MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) – Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden planned to compare the current unrest in Pakistan with the prelude to the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis during a speech Thursday.

Biden, a U.S. senator and party foreign policy guru, planned to tell a forum at Saint Anselm College that the situation in Pakistan is linked to the United States’ broader foreign policy goals. He said the United States must shift from a policy based on solely on President Pervez Musharraf to one based on the country as a whole.

“Pakistan has strong democratic traditions and a large, moderate majority. But that moderate majority must have a voice in the system and an outlet with elections. If not, moderates may find that they have no choice but to make common cause with extremists, just as the Shah’s opponents did in Iran three decades ago,” Biden planned to say, according to remarks his campaign provided to The Associated Press.

“But unlike Iran, Pakistan already has nuclear weapons.”

Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf declared emergency rule on Saturday and granted sweeping powers to authorities to crush political dissent. Musharraf has been promising to restore democracy since seizing power in a 1999 coup, but has since ousted independent-minded judges, put a stranglehold on the media and has put thousands of Pakistanis in jail or under house arrest since assuming emergency powers.

Musharraf said his decisions to suspend the constitution and oust its top judge were necessary to prevent a takeover by Islamic extremists. Biden, however, said such moves only invite such extremists such as those in Iran.

In 1979, a group of militant university students took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran, leading to a diplomatic crisis. The students objected to the U.S. support for its hand-selected leader, instead of a democratically elected chief. They held the Americans and their embassy hostage for 444 days, until President Reagan took the oath of office in 1981.

Biden said the nightmare could repeat itself, but this time with nuclear ability.

“It is hard to imagine a greater nightmare for America than the world’s second-largest Muslim nation becoming a failed state in fundamentalist hands, with an arsenal of nuclear weapons and a population larger than those of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea combined,” Biden said in prepared remarks.

Biden badly trails in most presidential polls, but he has laid his hopes that voters will reward his foreign policy expertise during the primaries. He has staked out Iowa as a place to make a stand against his better known rivals, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson also was scheduled to speak at the same forum in Manchester on Thursday.

AP-ES-11-08-07 0821EST