The most recent example of this was a reported meeting between Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shaloum during the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, last week.

On Saturday, Israeli officials confirmed the meeting but did not reveal its contents. The next day, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said: "We are interested in normalizing relations with Pakistan on the basis of equality and mutual respect. The ball is in their court; we are ready to move."

In Pakistan Tuesday, however, a spokesman for the Pakistan Foreign Office, Masud Khan, denied the meeting took place, saying his country had "no clandestine contact with Israel." On Thursday, Aziz also denied the meeting.

Israel and Pakistan do not have diplomatic ties but since joining the U.S.-led coalition against terror in September 2001, Islamabad has shown interest in establishing relations with the Jewish state.

Pakistanis believe having ties with Israel would neutralize the powerful Jewish lobby in the United States, which Pakistanis believe is strongly against them. They also hope it will bring political and economic benefits.

The Israelis are willing to help but every time Pakistan takes a reluctant step toward normalizing relations, it causes an uproar in the country's small but influential religious lobby, and Islamabad immediately goes back to its previous position of having no relations with Israel until Palestinians are given their rights.

Sometimes Pakistan shows a similar reluctance in openly acknowledging its role in the U.S.-led coalition against terror.

On Tuesday, Army Col. Cardon B. Crawford, the director of operations for the U.S. military command in Afghanistan, told a briefing in Washington Pakistani forces deployed along the Afghan border had helped U.S. troops in targeting terrorist hideouts inside their territory.

Explaining how Pakistani and American troops coordinate these artillery shootings, Crawford said: "A howitzer will shoot, let's say 5, 6, 10 kilometers. There has to be somebody out there who says, 'Here's the target.' And when the round lands, he'll say, 'go left, go right, go up, go down.'"

The next day a military spokesman in Islamabad, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, rejected the claim as "totally baseless" and said Pakistani forces were cooperating with U.S.-led coalition troops on the Afghan side of the border but "we are not guiding their fire onto our territory."

Pakistan is a key U.S. ally in the war on terrorism. It also has deployed about 70,000 troops along the Afghan border, waging a yearlong battle against al-Qaida and Taliban suspects in its South Waziristan tribal region. The U.S. military has about 18,000 troops inside Afghanistan but cannot pursue suspects into Pakistan.

A public acknowledgement of Pakistan's role in the search for terror suspects would have helped improve Islamabad's image in the United States where it is often criticized in the media for not doing enough in the war against terror.

Pakistan's denial, however, would neutralize whatever benefits Pakistan could have reaped from Crawford's statement.

Pakistani officials privately acknowledge that sometimes their denials hurt them but say that military cooperation with the United States remains a politically sensitive issue in Pakistan.

They point out that Musharraf angered hardliners by ending Pakistan's support of the Taliban regime that had harbored Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Musharraf has drawn additional domestic opposition for the military operations in Pakistan's tribal regions.

Liberal Pakistani intellectuals say, however, this "one step forward, two steps backward," approach is not helping Musharraf.

"It is not appreciated in the United States, at least not by the media, and has not won over the militants either," says Rasheed Khalid who teaches strategic studies at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.

When Musharraf telephoned U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her first day in office, Khurhsid Ahmed, deputy chief of the hard-line Jamaat-e-Islami party, accused him of "flattery."

"Our rulers have assumed such proportion of flatterers that they do not care for the country's dignity," he said.

Ahmed, who is also a member of the Pakistani Senate, said the Pakistani foreign minister should have called his U.S. counterpart instead.

In Washington, the libertarian Cato Institute last week called Musharraf Washington's "most unreliable" ally and said U.S. friendship with Pakistan was "unlikely to evolve into a long-term one in the war on terrorism."

The Cato Institute even questioned Musharraf's sincerity and said his decision to abandon the Taliban after Sept. 11 reflected not a strategic choice but a tactical one.

"It was based on the clear recognition that anything less than full cooperation with the United States would result in punishing American military retaliation, including the invasion of parts of Pakistan, and possibly the overthrow of the Musharraf government," it said.

Religious forces in Pakistan, who wanted Musharraf to continue to support the Taliban, see it differently, however. In one of many statements condemning Musharraf's decision to join the U.S. camp, the country's main religious alliance, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, said Musharraf always had "liberal and pro-American views" but was afraid of changing Pakistan's pro-Islamic policies out of fear the country's overwhelmingly Muslim population may not like it.

"But the 9/11 gave him the opportunity to take Pakistan back into the American camp, forgetting lessons of the past," it said.

This was a reference to a general complaint in Pakistan the United States used it as a conduit for fighting the Soviets in neighboring Afghanistan and dumped it as soon as the Russians left Kabul. For almost a decade, from 1990 to 2001, Pakistan was the recipient of many U.S. sanctions for its attempts to make a nuclear bomb.

"How can we trust the Americans this time? They will abandon Pakistan again, as soon as they achieve their targets in Afghanistan and the Middle East," MMA leader Qazi Hussain Ahmad said.

The Cato Institute says the same thing, but from a different perspective. Branding the Musharraf government "opportunistic," it says, "American relationship with Pakistan is, at best, a short-term alliance of necessity. Over the medium- and long-term, U.S. policy makers should distance themselves from the Musharraf regime."

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