USA > History > 2010 > International (IV)

Arms Talks Now Turn

to Short-Range Weapons

December 24, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — Fresh from winning Senate approval for a new strategic arms treaty, President Obama plans to return to the negotiating table with Russia next year in hopes of securing the first legal limits ever imposed on the smaller, battlefield nuclear weapons viewed as most vulnerable to theft or diversion.

This time around, though, Mr. Obama may have an easier time with the Senate Republicans who tried to block ratification of the new treaty, known as New Start, than he will with the Russians who were his partners in writing it.

As part of their case against the treaty, Senate Republicans complained vociferously that it did not cover tactical nuclear weapons, short-range bombs that have never been addressed by a Russian-American treaty. To press their point, Republicans pushed through a side resolution calling on Mr. Obama to open new talks with Russia on such weapons within a year.

That was always Mr. Obama’s long-stated plan for following up New Start, so now he has the added advantage of a virtual Republican mandate to negotiate a new arms limitation agreement with Russia. The challenge next time will actually be Russia, which has many more of these tactical bombs deployed in Europe than the United States does, and in its strategic doctrine deems them critical to defending against a potential conventional attack by NATO or China.

“The good news is, with Senate approval of New Start, the administration achieved the essential precondition to getting Russia to consider reductions in tactical nuclear forces,” said Stephen Young, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, an arms control advocacy group. “The Russians, however, will try to insist on limitations on U.S. missile defense, which is something the administration is both not inclined to do and couldn’t get through the Senate if it did.”

The White House said after the Senate voted 71-to-26 on Wednesday to approve New Start that it would move forward on tactical weapons. “We will carry out the requirements of the resolution by seeking to initiate negotiations with Russia on tactical nukes within one year of New Start’s entry into force,” said Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman.

Mr. Vietor said the administration was seeking to enlist Russia in collaborating with the United States and NATO on a European missile defense system rather than trying to obstruct it. “We have a robust schedule of consultations on missile defense cooperation with Russia planned for the early part of the new year,” he said.

The new arms control treaty, like its predecessors, placed limits on strategic nuclear weapons, meaning those that can be delivered long distances, but not on shorter-range bombs. Tactical weapons generally refer to those with ranges of 300 or 400 miles or less — some quite small and therefore particularly worrisome to officials responsible for guarding against terrorists obtaining such destructive weapons.

In 1991, as the cold war was coming to an end and the Soviet Union was near collapse, the first President George Bush announced that he would unilaterally withdraw most tactical nuclear weapons from forward positions. President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union then reciprocated. Experts estimate that thousands of tactical bombs were withdrawn or eliminated.

Today, the United States retains about 500 tactical weapons, according to the figures released this year, and experts say about 180 of them are still stationed in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. Russia has between 3,000 and 5,000 of them, depending on the estimate, and American officials have said Moscow moved more of them closer to NATO allies as recently as last spring in response to the deployment of American missile defense installations closer to its territory.

“In the 21st century, there is no plausible military, political or deterrent justification for the Russian government to deploy several thousand such weapons,” said Frank Miller, a former national security aide to President George W. Bush and now part of the American Security Project, which advocates for arms control.

The imbalance animated Republican opponents of the New Start treaty during the Senate debate. “Remember, the Russians have a 10-to-1 ratio of tactical nuclear weapons over us — 3,000 to 300 — not talked about in this treaty, an important issue,” said Senator George LeMieux, Republican of Florida, who inserted the provision calling for new talks in the resolution of ratification accompanying the treaty.

But other experts warned that it would be hard to persuade Russia to give up its advantage without getting something in return. If not a concession on missile defense, these experts said Russia would certainly want to talk about paring back the large stockpiles of stored strategic weapons that are also not covered by the New Start treaty.

In that category of weapons, the United States has the advantage. It reported having about 2,600 strategic warheads in reserve, while experts estimate that Russia has 1,000. At least some of the weapons to be removed as a result of New Start would simply go into storage.

Steven Pifer, a former arms control official at the State Department, said one way to devise a deal would be to negotiate an overall cap on all nuclear weapons of perhaps 2,500 each. Then both sides would have to reduce the weapons they have the most of, but precise parity in each category would not be required.

