Who is Pakistan’s biggest threat? Not the Taliban, not even India, but the United States, according to an overwhelming majority of Pakistanis surveyed in a poll just out.

On the eve of the 62nd anniversary of Pakistan’s creation, the Gallup Pakistan poll offers a window into the mind of a troubled, victimised nation. And it surely must make for some equally uncomfortable reading in the United States, led at this time by a president who has sought to reach out to the Muslim world and distance himself from the foreign policy adventurism of his predecessor.

Here is the poll summary and here the full poll conducted by Gallup Pakistan, an affiliate of Gallup International. The poll was commissioned by Al Jazeera and here are some highlights:

Fifty-nine percent of Pakistanis believe the United States poses the greatest threat to the nation, despite the billions of dollars of military and development aid. (There is, of course, a separate debate on about how heavily the previous administration skewed the aid towards the military instead of schools and hospitals as highlighted in a report by the influential Center for American Progress but that at some other point.)

About 18 percent of those polled said they felt most threatened by India. The number is not as high as you would ordinarily expect, given that the Pakistani establishment has long portrayed the neighbour as the existential threat. Is there an opportunity here? Will the peacemakers on the two sides seize on this to build greater people-to-people contacts?

Anyway to get back to the poll, only 11 percent thought that the Taliban were the greatest threat, despite all the bombings and suicide attacks they have carried out across the country. To a separate question, some 43 percent supported dialogue with the Taliban.

Is there a huge disconnect then? While America says the next major attack is likely to originate from the Taliban - al Qaeda strongholds in Pakistan’s northwest, quite a substantial number of Pakistanis do not think them to be a threat, and would like talks to resolve the problem.

“Drone anger” or public fury over U.S. Predator strikes inside Pakistan seems to be especially responsible for America’s unpopularity. A massive 67 percent of those polled said they opposed U.S. military operations on Pakistani soil.

Can America then really fight this war, with the Pakistani people so dead against it? For the United States to become even more hated than India, it takes quite a doing, the Gulf-based The Nation wrote.

“If it is less popular in Pakistan than India is, it must indeed be doing something wrong. Billions of dollars in aid and untold numbers of visits by US officials have failed to win Pakistan’s full support for efforts to defeat the Taliban,” the paper said.

This poll was conducted on July 26-27 in all four provinces of the country. Which means it was done before the reported death of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in a U.S. drone strike. That has been widely welcomed in Pakistan and some people think it may blunt some of the hostility to U.S. drone attacks as The Times notes.

But it is hard to see the numbers drop dramatically, especially given that the Pakistani Taliban is not about to be finished despite the loss of its powerful leader.

So where do we go from here?  Rob Asghar, a Pakistan-American writing in the Huffington Post, kicks the ball back at Pakistanis, saying ultimately nobody can help them save themselves. Pakistan must stop thinking of itself as the victim, blaming first India, and now the United States for all its ills.

“As a Pakistani-American, let me offer my own poll response: The biggest threat posed to Pakistan comes not from the U.S. Not from the Taliban. And not from India.”

“No, the biggest threat to Pakistan comes from Pakistanis. The threat comes from the actions of some, and the inaction of others.”

[File photo of a protest in Lahore and U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus and Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Kayani]

David Kilcullen knows a thing or two about counter-insurgency.

A former lieutenant-colonel in the Australian army and a senior adviser to U.S. General David Petraeus, he helped shape the “surge” policy that is widely credited with pulling Iraq back from the brink of chaos. He has just written a book entitled “The Accidental Guerrilla: fighting small wars in the midst of a big one” which closely examines insurgencies from Thailand and Indonesia to Afghanistan and Iraq, including what it takes to contain and quell them.

Far from being gung-ho or militaristic, Kilcullen takes an analytical approach, putting a heavy emphasis on the need for cultural and linguistic understanding. Without a deep appreciation of history, politics and anthropology, defeat is all but guaranteed  in complex foreign lands even for the world’s mightiest of armies, he argues.

 Which is why it was particularly notable what he said at a book launch in London this week.

The U.S. military has about 1.6 million personnel all told, from frontline troops to cooks and drivers. But there are just 6,000 foreign service officers in the U.S. State Department, he said. That’s about 260 soldiers to each diplomat, a far higher ratio than in any other major military in the world, according to Kilcullen.

“There are more members of U.S. military marching bands then there are foreign service officers,” he said. “In fact, there are about ten times as many accountants in the U.S. military as there are foreign service officers in the U.S. State Department.”

