In return Musharraf received $12 billion in aid from the United States after Sept. 11, 2001. Most of it was military and included some of the most advanced systems. Pakistan's military leaders, always with an eye on mighty neighbor India, said "thank you very much" and made a show of delivering a war on terror.

However, what the United States got for the hefty price tag was considerably less than advertised. Musharraf's legacy is the huge unpopularity of what is seen as an American war on terror, and the resurgence of the Taliban in the lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

The latter was significantly advanced by the 2006 truce Musharraf agreed with fundamentalist fighters after Pakistani troops understandably lost interest in being ambushed and killed in those areas.

The new, civilian government in Pakistan is being matched by a new approach from Washington, led not by the White House but from Congress. A bipartisan bill proposing $15 billion in development aid to Pakistan was sponsored by Senators Joe Biden and Richard Lugar, two foreign policy wise men, and approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

They understood that military aid did little good if Pakistan's economy was a basket case. That development was essential if the country was going to reject terrorism.

It's a lesson that the George W. Bush administration has appeared incapable of getting its mind around. From the beginning U.S. foreign policy under U.S. president has been a tangle of paradoxes and contradictions. The neoconservative visionaries advising the administration pushed the spread of democracy as the long-term key to defeating terrorism. But Bush had campaigned on a platform of no more involvement in nation-building.

His response to 9/11, the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, then the invasion of the Iraq, forced him to confront issues of nation-building, but his administration was not prepared for that and failed to deliver a coherent policy.

Instead they fell back on the most obvious U.S. strength as the last superpower standing, its military might. That explained the aid policy to Pakistan, which failed to deliver on the terrorism front and complicated U.S. relations with Pakistan as a whole.

It was also at work in Georgia where the United States provided modern military equipment and training for the Georgian army. Emboldened by this support Georgia's President Saakashvili decided to try out his new army. He sent it into South Ossetia to try and integrate the breakaway province into Georgia by force, giving Russia's the excuse it was looking for to launch an invasion.

The lessons are clear. Military force is a blunt and double-edged instrument. Failure to recognize its limits can produce a self-defeating foreign policy. And a country that wants to spread democracy has to resist the temptation to back the convenient military dictator.