After a five-month hiatus, Pakistan - a country with tense relations with its eastern and western neighbors and a deteriorating relationship with the United States - finally has a new foreign minister.
Hina Rabbani Khar, 34, was sworn in this past week as the country's head of foreign policy.
Khar's appointment is not exactly a surprise as she had been serving as a sort of junior foreign minister since February, when a Cabinet reshuffle saw former Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi lose his job. The circumstances of Qureshi's dismissal remain unclear, but the fact that it took five months to replace him gives a measure of the current government's internal tensions as well as friction with the powerful military establishment, which traditionally holds sway over Pakistan's foreign policy.
Najam Sethi, a political analyst and editor-in-chief of the Friday Times, said Khar's appointment is the result of a compromise between President Asif Ali Zardari, who needs someone he can trust politically; and the army, which Sethi said is "very comfortable" with the choice of Khar as the new foreign minister.
"The reason they got her as foreign minister is that she is very amenable and pliable," Sethi said. "In this country the foreign minister can't be an independent entity."
Khar started her political career in 2002 as a member of the National Assembly and later served as a minister in former President Pervez Musharraf's government. She then switched her political affiliation to the current ruling party - Pakistan Peoples Party - and in 2008 was named senior official in the present government's finance ministry.
Her latest appointment has received mixed reviews. While some observers have deemed her political and diplomatic credentials too thin for such a prominent position and have hinted at the disadvantage of being a young woman in South Asia's male-dominated political environment, others have saluted Khar's femininity and youth as a breath of fresh air.
"We must hope these factors alone can bring in some fresh thinking into the running of foreign policy and how to improve Pakistan's declining standing in the region," the Express Tribune, a local English daily, wrote in an editorial. "Ms. Khar has shown over her relatively brief career as a politician that she is quite capable of going about her mission with determination and sincerity."
Determination will be only one of the qualities required for the task at hand. Tension between Pakistan and the United States has been rising steadily this year after a CIA contractor killed two Pakistanis and a U.S. raid targeting Osama bin Laden was seen here as a breach of national sovereignty.
Meanwhile, recent allegations of cross-border attacks have marred Pakistan's warming ties with Afghanistan.
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