PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Ali Khan Afridi is a wanted man.
Militants come to his house in this frontier city and menace his family. Men claiming to be from Pakistan’s intelligence services call at 2 a.m. and tell him to watch his back.
Interactive timeline: The highs and lows of U.S.-Pakistan relationship
Views of the U.S.
Afridi accepts all this as the price of his radical views: In a country where the vast majority of people believe the United States is an enemy, Afridi is unabashedly pro-American.
“I believe that America is the only power that can defeat these monsters, these terrorists,” said Afridi, a clean-shaven 36-year-old who leads a consortium of non-governmental groups. “And that means my life is in permanent danger.”
The United States and Pakistan have been allies for decades, but it has rarely been easy to be pro-American here. Now, after the killing early last month of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy SEALs, speaking out on behalf of the United States requires a degree of boldness that verges on a death wish.
While bin Laden was held in low regard by most Pakistanis and there have been few public displays of anger at his death, the impact on attitudes toward the United States has been profound. Critics of Pakistani ties with Washington are ascendant on the streets, in the media and, crucially, at Pakistan’s military headquarters in Rawalpindi. Backers of the relationship, the few who remain, have been cowed into silence or are reconsidering their stands.
“The U.S. doesn’t realize it, but the damage done is huge. This is a deep hurt that is not going to go away,” said Riaz Khokar, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States who advocates a dramatic downgrading of the relationship. “We have placed all our eggs in the U.S. basket. And the eggs turned out to be rotten.”
What Khokar and others object to is not that the United States killed bin Laden. It’s the fact that after a decade of partnership in battling extremists, the Obama administration decided to carry out the raid in the northern city of Abbottabad without informing Pakistan.
U.S. officials have said they were concerned about tipping off bin Laden and did not want to risk confiding in Pakistani security services that have not always proved trustworthy. Since bin Laden was killed in early May, U.S. policymakers have openly wondered whether elements of the Pakistani military or intelligence services knew about bin Laden’s presence.
Such statements have deepened the mistrust here and the sense of betrayal.
“In this part of the world, public humiliation is a very serious matter. And the U.S. has humiliated the armed forces of Pakistan,” said Khokar, who has met recently with Pakistan’s powerful top general, Ashfaq Kayani.
Perhaps no other Pakistani backer of the U.S. alliance has come under more scrutiny, or pressure, than Kayani. The army chief had been tightly aligned with the United States and had forged a particularly strong relationship with Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But after bin Laden’s death, Kayani “almost went into a state of shock. He could never imagine in his wildest dreams that after all the coordination with Mike, this would be the outcome,” according to retired Maj. Gen. Mahmud Ali Durrani, a former ambassador to the United States who is considered close to Kayani.
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