It is no surprise that Pakistan dominates David Miliband’s musing on the coming year, with Kenya close behind. But the Foreign Secretary’s emphasis on promoting democracy in those countries and beyond is in sharp contrast with the US, where the championing of that cause is now muted, in the presidential campaign and in the Bush Administration itself.

“Millions of people seeking to have their voice heard through democratic politics is a fantastic thing”, Miliband said yesterday, in a press briefing on his 2008 priorities.

That sounds idealistic to a fault, given the imperfections of democracy in both of those troubled countries, never mind the outcome in Iraq. So does Miliband’s assertion that, “People want to be actors not spectators in the drama of life”. To welcome the “drama of life” is in itself a luxury; many people in the world would wish for less. Yet it is refreshing. The US is enjoying its most exhilarating presidential contest for more than a decade – and the campaigning for another 500,000 elected posts besides the top job – and yet abroad, the shock of its predicament in Iraq has stripped confidence from its advocacy of its own system.

Pakistan presents the problem most urgently: is the pursuit of democracy compatible with stability? For eight years President Musharraf said no, justifying his status as military leader by his claim to deliver stability and help in pursuing terrorists. For most of the eight years the US bought that answer; Britain was more equivocal.

It did not take the assassination of Benazir Bhutto two weeks ago to shatter that case. The pressure put on Musharraf by the US and Britain to let her return in October signalled frustration with him. It has been clear for years that the military was a cause of serious unrest, not the solution – appropriating land and large commercial interests, and inflaming tensions between the provinces and different ethnic groups. Even given the US’s investment in Musharraf, elections had come to look like the only way to allow those conflicts to be expressed peacefully.

Before the parliamentary elections set for February 18, Britain was making specific demands of Musharraf, said Miliband, such as the release from house arrest of Aitzaz Ahsan, chairman of the Bar Council and prominent in Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party.

British officials have expressed sharp exasperation with Musharraf since the beginning of November when he imposed the state of emergency (now lifted). Western support for him may be running its course, particularly now that General Ashfaq Kiyani, his successor as head of the army, is proving cooler-headed and with more support from the ranks.

But pushing for democracy in Pakistan is less perilous than it might sound because the military alternative is so unattractive, and because the two large parties are moderate – as is most of the electorate. The curse is that politics remains so personalised, shown in Bhutto’s choice of her 19-year-old son, Bilawal, as her successor.

In Kenya’s disputed election, Miliband said that he was encouraged that “what’s gone wrong was the counting bit” and that there was less intimidation compared with previous polls. It was also healthy, he argued, that there were overlapping teams of observers from the European Union and the Commonwealth.

He concluded that “the lesson of both British and American democracy is that you have to build it from the local to the national, whereas too many countries build from national to local”.

It is an argument easily mocked. As India has shown, democracy can exacerbate differences of religion and caste as politicians play on them to get ahead. As the US has found across the Middle East, combined with nationalism, it can put into power the people it least wants to see there. It is welcome that Britain is not inhibited in saying that in Pakistan, for one, democracy is the best answer.

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