Mr. Pifer said any agreement would test whether Republicans were serious when they criticized New Start for neglecting tactical weapons. “Will they support it, or will it turn out the lack of limits on tactical nukes was merely a pretext for saying no to New Start?” he asked.

Baker Spring, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation and a critic of New Start, said it would be better not to get into a new round of talks. “The imbalance in tactical nuclear weapons is very worrisome,” he said, “but I do not think the U.S. should enter into negotiations on these weapons, because it has no cards to play.”

In the end, Mr. Spring said, Russia would probably force each side to withdraw all tactical nuclear weapons to its own national territory in exchange for any reductions. Russia, and its weapons, would still be near NATO allies, while the United States would have to withdraw its small force from Europe. “What’s not for Russia to like?” he said.

Jamie Fly, executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a conservative research group, said that an American withdrawal from Europe would probably cost Mr. Obama any Republican support. “Such a move by the Obama administration would not enhance their credibility with Senate Republicans, given the common perception that the Russians got the better of us on several key issues during the New Start negotiations,” he said.

Arms Talks Now Turn to Short-Range Weapons, NYT, 24.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/world/europe/25start.html

Obama Gamble Pays Off

With Approval of Arms Pact

December 22, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — The final approval of a new arms control treaty with Russia may have been a foregone conclusion by the time senators stepped onto the floor on Wednesday. But that was not the way it looked one afternoon last month when White House officials rushed to the Oval Office to tell President Obama that his treaty might be dead.

The president and his team had built their entire strategy for obtaining approval of the treaty on winning over a single Republican senator deputized by his caucus to negotiate an accord — and that Republican, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, had just shocked the White House by pulling the plug on a deal for the year.

Some aides counseled Mr. Obama to stand down. Losing a treaty vote, as one put it, would be “a huge loss.” But Mr. Obama decided that afternoon to make one of the biggest gambles of his presidency and demand that the Senate approve the treaty by the year’s end. “We’ve just got to go ahead,” he told aides, who recounted the conversation on Wednesday.

Along the way, he had to confront his own reluctant party leadership and circumvent the other party’s leadership. He mounted a five-week campaign that married public pressure and private suasion. He enlisted the likes of Henry A. Kissinger, asked Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to help and sent a team of officials to set up a war room of sorts on Capitol Hill. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had at least 50 meetings or phone calls with senators.

When a wavering Republican senator told Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that the president needed to address concerns about missile defense, the senator quickly received a letter from Mr. Obama reaffirming his commitment to develop the system.

Other senators who were worried about the condition of the nation’s nuclear stockpile received a letter from the president vowing to stick by a 10-year, $85 billion modernization plan.

Even in the final 10 days, the effort appeared in danger of collapsing. The insistence of Democrats on passing unrelated legislation allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military upset the Republican conference and may have cost the White House five or more votes on the arms treaty. Administration officials worried last week that they did not have the required two-thirds majority in the Senate, and as late as Sunday, the president’s aides wondered whether to call off the vote.

In the end, the gamble paid off on Wednesday with a 71-to-26 vote in the Senate to approve the treaty, called New Start, with Russia, culminating what turned out to be the biggest battle over arms control in Washington in more than a decade.

No Russian-American arms treaty submitted for a Senate vote ever squeaked through by a smaller margin. But for a president seeking his way after a crushing midterm election, it was welcome validation that he could still win a battle.

“The president made a gutsy decision that he was willing to lose it, and that was a gutsy decision,” said Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who was Mr. Obama’s chief ally in the Senate. “Everybody said it wasn’t going to happen. Even colleagues on our side said it wasn’t going to happen.”

The treaty took on such importance to Mr. Obama because he had invested so much in it.

While it will not reduce nuclear weapons as much as previous treaties have, he has made it the centerpiece of his foreign policy — “the Jenga piece,” as one aide puts it, critical to a variety of priorities, including a better relationship with Russia, international solidarity against Iran’s uranium enrichment program and the president’s larger vision of eventually ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

The challenge of Senate approval always played into the administration’s thinking, even while the treaty was being negotiated with the Russians. At several pivotal moments, American officials like Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Under Secretary of State Ellen O. Tauscher; Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller; and Michael McFaul, the president’s Russia adviser, used the need to win Senate approval to leverage Russian negotiators into making concessions.

