change the complexion of the government in Islamabad. Nor could it have been of much consolation to the then imprisoned Sharif.
Now the wheel having come full circle it is Musharraf's turn to seek solace and absolution at American hands. He has earned warm praise from the American president by bending before the wind and being helpful to the US in its war on Afghanistan. But like others before him he too needs to keep things in perspective.
The cries from the Pakistani side about enduring friendship and about being abandoned by the Americans in the eighties are misplaced.
We should have made the most of our opportunities when the Americans needed us against their fight against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. If we didn't, the US is not to blame.
Enduring friendship is a chimera and is not to be found in the real world. Friendships are based on mutual convenience, advantage and interests and last while these conditions last. When these change, the best friendships wither.
The US is ruthless in the pursuit of its interests. We should be the same with ours. The US bent us to its will post-September 11. If we were afraid and settled for peanuts, the only thing to be said is that the Americans were strong enough to pursue a good bargain while we were weak enough to settle for a bad one. There is a strong body of opinion which says we had no choice. Perhaps. But then a no-choice position is hardly a strong foundation for enduring friendship.
The warmth from Washington is not because of General Musharraf's outstanding personality (although the president's admirers would like to believe otherwise) but because of our sepoy status in South-West Asia: our willingness to toe the American line.
Consider regional geography. For the first time in fifty years a cool breeze is blowing between Riyadh and Washington. Iraq and Iran top America's list of enemies. Up north are the Central Asian states whose hidden oil wealth is the prize in this emerging game.
Alone of all the states in the region, Pakistan, stretching from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, is eager to turn itself into a permanent tool of American interests. This then is what we want, not enduring friendship but permanent employment on current wages. We don't want to be cast adrift by the US again. We want our yearly handout to balance our accounts and we want hardware for our military. And we don't want to be pressed too hard for past loans. This is it, this the definition of enduring friendship. Nor is this reason for gloom because client states are in no position to seek anything more.
As for Kashmir, we need to stop deluding ourselves over it. The US wouldn't like India and Pakistan to go to war because this doesn't serve its interests. It would like India and Pakistan to talk their differences over, this being the common sense approach to their problems. But the US is not desperate to press India towards a Kashmir solution.
It will not be a mediator because India will not ask for it. So why say, as President Musharraf has, that bilateralism is dead? We may find the Indian attitude cussed and India may think us to be needlessly provocative, but experience tells us that India and Pakistan must themselves find the wisdom to settle their problems. The US will not go out of its way to bestir itself in this matter.
So whether we like it or not, bilateralism is the only way forward. This is also the logic of the past. We shouldn't have started the 1965 war because the only thing it resulted in was an inconclusive end. We shouldn't have lost the '71 war because it is our defeat in that conflict which condemns us to bilateralism.
The Shimla Accord was no devil's plot. It merely enshrined in words something that had already happened on the ground.
There is another reason, however, for the strong verbal line we are now taking on Kashmir. When the armed struggle was going strong, we could afford to be soft in our words.
Now that for all practical purposes we have quarantined our warriors and bid a farewell to arms, the only way to salve wounded national pride is to go hard on our rhetoric.
When innocence is lost it is only natural to protest too much.
We must look to the causes of things. General Musharraf can be feted at the White House every six months and hit Newsweek's cover again, and Pakistan get three times the amount of money it is now getting from the US, but we will remain a dependent, debt-ridden country unless we learn to mend our ways. Money without grit and dignity gets nothing. It got Indonesia and Nigeria (both oil-rich) nothing. If we remain slaves in thought it will get us nothing.
Washington will not discover political stability for us. It has used Pakistani leaders before and will do so again. It is for us to see the poison and avoid it. It is for us to seek the Holy Grail and create lasting political institutions. No one else will do it for us.
So let us stop the unseemly refrain of the US having abandoned us in the past. We abandoned ourselves because we had no eye for our long-term interests.
Even now all this talk of turning Pakistan into a modern state will remain meaningless unless the army forswears its taste for political intervention and learns to cultivate some respect for democracy - the real kind and not the variety being thrust down the nation's throat by Gen Naqvi.
Season of errors: Last week another error crept into my Diary. When Benazir Bhutto chose Leghari as her presidential nominee, the army chief was Waheed Kakar. I was wrong therefore to put the sin of Leghari's elevation at General Karamat's door. But for the rest of my broadside I stand. Karamat could have kept Leghari in check in 1996 but did not.