In diplomacy, perception is everything. The day that Pakistan's new prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani was sworn in this week, two top American diplomats were there from Washington to congratulate him. The State Department says that deputy secretary of state John Negroponte and assistant secretary of state for South Asia Richard Boucher's trip had been "planned for weeks." But in Pakistan itself, the move was widely seen as a heavy-handed attempt to make sure the newly elected coalition government would continue to cooperate with the U.S. in battling militants along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
And so the U.S. is off to a rocky start in a Pakistan where its old ally, Pervez Musharraf, is a waning power. Condoleezza Rice told the Washington Times on Thursday that she hoped Pakistanis would see Negroponte and Boucher's visit, so early on in the formation of the new government, "as a sign of respect." They did not. Pakistani newspaper editorials called the early visit "meddling." The photo op was widely seen for what it was, a move by the U.S. to make sure the new government doesn't back down from Musharraf's level of cooperation in the Bush Administration's declared war on terror. Other diplomats advise a civil distance, for now. The U.S. should "give Pakistan space to publicly proclaim its own policy," says former Ambassador Teresita Schaffer, who spent 30 years in the foreign service, most of it devoted to South Asia, "without having the visual of the U.S. government breathing down its neck." Read the article
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