Even before Mr. Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia signed the treaty in April, the administration had tried to woo Mr. Kyl, the No. 2 Republican and his party’s leading conservative voice on arms control. The White House strategy was to meet Mr. Kyl’s concerns on modernizing the nuclear complex, knowing that if he embraced the treaty, it would sail to approval.

Mr. Obama was coming under pressure from multiple sides as the end of the year neared. During a meeting in Japan in mid-November, Mr. Medvedev pressed Mr. Obama on the treaty. “Are you going to get Start done?” the Russian president asked, according to an administration official, who like others interviewed insisted on anonymity to share private moments.

Soon after Mr. Obama returned, his negotiations with Mr. Kyl suddenly disintegrated. On Nov. 16, the senator issued a statement saying he did not think there was enough time to deal with the issues surrounding New Start before the end of the year. That would mean waiting until the new Senate took office with five more Republicans.

White House officials learned about Mr. Kyl’s statement shortly after noon when a reporter sent it by e-mail. They instantly realized the peril. Mr. Biden; Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser; his deputies Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes; and the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, informed Mr. Obama.

“There were people here who thought that was it, we were going to call it a day,” recalled one White House official. There was no Plan B. But Mr. Obama, who often disappoints supporters by not responding to Republicans more aggressively, decided this was a moment to fight. “He decided that he would settle on nothing short of full Senate ratification,” said another official.

Starting in that meeting, they laid out a strategy. Mr. Biden was supposed to meet two days later with several Republican luminaries. Instead, Mr. Obama would host the meeting and make a public pitch for the treaty. The White House ripped up plans for the weekly radio and Internet address to make it about New Start. Then Mr. Obama flew to Lisbon for a NATO meeting, where he encouraged European leaders to speak out for the treaty.

Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry decided to show nothing but public respect for Mr. Kyl and to stick by the offer to spend $85 billion modernizing the nuclear weapons complex. But they gave up hope of winning over Mr. Kyl, who said he felt “jammed” by the White House. Instead, they began bypassing him to work with other Republicans. The assiduous efforts by Mr. Kerry and Mr. Biden to accommodate Republican concerns proved critical.

Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee was one important target. He said in an interview that he had “multiple, multiple, multiple calls” with Mr. Biden and also heard from Mrs. Clinton and Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military endorsements were particularly important. “For folks who are looking for additional support, that’s powerful,” Mr. Corker said. “For all the secretaries of state to say the things they said, that is powerful.”

Senator George V. Voinovich of Ohio, another Republican who received attention, said the more he learned about the treaty, the more comfortable he felt. “As people were able to gain more and more information about it and started to pay attention to the people who were supportive of it, its validity and need became more apparent,” he said.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who voted for the treaty, said Republican pressure by Mr. Kyl and others produced a better result. “Even most senators who vote against the treaty would say both the treaty and the nuclear modernization program are better as a result of this,” he said.

But Mr. Obama had problems with Democrats more focused on immigration and gays in the military. Mr. Obama had to call Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, to emphasize how important the treaty was to him, and even then, the decision to call a vote on the gay rights bill last weekend provoked a reaction among Republicans who thought they had been misled.

“Biden about had a heart attack” when Mr. Reid scheduled the vote, said a senator who talked with him. At that point, the senator said it appeared there were 78 to 80 votes for the treaty. Mr. Alexander said that anger over unrelated legislation cost the treaty 5 to 10 votes.

“It was very tricky, and it almost broke it apart,” Mr. Kerry said. “That was part of the overall high-stakes poker. A lot was hanging on different things.”

On Sunday, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, joined Mr. Kyl in declaring that they would vote against the treaty. At the White House, there was worry. “People think this means we’re dead,” one White House aide said in an e-mail message to colleagues.

Mr. Donilon convened a conference call with Mr. Biden and White House officials to talk about whether to file a motion to end the debate. Once the motion was filed, there was no turning back. “As you know, there are some doubts,” Mr. Donilon told Mr. Biden, according to notes taken by a participant.

Mr. Biden cut him off. “We’ve got the votes,” he said. “Period.”

Other aides expressed doubts.

“Look,” Mr. Biden said, “I’m not saying I think we have the votes. I’m telling you, we have the votes. I have personally spoken to 12 Republican senators yesterday or today. Personally. One on one. We have the votes.”

