WASHINGTON — By now everyone with an opinion about the viability of President Obama’s

By Joel Brinkley

WASHINGTON — By now everyone with an opinion about the viability of President Obama’s new strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan has proffered it to anyone who would listen. But here’s one important complication that has received no air time: In both countries, they despise us.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the populations harbor a deep, visceral hatred of the United States borne of perceived grievances, some present-day and others long past, carefully nurtured so that they can be passed from one generation to the next. To hear them tell it, America’s presence in the region over the last eight years has made things only worse. Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold, is a primary focus of Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan. In recent months, American troops have freed a handful of villages from Taliban control and found, to their dismay, that the villagers are anything but grateful.

“What are you doing here?” an unabashed village elder near Mianposhteh, Helmand, asked an American commander just after his men had won control of the area. “What are you doing in Afghanistan? You should go back to your country.”

Typical sentiment

That sentiment, reported in the Washington Post, is all-too typical. Afghans, generally, don’t much like the Taliban. But they like Americans less.

The United States and NATO have given up thousands of lives, billions of dollars, all sacrificed for the twins goal of eliminating al-Qaida and bringing Afghans and Pakistanis freedom to live their lives as they choose. The job is far from finished and, like every military, the West has committed blunders and miscalculations along the way.

But in both states, gratitude is the last emotion in the people’s minds. Where, they ask, was the United States in the terrible years before Sept. 11, 2001? No one cared about Afghanistan then.

As Pervez Musharraf, the former Pakistani president, put it earlier this month, “Pakistan and Afghanistan were shortsightedly abandoned to their fate by the West in 1989. This abandonment led to a sense of betrayal.”

And now that Americans have been in the region for eight years, Afghans say the problem isn’t just the Taliban. Western troops have shown an unfortunate propensity to shoot the wrong person, bomb the wrong village. What’s more, as they see it, Afghans are governed by Hamid Karzai, an American puppet who does nothing for them while his government steals everything that isn’t nailed down.

In Pakistan, the problem is worse. The day Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize, the Dawn, a Pakistani newspaper, interviewed a handful of Pakistanis, and their views were uniformly negative.

“’Everybody knows the presence of the American army in this region is the root cause of the problems,” Mushtaq Mohmand, a neighborhood administrator, told the newspaper. “People are dying in Afghanistan, Pakistan and in Iraq because of Obama policies.”

The only Pakistanis who showed any generosity toward the U.S. were government officials who depend on American aid to make their auto payments and pay their children’s private-school bills.

Meanwhile, just now, the Pakistani army has refused an American request to capture a major Taliban leader who is directing insurgents to kill Americans in Afghanistan.

Most telling of all was President Asif Ali Zardari’s cri de coeur, an op-ed in the New York Times last week. Zardari asked Americans to look at recent history “as seen by Pakistanis.” As he described it, over the last few decades the United States has insulted, slighted and ignored Pakistan, all “to manipulate and exploit us.”

‘Bitter memory’

American support for dictators in the 1980s “turned our peaceful nation into a Kalashnikov and heroin society,” he wrote. Then “after 9/11, the United States closed its eyes to the abuses” of Musharraf. “For Pakistanis it is a bitter memory.”

Now, he says, the nation is insulted once again because a new law requires the U.S. to certify that Pakistan is actually “demonstrating a sustained commitment” to “combating terrorist groups” before delivering aid. That, Zardari complains, is “unfair treatment.”

X Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.