U.S. government and military leaders worry that  the next attack on the homeland will emanate from western Pakistan, believing al Qaeda to have reconstituted there.

But Pakistanis worry too for their security and their fear is  the U.S. military itself.

A couple of polls on what ordinary Pakistanis think of the  U.S. campaign against al Qaeda makes for interesting reading,  coming as it does ahead of the second  U.S. presidential debate between candidates Barack Obama and John McCain where Pakistan will likely figure high on the foreign policy agenda, as it did in the previous round.

More than four in 10 (45 percent) of those polled by Gallup said the U.S. military presence in neighbouring Afghanistan was a threat to Pakistan.  Only 17 percent said the United States did not imperil their country while a sizeable 38 percent did not have an opinion

Pakistanis appear to be worried about a  U.S. military presence in Asia itself, suggesting the distrust that has crept into the relationship between the two allies runs deep and is not just about the war along the  Afghan-Pakistan border.

Forty-three percent of residents said a U.S. military presence in Asia threatens Pakistan and again only 17 percent said it did not.

Gallup carried out the poll in June, much before the United States intensified cross-border attacks on militants inside Pakistan including the first known ground assault in  September. So, for a significant proportion of Pakistanis  some of those fears are coming true.

Only one in 10 of the respondents said Pakistan’s  cooperation with the United States in the war against Islamist militants had helped their country. A third said it had benefited the United States, Gallup said.

The survey involved face-to-face interviews with 804 people, aged 15 years and older with a margin of error of  5 percentage points.

A broader, worldwide, BBC poll on the impact of the campaign against al Qaeda published late last month also elicted an interesting and rather  worrying response from Pakistan. 

While the most commonly held view of al-Qaeda in the  23 nations polled was a negative one, Pakistan and Egypt  had different ideas about Osama bin Laden’s organisation.

Some 60% of Egyptians said they had either a positive or  mixed view of al Qaeda.  The BBC suggested this could  be linked to the fact that the group has many Egyptians among its leaders.

Meanwhile in Pakistan, where much of the battle against  al-Qaeda is being fought, just 19% said they had a  negative view of the group.

The findings from Egypt and Pakistan were “yet another  indicator that the US ‘war on terror’ is not winning hearts and minds,” the BBC quoted Doug Miller, from polling agency Globescan, as saying .

Some 24,000 adults across 23 countries were polled for the  BBC World Service between 8 July and 12 September. A  pdf of the poll is available here.

The broader result of the poll was that U.S. efforts at  tackling al Qaeda were not regarded as having been  successful, producing instead a stalemate. Some 29% of people said the “war on terror” launched by  President George W Bush in 2001 had had no effect on  the Islamist militant network.

According to 30% of those surveyed, US policies have  strengthened al Qaeda.
 

The irony is hard to miss. Just as Pakistan is struggling with the fallout of the first known breach of its territorial sovereignty by U.S. ground troops and all the odium associated with it in a proud nation, India has been welcomed into the nuclear high table, almost entirely at America’s behest.

Two unrelated events but coming days apart seemed to underline the divergent paths the two nations are embarked upon.  One has a gun pointed to it; the other is being wooed.

On Saturday, America railroaded whatever opposition there was from smaller countries in the Nuclear Suppliers Group to civilian nuclear trade with India, despite its refusal to give up nuclear weapons and sign the NPT. As far as New Delhi is concerned the approval is a momentous decision as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, because it ends 34 years of sanctions and isolation following the first nuclear test in 1974.

I remember an Indian defence scientist telling me way back that the sanctions were so pervasive that some institutions blacklisted by the United States on suspicion they were involved in the nuclear weapons programme couldn’t even import a toothbrush from there.

In one stroke, and in line with the way in which the Bush administration has gone about remaking the world in its own image, all that has changed. India’s nuclear weapons aren’t a problem any more as America builds a new strategic partnership that many see as aimed at balancing China.

And what of Pakistan ? A seat at the nuclear table is probably the farthest thing on anyone’s mind including perhaps Islamabad’s as it struggles with  more fundamental issues of territorial integrity at this point. The raid this week by U.S. forces may signal an even more intense attacks as this report says.

But the Pakistan government, says Gary Leupp, a history professor at Tufts University, has provided more assistance to the United States than any other as it pursues its goals in southwest Asia. No country has been more dramatically destabilized as the price of its cooperation.
 
“But not only does the U.S. political class take this disastrous compliance for granted, it wants to further emphasize Islamabad’s irrelevance by attacking the border area at will,” he writes. And ominously it’s not just the Bush crowd; Senator Barack Obama has been saying that the United States must do more to press Pakistan to act against the Islamist militants as an earlier post on this blog pointed out.