Pakistanis are welcoming Americans, Europeans, Australians, Japanese and other rescue and relief workers. The popular gratitude for foreign assistance could offer the Bush administration a chance to slow or reverse America's declining stature in Pakistan following months of politically disastrous war in Iraq, analysts say. Journalist James Rupert, head of Newsday's international bureau in Islamabad, Pakistan began his career abroad as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching mechanics and welding in Morocco.
James Rupert says Quake may shake political landscape in Pakistan
Quake may shake political landscape
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By James Rupert
Newsday
Caption: A young victim of the earthquake sits in the ruins of his house in Dheri Muzammil Shah in the mountains in the north of the country. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan made a dramatic appeal for world assistance to Pakistan to prevent a second massive wave of deaths in the wake of the recent devastating earthquake. (AFP/Eric Feferberg)
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Pakistanis know that a natural disaster often brings political change. In 1971, after Pakistan's military government responded slowly to catastrophic flooding in east Pakistan, the population rebelled and seceded as the new nation of Bangladesh.
While no one is betting that political fallout this time will be so dramatic or permanent, Pakistanis say last weekend's earthquake has shifted the political landscape in a country critical to the U.S.-led "global war on terror." Muslim religious hard-liners who have been ascendant in recent years, and who demand a more explicitly Islamic state and oppose close relations with non-Muslims and Westerners, have been marginalized for now.
Pakistanis are welcoming Americans, Europeans, Australians, Japanese and other rescue and relief workers. The popular gratitude for foreign assistance could offer the Bush administration a chance to slow or reverse America's declining stature in Pakistan following months of politically disastrous war in Iraq, analysts say.
Still, Washington's political partner here, President Pervez Musharraf, is being condemned for his government's unpreparedness.
"It is shocking that a country that boasts nuclear weapons and missiles ... could only muster one crane on the day of the disaster," the national weekly Friday Times wrote in an editorial.
Musharraf, who took power in a 1999 coup and is trying to win election as president in 2007, "will have to work overtime," according to the paper, to overcome a vivid public image of him as unprepared and ineffective in the first week after the disaster.
Since 2002, when the relatively secular Musharraf made an awkward political alliance with the Islamic religious right, hard-liners have had unprecedented prominence. When the earthquake struck, hard-line mullahs proclaimed it divine punishment for Musharraf's alignment against Muslim militant groups in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But, amid the scramble by Pakistanis to save the earthquake's survivors, the Muslim militants quickly fell silent and "their credibility has been eroding fast," said Adam Nayyar, director of research at Pakistan's national cultural institute. Their position, he said, "is of no help to people who need tents and blankets," which are being supplied in part by Americans and Europeans.
A blow to Islamic militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan is that the earthquake's epicenter was next to Mansehra district, an area where militant groups reportedly concentrated training camps for fighters intended to join the Taliban against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Like villages in the area, such camps probably are heavily damaged or destroyed.
The earthquake is Pakistan's first nationally televised natural disaster. More than one-third of Pakistanis have TV access, and a handful of independent channels are providing CNN-type coverage.
So the televised images of the U.S. military have been reversed. Instead of seeing American soldiers fighting Iraqis or Afghans -- or guarding prisoners at Guantanamo, Cuba -- Pakistanis are watching U.S. helicopter pilots, British rescue teams and French medics help earthquake victims.
Those images and the presence of Americans could begin to alter the way Americans are seen in Pakistan, Nayyar said.
Still, it's not clear how far even a large U.S. military relief mission would improve Pakistanis' opinions of the United States. Even after weeks of similar relief work in Indonesia following the tsunami last year, many people there remained suspicious about U.S. motives.
