AMERICA CURRIES DISFAVOR

On both sides of the disputed Kashmiri border, educated opinion has a vastly deluded sense of the subcontinent’s importance to American foreign policy. At a recent dinner party giveh in London by the young heir to one of India’s industrial empires, one of the guests was an attractive Pakistani woman in a suit with a short skirt. She had gone to boarding school in England. “How are things in “Pakistan?” the host asked. “How is Benazir doing?”

“Well,” she replied, “things Would be getting better if it weren’t for the Americans.” ”

I looked up from my buna ghosht to see all the other guests nodding sagely. “Yes, it’s the same in India,” our host agreed.

I asked the woman what she meant. She was amazed at my ignorance. “The Americans control everything in Pakistan. Don’t you know that Pakistan has the largest CIA base in Asia?”

“But that’s because of the Afghan war,” I said. “And it’s not the largest in Asia anymore.”

“No,” she insisted, “the Americans are trying to control Pakistan.”

I protested that the United States has hardly any interest in Pakistan; Americans could hardly care less about the country; they are barely aware of its existence. “That’s only ordinary Americans,” she explained. “Everyone knows how ignorant they are. But the elite, the State Department, the Senate, they do the manipulating.” The Indians all agreed.

On my first day in Kashmir, a man who refused to surrender his camcorder was shot by Indian soldiers in Srinagar’s Old City. The pro-government press – – and my houseboat owner, Ahmet, who boasted of his connections in the police — announced that the victim was an American from Pakistan working for the CIA. When I tried to argue that the United States was unlikely to support a Muslim fundamentalist uprising in India, he pointed to Afghanistan and then refused to continue the discussion.

The militants themselves, mostly teenagers swaggering around with Kalashnikovs, can be found at evening prayers in a number of Srinagar’s mosques. Their spokesmen would like American support very much but deny they have received any. “Where is Bill Clinton?” they ask. “Why does he not help us? These Indian dogs are raping our women. They are killing us.” (On the other hand, the militants are convinced that the Israelis are supporting the Indian occupation.

The fact that the Indian government has long been unfriendly to Israel is immaterial.)

In India the “foreign hand” is everywhere. The leading newspapers use the phrase without irony, despite the fact that they rarely make even a symbolic effort to cover events outside the subcontinent. For all of Prime Minister Rao’s more modern rhetoric, members of parliament dressed in the white homespun that was the uniform of the working classes 30 years ago continue to explain solemnly that it is the Americans and their multinationals that are responsible for India’s poverty. Their minions in the state governments fought a losing battle to keep Coda-Cola out of India but have succeeded in closing the country’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, in Bingalore, and shutting down Enron’s vast power plant project in Maharashtra.

Point out to them that India is a rich country, or that the multinationals have been virtually excluded from India for 20 years — to the benefit of a small number of huge family-owned Indiafi corporations like Birla and Tata — and you are accused of neo-colonialism, or even a racial inability to understand India. Go further and question the spending of billions on India’s nuclear program, its rocket-building efforts, and its abject failure to provide food, electricity, or even running water to tens of millions of citizens, and you are an agent of the foreign hand.

In Pakistan, everyone — supporters of Benazir, supporters of opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, separatists from Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province — believes that the United States was responsible for the death of President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq in 1988. The fact that U.S. ambassador Arnold Raphael died in the same explosion makes no difference. Rather, as I was told by a film producer based in Lahore whom I will call “Hussain,” it shows how much the Americans hated Zia, What a threat he was to them, that they were willing to sacrifice their ambassador. American suggestions that the Soviet KGB might have been behind Zia’s plane crash or, even more likely, agents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul, are dismissed out of hand.

Hussain — who, with his long hair, tight black Levis, and beautiful actress wife, is about as modern and liberal as mainstream Pakistani intellectuals come — was himself imprisoned by Zia. Yet he believes that American policy is based on the fear that Pakistan will lead a resurgent Muslim Central Asia. (Would that either the Bush or Clinton administration could look so far ahead.) “After we beat the Russians,” he explains, “the Americans thought we were too powerful.”

Hussain believes that it was Pakistan that drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan. “We made great sacrifices during the war,” he told me. “Many of us “actually fought in Afghanistan. Not in uniform, of course, but many Pakistani soldiers fought and died there.” Afterwards, “Zia was calling in a debt” from the United States.

