President Barack Obama on Wednesday (epa/ZUMApress.com)

A year after President Obama’s speech in Cairo vowing to reset relations with the Muslim world, Muslims worldwide are telling pollsters about their disillusionment with what they consider unfulfilled expectations.

According to the Pew Center’s new survey of global attitudes (PDF), released Thursday morning, citizens of Muslim nations report disproportionate antipathy to Obama’s foreign policy. With the exception of Indonesia, where Obama spent a portion of his childhood, Muslims are the exceptions to the Pew poll’s findings that eighteen months of the Obama administration have seen a surge of international support for the United States after the public-opinion troughs of the Bush administration.

[Security1] “The Pew results reflect growing dissatisfaction with Obama’s policies, as many Arabs and Muslims are disappointed that Obama has not lived up to his promises, especially on the Arab-Israeli conflict,” said Marc Lynch, a George Washington University professor and the co-author of a recent Center for a New American Security report measuring Obama’s global engagement efforts. “They don’t see his actions matching his words, and until they do then it isn’t likely that there will be a sustained recovery in America’s image.”

In Jordan, the U.S. approval rating has fallen to 21 percent. It’s at 17 percent, the lowest of any countries Pew surveyed, in Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan. And this comes after the Obama administration has presided over the largest non-military aid package to Pakistan — the $7.5 billion, five-year Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill — in history.

“Opposition to key elements of U.S. foreign policy remains pervasive,” Pew analyzes, “and many continue to perceive the U.S. as a potential military threat to their countries.”

The news is not universally negative. Nigerian Muslims give Obama a 70 percent approval rating, up from 61 percent in 2009. But they’re the outliers. In Egypt and Lebanon, Obama’s ascendance — and the departure of George W. Bush — elevated Muslim attitudes toward the U.S. somewhat: 25 percent of Egyptians reported favorable opinions of the U.S. in 2009, up from 20 percent a year earlier; Lebanese Muslims in 2008 had given the U.S. a 34 percent favorability rating, which rose to 47 percent in 2008. Now Egyptian Muslims have reverted to their pre-Obama 20 percent favorability rating. Lebanese Muslims have settled into a 39 percent favorability rating.

More ominous from the perspective of Obama’s Cairo speech, Muslims express a sentiment directly opposite the speech’s offer of partnership: They fear that the U.S. will attack them. Majorities, and sometimes large ones, of respondents in Egypt (56 percent), Lebanon (56 percent), Indonesia (76 percent), Pakistan (65 percent), Jordan (52 percent) and Turkey (56 percent) believe the U.S. is a potential military threat. That shouldn’t be surprising: Pakistan, despite being a Major Non-NATO Ally of the U.S., is currently battered in its tribal areas by CIA drone strikes, a step the U.S. has taken in response to what it considers insufficient Pakistani military action against al-Qaeda-aligned extremist groups. In Cairo, Obama pledged that the U.S. “is not, and never will be, at war with Islam,” but many Muslims worldwide believe that the U.S. still has them in its crosshairs.

Support for the Afghanistan war and U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Muslim countries is also anemic. Lebanon is the only Muslim country surveyed by Pew where even 20 percent believe that the U.S. should keep fighting in Afghanistan. (Neighboring Pakistan? Seven percent.) While support for U.S. counterterrorism efforts have grown in non-Muslim countries since Obama took office, it’s at 18 percent in Egypt, 12 percent in Jordan, and 47 percent among Nigerian Muslims.

Several counterterrorism experts believe the U.S.’s counterterrorism efforts will ultimately be hobbled if they run into a headwind of Muslim antipathy. Malcolm Nance, a retired veteran military intelligence officer who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East, argues in a new book that rather than attempt to change Muslim attitudes, a more productive strategy would involve moving the conversation to al-Qaeda’s apostasy. Nance code-names this approach CIRCUIT BREAKER, and writes in “An End to Al-Qaeda” that subjecting al-Qaeda to a “deep analytical dissection of their religious motives” can provide a path to “a new era for reconciliation and cooperation with the Muslim street.” It would also provide a platform for popular acquiescence to military or intelligence action against al-Qaeda — or at least limit blowback from it.

The administration appears to be attentive to the challenges, even if it hasn’t figured out a programmatic way to overcome them. Last month, the Pentagon quietly established a new office to ensure that military efforts don’t inadvertently undermine the administration’s broader promotion of the rule of law around the world.

Lynch, who also recently evaluated Obama’s counterterrorism efforts for CNAS partially through the prism of Muslim acquiescence, disputed that the Pew numbers demonstrate that Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world was in vain. “It’s more that he said he would do things, but thus far hasn’t delivered,” Lynch said, “so the words lose their meaning. It’s a real problem for the broader counterterrorism strategy, since winning over mainstream support is absolutely key to the strategy.”

