ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 15 –– The images that lingered from President Clinton's visit to India and Pakistan in March were lopsided enough: the grinning U.S. president being showered with petals by Indian village women, then arriving grimly in a camouflaged plane in Pakistan under heavy security.

In recent days, as the leaders of Pakistan and India visited the United States, the contrasts again were sharp: Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was cheered as he addressed a joint session of Congress, while Pakistan's military chief, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was forced to delay his flight home because of a bomb threat.

Despite Musharraf's efforts to portray his U.S. visit as a success, highlighted last week by a brief handshake and chat with Clinton during the U.N. Millennium Summit in New York, the spotlight clearly belonged to Vajpayee, who was received with warmth and pomp during an official state visit to Washington.

U.S. officials took pains to stress that they will "work with" Pakistan's military government on such contentious issues as Islamic terrorism and the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, rather than endorse India's efforts to isolate its adversary and tar Pakistan as a country that supports terrorism.

"President Clinton is concerned about what is happening in Kashmir, and he is trying his best to resolve the issue," Musharraf told reporters when he landed in Karachi early this morning. "We will maintain relations with the United States, independently of India's relationship with them."

But Musharraf was not granted any formal meetings with U.S. officials during his stay, an indication of Washington's arm's-length attitude toward his government, which seized power in a coup d'etat nearly a year ago. Vajpayee's official welcome, in contrast, highlighted the increasingly warm relationship between the two democracies, which have pledged to increase both business and strategic ties.

Musharraf also failed to garner much sympathy at the United Nations for Pakistan's stance on Kashmir, despite his repeated pleas for international mediation and his offers to meet with Indian leaders and make a "no war" pact with New Delhi.

Moreover, in various speeches and news conferences, he and Vajpayee slung belligerent barbs at each other, creating a strong impression that the military rivalry between these two nuclear states is becoming even more intractable. Vajpayee called Pakistan the major "source of terrorism" in South Asia, while Musharraf charged that Indian democracy is undermined by human rights abuses and the country's caste system.

Pakistan and India both claim Kashmir, a Himalayan border region, and they have fought two wars over it. Pakistan supports a guerrilla insurgency there, composed of some Kashmiri groups that seek political independence and others based in Pakistan that view their mission as an Islamic holy war against India, which is overwhelmingly Hindu.

"It is strange that the authors of a vicious terrorist campaign . . . were offering a dialogue after sabotaging an historic peace initiative," Vajpayee said in a U.N. speech, referring to his 1999 peacemaking visit to Pakistan that was undermined when Pakistan-based guerrillas invaded the Kargil mountains in Kashmir. "Terrorism and dialogue do not go together."

Musharraf has depicted himself as tolerant of domestic dissent and press freedom, and yet during his New York visit he lashed out at critics in the media who have increasingly portrayed his government as inept and unable to deliver on its promises of reform.

"There was very little Pakistan could do to keep itself from being overshadowed" by Vajpayee's visit, wrote columnist Tahir Mirza in The Dawn newspaper today. But he suggested that Musharraf had made things worse by "engaging in a war of words with the Indians over Kashmir" and by "ridiculing the concepts of democracy and secularism" while on a visit to the United States.

In New York, Musharraf also drew an unexpected and humiliating snub from Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who condemned dictatorships and demanded prosecution for Pakistani abuses during the 1971 war with Bangladesh. The Pakistani leader reacted harshly, criticizing Hasina for intervening in Pakistan's affairs and canceling planned talks with her.

"Musharraf went abroad hoping to build international goodwill, but he came back having slighted one of the most important members of the South Asian alliance," said one Pakistani political analyst. "Instead of gaining new friends, he lost one." Then, in a final blow to Musharraf's foreign image, his flight home Thursday on a Pakistan International Airlines jet was marred by a telephoned bomb threat, which forced the plane to return to New York for five hours.

Even before his visit to the United States, Musharraf's claim that he seeks a peaceful resolution to the Kashmir dispute was weakened by the abrupt collapse of a brief cease-fire there. A Kashmiri insurgent group, Hizb ul-Mujaheddin, announced the truce in July, but two weeks later it was withdrawn by the group's Islamabad-based leaders. Indian officials said the halt to the cease-fire proved that Pakistan was not serious about ending the conflict, which has claimed more than 50,000 lives in a decade of fighting. Guerrilla leaders said India had undermined the truce by setting impossible conditions for peace talks, but Musharraf said he hoped New Delhi would not rule out future negotiations.

"The Hizb ul offer was a window of opportunity," Musharraf told reporters in Karachi today. "I hope India will show some statesmanship and take the Kashmir issue toward some practical solution."