Shaukat Mahmoud was on his way to Friday prayers at Islamabad's Red Mosque. Although he distrusts Western reporters and initially refused to talk, his hostility towards the United States got the better of him. "The defamation of Muslims in the world is making people take up the AK-47," the 37-year-old Pakistani exclaimed, referring to the assault rifle popularly known as the Kalashnikov.
"The US is creating a situation in which Muslims are forced to use violence against it." During a brief visit to Islamabad on Friday, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to repair Washington's badly damaged relations with Pakistan. There was no evidence that Pakistani government leaders knew that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was killed by US commandos in nearby Abbottabad on May 2, had been living in Pakistan for years, she said, and urged Pakistanis to fight terrorism alongside the United States. "Pakistan should understand that anti-Americanism and conspiracy theories will not make their problems disappear," Clinton said.
Anti-Americanism has hit new highs in Pakistan following the US raid on bin Laden's compound, carried out without informing Pakistani authorities. The negative sentiment has flared up before, however, and has been fuelled in recent months by repeated US drone air strikes along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
The flames were fanned further by the affair involving CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who shot dead two Pakistanis on a Lahore street in January, but was suddenly allowed to leave the country after a mysterious payment of "blood money" to relatives of the dead men.
In a survey after the US operation against bin Laden, just 1 percent of respondents said US-Pakistan ties were close. The majority described the US as either a rival or an enemy. "They (the Americans) ought to treat Pakistan like a front-line state in the war against terrorism, but they attack Pakistan instead," complained Pakistani senator Khurshid Ahmad, vice-president of the powerful Islamist Jamaat-i-Islami party. "Don't try our patience unduly," he warned Washington.
If Afghans can wage armed resistance against the US, so can Pakistanis - and even more so, said Ahmad, who believes nuclear-armed Pakistan should gradually withdraw from the war against terrorism. Pakistan is being "continually deceived," said former intelligence bureau chief, brigadier Imtiaz Ahmed.
"The perception deep in people's heads is that the war against terrorism serves America's interests only, while the Pakistani people pay the price," he said, adding that hostility towards the United States was at an "all-time high." As Pakistani scholar Ahmad Salim sees it, the animosity is growing daily and is not always rational. "If you talk to a woman at the market, she'll blame (US President Barack) Obama for the rise in vegetable prices," he said.
Experts say Islamabad needs the billions of dollars in aid from Washington, a view shared by few Pakistanis. According to recent Pakistani government estimates reported by local media, the war against terrorism - or, the alliance with the US - has cost the economy 68 billion dollars since the end of 2001, compared with US aid of 15-17 billion dollars during this period. Washington's financial assistance, conspiracy theorists say, is meant to keep Pakistan in economic dependence.
Although Clinton's visit may have succeeded in mollifying the Pakistani government and army, it will not have changed the minds of the general populace. Mohammed Siddique, a 22-year-old economics student at Islamabad's prestigious Quaid-i-Azam University, said his country's government had been bought by Washington and that the US was the root of all evil. "I think that the Americans want to destroy Pakistan and control the Muslim world," he remarked. "I hate America."