[The Washington Post - Islamabad, Pakistan, Sept. 14] -- Every Friday at 1 p.m., hundreds of Muslim men and boys in white cotton clothing and skullcaps hurry to the Red Mosque to pray and hear their imam, or mosque leader, deliver his weekly message.

Today, the message was about the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and it was unforgiving.

"This is the wrath of Allah," said the imam, his voice ringing out over a loudspeaker across the silent stone patios. "You Americans commit oppression everywhere, in Kashmir, in Palestine, and you do not see the blood spilled." No Arab country had the means to launch such attacks, the voice declared. "But when Allah catches hold of you, there is no escape."

Afterward, worshipers spilling out of the mosque seemed confused, anxious and angry. Many said they were sorry so many Americans had been killed and felt the attacks were wrong. Yet they also expressed bitter resentment against the United States and said it would be equally wrong to retaliate against Afghanistan, home to Osama bin Laden, the purported terrorist U.S. officials call the prime suspect in Tuesday's suicide hijackings.

"If America attacks Afghanistan, I myself will kill George Bush," vowed Zikria Agha, 18, his eyes and voice cold with conviction. "The Muslims of the world are united. We are the real superpower. If America attacks, it will be the beginning of World War Three."

While not shared by all Pakistanis, the intense, defiant emotions stirred here in the wake of the terrorist attacks half a world away partly explain why the government of Pakistan now finds itself in a dilemma as U.S. officials press its leaders to cooperate in a manhunt for bin Laden and possible military strikes against Afghanistan.

For years, Pakistan has been a society with a split personality. The majority of its 140 million people are poor, devout Muslims with little hope of bettering their lives and little faith in their political rulers. Instead, they have increasingly turned to Islam, and to an identification with suffering Muslims in other countries, whom they view as victimized by Israel and the West.

On the other side is a minority of more educated, religiously moderate Pakistanis who see their country's future as dependent on improved economic and political ties with Western powers. They fear that if Pakistan is tarred with the Islamic extremist label, it will risk economic collapse, international isolation and a bleak future.

Until now, the clash between these two Pakistans has been mostly rhetorical. The government of President Pervez Musharraf, an army general who seized power in October 1999, has tried to placate influential Islamic groups at home while seeking credibility among Western governments and lending institutions abroad.

But the terrorist attacks in the United States, and the enormous pressure now being brought to bear on Musharraf to cooperate with U.S. intelligence gathering and possible military actions, have crystallized these contradictions in the starkest possible terms, and they may well force him to choose between risking domestic upheaval and international isolation.

"This is a defining moment for Pakistan and a critical choice for Musharraf," said Rifaat Hussain, a professor of strategic and defense studies at Quaid-I-Azam University here in Pakistan's capital. "Do we swim with the current of world opinion against terrorism, or do we condemn ourselves to being on the wrong side of history? There is really no choice, but it will be a very difficult one for Musharraf to handle."

The government's dilemma is not a simple confrontation between religious sentiment and pragmatic politics. It is also deeply intertwined with Pakistan's troubled history of shifting international alliances, failed democratic governance, ambivalent relations with Afghanistan and nuclear rivalry with India -- a much larger, Hindu-dominated country from which Muslim Pakistan was split off in 1947.

During the 1980s, Pakistan was squarely aligned with the United States against the Soviet Union, which occupied Afghanistan for a decade. Pakistan's military ruler at the time, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, was a ruthless dictator and an ardent supporter of Islamic militancy, but also a clever Cold War strategist who worked closely with Washington to assist and arm the Afghan resistance movement.

>From 1979 to 1989, the United States spent $3 billion arming and equipping the Islamic guerrillas who eventually drove the Soviet army from Afghanistan. They fought mostly in the high mountains and isolated valleys that characterize the Afghan landscape, but their support base was in Pakistan, where the CIA funneled weapons and supplies through Pakistan's security services.

Once the Soviets withdrew in 1989, however, the scenario changed abruptly. The U.S. money and involvement evaporated, leaving Afghanistan to slip into violent civil conflict and Pakistan to cope with the growing influence of militant Islamic movements that had been nurtured with U.S. dollars.

Out of this volatile situation emerged the Taliban, the Islamic militia that now controls 95 percent of Afghanistan and harbors bin Laden as a Muslim "guest."

The Taliban, which has imposed a harsh system of governance and justice based on its own interpretation of Islamic laws, has been condemned by the West and sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council for sheltering bin Laden and violating human rights. Only Pakistan and two other countries recognize the regime as a government.

