When you live as we do in a country the size of a continent beset with all manner of hideous problems-religious violence and poverty, to mention only two-it's hard to pay too much attention to what is going on in the rest of the world. So, not even our newspapers commented much on the speed with which Israel started pulling its troops out of Palestinian cities last week as soon as the American President ordered Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to behave. Why should this matter to India? Because in the past when we have appealed to America to use its power to make Pakistan behave, we have always been told there was nothing that it could do. This is so hard to believe that a whole generation of Indians has grown up resenting America for what has long been perceived as its "tilt" towards Pakistan.

For a brief moment at the end of his presidency, when Bill Clinton stopped in Islamabad to lecture General Pervez Musharraf on democracy while gracing India with a full state visit, it seemed as if things were changing. But now the tilt is back and dangerously so. If proof were needed it came in Musharraf's recent threat to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, to resolve the Kashmir dispute. Did we hear one word of condemnation from the US State Department? Not a peep. It is doubly interesting when you consider that President George Bush makes his case for removing Saddam Hussein on the grounds that he is involved in making weapons of mass destruction and that such weapons are dangerous in the hands of a dictator who has not hesitated to use them against his own people. Interesting, is it not, that the Americans should not think that weapons of mass destruction are as dangerous in the hands of the subcontinent's friendly neighbourhood military dictator? Not even when he threatens to use them to settle the Kashmir dispute.

How does Bush expect anyone to take his war against terrorism seriously if it is going to be based on such blatant duplicity? How can he expect India's support when we are the next target of his new best friend, Musharraf?

We were targets even before September 11, but with the dismantling of Pakistan's Afghan policy, the General only has Kashmir left to deploy the mujahideen that the Pakistan Army has trained and nurtured for so many years. And Musharraf has now made it clear that he is ready to use nuclear weapons if his "freedom fighters" fail to win Kashmir. Why does this not worry the Americans? Before September 11, our only hope was that Pakistan's economy was in such a shambles that it was only a matter of time before it ran out of money to fund terrorism in Kashmir. But now we have the Americans pumping millions of dollars into Pakistan in gratitude for Musharraf's so-called help in fighting the war against terrorism.

Pakistan allowed the US to use its air space and territory during the war in Afghanistan, so a certain amount of gratitude is understandable, but surely someone in Washington can see that Musharraf's attempts to curb terrorism are mostly fake. Not only has he released most of those arrested in the immediate wake of his January 12 speech denouncing Islamic fundamentalism, but it's clear from the massacres that continue in Jammu and Kashmir that the killers the General likes to call freedom fighters are still at it. They would not be able to function if Pakistan withdrew its support.

Even if the Americans could not care less what the General was up to in Kashmir, surely they should care about the fact that large numbers of Taliban and Al Qaida men have managed to find safe houses in Pakistan. If reports in the Pakistani press are accurate then Osama bin Laden himself could be hiding in one of these houses. If Musharraf were seriously fighting terrorism, would any of this be possible? Would it have been possible to kidnap Daniel Pearl and kill him so brutally if the ISI had not been involved? And was not Omar Sheikh caught only when some ISI men were interrogated?

We can just hope there is someone in the US State Department asking these questions and occasionally telling Musharraf to behave. We ourselves should be doing something about it and did put the army on full alert as a warning to Pakistan, but then came Godhra and after that Gujarat, and we seem to have no time left for anything else. Also, our image in the eyes of the world has been so sullied by the violence in Gujarat that we have managed to make ourselves look as bad as Pakistan. With what face do we condemn Islamic fundamentalism when TV screens across the globe are filled with pictures of trishul-waving young men baying openly for Muslim blood. It is a bad time for us to be giving anyone else moral science lectures, a bad time for us in general. Clearly, it is advantage Musharraf for the moment but the Americans would do well to keep a close watch on the activities of their current favourite military dictator.