White House officials insisted in interviews that they had confidence that their longtime ally, General Pervez Musharraf would maintain enough influence to keep the country stable as he edged toward a power-sharing agreement with his main rival, Benazir Bhutto.

But other current and former officials cautioned that six years after the US forced Musharraf to choose sides in the days after the September 11 attacks, American leverage over Pakistan is now limited. And Musharraf is weakened. His effort at conciliation in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where al-Qaeda and the Taliban plot and train, proved a failure. His efforts to take them on militarily have so far proved ineffective and politically costly.

Almost every major terror attack since 9/11 has been traced back to Pakistani territory, leading many who work in intelligence to believe that Pakistan, not Iraq, is the place Bush should consider the “central front” in the battle against terrorism. It was also the source of the greatest leakage of nuclear arms technology in modern times.

After years of compromises and trade-offs, there are questions inside and outside the administration about whether Bush has invested too heavily in a single Pakistani leader, an over-reliance that may have prevented the US from examining other long-term strategies.“It never stitched together,” said Daniel Markey, a State Department official who dealt with Pakistan until he left government earlier this year. “At every step, there was more risk aversion — because of the risk of rocking the boat seemed so high— than there was a real strategic vision.”

Some officials worry aloud that a year of unrest, violence and political intrigue in Pakistan may undercut Bush’s last chance to root out Osama bin Laden from the lawless territory where al-Qaeda has regrouped. Likewise, they fear, the unrest could cripple a renewed administration effort to turn around the war against Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.

If serious divisions emerge in Pakistan’s army, they could also threaten the security of Pakistan’s potent nuclear arsenal, something that Bush administration officials worry about far more than they let on publicly.

Over the past year, the Musharraf government has quietly sent officials to Washington to assure Bush administration officials that even if the general were ousted or assassinated, the mechanisms for controlling both weapons and nuclear technology— safeguards that Pakistan acknowledges it has put together with aid from other countries— are now unbreakable. And his designated successor, the newly appointed vice-chief of the Pakistani Army, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, is widely seen as a pro-American moderate.

Several officials who have left the administration say they are less than sanguine about the prospect that Pakistan’s troubles will just settle down. “We have to remember that the US doesn’t have very much capability to affect internal developments” in Pakistan, said Robert D. Blackwill, the former American ambassador to India and a senior official in the National Security Council during Bush’s first term.

“What I am struck by are the trends we see today: the North-West Province is ungovernable and a sanctuary for terrorists,” he said. “The politics are fractured and deeply unstable, Musharraf is weaker, and the army is uncertain which way it will go.”

After trying for a year, and failing, to let tribal leaders deal with al-Qaeda and to negotiate with Islamist forces, a senior administration official contended, General Musharraf “learned you can’t appease these people, and they have to go after them. So there is room to be hopeful.”

But critics of the American policy say both General Musharraf and the Bush administration were slow to sense the gathering of new threats. Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, began warning senior administration officials that Pakistan had become the new sanctuary in 2004, according to a senior administration official. But some officials warned against placing too much pressure on Musharraf.

Help probe Karachi attack: Bhutto to US

KARACHI: Former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto made her first public appearance Sunday since narrowly escaping a suicide assassination attempt that killed 136 people and called for the US and Britain to help investigate the Karachi attack.