Pakistan’s tiny left, and Indian opinion generally, blame the United States for the tremendous power of the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence service. During the Afghan war, the ISI was the conduit for billions of dollars intended for the Mujahedin. Most of the money did indeed go to buy arms and supplies, almost all of them for Gulbedin Hekmaytar, the most anti-American and fundamentalist of the guerrilla leaders. But a lot of the money ended up in the ISI’s own coffers, making it a powerful force in Pakistani politics. Despite his own secular lifestyle, Hussain admires the ISI and its successes.

Like many Pakistanis, Hussain believes the United States is also responsible for the growth of a flourishing heroin industry in the lawless semiautonomous tribal areas of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. The area was a haven for smugglers even during British rule, when, as now, central-government law applied only on the main roads. Senior Pakistani military officers are rumored to be involved in the industry, which has begun to market its product in Karachi and Lahore as well as overseas. Blaming the United States for this requires an even longer leap of faith than the scenario beloved of our own racial conspiracy theorists, that ghetto addiction rates are the result of a fiendishly brilliant and unusually effective federal government policy.

On the other hand, the United States is largely to blame for the vast quantities of infantry weapons — including Stinger missiles and rocket- propelled grenades — that are now turning up in trouble spots around the world, including cites like Lahore and Karachi. The latter is now one of the most dangerous cities in Asia, as political factions fight bloody street battles.

Washington’s refusal to deliver an order of F16s bought and paid for five years ago is seen by Pakistani opinion as further proof of a sinister pro- India tilt — never mind that U.S. law forbids the sale as long as Pakistan is proceeding with its nuclear weapons program. Meanwhile in India, the fact that the planes were sold in the first place, combined with American unease about the Prithvi rocket prdgram, is seen as proof of a close Pakistani- American alliance whose aims are to undermine India’s ddminance of the region. Sen. Jesse Helms’s confusion of the two countries during Prime Minister Bhutto’s visit to Washington in the spring of 1995 has been cbnstrued in both countries as evidence of tilting toward the enemy.

As E.M. Forster observed in A Passage To India, the esetting Indian vice is a maniacill suspiciousness. As a result, the most moderate Clinton administration statements on Kashmir are seen as proof of an American conspiracy to foment rebellion in the Muslim-majority state. Even the 18- month delay in appointing an ambassador to New Delhi was deemed by the Indian press to be a Machiavellian ploy designed to humiliate India in front of its neighbors.

This suspiciousness makes antiAmericanism — here as elsewhere, a kind of intellectual disease — particularly virulent. But at its core is fin extraordinary faith in American prowess. Only our own militia movement has anything like the same fearful respect for the federal government. Talking to Pakistanis and Indians about Washington’s alleged Imachinations in Asia, you get the impression that there is nothing the United States cannot do. Like the Shadow, America’s agents are everywhere; they know everything, and they act with such daring and skill that their works leave no trace — hence the difficulty of proving their presence.

This undeserved respect is paradoxically increased as satellite TV and cheap air fares increase familiarity with the United States.

Often the most fervent believers in American conspiracy are those who have actually been to the United States. For many of them, an American city is still evidence not only of fantastic wealth and technological advancement but also of government so stunningly responsible, efficient, clean, and singleminded as to compete with memories of British rule.

The whole phenomenon of South Asian anti-Americanism would be amusing and flattering if Pakistan and India were not both nuclear powers whose paranoid elites see the decline of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to become mini- superpowers. Both governments have encouraged terrorists in the other country: the Pakistanis in Indian Kashmir, the Indians in Karachi.

Both send large numbers of guest workers and immigrants around the world. The Pakistanis dream of leading a resurgent, Muslim fundamentalist Central Asia; the Indians imagine building a zone of paramount influence extending as far south as Sri Lanka, as far west as Iran (which they have been assiduously courting), north to the borders of Russia, and east into China’s westernmost provinces. Given that both countries have the technology and motivation to help our enemies and damage our interests in Asia and the Middle East, the United States should consider applying some of the influence they believe we have.

Jonathan Foreman is a freelance writer and former lawyer based in New York. He has recently returned from seven months in India and Pakistan.