There are fears the protests will destabilise Pakistan
Events in Afghanistan are having a major impact on its eastern neighbour, Pakistan.
After a series of angry demonstrations by Islamist protesters and last Sunday's massacre of Christian worshippers, patience, in some quarters at least, seems to wearing thin.
I watched as thousands of men poured into the street to stage a demonstration after prayers.
They hurled insults at their president, General Pervez Musharraf, calling him a poodle of the United States. They described the US as terrorists.
Americans 'desperate'
Raheem Yusufzai is a retired air vice marshal. He is one of many here losing confidence in Washington.
"What really scares me is that the Americans are getting desperate, and a powerful country which gets desperate can make blunders also," he says.
An action which Pakistan's president promised would be short, sharp and targeted, is already starting to look decidedly messy.
"I think they have not identified the correct target and how to go about it. Personally I feel that if they had just invested money and time, some patience they would have got Osama bin Laden, but they went straight away to use air power," Mr Yusufzai says.
"Afghanistan is a country which has no targets to offer, so therefore it's a war that's going in the wrong direction and unless the American Government realises that, I think we are in for a very, very hard time."
Post-Taleban doubts
A chronically unstable Afghanistan is Pakistan's worst nightmare.
It has already tried to influence the shape of an alternative administration.
It is a plan designed to stop the opposition Northern Alliance from being too dominant and to embrace moderate elements of the Taleban.
Marianna Baber, the diplomatic correspondent of the newspaper The News, has her doubts.
"The point is, who vets these people? How do you define a good Muslim or a moderate Taleban?"
Bundles of women
But for many ordinary Pakistanis, another issue causes even more alarm.
Late in the evening I went to one of the poor parts of Islamabad.
Bundles of women and children were crouched together in the darkness alongside a food stall.
They were all Afghan refugees waiting patiently for strangers to buy them scraps of bread. Some came months, even years ago. Others, like Fausia, fled the bombing just a week ago.
Fausia told me she sneaked into the country with her husband and five children. Neither of the parents has work.
She spends eight hours a day begging for food.
Pakistan already has more than two million Afghan refugees. Its border with Afghanistan is now closed, but officials say about 60,000 more refugees have entered the country illegally since the bombing started.
Marianna Baber says they are now deeply unpopular.
"People are really fed up. There's unemployment. [The refugees] are taking away jobs which the Pakistanis would do.
"The question that Pakistanis are asking now is 'Hey, if all of us are in this coalition against terrorism together, why should Pakistan end up with the refugees? Why can't you have flights coming from Europe, from America, from elsewhere in Asia, the Muslim countries? Why can't they take over some of the refugees and lessen the load on Pakistan?'"
Danger to government
Meanwhile the demonstrations go on. Many of those shouting slogans are religious extremists.
But increasingly mainstream opinion is turning hostile too. And for the government, that could prove dangerous.
Hussein Haqqani is a former Pakistani ambassador and a political commentator.
"The demonstrations do influence public opinion in other ways. They also then have a dynamic of their own in terms of the control of the government.
"Now the problem for General Musharraf is, if he crushes them like they were crushed in Algeria or Egypt, then they are likely to go underground and become terrorists themselves.
"But if he allows them, then this becomes a disturbing factor. It doesn't destabilise his government, he doesn't lose power, but his power becomes less and less effective."
When the air strikes started, many here said President Musharraf had little choice.
Politically he had to support the international coalition.
But that was three long weeks ago, before tens of thousands of refugees gathered along the Pakistan border and before news of mounting civilian casualties.
Now the mood is changing and that is putting more pressure on an already strained Pakistani leadership.