And so they did. With Mr. Biden in the presiding officer’s chair and Mr. Kerry on the floor, the vote was called. Afterward, Mr. Obama gathered his team again in the Oval Office. This time he toasted them with Champagne.

    Obama Gamble Pays Off With Approval of Arms Pact, NYT, 22.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/world/23start.html

As Richardson Visits,

North Korea Assails South

December 17, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK McDONALD

SEOUL, South Korea — Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, on a visit to North Korea he described as a mission “to reduce tensions on the Korean Peninsula,” began a series of meetings on Friday with senior diplomats in Pyongyang.

While Mr. Richardson’s trip was approved by the State Department, he was not traveling as an official envoy. Television footage showed him arriving at the Sunan airport outside Pyongyang on Thursday. Mr. Richardson, a former ambassador to the United Nations, was greeted on the tarmac by a North Korean official who said, in English, “So nice to see you.”

Meanwhile, North Korea’s official news agency assailed a plan by the South Korean military to stage a live-fire artillery exercise from Yeonpyeong Island, perhaps as early as Saturday.

The latest inter-Korean crisis erupted three weeks ago with an artillery barrage from the North that targeted Yeonpyeong and killed four South Koreans.

“The puppet warmongers are contemplating staging madcap naval firing exercises,” said the news agency, K.C.N.A., which also called the new South Korean defense minister “a war maniac keen to ignite a war” and “a puppy knowing no fear of a tiger.”

North Korea does not accept the so-called Northern Limit Line in the Yellow Sea that Seoul and Washington consider a legal and valid border. Pyongyang has warned that any firing into the waters will provoke another response.

The North’s official Web site, Uriminzokkiri, also warned Friday that “if war breaks out, it will lead to nuclear warfare and not be limited to the Korean Peninsula.” The online commentary was cited by the South Korean news agency Yonhap.

Bilateral meetings throughout the region in recent days were part of a busy week of shuttle diplomacy focusing on a defusing of the crisis.

In Seoul, Sung Kim, the American special envoy to the so-called six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear programs, met Friday with his South Korean counterpart, Wi Sung-lac.

In Beijing, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg met Thursday with Dai Bingguo, state councilor in charge of foreign affairs, about China’s call for a resumption of the six-party talks on the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear programs. China, the host of previous talks, is North Korea’s principal ally and aid donor.

“The six-party talks are the only correct channel for settling problems on the peninsula,” said Mr. Dai, quoted by the official Chinese news agency Xinhua.

Mr. Dai had met with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, last week in Pyongyang.

Mr. Steinberg, who also met Thursday with Wu Dawei, China’s special representative for Korean Peninsula affairs, was due to leave Beijing on Friday to brief Japanese officials in Tokyo.

Beiijng and Pyongyang are supporting a new round of the six-party talks, while Washington, Seoul and Tokyo have so far rejected the idea. The talks were last held in 2008, when North Korea quit the process.

Russia is the other member of the group, and in a statement from the Foreign Ministry on Monday, Moscow pointed to “the need to create conditions for the relaunch of the six-nation talks.”

Russia’s nuclear ambassador, Aleksei Borodavkin, had consulted with Mr. Wi, the South Korean envoy, on Wednesday in Moscow.

The latest crisis on the peninsula erupted Nov. 23 ago with the artillery exchange that struck Yeonpyeong, which lies just 8 miles off the North Korean coast. The North’s shelling, which killed two South Korean marines and two civilian construction workers, has raised inter-Korean tensions to their highest level in decades.

North Korea said its attack against the island was provoked by wayward shells from a live-fire drill being held by the South. Seoul said the attack was unprovoked.

    As Richardson Visits, North Korea Assails South, NYT, 17.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/world/asia/18korea.html

The Unquiet American

December 16, 2010
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN

LONDON

It was the worst summer. The war seemed as unending as the excuses of Western leaders for their inaction. In a besieged Sarajevo, people raised hands to their necks in a gesture of self-strangulation as the flat fracturing boom of another shell reverberated in the valley.

Then Richard Holbrooke appeared in the snake pit.

Nobody could end the Bosnian war — nobody. Europe’s worst conflict since World War II had gone too far by 1995: the 100,000 dead, the three-way ethnic divisions traced in blood, the Srebrenica massacre of Muslims. Some things can’t be solved. This was one: until Holbrooke went for the Balkan jugular.

