The attempt on President Musharraf's life in Rawalpindi a few days ago is a reminder, if one were needed, of the risks he has run for standing with the United States in its so-called war on terror. The bomb which went off under a bridge missed his motorcade by a minute or so.

In al Qaida's list of enemies Musharraf is somewhere at the top. He befriended the United States when it attacked Afghanistan and continues to cooperate with the US in the hunt for al Qaida suspects.

But anyone thinking that Pakistan would get unstinting praise for its efforts can easily be proven wrong. Pakistan continues to be portrayed negatively in the American media. Indeed some of the stuff appearing there almost suggests as if it is the weirdest and most sinister place on earth.

Pakistan has deployed huge forces on its Afghan border to check cross-border movement but it keeps being accused by elements in the Karzai regime, whose writ doesn't extend much beyond Kabul, of aiding the Taliban, a charge also echoed in Washington from time to time.

After the attempt on Musharraf's life Richard Haas, a foreign policy mandarin, said that Pakistan was one of the most dangerous places on earth. More dangerous than Afghanistan? More than Iraq? It's like saying after the attack on the Twin Towers that New York was a dangerous place.

Pakistan may not be able to get much understanding from Washington but it can do without such rubbishing. Why is Musharraf on anyone's hit list? What has he done to arouse extremist anger?

It is tempting to say that his worries arise solely from his being an American ally. But that wouldn't be the whole truth. In the eyes of al Qaida and other extremist organisations in the forefront of what can loosely be called 'jihad', his sin is worse. He has abandoned jihad. His crime thus is not simply that of the unbeliever but of the apostate who has renounced the true faith.

Recall that prior to September 11 the line demarcating Pakistan and Afghanistan had all but disappeared. The Taliban were no one's puppets or acolytes but Pakistan provided them with critical support. As a sign of the closeness between the two countries, training camps in Afghanistan turned out a steady stream of Sunni warriors for service both in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Within Pakistan jihadi organisations openly recruited followers and collected funds. Strategic cover for this frenetic activity was provided by Pakistan's nuclear programme. Or so at least it was thought.

When the Twin Towers collapsed so did the pillars supporting Pakistan's strategic fallacies. What had earlier looked clever and doable was now dangerous and unsustainable. Quick to grasp what had changed, Musharraf, even before Powell's famous telephone call which was more ultimatum than call, had decided to change tack on Afghanistan and throw in Pakistan's lot with the US. Powell may have thought he had been persuasive. The truth is he was preaching to (or threatening) the already converted.

All this is pretty well known but if Pakistan is to derive any lessons from the saga of its shattered assumptions, there are other questions to ask. How on earth did Pakistan become the crossroads of jihad in the first place? How did so many al Qaida activists come to have a Pakistani address? Jihad Incorporated, how did its branches proliferate in Pakistan?

This story too is well known. With no small help from the US, the flames of jihad were lit in Afghanistan in the early eighties. Jihad was then a sacred word and 'mujahideen' a term of honour to describe the fighters, bankrolled and armed by the CIA and the Saudis, who fought the Soviet occupation.

When the Soviets, stricken and demoralised, left Afghanistan, the Americans, having achieved their purpose and thinking that they had avenged Vietnam, packed up too and promptly forgot that there was such a country as Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, however, had produced its share of Lawrences most notably amongst the Pakistani intelligence services which had been closely involved in the Afghan venture. These heroes were branded by the Afghan experience. Forgetting the vital role played by Saudi and American money, they were convinced that faith, not the agenda of a superpower, had been the key to victory. If faith had moved mountains once, it could do so again.

Arabs from across the Muslim world had also been drawn to the Afghan struggle, in no small measure because of CIA encouragement. With the Soviets vanquished these elements were in search of a fresh cause against whom to test their battle-hardened expertise. Discovering Satan in the visage of the United States some of them, under the leadership of one Osama bin Laden, formed al Qaida.

The Pakistani Lawrences for their part turned their attention to Kashmir. The moment could not have been more propitious. The Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989. The same year Kashmiri frustration with Indian rule reached boiling point and erupted in an armed uprising. In the Pakistani intelligence community there was no shortage of Afghan veterans who believed that Afghanistan's lessons could be applied to Kashmir.

It is a sobering thought to remember that the driving force behind both Afghan and Kashmir policy was the army. By supporting a friendly regime in Afghanistan the army believed it was acquiring 'strategic depth'. Supporting the Kashmir insurgency it was thought would keep a large section of the Indian army tied down and might even bring India to the negotiating table. During Pakistan's ill-starred decade of democracy (1988-99) civilian governments, too weak or too distracted by misgovernment to question these assumptions, went along with whatever the army dictated.

September 11 overturned these assumptions. The creed guarded zealously by the army and promoted for almost 22 years suddenly stood exposed as a dangerous fallacy. As the US trained its guns on Afghanistan, notions of strategic depth looked singularly out of place. Soon it also became clear that jihad in Kashmir was no longer a sustainable proposition.

Those who are targeting Musharraf are trying to turn the clock back. They are enacting the role of the French settlers in Algeria who back in the early sixties of the last century unleashed a vicious terrorist campaign in a bid to defeat General de Gaulle's declared purpose of getting out of Algeria. They accused him of betraying France just as those who are targeting Musharraf accuse him of betraying jihad and the greater glory of Islam. He has done no such thing. Not on his own but under the pressure of circumstances he has only done what reality dictated.

Between de Gaulle and the Pakistan army there is one crucial difference, however. No one could accuse de Gaulle of setting up the French settlers and of making them believe that France would stay in Algeria forever. But the jihadis nursing feelings of betrayal in Pakistan can say with some reason that they were encouraged for more than a decade before the rug was pulled from under their feet. The only answer to this: circumstances change.

There is another difference too. De Gaulle created the Fifth Republic which gave political stability to a country plagued by instability. To counter religious extremism it is not enough to add a third motorcade to the two in which President Musharraf habitually travels or to place posses of commandos beneath every bridge or culvert coming in his route.

The fight against extremism will remain incomplete as long as the army doesn't accept responsibility for its part in pursuing policies which have given Pakistan a bad name and the image of a country chaotic and dangerous. And it won't be complete as long as the army leadership does not realise that the real antidote to religious extremism lies not in more presidential security but in the building of enduring political institutions.