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Musharraf, who was forced out of office in August, 2008, under threat of impeachment, did not spare his successor. “Asif Zardari is a criminal and a fraud,” Musharraf told me. “He’ll do anything to save himself. He’s not a patriot and he’s got no love for Pakistan. He’s a third-rater.”

Musharraf said that he and General Kayani, who had been his nominee for Chief of Army Staff, were still in telephone contact. Musharraf came to power in a military coup in 1999, and remained in uniform until near the end of his Presidency. He said that he didn’t think the Army was capable of mutiny—not the Army he knew. “There are people with fundamentalist ideas in the Army, but I don’t think there is any possibility of these people getting organized and doing an uprising. These ‘fundos’ were disliked and not popular.”

Leslie H. Gelb, a president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said, “I don’t think there’s any kind of an agreement we can count on. The Pakistanis have learned how to deal with us, and they understand that if they don’t tell us what we want to hear we’ll cut off their goodies.” Gelb added, “In all these years, the C.I.A. never built up assets, but it talks as if there were ‘access.’ I don’t know if Obama understands that the Agency doesn’t know what it’s talking about.”

The former high-level Bush Administration official was just as blunt. “If a Pakistani general is talking to you about nuclear issues, and his lips are moving, he’s lying,” he said. “The Pakistanis wouldn’t share their secrets with anybody, and certainly not with a country that, from their point of view, used them like a Dixie cup and then threw them away.”

As Obama mulls whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, he is also considering other ideas, like stepped-up bombing attacks on Taliban and al Qaeda targets in Pakistan.

Raids by unmanned "drone" aircraft are credited with killing Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in August, although they have yet to net any major al Qaeda leaders.

They have also killed scores of civilians and angered many Pakistanis who feel their sovereignty has been trampled upon, leading critics to argue the policy is counterproductive.

"You have to understand our sensitivities," Qureshi said in the interview with Reuters. "The way out that we have suggested is the use of drones, but under our ownership. Transfer technology to Pakistan and then let us use them."

Such an idea would provoke howls of protest from neighbor and arch-rival India, and would surely meet significant opposition in the U.S. Congress.

Bloggers will probably err on the side of more imaginative
conspiracy theories, but the truth is probably simpler. After the September
11 attacks, the West in general, and the United States in particular, had to
work with Pakistan to counter Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in neighbouring
Afghanistan. That meant that they had to work with President Musharraf, even
though he was no democrat. As part of the bargain, Pakistan’s nuclear sins
also needed to be placed to one side.

As sins go, they were big: Pakistan had been spreading nuclear technology for
years. The first customer for one of its enrichment plants was China — which
itself had supplied Pakistan with enough highly enriched uranium for two
nuclear bombs in the summer of 1982.