Do no harm.

• Author: Lieven, Anatol
• Position: Situation: Critical - United States and Pakistan

IF YOU don't know what to do, better to do nothing--and the United States does not really know what to do in Pakistan. Moreover, things there are not nearly as bad as the Western media and some excitable politicians present. The situation is deteriorating, but the country is not yet close to failing. Although it is a flawed state, menaced by terrorists and insurgents, it is still a largely effective one.

By pushing for particular political outcomes, the United States does more harm than good to its own interests--because, to put it mildly, the United States is not popular in Pakistan today. And if it keeps meddling, America will strengthen Islamist radicalism and could even help push Pakistan toward disintegration.

The United States urgently needs a new strategy. Washington must get over the idea that it can and should micromanage political outcomes in countries like Pakistan. Trying to produce governments that both uncritically accept all U.S. security requests and also pass our democracy litmus test is hopeless given the fact that the overwhelming majority of voters in Pakistan are hostile to U.S. strategy in the region.

Current U.S. policy is based on an incomplete understanding of the political and ethnic landscape in Pakistan. Just one example of how disastrous U.S. policy can be: the assassination of Benazir Bhutto by Islamist militants who saw her as a U.S. stooge. But this partly U.S.-induced tragedy--with very dangerous implications for Pakistan's future stability and unity--may at least help clear up some confusion.

U.S. interference is animated by the fear of state failure and an Islamist revolution in Pakistan leading to militants seizing control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. For a long time to come, however, this will be an extremely unlikely scenario, due to the limited nature of Islamist support and the strength of the Pakistani army and ruling class. The Islamist extremists can certainly cause serious violence and destabilization, but they cannot take over the country. In fact, it is only American military intervention in Pakistan that could make America's worst nightmares happen.

THE PAKISTANI ruling class is divided by its ambitions but united in its opposition to an Islamist revolution that would destroy its own hold on wealth, power and status. This is a ruling class that in some ways resembles those of late-medieval and early-modern Europe. Though different strands come together to make up Pakistani electoral politics, the most important one by far is the distribution of patronage: not just jobs and contracts, but legal, administrative and, when necessary, physical protection from enemies and rivals provided by the police or the bosses' own gunmen.

The most important political relationship in Pakistan is therefore between the patron and the client. It is patronage more than anything else that determines the political actions and allegiances of most local actors, especially in the countryside, and that holds together (and sometimes splits apart) the varied clans that are the building blocks of Pakistani politics. By contrast, mass parties in the Western sense play only a very limited role, and one that has been reduced still further by the death of Benazir Bhutto and the possible weakening of her dynastic Pakistan People's...