It was an interesting evening. I am not sure that we got very far with our Harvard professor. Harvard sometimes translates as hubris. But our little seminar was informative and educational for those of us who had sponsored it.

Our Crimsonite said: “ Most foreigners do not appreciate that Japan has a democratic tradition”. Our Japanese professor: “If you mean that we Japanese have a sense of egalitarianism, I agree, Dr. Reischauer. Yes, Prime Minister Ikeda does talk to his barber on more or less equal terms. But it seems to me that in the modern age, democracy can only mean representative government. And we Japanese have no traditions of representative government.” Crimsonite riposte: “But Japan has – since the Meiji Restoration – been moving steadily more and more toward democratic institutions”. Our long-suffering Japanese professor: “But if I may remind you, Dr. Reischauer, if we should have many more interregnums like 1936-45, there may not be a Japanese people around to enjoy those institutions”.

Alas! Democracy [the voice of the mob as the ancient Greeks had it] in the complex world societies in which we live today cannot simply be an expression of the current popular mood [too many “Good Germans” did vote for Hitler! just as Palestinians in the Gaza strip voted for Hamas]. Nor can elaborate written constitutions [Britain functions as a paragon of democratic virtue without one] which lay out the people’s rights insure them. Thailand has a new one after each military coup d’etat overthrows a government, and, sometimes [as most recently] probably for good cause.

A skeptic might even argue that “the world’s largest democracy”, India, has a tortured electoral system that exaggerates and reemphasizes the inequalities and conflicts of its peculiar caste social structure by creating “vote banks’ based only on tribal loyalties.

Nor does the fundamental concept of democratic life that inherited wealth and bloodlines should not dictate government always be the test. [Winston Churchill argued, for example, that given parliamentary supremacy, the United Kingdom should maintain its upper if weaker genealogical chamber as a check on the possible tyranny of a House of Commons overtaken by populism.]

That’s why President George W. Bush’s critics ring clear when they say that plunking down “democracy” in Iraq could be a will-o’-the-wisp But what seems also clear is, as Bush has now repeatedly said, is that the Iraqis and not American politicians would have to eventually determine what that form of their “democracy” would be.

All these arguments come into focus now with the continuing crisis in Pakistan.

Mohammed Ayub Khan, was perhaps the most effective – at least for a short time in his decade of power 1958-69 – of the several military men who have seized power from a repeatedly dysfunctional civilian government. He tried to create a new system from the Westminster forms Islamabad had inherited whole hog [sic] from the British Indian Empire.

But his “basic democracy”, intended to stagger representative government at a level of competence from the village up, collapsed in an orgy of corruption and malfeasance, not the least in his own family.

Other Asian leaders have “invented” their own versions of “democracy”; the brilliant orator and agitator Soekarno in Indonesia formulated “guided democracy” which simply turned into a personal dictatorship. He balanced among the forces of the society as the economy collapsed. But the “experiment” finally ended in disaster and a gigantic slaughter across the islands when Communists with Beijing’s connivance tried unsuccessfully to take over from his aging, faltering hands.

Now, under pressure of events which threaten to erode President-General Pervez Musharraf’s support in the armed forces, his base of power, and calls from Washington to return to “democracy”, Pakistan is again patching together a new system.

Whatever compromise Musharraf makes with the civilian political leadership, it is fraught. And not the least because the two principal national civilian leaders are tainted.

Benazir Bhutto, twice prime minister in earlier governments, is badly stained with corruption and her own autocratic manner – perhaps in the genes of a notorious Moslem Sindhi landlord family of The Raj. Nawaz Sharif, whom most Pakistanis were happy to see the backside of when Musharraf ousted him in a coup d’etat, is generally believed as corrupt. Furthermore he has flirted with the Moslem fanatics, backed as they always are in Pakistan as elsewhere by the Saudis and their oil loot.

Basic to the Pakistan problem [one that stretches through much of the Third World from Bangladesh to Mexico] is a feudal [for lack of a better word] elite which simply has no loyalties beyond family. It is perhaps one of the ironies of history that at the moment when in much of the industrial world the deterioration of the traditional family and its loyalties is considered as part of a social crisis, the family, the tribe, endogenous marriage, appears to be a principal source of the inability to modernize in the pre-industrial societies.

Musharraf, who spent part of his adolescence in Turkey, has sometimes talked of modeling Pakistan’s modernization on that country. But that whole concept is up for grabs in Asia Minor. Furthermore, Musharraf has acknowledged that market economics and the encouragement of globalization – the introduction of foreign investment with its accompanying technology – is the only way to lift most Pakistanis out of their abysmal poverty. That would be far from the Kemalist policies of state capitalism that for so long inhibited Turkish growth.

Pakistan, as the largest Muslim state with its 160 million people [Indonesia is a much more diverse and catholic collection of cultures despite its Islamic majority], its crucial geography at the juncture of the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, and its nuclear weapons, is the cauldron for the Islamic convulsion.

Nowhere in the war against terrorism and Islamofacism is the outcome more crucial than in Islamabad.

Further deterioration of governance would spell increased dissidence among the large Pakistani [and Indian Moslem] population in the U.K. A failed state in Pakistan would also inevitably lead to the inability of India to find a solution to its own problems with a Muslim minority, to some extent disaffected, which is as large or larger than the population of Pakistan. Nor could the current grandiose Indian military rearmament hope to stabilize its western borders. And it would reverberate in neighboring Bangladesh [with its estimated 140 million, mostly Muslims] where civil government has collapsed under the same sort of pressures.

That is why Musharraf’s maneuvers, however much they may appear to be dictated by self-interest, are crucial to U.S. national interests in the Middle East and throughout the whole Isamic world stretching from Casablanca to Zamboanga.

And it is why it might behoove our talking heads on TV as well as elected officials to speak softly, softly, about the incredibly complex issues that surround events now taking place there.