"In an ironic reversal of roles, it is this militancy, born in the crucible of the Cold War and baptized in Afghanistan by the U.S. itself, which the U.S. now proclaims as its principal enemy," columnist Ayaz Amir noted in the Dawn newspaper today. "Osama is not the cause but the consequence" of American arrogance and bias, he wrote, suggesting that Washington needs to reflect on the "fury of despair" that motivates Muslim terrorists to commit extreme acts. "Thus do demons come to haunt their own creators."

Many Pakistanis have little love for the Taliban or bin Laden, viewing both as a threat to Pakistan's stability at home and credibility abroad. Yet even middle-class professionals, while expressing deep concern for the loss of life in Washington and New York, said they understand why some Pakistanis and other Muslims would find grim satisfaction in the assaults on American symbols of power.

"People here do not favor what happened, but there is so much poverty here and in Afghanistan, and any American attack on Osama would hurt so many innocent people too," said a communications company manager named Ardeshir. "Instead of going after one man, the U.S. should try to find out the root causes."

In some conservative mosques and Islamic schools, the Taliban is viewed as a movement of admirable, "pure" Muslims, and bin Laden as a symbol of heroic defiance against the West. In fact, many Taliban members were raised in the refugee camps and Islamic schools, known as "madrassas", of Pakistan's northwest frontier province, a rugged region bordering Afghanistan, where much of the population is of Afghan origin and where Muslim traditions are deeply conservative.

Since the end of the Afghan war, many Pakistani Islamic groups that provided fighters against the Soviets have maintained strong ideological ties to the Taliban, but have turned their religious and military attention to a different so-called holy war -- the armed Muslim insurgency in Kashmir.

The insurgency erupted in 1989 in the Indian portion of Kashmir, the disputed Himalayan border region divided between India and Pakistan and claimed by both. It has been publicly championed and covertly aided ever since by Pakistan, which views Kashmir as the vulnerable Achilles' heel of its arch-rival.

For years the Kashmir conflict gained little international attention, in part because both India and Pakistan were under civilian control and there seemed little risk of full-fledged war. But in 1998, India and Pakistan both tested nuclear weapons, sharply raising the stakes. Then in 1999, Pakistan-backed fighters invaded India's Kargil mountains and Pakistan's unpopular prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, was overthrown by the army, raising further international alarm.

Since taking power, Musharraf has tried to establish his regime as friendly to Western governments and investors, whose favor is crucial to reviving Pakistan's ailing economy. Yet he has persisted in twin foreign policies that are popular among many Pakistani Muslims but widely condemned abroad: overt support for the Taliban in Afghanistan and covert support for the Kashmir guerrillas.

Although Musharraf is widely viewed as a moderate Muslim and well-intentioned leader, he has largely been held hostage by the influence of conservative Islamic groups in Pakistan, who have access to weapons, command passionate support from a vocal minority of Muslims, provide crucial support for the Kashmir conflict and have close ties to some segments of the military.

In the aftermath of this week's attacks on the United States, Musharraf has condemned terrorism and said he will cooperate with U.S. authorities, while Pakistani officials have continued to insist that they prefer to "engage" with the Taliban and have little influence over their actions in any case. But day by day, as the American case for targeting bin Laden gains momentum and world support, Pakistan's contradictory policy becomes increasingly untenable.

"If Musharraf handles this right, he has an opportunity to turn a perilous situation into a grand opportunity. The question is how much he can concede to the Americans before he feels the domestic heat," said Najam Sethi, publisher of the Friday Times, an influential weekly newspaper here.

"The public mood is very anti-American right now, but people will probably not be too upset if Pakistan ditches Afghanistan. The army is pragmatic, and they know Pakistan faces economic ruin if it does not stand with the United States on this," Sethi said. "But if the Americans want to go after the larger umbrella of Pakistani groups that are linked to Kashmir, it will create enormous problems."

Musharraf reportedly has met with Islamic leaders here this week and told them not to make provocative statements or threats on the Afghan situation. But if Musharraf does agree to collaborate with a U.S. attack on Afghanistan, today's message from the Red Mosque suggests he could face more than wrathful rhetoric from the disaffected, desperate and devout Muslims of Pakistan.

"America is against Osama because he is a true Muslim and a defender of Islam, not like our Pakistani leaders who are so-called Muslims," said Mohammed Rafiq, 50, shaking with rage as he stood in a crowd outside the mosque. "The Americans bombed Hiroshima, and they can do it to Afghanistan now, but history will never forgive them."