ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Early in the negotiations to reopen NATO supply routes through Pakistan, a senior American official suggested to his Pakistani counterparts that they should engage in “carpet haggling.”

“I give you a figure, you give me a figure, and then we’ll sit down and have tea and agree on a figure,” was how one participant in the meeting remembered the suggestion.

The remark annoyed some of the Pakistanis, who viewed it as a crude characterization of a politically delicate process; others took it more phlegmatically. But as the talks between Pakistan and the United States drag into their seventh week, a haggle is what they have become — over money, certainly, but also over roads, drone strikes and, the trickiest of all, intangible notions of honor and pride that play into electoral politics in both nations.

Peter Lavoy, a senior Defense Department official, arrived in Islamabad on Friday in a bid to inject momentum into the bargaining. But though the stakes are high, optimism that a deal may be struck is in short supply on both sides.