Three things distinguished him. The first was his passion. He’d been in Banja Luka in August 1992, where he witnessed “half-drunk Serb paramilitaries” on a raping rampage. Later he was given a wooden carving by a Muslim survivor of a Serbian concentration camp. He put the sculpture in his Washington office, a daily reminder of Western failure.

The second was his understanding of the place of force in diplomacy. He was comfortable with American power, Vietnam notwithstanding. The Balkan bullies, Slobodan Milosevic chief among them, shrank before U.S. military brass; Holbrooke, adept at theater, knew that. NATO soon embarked on its first serious bombing of the Serbs. When the bombardment paused and Milosevic pleaded, Holbrooke parried: “History would never forgive us if we stop now.”

Living in three time zones — past, present and future — he liked to invoke history, for it was prologue. Living in three identities — doer, observer and chronicler — his persuasive arsenal was intricate, part dagger, part whimsy. He knew how to close and how closing depended on a balance of forces.

The third was his determination. When an American diplomat, Robert Frasure, and two senior officials were killed in an accident near Sarajevo, Holbrooke’s relentlessness was redoubled. As another fine U.S. diplomat, Ron Nitesky, said, Holbrooke knew Frasure was “too good a man to die putting the best possible twist on a bad policy.”

Now Holbrooke, too, has gone out “with his boots on,” as his wife Kati Marton told me, trying to end another war in Afghanistan. Will somebody assume his mantle as Holbrooke took up Frasure’s, with that fire?

I’m not sure we breed his like any more in this age of narrow-gauge specialization. The pusillanimous paper-shufflers — the kind that denied him a deserved Nobel Peace Prize — busy “putting the best possible twist on bad policy” multiply; they complicated Holbrooke’s life in the Obama administration. American power in 2010 is not what it was in 1995.

Still, this untimely death is a clarion call to America to set aside smallness in the name of values that can still inspire. Holbrooke was a fierce believer in the U.S. capacity for good. Here stood the nexus of his multiple beings. It is what made him so consequential in so many places and saved so many lives.

Wilsonian idealist? Ruthless realpolitiker? He was both rolled into one dreamer-doer. As he once told me, “We cannot choose between the two; we have to blend the two.” How could Americans forsake their idealism if they had become Americans precisely in defiance of the hateful ideologies that drove Holbrooke’s Jewish parents from Europe and ooze from Waziristan caves today?

Archibald Macleish wrote that if we had not believed all humankind is endowed “with certain inalienable rights, we would never have become America, whatever else we might have become.” That was the America Holbrooke took out to the world, even post-Iraq, with “interventionism” a dirty word.

An Afghan student, Ziaullah, once a radical anti-American at Khost University, was transformed by meeting Holbrooke. He wrote of his “bad grief” and the “bad shock to the peace mission in the world.”

It was impossible to end the Bosnian war. Yet he ended it with the Dayton accords. It was impossible, in one life, to do so much for Chinese-American rapprochement; so much for transatlantic ties and the German-American bond; so much for AIDS and the American Academy in Berlin (his brainchild); and so much and so loyally for so many friends. Yet he did.

Dayton was imperfect and achieved in talks with a bloody killer, but immensely precious. That’s worth recalling in Afghanistan. The Afghan review upholding the start of withdrawal in July 2011 bears the mark of Holbrooke’s realism.

When I spoke to Marton, the president of Georgia had just called to say a street would be named for Holbrooke, and a former French minister to relay Le Monde’s headline: “L’Amérique a perdu un diplomate de légende.”

Holbrooke would have liked that. He took a lively interest in the press’s lively interest in him. “Calling from some hell hole, he’d always ask, ‘Was the piece above the fold?’ ” Marton recalled.

Yes, Richard, the obit was well above the fold, a reflection of a life of unrelenting and passionate engagement.

    The Unquiet American, NYT, 16.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/opinion/17cohen.html

Strong American Voice in Diplomacy and Crisis

December 13, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2009 and a diplomatic troubleshooter who worked for every Democratic president since the late 1960s and oversaw the negotiations that ended the war in Bosnia, died Monday evening in Washington. He was 69 and lived in Manhattan.

His death was confirmed by an Obama administration official.

