Analysis: Obama and Hillary Clinton Must Move More Decisively on Key Issues in Afghanistan, Iran and Middle East

Unlike the nation's school children who've just returned to classes after having the summer off, President Barack Obama's foreign policy team has not been exactly idle the first seven months of the administration term in office. But it has limited its foreign policy making initiatives, focusing instead on staffing, reviewing existing policies and waiting for the outcome of elections in such critical places as Israel, Iran and Afghanistan.

Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton now must move much more decisively on a number of key issues. You can have "ongoing policy reviews" only so long and although Mr. Obama is preoccupied with the health care reform debate and other domestic issues, he can no longer put off more specific policy implementation on Afghanistan, Iran and Middle East peace negotiations without being taken to task.

No one ever uses the words "Afghanistan" and "easy" in the same sentence - or at least they never should. Still, Afghanistan is proving more and more problematic on both the military and political sides of the problem. Not only is the fight against the Taliban requiring additional numbers of U.S. troops and causing increased American casualties but Afghan politics is providing policymakers unexpected problems as accusations mount against President Hamid Karzai for tampering with recent election results. The bottom line is an increased questioning of America's role in Afghanistan in the body politic, not something easily ignored or dismissed by the White House.

The Obama administration's Iran policy was predicated on extending an open hand to Tehran if only Iranian leadership would "unclench its fist." Well, so far they have refused to do so, neither before nor after their presidential elections in July. Iran says it will deliver a "package" of proposals this week aimed at dealing with various global "challenges," presumably including its nuclear programs. Expectations are low.

Washington, along with European allies plus Russia and China, have threatened further sanctions if Iran doesn't take steps to curb its nuclear ambitions but these threats never seem to amount to much and certainly not enough to pressure Iran to drop its efforts to obtain a nuclear weapons capability. This fall Washington is likely to find out whether it has enough international support to prevent Iran from reaching its goals.

And then there is the diplomatic portfolio that keeps on giving - the pursuit of peace in the Middle East. George Mitchell, the administration's special envoy, has been working with Israelis, Palestinians and others in the region but to date - and to no one's surprise - there has been little to show for it.

The focus now is on late September when it is hoped Mr. Obama will have a three-way meeting in New York with Israel's newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. Such a "tri-lateral" get-together would be proclaimed a big step forward but, if it happens, it would be expected to announce only a temporary freeze on settlement construction and a resumption of direct talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Even this step is not guaranteed since Netanyahu's policy of West Bank settlement expansion continues to alarm Palestinian and other regional leaders in the Arab world and is contrary to Washington's policy that further settlement activity should be "frozen."

In the best of circumstances, what Mitchell is discussing still falls in the category of process, i.e. just getting the parties back to the negotiating table.

Efforts continue on other issues as well, most notably North Korea, but positive steps are hard to find and no one seems to have found the key to getting Pyongyang back to the negotiating table in the first months of this administration. Again, the emphasis is on process and talk of more sanctions. Washington has taken some additional unilateral steps to bring pressure but so far without effect.

Through the first months of the administration the role of Hillary Clinton has not been as high profile as many predicted. Instead, special envoys have handled the details as policy reviews have proceeded. This fall, Clinton already has planned trips to key capitals like Islamabad and Moscow, perhaps a signal she is going to engage more directly in coming months.

In October 2008, then Vice-Presidential candidate Joe Biden famously predicted: "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.... Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy." So far the only tests have been relatively minor - North Korea testing a small nuclear weapon, Netanyahu ignoring Washington on a settlements freeze and Iran continuing its defiance of the international community. The next six months promise to pose a greater problem: become much more pro-active with your policies and move your agenda forward or risk being seen as "weak" - something no president or secretary of state wants to be called.





By Charles Wolfson, CBS News, September 8, 2009

WASHINGTON - On Monday, as the vote-counting in Afghanistan was nearing an end, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was briefed by the American ambassador in Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry. The same day, the ambassador delivered a blunt message to the front-runner, President Hamid Karzai: "Don't declare victory."

The slim majority tentatively awarded Mr. Karzai in Afghanistan's fraud-scarred election has put the Obama administration in an awkward spot: trying to balance its professed determination to investigate mounting allegations of corruption and vote-rigging while not utterly alienating the man who seems likely to remain the country's leader for another five years.

Mrs. Clinton and Ambassador Eikenberry, senior administration officials said, wanted to prevent Mr. Karzai or his backers from pre-empting an outside investigation of allegations of irregularities in the Aug. 20 vote.

"We realize that the allegations have reached such a level that we need to be very careful to allow the process to breathe," said an administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. "The message was, Let's make sure that the electoral bodies do their work, and do it rigorously."

On Tuesday, the United Nations-backed commission that is the ultimate arbiter of the vote said it found "clear and convincing evidence of fraud" at several polling stations and ordered a partial recount.

Election officials said Mr. Karzai won 54.1 percent of the vote, a percentage that, if certified, would spare him a runoff against his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, who received 28.3 percent.

But in recent days, the Obama administration has grown increasingly alarmed by the raft of allegations that ballot-stuffing and phantom polling stations generated lopsided margins in favor of Mr. Karzai.

