Karzai’s Warm Reception Reflects New U.S. Approach

Karzai’s Warm Reception Reflects New U.S. Approach
By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/world/asia/11karzai.html?hp


WASHINGTON — The last time Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, was in Washington — a year ago — he had to share the spotlight with his Pakistani counterpart, Asif Ali Zardari, who got the bulk of the attention from the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton even made a personal, unscheduled visit to huddle with Mr. Zardari at his hotel.

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It is a far, far different visit this time around, reflecting the Obama administration’s decision to abandon the publicly tough approach it tried to use to pressure Mr. Karzai to tackle corruption and drug trafficking in his government. Administration officials concluded that the strategy had backfired, making Mr. Karzai more resentful and resistant.

This time, the Americans are pulling out all the stops for Mr. Karzai as part of a new charm offensive. Mrs. Clinton, one of the few people in the administration with a good rapport with him, has invited him for a stroll through the grounds of a private enclave in Georgetown. Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative to the region, was dispatched to Andrews Air Force Base at 7 a.m. on Monday to personally greet Mr. Karzai. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will be Mr. Karzai’s host for a private dinner at the vice president’s mansion.

And Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the ambassador to Afghanistan, who personally escorted Mr. Karzai on the flight from Kabul to Washington, was sent off to assure reporters at the White House that he now had faith in the Afghan president’s determination to succeed, a position that stands in contrast to his diplomatic cable last fall denouncing Mr. Karzai as “not an adequate strategic partner.”

The new warmth is oozing all the way to the Oval Office. President Obama, in an unusual show of hospitality and presidential attention toward a visiting foreign delegation, will be host to Mr. Karzai and others in his government for almost a full day at the White House, including a lunch on Wednesday followed by a rare joint news conference.

“Two things are happening,” said Richard Fontaine, a former foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain. “One, there wasn’t much payoff from the earlier approach. And second, it’s sunk in, after the Afghan elections last year, that this is the guy who’s going to be here for four years and change, so we better get along with him because we don’t have an alternative.”

But the administration’s new public embrace of Mr. Karzai clearly has its own limitations, which were on display during the news briefing on Monday when General Eikenberry refused to answer repeated questions about whether his concerns about Mr. Karzai as a strategic partner had been laid to rest. “President Karzai is the elected president of Afghanistan,” General Eikenberry said. “Afghanistan is a close friend and ally, and of course I highly respect President Karzai in that capacity.”

Administration officials are also having to walk carefully around what remains one of the most contentious subjects in the relationship with Afghanistan: allegations of pervasive corruption in the Karzai government. Here the reversal in tone is most evident. Whereas it was a building crisis a few months ago, the Americans now portray it as one of several.

Though officials admit privately that corruption remains a big issue, some took pains to compliment Mr. Karzai for taking steps in this area. General Eikenberry, for instance, noted that Mr. Karzai had given new powers to a government anticorruption body, the High Office of Oversight, and added that “we’ve recently seen high-profile public corruption trials taking place in Kabul.”

These days, the administration is focusing more on the misuse of foreign assistance dollars at the provincial and district levels, said a senior administration official, who, like some of the other people in administration and diplomatic circles who were interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the relationship.

Rather than lecture Mr. Karzai, the official said, the administration will offer to work with his government to root out corruption in places like Kandahar. This too, may present a problem, given that one of Mr. Karzai’s brothers, whom some American officials suspect of links to drug dealers, insurgents, and voting fraud, is a powerful force in the region.

An early highlight in this carefully choreographed week will be a glittering reception on Tuesday, with Mrs. Clinton as the host to Mr. Karzai and his ministers, in the State Department’s ornate Benjamin Franklin Room.

The ministers will mingle with their American opposite numbers, a list that is expected to include Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner; Leon E. Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. David H. Petraeus; and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

The meetings’ purpose, a senior official said, is twofold: to underscore the “strategic partnership” between the United States and Afghanistan, and to underscore to the American public that the Afghan government is more than Mr. Karzai. The Afghan president has collected some worthy ministers in his cabinet, officials insist, and the State Department meeting will serve as a way to showcase them.

But foreign policy experts caution that this camaraderie does not mean all is rosy between Washington and Kabul. Far from it. While the administration “is in kiss-and-make-up mode,” said Brian Katulis, a foreign policy expert with the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group with ties to the administration, “the fundamental issues remain the same. We have not articulated what our endgame in Afghanistan is. What exactly are we asking Karzai to do?”

Mr. Katulis said huge gaps remained between what the United States would like from the Karzai government and what the Afghan government had been able to do.

For instance, American officials coined the “government in a box” idea for an Afghan government that would be ready to roll into the former Taliban stronghold of Marja once American troops cleared out the insurgents. But once that military operation was completed, Mr. Katulis noted, “there wasn’t much inside the box,” referring to the slow pace of the civilian effort in Afghanistan.

Beyond that, Mr. Karzai, concerned about his own future, remains wary of whether the United States is in Afghanistan for the long haul. Mr. Obama’s pledge to begin pulling American troops out of Afghanistan next year has left Mr. Karzai “wondering who its protectors will be after 2011,” said one European diplomat with close ties to the international operation in Afghanistan. “Will it be the Taliban?”

Administration officials said they planned to give general support to Mr. Karzai’s effort to reach out to some leaders of the Taliban, though the administration had not yet formulated a detailed policy on so-called reconciliation. They expect Mr. Karzai to push for American backing, since, among other things, he has already met with representatives of one prominent insurgent leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.