NEW YOK --  With anti-American sentiment in Pakistan peaking, India is not enemy No.  1 anymore, said charismatic Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan. He said what amounts to an American assassination campaign in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal area had made Pakistanis view India differently.

Khan held a large audience captive during a talk organized by the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) and the Columbia Journalism School in New York. He said one decade of fighting America’s “unwinnable war” had nearly destroyed Pakistan.

Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice), the party Khan founded in 1996, has faced many humbling moments, winning no seats in the 1997 elections and one in 2002. But it is now seen by many Pakistanis as a credible alternative to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s government.

“People don’t use guns just because they carry guns,” Khan said referring to the “million armed men from the tribal areas. You win the war when you win the people’s hearts and minds.”

“The Pakistani government should have asked the men from the tribal areas to isolate al-Qaeda right in the beginning. Instead, Musharraf made a blunder; under pressure from America, he sent the army into the tribal areas in 2004. This was an insane and immoral way to war, with artillery, F-16s, and helicopter gunships bombing villages. As a result, thousands have died, more than 3.5 million have been internally displaced, and the economy has lost $70 billion, compared to the $15 billion in foreign aid we received.”

Khan rattled off these reasons for why “80 percent of Pakistanis perceive the U.S. as a bigger enemy than India.”

The New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, estimated that 2,551 people had also been killed in U.S. drone strikes since 2004. It says 80 percent of them were militants, but the rest were civilians.

Time magazine’s world editor Bobby Ghosh asked Khan: “Does India represent an existential threat?” Khan didn’t blink, “No. But it’s in the military genes, and hence the army has played a disproportionate role.”

Khan said relations between India and Pakistan would remain fragile “unless we are confident that our intelligence agencies will not play a part in cross-border violence. One act like Mumbai will bring us back to square one.”

Khan had an answer for why India and Pakistan which began in similar circumstances had developed such different trajectories; “Jawaharlal Nehru embedded democracy in India, while Pakistan lost our only great leader (Mohammad Ali Jinnah).” Khan said, “Our democracy never took off.”

Unlike most Pakistani politicians, Khan feels Islamabad should stand on its own feet and say no to U.S. aid. Khan said aid has been a curse to his country, and the money is wasted by corrupt government officials.

“Our government policies have been dictated by aid, they have enslaved us by aid. If you do not respect yourself, no one will respect you.” Khan said the Pakistani economy was “not poor, just terribly mismanaged.”

Pressure is growing in the U.S. Congress to reduce the billions in annual military and civilian aid as it has failed to persuade Pakistan to target Haqqani militants using its territory to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Khan told his New York audience that he wrote his book, Pakistan: A Personal History because he had never seen his countrymen “so confused, about secularism, Islam… There needs to be a direction.”

Khan has called for not just political overhaul but religious reappraisal, calling for an “enlightened Islam” that is not too afraid to take as its guide the best of Western democratic values as well as Qoranic scripture.

In his book, Khan describes the greedy nexus between “dollar addicted” ruling elites, a compliant judiciary and a corrupt political system. There is a note of urgency to Khan’s words in A Personal History, calling Pakistan not yet a failed state but failing.

Khan’s cricketing debut was so inauspicious that it earned him the humiliating nickname, “Imran Khan’t” but he went on to achieve many cricket milestones, including lead Pakistan to its only World Cup victory in 1992. Four decades on, Oxford-educated Khan has also soared past his Khan’t moment in politics and is increasingly viewed as a rare, clean leader in the bog of Pakistan’s politics.