His point hardly needed reinforcing. The U.S. military spends vast amounts — forecast to be $650 billion in 2009 — on ensuring its armed forces are able to fight whatever threat may emerge anywhere in the world at any given time, but a tiny fraction of that amount on diplomatic and cultural liaison work that might help understand a conflict better or even prevent it.

While it’s true that military officers have received a great deal of intensive training in recent years in understanding customs and culture in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the relevant languages, the amount spent is still miniscule alongside that dedicated to arms and weaponry.

Of course, a war is not won by words and diplomacy alone; Kilcullen was not saying that the United States should ditch its tanks and fighter jets and just sit down to talk things through. But what he did say was this:

“The U.S. military is fabulously well developed but is ready to fight the wrong kind of conflict… It is good at fighting state actors but not so good at fighting non-state actors.” 

And in conclusion on Afghanistan he added: “I fear that in Afghanistan we are getting to the worst of both worlds. In the next year or two, we still won’t have enough troops there to keep everyone safe, but we will have just enough to keep everyone pissed off. It’s the opposite of a sweet spot. It’s a sour spot.”

Does the financial crisis mark the beginning of the end of American global dominance? And if so, what would the decline of American power mean for Afghanistan and Pakistan? It’s early days yet, but here are a few themes that are emerging from the maelstrom.

If you put aside the many arguments over whether the Americans were, or were not, guilty of latter-day imperialism, you can find consensus on two main points: that the U.S. model of free-market capitalism has been sorely challenged by the financial crisis; and that America’s reputation as a military superpower has been tarnished by its less-than-successful campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this respect, there are obvious parallels with the collapse of the British empire after World War Two, starting with its departure from India in 1947. Although Britain likes to think it won the war, its postwar situation carried all the hallmarks of defeat. It was virtually bankrupt and with the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942 it had lost the myth of invincibility that allowed it to rule an empire on which the sun never set.  With neither the money, nor the credibility, to hold India by force in the face of a powerful Indian independence movement, it mustered as much dignity as possible for an emperor stripped of his clothes and left abruptly, partitioning the subcontinent into India and Pakistan on its way out.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this analogy works for the United States, and that it too begins to draw in on itself. The lessons of British imperial history suggest that when empires collapse, they do so not gradually, but in big leaps that create chaos for those left behind (for example in the estimated one million killed at Partition).

In an analysis in TomDispatch.com, Aziz Huq writes about how Britain, even after being forced to withdraw from India, only properly realised the limitations of its power in 1956, after its hopelessly miscalculated attack on Egypt following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. “The country’s monetary weakness led directly to its military collapse in the crisis,” he writes. ”The Suez fiasco … also marked the end of British imperial ambitions.”

This is not to suggest that the Americans are about to suddenly abandon Afghanistan and Pakistan.  In the short term, both U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are committed to stepping up the campaign in Afghanistan. At the same time, Western leaders are already lowering their sights on Afghanistan, according to this analysis from Reuters Kabul correspondent Jon Hemming. In a country that is ”famously unforgiving to foreign forces”, this may well have happened even without the financial crisis.

But it does suggest that whatever the next U.S. President decides to do about Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is unlikely to be smooth.

Now add into this mix the growing power of Afghanistan’s neighbours — Iran and Russia, traditional U.S. rivals buoyed up by petrodollars and so likely to benefit from the clipping of America’s wings that they have been dubbed along with Venezuela as a new “axis of oil“. Both Iran and Russia, along with India, supported Afghanistan’s anti-Taliban Northern Alliance when the Taliban were in power in Kabul, and are seen as likely to resist any attempt by the United States to seek reconciliation with the Taliban as a face-saving way out of the Afghan quagmire.

Then there is China, sitting on $2 trillion of foreign exchange reserves.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari just visited China to seek help to bail out Pakistan’s economy, in a trip that also marked out his independence from the United States. China has yet to fully show its hand in how far it intends to use its new-found economic might to exercise global political power.  But it’s worth remembering that the United States, when it rescued Britain from bankruptcy after World War Two, insisted on an end to British imperialism and a withdrawal from its overseas colonies. We don’t yet know what China will demand.

Does anyone want to hazard a guess how all this will play out? America’s status as the lone superpower looks vulnerable; Iran and Russia are loudly assertive, and China is quietly buying up the world’s economy.  Personally, I think there are so many variables that we can’t possibly know yet; but whatever happens, it’s likely to catch us by surprise.

