America now needs Iran's trust and cooperation vis-à-vis the future of Iraq. That requires, among other things, some realpolitik adjustments, plus what Iranians call an exit strategy, complete with a withdrawal timeframe from Iraq.

The US is still refusing to leave Iraq. Apart from prestige, it wants to preserve some gains from its Iraq venture -- at least oil contracts and some tolerance from Iran for US interests. Will Iran oblige with a realpolitik détente?

It is scarcely likely. And that will not amount to a US exit strategy from the Iraqi imbroglio, much less from the region where its presence is now increasingly being endangered by a plethora of new forces, including Islamic extremism and various nationalisms. Unless the Americans revise the aims and role that they assumed in the post-1945 period, they will remain hobbled by the lack of what Bush senior called the "vision thing."

The starting fact is that two of the big American enterprises, Afghanistan and Iraq, are doing badly. Iraq is a quagmire, and it may soon be out of control, and might even split up -- unless all Iraqis unite around an Iraqi national reconstruction programme.

Few in the west talk about Afghanistan; it is an open-ended war that is going nowhere; no one is likely to win it and perhaps, in the end, all will lose it. The Americans have lulled themselves with the thought that by persuading Nato to take over, they had found a master solution. That is an illusion, and is progressively being shown as such.

What precisely are America's aims and objectives in Afghanistan has been less clear than what the American interests could be in Iraq. They issued from purely strategic calculations that would stand in good stead for the US if and when its forward foreign policy in Central Asia begins to roll, with or without cold wars with Russia and China. But right now Afghanistan is as much a bog for Nato as Iraq is for other Europeans.

The basic weaknesses of American positions are twofold: one is the over-reliance on a heavily militarized Israel. Last year, Hezbollah in Lebanon fought Israel to a stalemate, and punctured its pride. The political actions of Israel are a constant source of anger in the so-called Arab Street.

The American contribution is that it has helped kill the old, ambiguous Israeli Left, and has pumped up the ugly Israeli Right to such an extent that it might have become a danger to Israel itself. The Israeli shenanigans in Palestinian areas are a source of total alienation of all Arab thinking. At this point one should pause to think a little harder.

A not-so-subsidiary aim of the Americans was to secure Middle East oil; it has to remain in control of western oil giants, or the Seven Sisters. That task included the preservation of all manner of actually anti-democratic Arab regimes in all major oil producing countries.

America was only too happy to provide them security. But what that has done to the Arab peoples has not been fully taken into account, either by the Americans or by many others, including perhaps many Arabs. The Arabs simply perceive the Americans as unjust colonial masters sustaining hated regimes -- against their wishes. For one thing, it has made Arab opinions paranoid and partly narcissistic.

It has also opened wide the doors of Arab hearts and minds to Iranians, whom they used to contemptuously call Ajamis. The Iranian propaganda has made serious inroads, and is now a factor. Iran is now a pre-eminent local power. That its foreign policy has imperialistic undertones is only a part of the story; the other part of the story is that their analysis of what is happening today in the Arab Street fits the thinking of Arabs bang on. They have simply to agree.

True, the Iranians are an ambiguous force. They can play a useful anti-imperialist role throughout the region, but can also get enmeshed in some of the local territorial disputes over islands with Gulf Sheikhdoms. Hitherto, Iranian diplomacy has been suave and sophisticated. How it will develop will depend on a number of factors, including its own domestic politics.

To revert to Iraq, Islamabad recently organized an OIC foreign ministers' conference with some fanfare, and the word went out that the great OIC was poised to send Muslim troops to Iraq. One had not heard a more laughable proposition before. Which Muslim country's troops will be welcome in Iraq? What role will they play, or can play? If Nato and other Europeans have not been able to salvage the American position in Iraq, surely the rag-tag OIC would not be able to provide a credible alternative.

True, Pakistani and Bangladeshi troops are available for hire. But can they take up combat duties? Would the people of Pakistan and Bangladesh stand for it? Let us face the fact that OIC, constituted in 1969, is a big cipher; it has counted for nothing, and it counts for nothing today.

It represents mostly unelected, and unelectable, corrupt regimes whose survival is largely an American achievement. This unwieldy instrument cannot perform any cognizable role that Iraq's situation might demand.

Similarly, there is no exit route from Afghanistan for either the west, meaning US and Nato, or for Afghans and Pakistanis. They are all stuck there. Insofar as Pakistan is concerned, it had better give up its imperial dream of adding Afghanistan to its own strategic depth; that is unlikely to happen.

While Pakistan itself can become unstable if it tries, it will be too presumptuous of a lay commentator to say that there is no way out for Pakistan, or anyone else, from Afghanistan. All governments are caught in this maelstorm.

It is particularly hard for Islamabad, burdened as it is with all manner of clichés and memories of the colonial era. Nevertheless, Pakistan has to extricate itself as best as it can and let Afghanistan go its own way -- and if it can, by any chance, become a democratic country, very good. If it does not, it is just too bad.

The question recurs: what are the Americans really after? One thing that they have to realize is that no great power in history has retained all its options all the time. America inherited exhausted Anglo-French imperialism, and gave them a subordinate place in the Brave New World it inaugurated in 1945.

Times have changed. New challenges to American unipolarity are surely and steadily emerging. The strategy of keeping all the Arabs down and keeping Israel up is now failing. The Lebanon war in 2006 showed that Israel has been an overrated force; the emergent forces in the field -- Hezbollahs and Hamases -- cannot be eliminated by colonial methods. People can fight back in new ways and with a new spirit.

The Americans cannot now keep all the oil and Israel's permanent occupation of Palestine simultaneously. Something will have to give way. If the Americans opt for some understanding with the Arabs -- and at a price to themselves -- they will have to demystify and bring Israel down several notches in their priorities. That may provide an opening. Then, they have to talk to Iran more seriously, and find ground rules for a new peaceful co-existence in a changing ME. Do the Americans have the imagination to realize this?

MB Naqvi is a leading Pakistani columnist.