What is the U.S. perception of Pakistan? Not particularly good, it seems safe to say. In theory, an ally of the U.S., but a very shabby ally. Apparently, Osama bin Laden hid out in Pakistan for much of the period when he was hunted by the U.S. military, and was in Pakistan when he finally was killed in Abbottabad. The west and north of the country have more than a few Taliban sympathizers.

Big picture, Pakistan is a mess. The assassination of someone important generally seems imminent. The country is always a couple of bad weeks from a coup.  Always about one incident away from mobilizing against India.

But then there is cricket. A sport which is as avidly followed in Pakistan as it is in India or anywhere else, as a story in The National today would seem to suggest.

The occasion?

A former Pakistan bowler (pitcher) named Shoaib Akhtar was in the UAE to do some corporate things, and to visit labor camps, where most of the 500,000-plus Pakistanis in the UAE live, and to lend his name to a plan to set up cricket leagues in the camps.

Akhtar retired from cricket in 2011, but during his playing days he was known as one of the fastest bowlers in the world and was given the nickname “Rawalpindi Express” — because he is native to a small town near the major northern Pakistan city of Rawalpindi.

We were offered a chance to speak with him, and our reporter Ahmed Rizvi, one of several members of our staff who are ecricket experts, met up with Akhtar, and listened to him criticize the current Pakistan team at the Champions Trophy competition in Britain.

As can be seen in Rizvi’s story, Akhtar bemoans the poor choice of players, no dependable batters, Akhtar said. Given Pakistan’s two defeats so far, can’t say he’s wrong.

But what sticks with me from this story is one of the photos sent along by a public relations firm. Which we ran with the story — and is at the top of this post.

That is Akhtar, on the right, and he is holding a microphone and appears to be speaking with hundreds of Pakistan fans, most of them young or youngish guys who do a lot of the hard work in the UAE.

And the happy (ecstatic?) crowd, jammed together, is reaching out to touch Akhtar, taking photos of him, listening to what he might say about their dear cricket side.

(It looks like what we might imagine a crowd of fans in New York, 90 years ago, might have behaved if Babe Ruth had showed up at a publicized event and hung around with regular guys. A sort of giddy chaos.)

And that photo goes a long way towards reminding us that many (if not nearly all) Pakistanis are regular guys who love the national sport, which places them firmly into an international world of order and love of sport, and are huge fans of the leading figures in the game.

It is the curse of Pakistan that more than a little terrorism is traced back there, including one of the handful of attacks on international sportsmen in recorded history — the 2009 terror attack on the Sri Lanka cricket team.

Some Islamic fundamentalists believe cricket is sinful, and that seemed to set the stage for the attack on the Sri Lanka team — which ended with eight fatalities, six of them police, two of them civilians. Six members of the Sri Lanka team were wounded. It was a monstrous act.

And that madness again made Pakistan a no-go country for foreign national teams. Since 2009, most of Pakistan’s “home” matches have been staged in the UAE, in Sharjah or Dubai or Abu Dhabi. And they often get big crowds.

(Also, Afghanistan’s cricket team, which has risen far and fast after citizens of that country picked up the game while living in refugee camps in Pakistan, often plays in the UAE, too — also luring big crowds.)

Pakistan has problems. Lots of them. I know some natives of the country who have very little hope for a stable, prosperous country any time soon.

But when we see Pakistanis as cricket fans, it makes us reconsider stereotypes.