It’s a long study, with seven authors, and I’ve barely made a crack in it, so I won’t try to summarize the specific recommendations. But CNAS, looking at recent cases of international peacekeeping forces in transitional states or autonomous provinces, examines what security conditions need to be met for a viable independent Palestine that doesn’t threaten Israel to come into being.

Israel generally has balked over the years at the prospect of international peacekeeping forces patrolling the West Bank, as such a force would limit Israel’s freedom of military action in occupied Palestine. (Andrew Exum, one of the studies’ authors, lists a short host of reasons why Israel shouldn’t have a problem with such a force while — at least in the introduction — glossing over the fact that it does.) But less important than any specific recommendation is the fact that the think tank that has launched many an official into the Obama Pentagon and State Department, CNAS, is expending any intellectual heft on the issue at all, let along thinking through the modalities of interim internationalization of West Bank/Jordan River Valley security. Such a detailed study, coming in advance of a potential Obama peace plan — which the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu definitely does not want — will most likely be read at the Israeli embassy and in Jerusalem as a sign that a real U.S. push on a two-state solution is gathering momentum.

And it reaffirms a linkage that some on the American Jewish right and the Israeli government don’t want to see made. “Although peace in the Middle East is hardly the exclusive responsibility of the United States,” Exum writes in the introduction, “it is a goal long sought by its political leaders and one inextricably linked to U.S. interests.” That viewpoint was roundly mocked as simplistic at the AIPAC conference this year, despite it being the stated policy of decades of American administrations.

Marc Lynch, thankfully, breaks out of this entire frame with an eloquent and thoughtful post about the advantages that safeguarding an open space for Muslim-American identity poses to national security. It’s long but worth your time. A brief excerpt:

There is a connection between what these critics are calling “political correctness” and national security, but it runs in the opposite direction. The real linkage is that there is a strong security imperative to prevent the consolidation of a narrative in which America is engaged in a clash of civilizations with Islam, and instead to nurture a narrative in which al-Qaeda and its affiliates represent a marginal fringe to be jointly combatted. Fortunately, American leaders — from the Obama administration through General George Casey and top counter-terrorism officials — understand this and have been acting appropriately.

Really, read the whole thing.

Marc, a political science professor at the George Washington University, started his blog Abu Aardvark in 2002, and pioneered mixing a deeply informed view of Arab politics and media with a colloquial style. (The “Aardvark” in the title is, in part, a reference to Dave Sim’s classic independent comic book Cerebus, which — to be reductive! — is about an aardvark version of Conan the Barbarian.) Two of his frequent themes have been the liberalizing force that new Arabic-language media like the satellite channels al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya represent for a staid political culture, even if their content isn’t liberal; and the need for U.S. foreign-policy elites to understand the Arab world as their Arab interlocutors perceive it, a frequently neglected exercise that Marc shows — in at least one post per day, usually — can be as accessible as reading an Arabic newspaper. Interestingly, while other academics have suffered for their blogospheric indulgences — Dan Drezner was  famously denied tenure — George Washington University had no problem hiring Marc.

Given CNAS’s continued focus on the Middle East, bringing a scholar of Arab politics like Marc on board makes sense. Another wrinkle: some on the progressive side have viewed CNAS with skepticism ever since it called for a more robust U.S. presence in Iraq in 2007 than progressives preferred. But while Marc is hardly doctrinaire, he’s always been aligned with progressives, and it’s notable that the think tank is incorporating more progressive voices as it fills the gaps left when so many of its scholars joined the Obama administration.

Why would Biden have made a statement which so radically undermines Obama’s policy towards Iran? Maybe it reflects bad new advice coming from a new NSC adviser of vague portfolio. Maybe it’s a clumsy attempt to ratchet up some pressure on the Iranian regime without actually doing anything, without regard to the spiral dynamics it could kick into gear. Or maybe it is just a major Biden gaffe, not a dramatic departure in the Obama administration’s policy. That would still be bad, but would be salvagable [sic]. Either way, the administration urgently needs to come forward quickly with a restatement of its policy — and make sure the Israelis and others in the region understand it clearly — or else it risks paying some extraordinarily serious costs.

The White House emailed Marc to walk Biden’s statement back — indicating that the vice president really did say something out of line with administration policy — by writing, “Our friends and allies, including Israel, know that the President believes that now is the time to explore direct diplomatic options.” None of which really explains why Biden said what he said. It’s hard to imagine that a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee didn’t understand that his words would be read as a green light for an Israeli strike on Iran.