Extended foreign trips, conducted at a leisurely pace and for the most part for no pressing reason, or none easily discernible, are a luxury that even US presidents, reputedly the most powerful figures on earth, can ill afford.

Indeed an American president would be laughed out of court were he to permit himself the kind of Grand Tour Pakistan's supreme leader has just undertaken. It's a flattering reflection on our culture that we are more relaxed about such things.

What actual business did the Pakistani supremo conduct with the British prime minister? None that any mortal with ordinary eyesight can make out. What was clinched at Camp David that was not already in the pipeline? In Berlin, stretching a point, you could say that talks with the German chancellor led to the lifting of the ban on the sale of military spare parts. But in Paris, lunch at the Elysee followed by a quick farewell on the presidential steps by the French president.

However, the three days the president and the First Lady spent with their son in Boston (doesn't he ever come to Pakistan?) is something with which all grandmothers will sympathize.

No doubt at all, it's more fun being head honcho in Pakistan than president of the United States. An American president gets his way in the end but often after a great deal of manoeuvring and lies. He can subvert the constitution and undercut democratic procedures. But he has to go through the motions of seeking democratic approval.

A Pakistani strongman is under no such necessity. He runs a one-man show, his decisions subject only to his fears or the stock of wisdom granted him by Providence. He can make state policy as he goes along, on the march, so to speak, or in front of the cameras.

Example: committing troops to Iraq is serious business, fraught with possibly messy consequences. It says something for General Musharraf's 'real' democracy - the constitutional novelty of which he is the author and father - that without batting an eyelid he can declare before a foreign audience that Pakistan was considering the dispatch of two brigades (no less) to Iraq.

Where's parliament? What about the hapless prime minister? With whom has the generalissimo consulted? Who's given him the okay? Foolish questions. Tony Blair who must explain his actions before the House of Commons - or at least lie about them through gritted teeth - would envy the exercise of such imperial authority.

The very amplitude of the Grand Tour, ambling leisurely from capital to capital, demonstrates one thing above all: that the president is in charge.

Prime Minister and parliament enmeshed in irrelevance. PPP and PML-N exhausted with denouncing the Legal Framework Order (LFO), General Musharraf's hatchet job on the constitution. The clerical leaders of the MMA considering with long faces the sudden threat to their educational degrees. The nation grappling with summer and waiting for the monsoons.

As against all this consider the president and First Lady: travelling in slow motion across the continents, all the time in the world at their disposal.

(The president barely will have time to catch breath before he is off on another round of rigorous travelling, this time to Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. The things one has to do in the national interest.) And, let style gurus note, the First Lady, shedding her diffidence, has never looked more relaxed than on this tour. It is for the opposition parties to go behind closed doors and over tea (sorry no beer, we're Pakistanis) consider whether these signs betoken a presidency in trouble or one basking in its strength.

The general has set his course: no deviation, not the slightest, from the iron tenets of 'real' democracy. He calls the shots and takes the decisions. Democratic trappings are for ornamental purposes. These trappings won't be sacrificed because that will mean challenging the rules of make-up. But only the gullible will take them seriously.

The mullahs of the six-party religious alliance, the MMA, miscalculated their strength or their nuisance value. And look at the soup they are in.

In the run-up to the elections the military government flirted with the MMA, giving it latitude denied to the two mainstream parties, the PML-N and the PPP. Why this kid-glove approach? The military and the religious parties had collaborated before both on the foreign front, as during the Afghan 'jihad', and in domestic politics, as against Bhutto's PPP. This alliance could be resurrected. Or so at least some elements from both sides thought.

The biggest concession came in the matter of graduate degrees. Remember that Musharraf's National Reconstruction Bureau (why not send it to Iraq where it should be able to teach Bremer a thing or two?), had made a graduation degree a must for standing for parliament.

Now every primary school student in Pakistan knows that certificates issued by religious seminaries have never been considered equivalent to university degrees. But the military government wanted the mullahs on board. And the Election Commission being about as independent as any sergeant major, held religious certificates equal to university degrees. That's how the mullahs were able to contest the elections last year.

Funny, isn't it? Musharraf's strongest talking point these days is his resolute opposition to Talibanization as exemplified by the mullahs of the MMA. But who helped create Frankenstein?

But this is to run ahead of our story. As their side of the bargain, the mullahs were expected to cooperate with the military. Favour for favour. But once the mullahs made a big showing in the October elections, posting their biggest ever win in the country's history, they fell prey to delusions of grandeur.

Bear in mind that apart from the military-sponsored Q League (the King's Party in 'real' democracy), the mullahs were the biggest beneficiaries of the October elections, winning outright power in the Frontier, half a share of power in Balochistan and a significant presence in the federal parliament. They were now part of the system, something that, in a rational setting, should have dictated the logic of compromise or collaboration.

But the mullahs wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Even while wanting desperately to preserve the electoral power they had acquired, they felt impelled to flaunt their commitment to democracy. So they challenged the LFO, Musharraf's hatchet job on the Constitution, and, far more seriously, made an issue of Musharraf's uniform, saying that he should take it off or give a date for doing so. This was heresy. It was also unrealistic politics for it amounted to asking Stalin to leave the Kremlin, the source of his power.

In their flirtatious or bashful mode Musharraf was all praise for the MMA going to the extent of saying its leaders were the only sane and rational people in Pakistani politics.

Everything changed when the LFO and the president's uniform became issues. Overnight the same people hailed as apostles of sanity and reasonableness were denounced as firebrands wanting to bring Talibanization to Pakistan. That was the time moves were set afoot to call into question the very religious certificates earlier declared kosher by the Election Commission.

Not to forget another thing, the MMA's rediscovery of democracy brought it closer to the PPP and the PML-N. Now in Gen Musharraf's dictionary there are two Al Qaidas, one led by Osama bin Laden and the other jointly by Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. When it comes to these two figures, the radar signals go wild in the central situation room of 'real' democracy.

The mullahs have already been put on the defensive, the spring deserting their step. If the centre (for which read Musharraf) chooses to make an issue of their degrees, there is little they can do about it. Calls for popular protests are easy to make but harder to carry out.

In any case, it stretches the imagination to think that Pakistan's mullahs have any stomach for taking on the military, their erstwhile godfathers.