By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Edftor

In the wake of the Benazir Bhutto assassination, American officials aren’t talking much about plans to dramatically boost U.S. military aid and counterinsurgency operations in the wild, tribal areas of Pakistan.

You can’t blame them. If the past is any guide, a $300 million military aid package rolling down the rails in Congress was headed for deep, deep waters, even before the latest eruption of political chaos in Islamabad.

But the Dec. 27 murder of Bhutto, the U.S.-backed candidate in elections whose future is now in doubt, will prompt “no change” in U.S. plans to bolster Pakistan’s 80,000-strong indigenous Frontier Corps with aid and training, a State Department spokesperson said, speaking on a not-for-attribution basis.

The U.S. Special Operations Command, reportedly planning to “vastly expand” its presence in Pakistan, referred my request for details to the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for the region. A spokesman there likewise said he could provide no information.

Continuing to call Pakistan a U.S. ally is bizarre, if compulsory. The problem we face there is simple, even if the solution is not: They don’t like us.

The Pakistani army and intelligence services like getting our money, guns and jet fighters, the better to prepare themselves for another war with India. As far as mobilizing against insurgents in the tribal areas, though, most of the $10 billion in aid Washington has given Pakistan since Sept. 11, 2001, seems to have disappeared down a rat hole.

During a recent visit to the border region, an American official found members of the Frontier Corps, which is scheduled for $350 million more in aid this year, “standing there in the snow in sandals” and armed with bolt-action rifles, The New York Times reported on Christmas Eve.

‘From Wary to Actively Hostile’

We have a tendency to think that inside every Pakistani, Iraqi or whoever else we decide to befriend is an American screaming to get out.

Shocking fact: Even if they speak the King’s English, most Pakistanis distrust us, at best.

I witnessed this first-hand on a reporting trip to Pakistan a little over a decade ago, in August 1997, which marked the 50-year anniversary of the Islamic country’s partition from Hindu-dominated India.

Nobody was in a very good mood. The country was flooded with AK-47s and heroin, a product of the Afghan war against the Russians in the 1980s. The newspapers were full of gloom.

America had essentially walked away from Pakistan after clinking champagne glasses over the Red Army’s defeat. The only thing Pakistan had to cheer about was its renegade nuclear weapons program. Imagine that.

The everyday corruption ordinary Pakistanis faced was withering, from having to pay bribes for electrical and telephone service to falling ill from out-of-date medicines sold by the local pharmacy.

One day my interpreter told me a joke about Nigeria surpassing Pakistan in that year’s ranking of the world’s most corrupt nations.

“We bribed the Nigerians to go first.”

Early in my visit I drove to the army town of Rawalpindi, where Bhutto would be murdered, for an interview with Hamid Gul, the former head of ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency.

Gul, whose dagger-like eyes, thick, slicked-back black hair, and clipped Sandhurst accent gave off the aura of a 1920s-era movie star, had worked closely with the CIA in supplying U.S. arms to the Afghan mujahideen against the Red Army. For the next hour and a half he slouched in an overstuffed chair, blaming the United States for all of Pakistan’s problems.

Today, Gul is actively advising Islamist forces trying to topple the Musharraf regime.

The next night I went out to dinner in Islamabad with a couple of U.S. military advisers, who had been surprised to find that most Pakistani troops they worked with hadn’t welcomed them with high-fives.

“They don’t like us much,” I remember one grousing over plates of shish kabob at a bustling place festooned with green and white lights — Islam’s colors. “They seem to range from wary to actively hostile.”

It was disconcerting to them that every few hours a wail from the minarets brought training to a halt, as the troops knelt in prayer.

Baptists, they weren’t.

A couple of days later I was in Dera Gazi Khan, a market town in central Pakistan’s fetid cotton country, not far from the Afghan border. An FBI-led raid a few months earlier had captured a Pakistani who had shot several CIA employees in their cars at the spy agency’s gate in January 1993.

As it turned out, the locals were steamed. The assassin was a kind of a hero.

My “cover” to ask questions about the raid, as a German travel writer, quickly unraveled. When a hostile crowd gathered in a cafe where I was conducting an interview, my interpreter whispered, “Let’s get out of here.” He saved my life later that night by sleeping against the door in my hotel room as would-be intruders constantly tested the locks.

Many billions of dollars later, the situation is worse. And hundreds of millions more U.S. dollars are in the pipeline.

But the real Hail Mary play being called in the administration’s huddle is a plan to recruit tribal leaders in the frontier areas to go after bin Laden.

Does this make any sense? It seems like something Henry Paget Flashman, the roguish Victorian-era British military officer created by George MacDonald Fraser, who died Jan. 2, would think up.

Putting aside the political chaos in Islamabad (which is a big put-aside), the idea that we can replicate in Pakistan what is temporarily working in Iraq is very likely a fantasy.

Unlike Iraq’s Sunni tribes, who have every self-interest in the world to take American guns and money to kill al Qaeda now, the better to take on Baghdad’s murderous Shiites later, Pakistan’s anti-government tribes have nothing to gain by strolling around Osama bin Laden’s real estate with M-16s in the company of U.S. advisers.

Even the idea of U.S. advisers in the territory strikes some weathered counterinsurgency officers as absurd.

“Who are they going to talk to when they get there?” a special operations veteran asked over a hamburger at the Pentagon food court last week. “And when they get there, how are they going to change the view of the people and the tribes there?”

The tribal leaders do have every interest in using U.S. arms and dough to bolster their centuries-old autonomy from Pakistani authority, however.

But what else are we to do? By all accounts, al Qaeda’s base in the autonomous wastelands on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border is even more in the grip of Islamic fundamentalist supporters than it was in winter 2002. In Afghanistan, the fundamentalists are resurgent, threatening the entire Western enterprise there, not to mention the stability of the nuclear-armed government in Islamabad.

We seem to be in the worst possible situation, with absolutely no good alternatives.

“I think the notion that we need a more comprehensive strategy for the tribal areas is the right one. It was probably overdue,” says Craig Cohen, chief of research on U.S. policy toward Pakistan at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“If that means more trainers out there with the Frontier Corps and more development assistance going to that area. I think those are positive developments,” he said.

“I don’t think we should kid ourselves, though, that there’s an easy, quick solution for achieving short-term goals,” Cohen added.

Yet, by all accounts, the clock is running out.

“The need is immediate, but there’s not probably any short-term solution,” Cohen said. “That’s the reality. Counterinsurgency is a long-term effort, with no quick fix. Incorporating a part of their society that has historically been separate is going to take time.”

To say the least.

But time is just one of the things we don’t have in Pakistan.

“Hail Mary” may be more a prayer than a plan.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.