WASHINGTON - Anti-American sentiment in Pakistan is "going out of style", a leading American newspaper said in a dispatch on Monday, noting "a subtle but broad" shift in Pakistani society's attitude towards the United States.
"The shift has come as Pakistanis appear to be looking closer to home for the causes of — and answers to — the country’s woes, according to interviews with residents, analysts, and current and former diplomats," The Washington Post reported from Islamabad.
In this regard, correspondent Tim Craig cited the experience of American citizens, analysts and PEW research findings in a news story on the change in the views about the United States, which contrast with the opinions prevalent during the height of the Afghan conflict, when war spilled over into Pakistan and frequent and highly controversial drone strikes caused deaths.
The story relates the experience of an American citizen, a Montana resident Doug Chabot, who sometimes stuck a Canadian maple leaf on his bag in the previous years in a climate when Pakistanis were angered by US foreign policy. But when Chabot returned late last summer, he was surprised by how “welcoming” Pakistanis were, the Post notes. “There was no anti-American sentiment walking into stores or the markets and, if anything, people were concerned that I thought they hated Americans,” said Chabot, who runs a charity focused on educating Pakistani girls. “His experience reflects a subtle but broad shift in Pakistani society as the war in neighbouring Afghanistan draws to a close: Anti-American sentiment appears to be going out of style,” the Post story added. The gruesome massacre of about150 students and teachers in Peshawar on December 16, 2014 also affected a change views about some counterterrorism policies. And as conflict spreads in the Middle East, there is a growing recognition in Pakistan that sectarian violence in Muslim countries isn’t all driven by the United States, the newspaper report says.
"The Obama administration’s efforts to quietly rebuild relationships here are starting to have an effect," the Post said, citing analysts.
The report says the US Embassy has been reaching out to religious and business leaders while avoiding getting entangled in Pakistani political debates.
“The metaphor that people use for the US-Pakistan relationship over its 65-year-plus history is a roller coast of ups and downs, peaks and valleys,” Richard Olson, the US ambassador to Pakistan since May 2012," was quoted as saying.
Ayaz Amir, a political commentator and former lawmaker, was quoted as saying, “You now don’t even see the usual firebrands coming up with standard anti-American declarations. There is a sense we have to deal with our own problems, and it is up to us how we handle those problems, and I think anti-Americanism, really, no longer seems that relevant.” In recent years, as the war in Afghanistan spilled across the border and US drone strikes pounded the Pakistani tribal hideouts of al-Qaeda and other militants, the report noted that the United States was often the chief target of Pakistani frustrations over a stagnant economy, political turmoil, and the terrorism-related deaths of thousands of civilians and troops.
"Newspaper commentaries regularly savaged the United States, and anti-American protests — sometimes violent — were frequent. Poll after poll indicated that Pakistanis viewed the United States, a major provider of aid to Pakistan, with more disdain than people in almost any other nation."
But, it said, a Pew Research Center poll released in August showed a significant decline in the percentage of Pakistanis who held negative views of the United States — still a majority at 59 percent, but down from 80 percent two years before.
"The shifting attitudes do not necessarily mean Pakistan is safer for Westerners, the report pointed out. This month, an American teacher was shot and critically wounded in Karachi, and three US citizens have been kidnapped and released here over the past two years, according to a recent State Department report. (President Obama recently announced that Warren Weinstein of Rockville, an American who had been captured in Pakistan, was accidentally killed in a US drone strike in January.)
"But those incidents, carried out by Islamist extremists or criminal gangs, cloud what otherwise has been an improving relationship between the two countries."
“Now, the progressive Pakistanis are choosing to stay quiet,” Farzana Bari, an Islamabad-based human rights activist, was quoted in the report as saying. “I personally have been very anti-drone strikes, but now I feel like, ‘Okay, if they are dealing with the extremist groups, that is good.”
Public anger toward the United States is now increasingly hard to spot, correspondent Craig said.
"Last year, Imran Khan, a political figure and former cricket star, struggled to gain public support for a blockade of NATO supply routes to Afghanistan in response to American drone strikes. This year, after an al-Qaeda attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, the decision by several American media outlets to publish some of the magazine’s controversial cartoons of Prophet Muhammad drove relatively few protesters to the streets."
Even controversial American movies generate far less passion here than they would have a few years ago, it noted. Little attention, for example, was given to “American Sniper,” which has been criticised as insensitive to Muslims.
On the campus of Quaid-i-Azam University, several students said the United States just isn’t a major topic of discussion anymore.
Rasool Bakhsh Rais, a political analyst, said the rise of the Islamic State and the broader sectarian struggle in the Middle East is diverting attention away from the United States. Even though many Pakistanis still disdain US military involvement in the region, Rais said they increasingly pin much of the blame on “new actors” such as Iran or Saudi Arabia.