IN his unusually blunt address to the Pakistani nation during his brief stopover last week, President Clinton warned us of the dangers of "increasing isolation" if we continued with our present policies.

Although he was stating the obvious, I have little doubt that his warning will fall on deaf ears: as it is, we stand isolated to an extent that would have been unimaginable even a few months ago. The fact that it took much diplomatic effort to persuade the US president to spend a few hours on Pakistani soil is a measure of our isolation. The Turkish prime minister has refused to include Pakistan in his Indian visit this week because he is 'too busy'. Considering our strong links with Turkey, and General Musharraf's personal admiration for Kemal Attaturk, this is an unprecedented snub. We have been suspended from the Commonwealth, and are kept at arm's length by most democracies.

So what? ask the many hawks in our establishment and the media. So plenty. These snubs add up to a loss in trade, economic ties and technical cooperation. During Clinton's visit to India, deals worth four billion dollars were announced; during his five-hour visit to Pakistan, bilateral trade was not even mentioned. Military assistance is a distant memory.

But our isolation is not just diplomatic: most of the major airlines no longer stop in Karachi, KLM was the latest one to announce that it was shutting down its operations here. Most of them pulled out long ago, citing high fuel cost and exorbitant Civil Aviation Authority charges. Unofficially, their functionaries have complained of the existence of many government agencies operating at Karachi airport, all of them demanding some kind of gratification whether in the form of upgrades or bottles of booze.

In the old days, these airline operations resulted in considerable revenues for businessmen as hundreds of crew members broke their journeys in Karachi and were accommodated in local hotels and spent money shopping for presents. But one unstated reason why airlines no longer let their crew stop in Karachi for any length of time is that their safety cannot be ensured.

The instability in the region is another reason why Pakistan is an undesirable tourist destination. Until the seventies, buses full of tourists would stop in Lahore on their way from Europe to India, and bachelor friends would descend on Falleti's Hotel to check out the talent. But after the Iranian revolution and the Afghan war, this stream of tourists has dried up completely.

Of course, Pakistan's image abroad has not exactly helped in attracting visitors: after Zia took over in 1977, photographs of public floggings and hangings have made front pages across the world. Ethnic and sectarian terrorism has prompted foreign ministries to advise their citizens not to travel to Pakistan. Upmarket glossy magazines in the West contain dozens of advertisements for holidays in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka without a single one for similar package tours to Pakistan. The repeated violence initiated in Chitral and neighbouring areas in the North by fundamentalist groups demanding the imposition of Sharia law over the last few years has frightened away those hardy foreign trekkers who travelled to such remote valleys.

I have no doubt the "so what?" brigade will immediately declare that our national interests outweigh such mundane considerations. But this insular approach loses sight of the fact that in today's interconnected world, no country can afford to stand in splendid isolation. North Korea and Myanmar (earlier known as Burma) are two countries that have basically said: "to hell with the rest of the world; we will go our own way". Both are basket cases where the citizens are suffering for their leaders' egomania and insularity. Do we really want to travel down that path?

But isolation is ultimately a state of mind, and individuals can cut off contact with society. Thus, hermits and sufis have sought solitude to commune with God. But while individuals can afford this luxury, nations can't. Trade, finance and technology drive development and economic well-being. In today's wired world, countries either compete and cooperate, or get left behind. There are no prizes for sulking or for being forced to sit in the corner with a dunce cap on the head.

If a set of policies gain no results and instead cause a nation to be sent to Coventry by the rest of the world, clearly those policies need to be re-examined. And if they aren't, then the policy-makers need psychiatric help. In our case, our stand on Kashmir has led inexorably to unending confrontation with India, the militarization of Pakistan together with its political fallout, and to the acquisition of nuclear weapons with its international ramifications. Along the way, a slew of fanatical militias have been encouraged to dictate the nation's agenda.

And what result has our Kashmir policy produced apart from thousands of casualties in India, Pakistan and Kashmir itself? For a moment, forget about the rights and wrongs of the whole issue, and how much India is to blame for the problem. If we do a cost-benefit analysis of our 50-year old Kashmir policy, we will find that it has been a disaster for the people of Pakistan with the breakeven point nowhere in sight. Here again, the "so what?" school of thought will say this does not matter as long as we continue to stand on "principles." Perhaps, but it is a lonely place to be when the rest of the world is telling us to grow up, get real and get on with life.

One point that is consistently overlooked in discussions about our place in the world is that a progressive, modern and forward-looking Pakistan is much better placed to persuade the international community than a mediaeval country full of zealots that is seen as supporting terrorism. In the battle for public opinion, image is all; the contents of an argument are secondary. Despite having a weaker legal case on Kashmir, India is seen as the aggrieved party, and Pakistan as the instigator of the violence in the Valley. This may seem unfair, but that's life in the real world.

If we are to break out of the largely self-imposed isolation we find ourselves in today, we need to have a hard, objective look at our failed policies that we insist on following. But I doubt if our leadership - whether civilian or military - has the imagination and courage to act on the results of such a review.