At least some policymakers in Washington still hold out hope that Islamabad might come around. In time, the thinking goes, Pakistan will resume its role as a critical transport corridor for materiel to the Coalition in Afghanistan, and step up cooperation with the West against Islamist militancy.
The numbers, however, suggest that Pakistan's divorce from the U.S. isn't fleeting, or tactical. Rather, it reflects a slow but building sea change in Pakistani strategic direction.
That direction isn't necessarily Islamist; the same Pew center poll found 55 percent of respondents to view al-Qaeda unfavorably (the same percentage as in 2011), and largely-negative attitudes toward the Taliban and its various factions to be more or less unchanged from previous years. China, by contrast, is seen by 90 percent of Pakistanis as an ally, particularly against regional rival India.
That's not good news for Washington, which currently could benefit from assistance - or at least political support - from Islamabad on a number of key strategic and security fronts. But, with an American disengagement from the War on Terror's first front now on the horizon, it's not too early for policymakers inside the Beltway to begin contemplating what a "post-Afghanistan" relationship with Pakistan might look like. Clearly, the Pakistanis themselves are already doing so.
