By Paul Eckert, Asia Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Nov 4 (Reuters) - Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf's "coup against his own government" puts his main backer the United States in a spot where even the best-case scenarios are messy if not dangerous.
Musharraf's crackdown, despite strong U.S. entreaties, drives home the price Washington is paying for backing a wayward ally in the war on terrorism while overlooking failures of performance, capacity and will, experts said on Sunday.
U.S. pressure on the military strongman who took power in a 1999 coup to take steps toward restoring democracy and civilian rule came too late to advance American goals, they said.
Musharraf imposed emergency rule on Saturday in a bid to reassert his flagging authority against challenges from Islamist militants, a hostile judiciary and political rivals.
As opposition figures were rounded up in a nationwide crackdown that continued on Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States would review billions of dollars in aid -- in part because U.S. laws set conditions for some military aid.
Politicians called for tougher U.S. actions.
"We have bolstered Musharraf with billions of dollars in recent years in military support and we ought to be specific that it's not going to continue," said Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
"And then on the terrorism front with al Qaeda and Taliban having control in provinces we have to give some consideration to perhaps some unilateral action," he said on CNN's "Late Edition."
NUCLEAR STAKES
Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson called for a "hardball" approach with Musharraf short of cutting aid that also recognized the high stakes at play in Pakistan.
"We need to understand that this is a nuclear country," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"We could face a real nightmare scenario by seeing these radical elements, these terrorist sympathizers, take control of that government," warned Thompson.
Pakistan this year is receiving about $700 million in U.S. economic and military assistance and in 2008 is expected to receive more than $800 million. The country has received about $10 billion in U.S. aid since 2001, with much of that in counter-terrorism assistance.
Retired U.S. diplomat Teresita Schaffer said Washington's scope for action beyond tactical steps to show displeasure at Musharraf was narrow in a country that borders Afghanistan -- another U.S. ally at war with resurgent Islamic militants.
"We don't have the luxury of simply blowing off the whole country," the South Asia expert at the Center For Strategic and International Studies think tank told Reuters.
"Strategically, we have to work with whoever is in charge of Pakistan," she added.
U.S. legal strictures against giving military aid to countries after army coups could be finessed by deciding they don't apply to a Pakistan with "the same guy in charge, albeit under very different circumstances," Schaffer said.
She predicted Washington will continue aid "and those aspects of military assistance and coordination that are specifically related to anti-terrorism and to Afghanistan."
CLOUDY BEST-CASE SCENARIOS
Pakistan's army has been playing a "double game" in joining hands with the United States and taking aid yet not fighting the Taliban and other extremists with sustained vigor, said Brookings Institution analyst Stephen Cohen.
"In effect we've wasted several billions of dollars, becoming Musharraf's ATM machine, allowing him to build up a military establishment that was irrelevant to his and our real security threat, yet presiding over an intensification of anti-American feelings in Pakistan itself," he wrote in a soon-to-be published essay for the Web site www.brook.edu.
Emergency rule will not help reach U.S. anti-terror goals.
"Musharraf's recent coup against his own government -- for that is what it was -- does nothing to improve the Pakistan army's performance in matters of vital concern to the United States," wrote Cohen.
Cohen sees a best-case scenario of carefully controlled elections bringing former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto back into office to work with an army run by trusted Musharraf advisers in fighting extremists.
But that picture is clouded by fears that Musharraf's men will reject Bhutto and extremists won't give up on their drive to "turn Pakistan into a base from which they can attack other soft Muslim and Western states and India, and even lay their hands on Pakistan's nuclear arsenal," he warned.
(Additional reporting by Chris Baltimore, Arshad Mohammed and John Poirier)
