The Flood is an archetypal symbol. The catastrophic floods in Pakistan bestirred sunken myths in the American psyche. A leading columnist credited with the capacity to reflect establishment thinking in Washington, wrote in the weekend that the US relief for Pakistan would help get America past its “recent traumas about Islamophobia”.

Attributing to “Islamophobia” the qualities of “original sin” is indeed thought-provoking. The image of the US in the Muslim world remains extremely poor. The high hopes held out by the Barack Obama presidency are dissipating. Obama struck fast following the withdrawal of all US combat troops from Iraq last Tuesday with the formal launch the very next day of direct talks between the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. But the Arab opinion is already putting a question mark around Obama’s latest shot at Middle East peace.

What seems to matter to the Muslim psyche at the end of the day is that over 1.3 million innocent Iraqi civilians perished as a result of the US invasion in 2003. The fact remains that the US continues to be deeply mired in the Middle Eastern conflicts – from the Levant to the Central Asian steppes – and there is no light yet at the end of the tunnel.

Fourteen US troops got killed in action in eastern and southern Afghanistan over the past 72 hours. Forty-nine US service members died in Afghanistan in the month of August alone. And they seem to be largely dying in vain. When 14 brave US servicemen laid down their lives, the Washington establishment and the American media treated it as a parenthesis while their obsessive concern was with debunking the Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

No wonder, Karzai is hitting back. He told the visiting western dignitary, German Parliament speaker Norbert Lammert, that the US’s war strategy in Afghanistan over the past nine years has been “ineffective apart from causing civilian casualties.”

If there is a grain of truth in what Karzai alleged, it not hard to find why 59 percent of people in Pakistan regard the US as an “enemy” country – which was the July 29 finding of the reputed Pew Research Centre poll.

Indeed, there is scope to redeem the US’s image among the Pakistanis. Pew also said over 60 percent of Pakistanis want their country to have good relations with the US. The issue is how to go about it so long as America’s foreign wars continue.

The American columnist has come to the conclusion that “The Pakistan flooding, which has displaced an estimated 20 million people, is one of those natural disasters that can break through those usual political barriers and resentments.”

He argued: “The national security arguments for coming to Pakistan’s rescue are strong, but there’s a larger point: Helping desperate Pakistanis in this catastrophe will be good for the American soul… We all know in our personal lives the paradoxical truth about charity – that it helps the giver as much as the receiver. This would be especially true now, with a national mobilization to aid Pakistan.”

This is how columnists score over diplomats and politicians. They can wax eloquently metaphysical and get away with waffling. But politics is hard-ball.

Thus, John Kerry, the chairman of the US senate foreign relations committee, writing in Boston Globe on the same day was quite focused in arguing clear-headed why the US should help Pakistan in its hour of tragedy: “Pakistan has made enormous strides in combating extremism and terrorism – at great sacrifice by its soldiers, police and citizens. But its ability to keep at the fight requires an effective response to this crisis.” That is as straight a talk as any serious politician can give.

In comparison with diplomats-politicians, however, soldiers don’t have to mince words. The Commandant of the US Marine Corps General James Conway revealed at a Pentagon briefing last Tuesday: “[Pakistani army chief] General [Pervez] Kayani cautioned me that the involvement of his army in the flood relief will for a while detract from their efforts to secure the Pakistani frontier.”

Simply put, the Obama administration has reason to be worried that unless Pakistani military doesn’t get on with its part of the war effort in Afghanistan, there will be dire consequences.

True, there is nothing the US can do at the moment but to desperately hang on while the Afghan war glides into a state of animated suspense.

Of course, the less said the better about any intensified operations in Kandahar in any foreseeable future. Without a simultaneous push by the Pakistani military from their side of the border, there is little General David Petraeus can do, which explains why the Afghan war is fast degenerating into a brutish expedition by the US special forces – like in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the hope is that with a high-profile aid relief role, the US will burnish its image among the Pakistani people and also at the same time salvage its own conscience as a magnanimous soul.

But there is always a catch somewhere. How long can a war be kept in suspense? There is no more any political fig-leaf to cover up the stark, ugly nakedness of the Afghan war.

The memories of the conference in January in London, the Loya Jirga held in June in Kabul and the foreign-ministers’ conference in Kabul in July have all receded as distant memories.

So indeed the consensus opinion to have an accelerated process of “reintegration” of the reconcilable Taliban fighters alongside a robust “Afghanisation” of the war and to strengthen the Afghan government led by Karzai.

To be sure, these were brilliant ideas conceived by the US in the first instance while a sceptical international community largely went along with them at the Lancaster House in London.

What happened since then is, therefore, simply bizarre. In sum, the US undercut its own road map. According to US media leaks, the “capture” of Mullah Baradar (Taliban’s №2) in Karachi in January was in actuality a joint US-Pakistani intelligence operation with the sole objective of depriving Karzai of his main interlocutor within the Taliban leadership’s Quetta Shura and to drive home the message that the Afghan leader cannot deal with his fellow-countrymen directly.

So much for “reconciliation” and “Afghanisation”. And all this since the Karzai-Baradar secret parleys probably reached a criticality that might have facilitated Taliban participation in the upcoming Loya Jirga in April – undoubtedly, what could have been a defining moment.

Essentially, the U.S. doesn’t seem to want a strong Afghan leader in Kabul with an independent power base and it is on an overdrive to tear apart Karzai’s web of alliances with the erstwhile Northern Alliance groups. There is no other way than that to isolate him and to hunt him down – until he becomes supplicant and a mere vassal.

The US’s AfPak viceroys seem nervous that a newly-elected parliament in Kabul following the September 8 election may work in harmony with Karzai, which in turn could lead to a genuine “Afghanisation” of the war and a consensus regarding “reconciliation” that they can no longer micromanage.

Their game plan is to keep up the pressure on Mr. Karzai even as the mother of all questions concerning the future of the U.S. military presence is yet to be addressed. The Afghans oppose permanent U.S. military presence, while the Pentagon is hell-bent on getting a status of forces agreement with the powers that be in Kabul so as to retain long-term access. Will Karzai play ball? This seems to be an intractable question.

Kerry wrote, “If we fail to reverse the tide of public opinion, no amount of aid will succeed.” True, this is the heart of the matter – although not in the way Kerry probably meant. The pervasive feeling among Afghans and Pakistanis is that US will never stop interfering.  And they deeply resent the prospect of occupation by a Christian army. A 150 million dollar relief package for the Pakistani floods alone cannot achieve much.