Visiting US officials hoping to mend fences, encounter anger and distrust

Karachi Judith A. McHale was expecting a contentious session with Ansar Abbasi, a Pakistani journalist known for his harsh criticism of US foreign policy, when she sat down for a one-on-one meeting with him in a hotel conference room in Islamabad on Monday. She got that, and a little bit more.

After McHale, the Obama administration's new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, gave her initial polite presentation about building bridges between America and the Muslim world, Abbasi thanked her politely for meeting with him. Then he told her that he hated her.

"You should know that we hate all Americans," McHale said Abbasi told her. "From the bottom of our souls, we hate you."

Beyond the continuation of the battle against militants along the Pakistani-Afghan border, a big part of President Barack Obama's strategy for the region involves trying to broaden US involvement in the country to include non-military areas like infrastructure development, trade, energy, schools and jobs - all aimed at convincing the Pakistani people that the United States is their friend.

But as McHale and other US officials discovered this week, during a visit by Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, making that case is not going to be easy.

"We have made a major turn with our relationship with Pakistan under President Obama," Holbrooke told reporters at a news conference in Karachi on Wednesday. Time and again, Holbrooke tried to delineate the differences between the Obama administration and the Bush era, painting the new administration as one that wants to see a better life for Pakistanis.

He said his very presence in Karachi - Pakistan's largest city and its commercial capital - demonstrated that drone attacks and the hunt for Al Qaida were not the only US foreign policy activities in the country.

To polite applause, Holbrooke told local officials at the Governor's House that the US Consulate in Karachi would start granting business visas - 100 a week - instead of making would-be business travellers to the United States go to Islamabad for the visas, as has been the case.

And McHale strayed from his side only when she ventured out on fence-mending missions of her own. But Abbasi's reaction - a response that, McHale acknowledged, apparently reflects the feelings of about 25 per cent of the population, according to a recent poll - demonstrated just how tough the job is.

For all of the administration's efforts to call attention to the non-military ties that would bind the two countries, America is still being judged by many Pakistanis as an uncaring behemoth.