The scenes of carnage in Pakistan this week conjured what one senior US administration official on Friday called “the nightmare scenario” for President George W Bush’s last 15 months in office: Political meltdown in the one country where the al-Qaeda, Taliban and nuclear weapons are all in play.

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.”

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