"The United States has backed the wrong horse in Pakistan and that's like the situation with the Shah in pre-Revolutionary Iran," said Syed Hasnat, a scholar at Washington's Middle East Institute. "It's not too late to amend policy, but this is the crunch time for the United States," he said.
Washington was wrong-footed by the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah of Iran and ushered in the Islamic republic, having backed the monarch for decades despite rising popular anger against his dictatorial rule. The Shah was seen as a valuable anti-Communist ally, a friend to Israel and sympathetic to US strategic and commercial interests in oil-rich Iran.
Musharraf meanwhile has been an "indispensable" ally for the US-led "war on terror," according to US officials, even if there is deep disquiet about his imposition of a state of emergency last weekend. The White House welcomed Thursday the fact that the military ruler had "clarified" the date for Pakistani elections, now scheduled to take place by mid-February, but urged him to take further steps toward democracy.
While Iran's clerical regime today is accused by the West of pursuing nuclear weapons, Pakistan under Musharraf indisputably has them already, which makes the stakes even higher. The US government is "locked in much the same kind of policy vise that bedevilled the US in Iran," Gary Sick, a Middle East professor at New York's Columbia University, wrote in a recent opinion piece.
"We have bet the farm on one man - in this case Pervez Musharraf - and we have no fall-back position, no alternative strategy in the event that does not work." Successive US administrations, bent on containing the Soviet Union during the Cold War, were accused of failing to nurture voices of democratic moderation in Iran under the Shah's rule.
The result was that when he was swept into exile, the United States was tainted by association in the eyes of ordinary Iranians and was powerless to prevent the extremist regime that eventually took over. The Bush administration has in recent weeks given more emphasis to the democratic alternative in Pakistan espoused by Benazir Bhutto.
But Benazir has not been alone in arguing that much of the 10 billion dollars in US military aid extended to Musharraf since the 2001 terror attacks would have been better spent on education to diminish the influence of extremists.
The parallel with 1970s Iran was raised by several US lawmakers when Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte was grilled about Pakistan by the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday.
Democratic Representative Gary Ackerman acknowledged that Musharraf's support has been central to the pursuit of al Qaeda and the Taliban. "But in the end, you're going to have the story of Iran," he told Negroponte.
"You're going to be supporting a guy, like the Shah, who was tough on terrorists and did things that we need, and in the end, the results were absolutely and totally disastrous," Ackerman said. Democratic White House hopeful Joseph Biden called Thursday for a new US policy oriented towards the people of Pakistan as a whole and not just "concentrated on one man - President Musharraf."
Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the choice was "Pakistan as a repeat of 1979 Iran or 2001 Afghanistan," or Pakistan as a stable and secular Muslim state. "Which future unfolds will be strongly influenced - if not determined - by the actions of the United States," he said.
Daniel Markey, a Council on Foreign Relations specialist on South Asia, said Musharraf needs to abide by his promise of elections to prevent moderate parties allying with Islamists against his government. "It was this kind of coalition in Iran that led to the overthrow of the Shah, and the subsequent purging of the liberals, leaving the radicals in power," he said.