Diplomatic Windfall as Goodwill for Obama Lingers

By HELENE COOPER(NYT.COM)
WASHINGTON — The honeymoon period between President Obama and Congress may be running its course in Washington. But on the world stage, the romantic flame is still flickering.Three years ago, President Bush could barely get the leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan to be polite to each other — let alone shake hands — when he dragged Pervez Musharraf and Hamid Karzai to the White House. But this week, things were decidedly warmer as the new Obama administration played host in Washington to high-level delegations from the two countries for talks aimed at producing a new strategy.
At a three-way dinner with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday night, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi of Pakistan and his Afghan counterpart, Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, made nice, assuring each other that they were committed to fighting extremists in both countries, administration officials and diplomats said. While it’s not exactly on par with Yitzhak Rabin reluctantly extending his hand to Yasir Arafat in 1993, South Asia experts noted that just getting the two camps in the same room to talk about a common approach was a step in the right direction.
Similarly, the Bush administration spent three years urging the Egyptian government to free Ayman Nour, the country’s most prominent political dissident, to no avail. But last week, in a move that many interpreted as a goodwill gesture, the Egyptian government abruptly released Mr. Nour, citing “medical reasons.”And two weeks ago, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia dismissed two powerful religious figures — including the head of the cane-wielding religious police known as the mutawa — as part of a government shuffle that appeared aimed at reforming the kingdom’s hard-line religious establishment.While it is a stretch to assume that King Abdullah, who has been slowly inching toward modest reform, suddenly dumped the head of his religious police to curry favor with the Obama administration, the new cooperation coming from the Egyptian, Afghan and Pakistani governments is a different story, foreign policy experts say.“I think the Ayman Nour release is definitely connected to Obama,” said George Perkovich, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It was a fairly simple thing for the Obama administration to say to the Egyptians that if you want Mubarak to see our guy, this has to happen.”
As for “Afpak” — the new shorthand e for Afghanistan/Pakistan being popularized by Richard Holbrooke, the new high-level American envoy for the two countries — Mr. Perkovich says that both governments are trying to put their best foot forward. They expect demands from the Obama administration for the Afghan government to do more to fight corruption and drug trafficking, which many in the West believe has helped to fuel the resurgent Taliban and for Pakistan to do more to crack down on extremists in the border region.Mr. Holbrooke is a veteran diplomat known for dragging reluctant Serbs to the peace table during the Balkans conflict, and Mr. Perkovich suggests that the prospect of being put under his purview may have scared the Afghan and Pakistani delegations into making nice. “Some of this is them saying, ‘O.K., these guys mean business, and Holbrooke is going to be coming out here every month, so let’s see if with little gestures we can turn down the pressure.’ ”But the question of how much of the early good will translates into real policy changes remains. Kenneth M. Pollack, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, says the better atmospherics are great in the short term. But he cautions that, “as with all honeymoons, this says nothing about the long-term durability of the marriage.”The United States wants Pakistan to focus more on insurgents and a little less on its long-running fight with India, which Washington believes is occupying the Pakistani army, whose time would be better spent — in the American view — on Afpak, instead of what might be called Indiapak. The Egyptians want the United States to do a little more to press Israel on settlements in the West Bank. And in Afghanistan, where the presidential election season will be getting under way soon, Mr. Karzai has been striking increasingly anti-American tones, in a move to distance himself from the United States at a time when America is viewed with increasing hostility in that country.
“At the end of the day, we have some very significant policy differences with all of these countries,” Mr. Pollack said.