For the United States, the problem is twofold: the fraud complaints against Mr. Karzai are almost certain to undercut his legitimacy if he is sworn in for another term as president, and American officials want whoever is president to have credibility with the Afghan people and with the international community.

Yet the more outside observers complain about fraud, the more alienated Mr. Karzai may become, and the less willing he may be to work with the United States or its allies, administration officials said. "We are still going to probably have to deal with him," another American official said. "This just makes the morning after a lot more difficult."

A possible path out of the morass, said another American official, would be if Mr. Karzai and the runner-up, Mr. Abdullah, were able to work out a deal under which Mr. Abdullah, a former Afghan foreign minister, would join the new Karzai government.

"Everybody's thinking about this," the official said. "It would be like getting Hillary Clinton to endorse Obama at the convention. Getting Karzai's people to work on Abdullah and get him to come into the government is too obvious for people not to be considering it."

Such a deal would be difficult for Mr. Abdullah, experts said, given the temptation for him to condemn the vote as a fraud. But officials said Mr. Karzai could entice him if he were to agree to the direct election of provincial governors, which Mr. Abdullah has advocated, or to limit the influence of powerful warlords.

Publicly, the administration is calling for a "complete and rigorous vetting" of all election complaints, said the State Department spokesman, Ian C. Kelly. He told reporters on Tuesday that it could take "a matter of months."

"It is very important that these elections are seen as legitimate in the eyes of the Afghan people and in the eyes of the international community," he said. "I'm not going to prejudge where the whole thing comes out."

Even privately, administration officials are reluctant to confirm that there was wholesale fraud of the kind that would invalidate the election. While there were clearly numerous egregious instances of fraud or vote-rigging, these officials said, it would take further investigation to judge whether, as one put it, "this whole thing is rotten, top to bottom."

Their caution reflects the fact that while the initial vote-counting has reached its conclusion, the Electoral Complaints Commission, an Afghan and international panel that will certify the final count, is still in the early stages of an investigation that could take several weeks.

But it also reflects a recognition that the administration will have to keep dealing with Mr. Karzai, especially as it enters a treacherous phase in its engagement in Afghanistan. Raising too many doubts about Mr. Karzai's legitimacy could make it impossible to work with him later.

"Even if we get a second round of voting, the odds are still high that Karzai will win," said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who advised the administration on its Afghan policy. "We have a fundamental interest in building up the legitimacy of the Karzai government."

European diplomats expressed similar frustration that they were powerless to do much now except wait. "There's a great perception out there that Karzai has stolen this," one diplomat said. "I'm realistic enough to know that there's not much we can do about that right now."

If there is an advantage to a lengthy inquiry, Mr. Riedel said, it is that it would give Ambassador Eikenberry, a retired general, and other officials time to try to maneuver Mr. Karzai into a bargain with his opponents.

"This requires delicacy and a deft hand," he said. "You don't want to create a downward spiral in U.S.-Afghan relations."

By Mark Landler and HELENE COOPER, The New York Times, September 8, 2009

NEW YORK - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg welcomed Dutch royalty to New York for the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage up the river that now bears his name.

Tuesday's festivities included military vessels, Dutch barges and a replica of Hudson's Half Moon.

Willem-Alexander, Crown Prince of Orange, and his wife, Princess Maxima, visited the Intrepid, a World War II aircraft carrier that's now a museum. The prince said New York was built on the values of Dutch-American pioneers, including a passion for liberty.

The royals also were visiting the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and meeting with the governor.

Hudson, an Englishman, was working for the Dutch during his September 1609 sail.

The Associated Press, September 8, 2009

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced Thursday that the United States would formally suspend nearly $30 million in aid to the coup-installed government in Honduras. She also suggested for the first time that the United States might not recognize the country's elections this fall if the ousted president was not returned to power by then.

Senior administration officials said she was sending a "powerful signal" of their commitment to the restoration of democracy in Honduras, which has been the object of international condemnation since June 28, when soldiers rousted President Manuel Zelaya from his bed and loaded him onto a plane leaving the country.

Some outside the Obama administration, however, wondered whether it was much of a signal at all, saying that formally terminating the money would not have much of a practical effect because the aid had been suspended immediately after the coup. In addition, the United States will continue providing tens of millions of dollars in development and humanitarian aid.

"They are doing these piecemeal steps to see how the de facto regime responds," said Vicki Gass of the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. "And each time the de facto regime remains intransigent, they up the ante, but it takes them way too long."

Mrs. Clinton's announcement came as she met with Mr. Zelaya, who had urged the administration to issue a finding that his ouster fit the legal definition of a military coup. Senior administration officials said such a determination - which was not made - would not have obligated the United States to cut aid further.

A legal determination would have required certification by Congress, where some Republicans support Honduras's de facto government. Reaction to Thursday's announcement suggested that there might be a fight brewing anyway.

"Today's decision by the State Department to cut aid to Honduras is an outrage," said Representative Connie Mack, Republican of Florida, who called the cuts "simply over the top."

By Ginger Thompson, The New York Times, September 3, 2009