The United States faces some of its most difficult national security dilemmas in the country a Newsweek magazine cover recently dubbed “the most dangerous nation in the world.” Serious stakes hang in the balance, with Pakistan at the nexus of the most pressing security challenges: nuclear weapons, international terrorism, religious extremism, endemic poverty, and political reform. Pakistan directly impacts international efforts in Afghanistan, with the Taliban and Al Qaeda finding safe haven in the lawless border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet hardly anyone knows what to do about Pakistan, including our most experienced national security hands. For decades, the U.S. approach to Pakistan has suffered from ad hoc, reactive, and short-term thinking, and the coming year will present even more difficult choices for U.S. policymakers.

A survey of America’s top national security thinkers from both sides of aisle conducted by the Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy magazine earlier this year demonstrates that while experts understand the challenges posed by Pakistan, they don’t have a clear idea about what to do. When asked which countries in the world would most likely become the next Al Qaeda stronghold, the leading response was Pakistan, not Iraq.

Fully 74 percent of respondents named Pakistan as the country most likely to transfer nuclear technology to terrorists in the future. But when asked what the United States should do to combat extremists groups and Al Qaeda in Pakistan, these experts gave no clear answer; they were divided between threatening to cut off aid, increasing assistance, sending in U.S. troops, and simply doing nothing because there wasn’t anything effective to do.

Events during the past few months in Pakistan have added additional layers of complexities to the policy dilemmas. With parliamentary elections on the horizon, two leading opposition figures, former Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, returned from exile earlier this year. In response to a possible move by the judiciary to challenge his reelection earlier this fall, President Pervez Musharraf sacked key judges including Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. He imposed emergency law, closed independent media outlets, and jailed thousands of opposition figures.

These actions raised red flags for U.S. policymakers who were already starting to question what benefits the United States was getting for its investments of billions of dollars of assistance each year. At hearings last week on Capitol Hill, some U.S. lawmakers questioned whether the investment in Pakistan was worth the return – some raised concerns that Osama bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders are still on the loose and presumably in Pakistan, and others worried that U.S. taxpayers were underwriting Musharraf’s political repression.

This intensified U.S. debate on Pakistan policy comes at a time when Pakistan is heading into hotly contested parliamentary elections early next year on January 8th. Judges lawyers, and leading civil society groups, as well as a handful of political party leaders have decided to boycott the elections on principle, saying that there is no way for the country to have free and fair elections under current conditions. Other leading political figures, while complaining about the lack of an independent judiciary and predicting massive electoral fraud, have calculated that their interests are best served by throwing the parties into the mix.

Some analysts predict growing chaos in the coming weeks, with the political opposition parties taking their fights to the streets. Others foresee a calmer scenario involving an increasingly disenchanted Pakistani public disengaging from formal politics and continuing the downward trend in voter turnout seen in recent years.

No matter who wins next month’s elections, two outcomes seem quite likely, absent major shifts in policy. First, the Pakistani army, the dominant institution in public life, will maintain its strong position. Though the squabbles between politicians will garner news headlines, these electoral battles will remain a sideshow in terms of who holds real power in Pakistan. Second, some combination of the troika of leaders that has dominated Pakistani political life for the past two decades – Musharraf, Sharif, and Bhutto – will likely play important leadership roles in the coming years, absent any major changes in Pakistan’s system.

This second likely outcome should give U.S. policymakers some serious pause. Some U.S. leaders have already questioned Musharraf’s performance on the Al Qaeda and Taliban fronts. Sharif and Bhutto’s past performance on these issues is far from stellar – under Bhutto, the Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), provided support to the Taliban in the 1990s. Her successor, Nawaz Sharif, did little to rein in these extremists.

Moreover, some observers note that Bhutto is not the savior for democracy as she claims to be, including Bhutto’s niece in a recent biting opinion editorial in the Los Angeles Times. Of course lest we not forget that Sharif was the leader when Pakistan first tested a nuclear weapon in 1998, and all three of these leaders stood by while Pakistan nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father Pakistan’s nuclear program built an international network that led to dangerous transfers of nuclear technology.

This is all to say that even if by some small chance next month’s elections are relatively “free and fair” as President Musharraf recently promised, the outcomes will not likely mean Pakistan has become a democracy, nor will it mean that its leaders will help advance U.S. security interests in Pakistan.

In the wake of Musharraf’s declaration of emergency rule last month, some observers crowed that President Bush’s “freedom agenda” had fizzled and was responsible for the mess in Pakistan. But the truth of the matter is that the problem with U.S. policy in Pakistan isn’t simply linked to mistakes made by the Bush administration – Republican and Democratic administrations alike share some blame going back decades.

A top official in a leading opposition party in Lahore argued with me today that a key problem with U.S. policy on Pakistan is its almost singular approach and obsession with individual leaders, rather than institutions and the whole society. “Why does President Bush say, ‘Mr. Musharraf is my friend?’ Why doesn’t he say Pakistan is our friend?” With many of Pakistan’s top judges fired by Musharraf, he could see little point in holding an election – in his view, the lack of rule of law would make a mockery of the process. Rather than push for immediate elections, he argued, it would be better for the United States to support building strong institutions – including continued support for Pakistan’s army, but also standing by other vital institutions like the judiciary – especially at this time when its independence is called into question.

When it comes to Pakistan, there are no easy answers. Perhaps one starting point is to look beyond the narrow, two-dimensional view of “you’re either with us or against us” perspective, one that has been heavily dependent on relationships with individual leaders – whether it is Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, or even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Maybe another step forward would be focusing on how the United States can bring to bear the full range of its considerable powers – including economic and diplomatic powers, as well as its military and intelligence – in policies that help build functioning institutions that expand stability and prosperity in places like Pakistan.

Developing a coherent strategy that balances all of our competing interests is an unenviable task for U.S. policymakers. But past experience in Pakistan and elsewhere demonstrates that putting our hopes on a single leader or a single election rarely makes Americans safer or advances stability and prosperity in other countries. As Pakistan heads toward its next election, U.S. policymakers should continue their debate over how to build an integrated strategy that fosters Pakistani institutions capable of meeting our common security threats and making life better for its people. It’s a tall order with no easy answers, but continuing to amble along the current path won’t make the situation better.