"If you were to look around the world for where al-Qaeda is going to find its bomb, it's right in their backyard," Bruce Riedel, the former senior director for South Asia on the National Security Council, was quoted as saying by Newsweek.

General Pervez Musharraf, who led a military coup in 1999, imposed a state of emergency in nuclear-armed Pakistan Saturday in response to what he said was a hostile judiciary and the growing menace of al-Qaeda and pro-Taliban militants.

US Senator Joseph Biden has said General Musharraf's decision to declare a state of emergency and suspend the constitution underscores the need for the United States to move from a Musharraf policy to a Pakistan policy.

President George W Bush should make it clear to General Musharraf the risks to US-Pakistani relations if he does not restore the Constitution, permit free and fair elections and take off his uniform as promised. Then, we have to build a new relationship with the Pakistani people, he said.

The dilemma facing the "democracy crusader" President Bush, Newsweek says, is that Washington is left not many friends to call in Pakistan -- "perhaps the number one generator of terrorism in the world" -- after propping up President Pervez Musharraf for six years.

"There is perhaps no place on earth that more powerfully validates Bush's idea that democracy can be a cure for terrorism than Pakistan. And there is perhaps no place on earth that so powerfully exposes his occasional hypocrisy in failing to push for that policy," the magazine says.

Commenting on Musharraf's decision to declare a state of emergency shortly before the justices of the Pakistan Supreme Court were expected to rule that his presidency was illegal, Newsweek says US officials did the dance they always perform when it comes to his anti-democratic actions: They disapproved but expressed hope that Musharraf would see the light.

Conceding that Musharraf has been a firm "if uneven ally" against terrorism, the news magazine says, "all of this double talk illustrates the Faustian bargain that the United States has struck with Pakistan in the war on terror."

Again and again, the Bush administration has looked the other way as Musharraf has "trampled all over democracy in the service of stability", it adds.

In 2002, when Musharraf finally held parliamentary elections, Islamist fundamentalists won a surprising number of seats, the magazine notes and adds "US officials swallowed hard but lauded the elections as fair and square."

But the elections, the report said, were not fair and square. It was left to an observer from the EU to point out that there were "serious flaws" in the elections because Musharraf's government had unfairly directed state resources to his party and created laws intended to prevent exiled leaders Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto from taking part.

Washington was quite noticeably silent on this point, it said, adding Bhutto could not even get a hearing at the White House, belying Bush's second-term commitment "to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture."