Islamist charities and the United States are competing for the allegiance of the 2 million people displaced by the fight against the Taliban in Swat and other parts of Pakistan — and so far, the Islamists are in the lead. Although the United States is the largest contributor to a U.N. relief effort, the Pakistani authorities have refused to allow U.S. officials or planes to deliver the aid in the camps for displaced people. The Pakistanis do not want to be associated with their unpopular ally. Meanwhile, in the absence of effective aid from the government, hard-line Islamist charities are using the refugee crisis to push their anti-Western agenda and to sour public opinion against the war and the United States. Last week, a crowd of men, the heads of households uprooted from Swat, gathered here in this village in northwestern Pakistan for handouts for their desperate families. But before they could even get a can of cooking oil, the aid director for a staunchly anti-Western Islamic charity took full advantage of having a captive audience, exhorting the men to jihad. "The Western organizations have spent millions and billions on family planning to destroy the Muslim family system," said the aid director, Mehmood ul-Hassan, who represented Al Khidmat, a powerful charity of the strongly anti-American political party Jamaat-e-Islami. The Western effort had failed, he said, but Pakistanis should show their strength by joining the fight against the infidels.
The authorities' insistence that the Americans remain nearly invisible reveals the strains that continue to underlie the U.S.-Pakistani relationship, even as cooperation improves in the fight against the Taliban, and public support for the war grows in Pakistan. Yet Islamist and jihadist groups openly work the camps. In contrast, although a substantial amount of U.S. aid is getting through, it is not branded as American, and Pakistani authorities have insisted that it be delivered in a "subtle" manner, said Lt. Gen. Nadeem Ahmad, the head of the Pakistani army's disaster-management group. The general said he had told U.S. officials that there would be an "extremely negative" reaction if Americans were seen to be distributing aid, particularly if it was delivered by U.S. military aircraft.