Pakistan has replaced the head of its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, following months of questions from the United States about its reliability in the battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda.  Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shujaa Pasha, formerly head of military operations, will replace Lieutenant-General Nadeem Taj.

The change was part of a major overhaul of the military leadership by Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani, who also replaced the head of the 10 Corps in Rawalpindi, the most powerful corps in the army.

So to what extent was the United States responsible for the move? Or how far was it Pakistan’s own attempt to shore up its security operations as it cracks down on Islamist militants, who according to U.S. military commander David Petraeus threaten Pakistan’s “very existence”?

Washington has long suspected elements within the ISI of passing sensitive information to the Taliban –with whom the spy agency worked closely before the 9/11 attacks on the United States — undermining its campaign in Afghanistan. India and Afghanistan also accused the ISI of involvement in the July bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. Pakistan has denied the allegations.

The New York Times reported at the weekend that President Asif Ali Zardari had held an unpublicised meeting with Michael Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, during his visit to the United States last week, amid ongoing U.S. pressure about what it called “the double game played by Pakistan’s spy agency”.

But it also quoted Zardari as saying that: “The ISI will be handled, that is our problem.” He added that ”We don’t hunt with the hound and run with the hare, which is what (former president Pervez) Musharraf was doing,” and said that ”Anyone not conforming with my government’s policy will be thrown out.”

Besides asking how much the change of leadership at the ISI was dictated by Washington, the other question is how much the army and the government worked together on it.  

Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper said in carrying out the overhaul of the military leadership, General Kayani ”has put in place a new team to implement his vision for reviving the prestige of the armed forces and for enhancing the security of the state.” The army’s authority has been challenged by U.S. military incursions across Pakistan’s border, in what Pakistan sees as a violation of its sovereignty.

The News added however that the trend of the reshuffle demonstrated “full coordination between the civil and military leadership”.

U.S. ambassador Anne W. Patterson, in a speech reported by the Pakistan press, said last week that the depth of anti-Americanism in Pakistan, especially among the middle-class, had surprised her. Pakistan’s long-term interests were aligned with those of the United States, and those opposing U.S. engagement in the country had a limited understanding of  how the partnership based on economic assistance had changed the lives of Pakistanis, she told a meeting in Karachi. For added measure, she said that the “ïncreasingly prosperous middle class” would be the first to suffer if  hardliners gained ground.

She needn’t have looked further than to events last  week to see why America sits rather uneasily on the Pakistani mind, a heavy hand of friendship that Pakistanis are increasingly chafing against.

The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had cancelled the appointment of Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood as the senior American officer based in Pakistan following weeks of criticism in the Pakistani news media over one of his previous jobs : commander of the U.S.  prison at Guantanamo Bay.

“During General Hood’s command from 2004 to 2006, military authorities force-fed with tubes detainees who were engaging in hunger strikes at the Guantánamo prison, a step they justified as necessary to prevent the prisoners from committing suicide to protest their indefinite confinement,” the newspaper said. “Also during General Hood’s tenure, reports that an American guard may have desecrated a Koran stirred wide protests in the Islamic world.”

The surprise was more that he was named to Pakistan in the first place, where resentment about Guantanamo runs deep. It was seen as all the more insensitive  given that a new government had taken over in Islamabad promising  a different approach to tackling Islamist militancy. For while the Pentagon might have been trying to send a crisis-tested 33-year army veteran to Islamabad at a pivotal time in the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda, it was his Guantanamo command that stuck in the Pakistan mind.

“Guantánamo Bay itself has become a symbol of injustice, torture and abuse of Islam, and sending a commanding officer from there to Islamabad begs the question: What is the message coming out of the Pentagon for Pakistanis by this insensitive act?” Shireen M. Mazari, director general of the Institute of Strategic Studies, wrote in The News back in March when the appointment was announced.

There was even more coming on Capitol Hill where, according to Pakistani news reports, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee told the Foreign Affairs Committee of Congress that while the late Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People Party was doing a good job, coalition partner Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), led by Nawaz Sharif, “needed to be watched.”

Her comments, widely reported in the Pakistan press, prompted admonishment at this kind of micromanagement of the affairs of a sovereign nation and warnings that it was a recipe for disaster.

Indeed the News  argued that the more the United States or members of its political establishment criticised Sharif the greater would be his following in a country rife with anti-American sentiment. Conversely Bhutto’s widower Asif Ali Zardari might cringe at praise from Washington because it would not do him any good at home.  

The best Washington could do, the News said, would be to distance itself from governance of the country. It might even arrest the anti-Americanism that  many Americans find hard to accept.