LAHORE, PAKISTAN

AMERICA’S wonderful message and example of economic and political freedom have been undermined by its president and politicians. By turning their backs on America’s founding principles, they have turned their backs on those struggling throughout the world to gain a small degree of such freedom.

When Russia invaded Georgia this month in a “peace-enforcement operation,” America’s protests about invading weaker nations that present no threat rang a bit hollow after its five years of occupying Iraq.

Those of us in Pakistan who long for individual freedom, free markets and the rule of law with a working constitution and an independent judiciary can no longer cite the United States as an example. Because our country is a “frontline ally” of the United States in the “war on terror,” our political reforms have been held back.

But now that military dictator Pervez Musharraf has announced his resignation, the Bush administration has lost its closest ally in this war on terror. Yet our new democratic process here in Pakistan and our weak, corrupt and violent political parties need all the support they can get. This presents a huge opportunity for America to help us and to reach hearts and minds in a country that views the United States with resentment but also envy.

Americans create abundant wealth because they are economically freer than people in most nations. That makes Americans politically freer. What underpins all that is the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, and independent courts and news media.

Despite America’s encroachments on freedoms since 9/11, Americans are free to pursue most economic, political, social, intellectual, philosophical, moral, spiritual and aesthetic enterprises — free to do whatever they like as long as they do not encroach on others’ freedoms.

America’s foreign policy, however, has never been constrained by its founding principles, not least because Americans have little interest in the outside world: that’s the business of government. But with instant communication, the contradictions between America’s domestic virtues and its imperial excesses are visible, as they were not when, for example, the United States sent Marines to independent Hawaii in 1893 to “enforce neutrality” by, in effect, reinforcing a coup d’état by foreigners against the monarch.

With the new language of spreading democracy and nation-building, even if such ventures as Iraq and Afghanistan have brought these fine notions into ridicule, that disconnection between rhetoric and reality is all the more stark.

Saner Americans must realize that America is not going to win this war against Islamist extremism and its allies the way it is going about it now. Envy, religious fanaticism and animosity toward the United States are only fanned by the blatant contradiction in its foreign policy. Unless that is remedied, nothing else it does is going to make any difference.

But America’s abundant wealth means that even the massive cost of the invasion of Iraq, costing more than $100 billion a year and rising, is less than 2 percent of its GDP, less than the percentage cost of the Vietnam War, so it could go on for years. Whether the United States can sustain the casualties, while maintaining military morale and political support for an endless quagmire are another matter, factors that could lead to sudden withdrawal and humiliation as in Vietnam.

In order to become again an emblem of freedom for the oppressed, America needs to go back to basics, following its own charters of freedom so beautifully displayed in Washington. Its foreign policy needs to win the hearts of foreign peoples, not their heads of government. That’s the only way to save America, and the rest of us, from America’s imperial hubris.

Khalil Ahmad is the founder and executive director of the Alternate Solutions Institute ( www.asinstitute.org), Pakistan’s first free-market think-tank.