Even before Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's resignation on Aug. 18, President Bush cut loose his old ally in hopes that Pakistan will end up a stable democratic ally like South Korea or the Philippines.
But Pakistan also could go the way of Iran after President Jimmy Carter abandoned the Shah in 1979.
The stakes could not be higher. Pakistan already has nuclear weapons. It is a central front in the war on terror. And it is besieged by Islamic extremists who already have a secure operating base in the country.
Musharraf, who seized power in a military coup in 1999, was President Bush's friend and anti-terrorist ally — rather like Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and South Korea's Chun Doo-hwan were anticommunist allies of Ronald Reagan.
In 1986, Marcos stole his last election and created a civic crisis. Reagan, influenced by then Assistant Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz and his deputy, Scooter Libby, decided to abandon Marcos and make a bet that democracy was a surer way to fight communism. The bet paid off.
The following year, in South Korea, military rulers Chun and Roh Tae-woo gave way to popular demands for democratic elections. Reagan supported the move after the fact, but it was driven more by the threat that Korea would lose the 1988 Olympics. But that bet on democracy paid off magnificently, too.
Now, Bush is making a similar wager in Pakistan. There's not much else he could have done, given Musharraf's unpopularity, and Bush did it reluctantly. First, he tried to organize a power-sharing arrangement leaving Musharraf in the presidency while a new democratic coalition ran the government. Now that doesn't matter, as the two ruling parties have won Musharraf's ouster by forcing his resignation.
In June, the White House announced that Bush had spoken on the phone with Musharraf and urged him to stay in the presidency. This week, with his position crumbling, Musharraf tried to call Bush at least twice, according to Pakistani sources. Bush did not take the calls.
It's a good sign that when Musharraf asked Pakistan's army chief of staff, Ashfaq Kiyani, to support his effort to stay in power, Kiyani said that the army would stay out of politics.
Musharraf's adversaries feared he would use constitutional authority he gave himself in his heyday to topple the elected government —which would have provoked popular unrest and might have put the army in the position of having to fire on the population. Kiyani, in effect, told Musharraf not to take that option.
With Musharraf gone, the Bush administration is trying to secure guarantees from the leaders of the two opposition parties that Musharraf will not be criminally prosecuted.
Asif Ali Zardari of the Pakistan Peoples Party, husband of the PPP's assassinated leader, Benazir Bhutto, has been willing to make such a deal. Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistani Muslim League has been demanding Musharraf's jailing but reportedly has relented.
Zardari is expected to assume the presidency. Then comes the real test of whether this democratic bet is paying off — or whether Pakistan will go the way of Iran.
In that case, the Shah had incurred the hatred of both Islamic radicals and secular democrats for running a corrupt and brutal regime. The United States was a target of resentment, too — much as it is in Pakistan — because of its unwavering support for the Shah.
In 1979, when massive demonstrations brought on Iran's moment of truth, the army declined to fire on the population. The Carter administration withdrew support from the Shah while offering him asylum, and a revolutionary regime took power.
Unfortunately, that regime still rules — with radical Shiite Islam and hatred for the United States as its guiding principles. It is now developing nuclear weapons and is aiding anti-U.S. and radical Islamic movements all over the Mideast.
Which future Pakistan will follow largely depends on whether Zardari and Sharif can govern effectively — inflation is running over 20 percent, and unemployment is mounting — and defeat increasingly aggressive Islamic extremists, some aided by Pakistan's own intelligence service.
Four past tries at democracy failed. Bhutto served as prime minister from 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996, and Sharif also served twice, before being toppled by Musharraf. Zardari and Sharif are now coalition partners but are still rivals.
Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.
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