Mr. Holbrooke was hospitalized on Friday afternoon after becoming ill while meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in her Washington office. Doctors found a tear to his aorta, and he underwent a 21-hour operation. Mr. Holbrooke had additional surgery on Sunday and remained in very critical condition until his death.

Mr. Holbrooke’s signal accomplishment in a distinguished career that involved diplomacy in Asia, Europe and the Middle East was his role as chief architect of the 1995 Dayton peace accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. It was a coup preceded and followed by his peacekeeping missions to the tinderbox of ethnic, religious and regional conflicts that was formerly Yugoslavia.

More recently, Mr. Holbrooke wrestled with the stunning complexity of Afghanistan and Pakistan: how to bring stability to the region while fighting a resurgent Taliban and coping with corrupt governments, rigged elections, fragile economies, a rampant narcotics trade, nuclear weapons in Pakistan, and the presence of Al Qaeda, and presumably Osama bin Laden, in the wild tribal borderlands.

One of his main tasks was to press President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to take responsibility for security in his country and to confront the corruption that imperils the American mission there. At times, Mr. Karzai refused to see him, but Mr. Holbrooke was undeterred.

“He’s an enormously tough customer,” Mr. Holbrooke said during one of the periodic breakfasts he had with reporters who covered his diplomatic exploits. “As you’ve heard,” he added with a smile, “so am I.”

He helped his boss, Mrs. Clinton, whom he had supported in her presidential bid, to persuade President Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan, while pressing for more aid and development projects to improve the United States’ image there. But he died before anyone knew if the experiment would succeed.

A brilliant, sometimes abrasive infighter, he used a formidable arsenal of facts, bluffs, whispers, implied threats and, when necessary, pyrotechnic fits of anger to press his positions. Mr. Obama, who praised Mr. Holbrooke on Monday afternoon at the State Department as “simply one of the giants of American foreign policy,” was sometimes driven to distraction by his lectures.

But Mr. Holbrooke dazzled and often intimidated opponents and colleagues around a negotiating table. Some called him a bully, and he looked the part: the big chin thrust out, the broad shoulders, the tight smile that might mean anything. To admirers, however, including generations of State Department protégés and the presidents he served, his peacemaking efforts were extraordinary.

When he named Mr. Holbrooke to represent the United States at the United Nations, President Bill Clinton said, “His remarkable diplomacy in Bosnia helped to stop the bloodshed, and at the talks in Dayton the force of his determination was the key to securing peace, restoring hope and saving lives.” Others said his work in Bosnia deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.

Few diplomats could boast of his career accomplishments. Early on, Mr. Holbrooke devoted six years to the Vietnam War: first in the Mekong Delta with the United States Agency for International Development, seeking the allegiance of the civilian population; then at the embassy in Saigon as an aide to Ambassadors Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.; and finally in the American delegation to the 1968-69 Paris peace talks led by W. Averell Harriman and Cyrus R. Vance.

Mr. Holbrooke was the author of one volume of the Pentagon Papers, the secret Defense Department history of the Vietnam War that cataloged years of American duplicity in Southeast Asia. The papers were first brought to public attention by The New York Times in 1971.

As assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Carter administration, Mr. Holbrooke played a crucial role in establishing full diplomatic relations with China in 1979, a move that finessed America’s continuing commitment to China’s thorn in the side Taiwan and followed up on the historic breakthrough of President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 visit to China.

During the Clinton presidency, Mr. Holbrooke served as ambassador to Germany in 1993-94, when he helped enlarge the North Atlantic alliance; achieved his diplomatic breakthroughs in Bosnia as assistant secretary of state for European affairs in 1994-95; and was chief representative to the United Nations, a cabinet post, for 17 months from 1999 to 2001.

At the United Nations, he forged close ties to Secretary General Kofi Annan, negotiated a settlement of America’s longstanding dues dispute, highlighted conflicts and health crises in Africa and Indonesia, and called for more peacekeeping forces. After fighting erupted in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1999, he led a Security Council delegation on a mission to Africa. He also backed sanctions against Angolan rebels in 2000.

While he achieved prominence as a cabinet official and envoy to many of the world’s most troubled arenas, Mr. Holbrooke was frustrated in his ambition to be secretary of state; he was the runner-up to Madeleine K. Albright, Mr. Clinton’s choice in 1997, and a contender when Mr. Obama installed Mrs. Clinton in the post in 2009.

