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.
 

In a new book launched this week about the ill-fated attempt by British imperialists in the mid 19th century to occupy Afghanistan, I came across an interesting detail: the Afghans refused to play cricket. During the occupation of Kabul by British troops from India, “the Afghans looked on with astonishment at the bowling, batting and fagging out of the English players”, writes former Reuters journalist Jules Stewart in ”Crimson Snow: Britain’s First Disaster in Afghanistan“.

With NATO reaffirming its commitment to Afghanistan in a “strategic vision” statement issued at a summit in Bucharest this week, I wondered if there was a bigger lesson in this refusal to engage in cricket,  just as the Afghans have never submitted to foreign occupation — seeing off the British Raj in the 19th century and defeating Soviet occupiers in the 20th century. ”The Afghans will always win,” writes Stewart in the conclusion to his book.

The lessons of history would suggest the odds are stacked against NATO. It has just 47,000 troops in the country, whereas the Soviet Union had between 100,000 and 120,000 troops there at any one time. U.S. Army General McNeill, the commander of the NATO-led force in Afghanistan, has said U.S. doctrine suggests a force of well over 400,000 Afghan and foreign troops to fight an insurgency in a country of Afghanistan’s size and population, although he has made clear he does not expect NATO to provide that.

The situation is made additionally complicated by instability in Pakistan, whose lawless tribal areas are used as a refuge by al Qaeda and Taliban militants fighting in Afghanistan. As Karl Inderfurth, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, wrote earlier this week, Pakistan can “make or break” the NATO mission in Afghanistan: “Afghanistan and Pakistan are inextricably linked. There can be no successful outcome for Afghanistan if Pakistan is not a part of the solution.” 

Indeed, so bleak is the outlook that some are calling for an exit strategy as in this article by Patrick Seale, who says NATO has ”got itself into a colossal muddle in Afghanistan”.

But there are other voices to be found too. In the foreword to Crimson Snow, British General David Richards, a former commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, says that this war is different from those that preceded it.  While admitting that today’s diplomats and soldiers frequently make the same errors as did the British in 1841-42,  he argues that “after a hesitant start, lessons have been learnt”. He quotes polling in late 2007 that, he says, indicates that more than 80 percent of the Afghan population want its elected government and the international community to succeed. “While the lessons of history tell us that we do not have forever, in this Afghan war the Afghan people and the foreigner are for now on the same side.”

So is he right? Is there still cause for optimism in Afghanistan? Or is NATO condemned to the same fate as the foreign forces that preceded it?

As an afterthought, I checked with our Afghanistan correspondent Jon Hemming whether cricket has finally caught on in Kabul. He pointed me to a story he wrote late last year about a fledgling Afghan cricket team itching to take on the best sides in the world. Before, he writes, “the absence of cricket in Afghanistan was a sign that the Afghans, unlike neighbouring imperial India, had never been conquered by the British”. But the sport has now finally been brought to Afghanistan by refugees who had fled to Pakistan and then returned  when the Taliban were toppled in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks.

With NATO saying it is nearing a deal to use Russian land and airspace to supply its security forces in Afghanistan, I’ve been trying to  work out what this could mean for Pakistan.

In the Asia Times Online, former Indian diplomat M K Bhadrakumar quotes U.S. military spokesmen as saying that about three quarters of all supplies are currently sent to Afghanistan via Pakistan. ”On the face of it, Washington should jump at the Russian offer of support to the NATO mission in Afghanistan,” he writes. “Pakistan has proved to be an unreliable partner in the ‘war on terror’. The growing political uncertainties in Pakistan put question marks on the wisdom of the US continuing to depend so heavily on Pakistan for ferrying supplies for its troops in Afghanistan.”

My first thought was to ask if this would mean a lowering of U.S. support for Pakistan and a concomitant reduction in the $10 billion in aid that it has pumped into Pakistan since 9/11 to obtain its help in the war in Afghanistan? Many Pakistanis complain the  United States has a long history of using and then abandoning Pakistan, most notably relying on it to arm and fund the mujahedeen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and then losing interest when the Russians withdrew in 1989.

 But it seems highly unlikely that the United States would turn its back on Pakistan this time around since it can’t afford to keep driving Taliban and al Qaeda fighters out of Afghanistan only for them to seek refuge in Pakistan. According to a report published by the U.S. intelligence group Stratfor in January, “So long as the Taliban have sanctuary and logistical support from Pakistan, transferring all coalition troops in Iraq to Afghanistan would have no effect. And withdrawing from Afghanistan would return the situation to the status quo before Sept. 11. If dealing with the Taliban and destroying al Qaeda are part of any endgame, the key lies in Pakistan.”

In fact it would seem more logical that the United States would want to send troops to Pakistan to fight the Taliban and al Qaeda and prevent them seeking sanctuary there - as Defense Secretary Robert Gates suggested in January. That “offer” was promptly rebuffed by Pakistan and is even less likely to be acceptable after parliamentary elections in February left Washington’s ally, President Pervez Musharraf, fighting for his survival.

The new coalition government being put in place by the Pakistan People’s Party of the late Benazir Bhutto and the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif is expected to try to avoid the confrontational approach to Islamist militants which left many Pakistanis accusing Musharraf of fighting America’s war, and which many blame for bringing  mayhem into its heartland, including the latest bomb attacks in Lahore and Islamabad.

In a comment on a blog I posted last week, former Pakistan diplomat Wajid Shamsul Hasan writes that ”by exploring a more carrot-and-stick approach to dealing with the Taliban and al Qaeda than simply shooting at everything that moves, there may be greater dividends than were possible hitherto. Even the army has been uncomfortable with methods tried thus far.”

There are lots of pieces of the jigsaw missing here. Bhadrakumar says in his Asia Times Online article that NATO is so keen to secure Russian help in Afghanistan that it is willing to defer a decision on membership for Ukraine and Georgia in what he calls “a huge gesture by NATO to Moscow’s sensitivities”. Though the existence of such a trade-off has been denied by western diplomats, it does suggest  Washington is extremely worried about the situation in Afghanistan. If it is desperate enough to go cap in hand to Moscow to help it defeat the Taliban, can it also be patient enough to tolerate a new government in Pakistan trying a more softly, softly approach?

So to go back to my original question, what would a deal between NATO and Russia on Afghanistan, if confirmed, mean for Pakistan? Would the United States’ reduced reliance on Pakistan for supplies to Afghanistan lead to less involvement there? Or does it signal the opposite — that Washington is now so worried about Afghanistan that it will put even more pressure on Pakistan to crack down harder to cut off the escape routes?

In this context it’s perhaps worth rereading Henry Kissinger’s warning to the United States in an op-ed published last week in the International Herald Tribune. “A wise policy must recognize that the internal structure of Pakistani politics is essentially out of the control of American political decision-making,” he writes.