So, Al-Jazeera (yeah, I know) commissions a poll from Gallup in Pakistan. 2,600 people across the political spectrum, in all 4 Pakistani provinces. Might be methodologically flawed for all I know, but doesn't look like it to casual inspection.
And the question is which is the greatest threat to Pakistan - India, the Taliban/Al-Qaeda who are waging an internal civil war in Pakistan, or the USA.
11% say the Taliban. 18% say India. 59% say the United States.
Clearly, President Obama has forfeited the USA's reserves of goodwill.
Other conclusions are possible, of course, for people who realize the globe doesn't revolve around them and their wishes, and who weren't stupid enough to believe nonsense about squandered goodwill in the first place. For instance:
"Pakistan is a Potemkin State with nukes, poor development, limited capacity to deal with its Islamist civil war, justifiably low government legitimacy (note other poll), and a cultural penchant for blaming others rather than facing its problems. Except for the nukes, it resembles many if not most states in the Islamic world. Its government and/or local leaders will deal with its problems only to the extent that they're forced to (coalition of the bribed, bought, and coerced), and will resent those doing the forcing."
In Pakistan, however, the alternative is Islamonazis with nukes - which is why the forcing acquires such an urgent dimension in the first place. Without US help and strikes, the Taliban was clearly winning in Pakistan - and still might with support from its high-level friends in the ISI and military.
This dynamic, and these sorts of poll results, will be common to every other Islamic country now aiming at nuclear technology.
The US model of development aid to mostly 'strengthen central government' is part of the problem.
Poor countries need better functioning justice systems / property rights & contract enforcement -- but otherwise smaller governments with more space for private (=peaceful) business.
Tom, the problem with "better functioning justice systems/property rights" and "smaller government with more space for private business" in places like Iraq and Pakistan is that those places have a millenia-long (10,000 years in the case of Iraq) tradition of brutal tyrants lording over supine populations and a religion that commands just that political arrangement. If these were Western cultures with a tradition of Christianity and the Enlightenment, I would agree with you, but they're not. In my view what went wrong with the Iraq war was Bush's lunatic notion that, to paraphrase the Marine Colonel in Full Metal Jacket, "Inside every raghead there's an American struggling to get out." There's not. And there never will be. The question is not whether or not the Middle East and Western Asia will be a collection of tyrannies, but what kind of tyrannies they will be, ones that support, or at least don't oppose, our interests or ones that damage them.