Foreign policy was his life. Even during Republican administrations, when he was not in government, he was deeply engaged, undertaking missions as a private citizen traveling through the war-weary Balkans and the backwaters of Africa and Asia to see firsthand the damage and devastating human costs of genocide, civil wars, and H.I.V. and AIDS epidemics.

And his voice on the outside remained influential — as an editor of Foreign Policy magazine from 1972 to 1977, as a writer of columns for The Washington Post and analytical articles for many other publications, and as the author of two books. He collaborated with Clark Clifford, a presidential adviser, on a best-selling Clifford memoir, “Counsel to the President” (1991), and wrote his own widely acclaimed memoir, “To End a War” (1998), about his Bosnia service.

Mr. Holbrooke also made millions as an investment banker on Wall Street. In the early 1980s, he was a co-founder of a Washington consulting firm, Public Strategies, which was later sold to Lehman Brothers. At various times he was a managing director of Lehman Brothers, vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston and a director of the American International Group.

Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was born in Manhattan on April 24, 1941, to Dr. Dan Holbrooke, a physician, and the former Trudi Moos. He attended Scarsdale High School, where his best friend was David Rusk, son of Dean Rusk, the future secretary of state. Richard’s father died when he was 15, and he drew closer to the Rusk family.

At Brown University, he majored in history and was editor of the student newspaper. He intended to become a journalist, but after graduating in 1962 he was turned down by The Times and joined the State Department as a foreign service officer.

In 1964, Mr. Holbrooke married the first of his three wives, Larrine Sullivan, a lawyer. The couple had two sons, David and Anthony, and were divorced. His marriage to Blythe Babyak, a television producer, also ended in divorce. In 1995, he married Kati Marton, an author, journalist and human rights advocate who had been married to the ABC anchorman Peter Jennings until their divorce in 1993. He is survived by Ms. Marton; his two sons; his brother, Andrew; and two stepchildren, Christopher and Elizabeth Jennings.

After language training, he spent three years working in Vietnam. In 1966, he joined President Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House staff, and two years later became a junior member of the delegation at the Paris peace talks. The talks achieved no breakthrough, but the experience taught him much about the arts of negotiation.

In 1970, after a year as a fellow at Princeton, he became director of the Peace Corps in Morocco. He quit government service in 1972 and over the next five years edited the quarterly journal Foreign Policy. He was also a contributing editor of Newsweek International and a consultant on reorganizing the government’s foreign policy apparatus.

He worked on Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in 1976, and was rewarded with the post of assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs. When Ronald Reagan and the Republicans took over the White House in 1981, Mr. Holbrooke left the government and for more than a decade focused on writing and investment banking.

When President Clinton took office in 1993, Mr. Holbrooke was named ambassador to Germany. He helped found the American Academy in Berlin as a cultural exchange center.

He returned to Washington in 1994 as assistant secretary of state for European affairs. His top priority soon became the horrendous civil war in the former Yugoslavia, a conflict precipitated by the secession of Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Bosnia. Massacres, mass rapes and displaced populations, among other atrocities, were part of campaigns of “ethnic cleansing” against Muslims.

After months of shuttle diplomacy, Mr. Holbrooke in 1995 achieved a breakthrough cease-fire and a framework for dividing Bosnia into two entities, one of Bosnian Serbs and another of Croatians and Muslims. The endgame negotiations, involving the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia, unfolded in Dayton, Ohio, where a peace agreement was reached after months of hard bargaining led by Mr. Holbrooke.

It was the high-water mark of a career punctuated with awards, honorary degrees and prestigious seats on the boards of the Asia Society, the American Museum of Natural History, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Council on Foreign Relations, Refugees International and other organizations. He was 59 when he left the United Nations as the Clinton administration drew to a close.

But there was to be one more task. As Mr. Obama assumed office and attention shifted to Afghanistan, Mr. Holbrooke took on his last assignment. He began by trying to lower expectations, moving away from the grand, transformative goals of President George W. Bush toward something more readily achievable.

But his boss and old friend, Mrs. Clinton, expressed absolute confidence in him. “Richard represents the kind of robust, persistent, determined diplomacy the president intends to pursue,” she said. “I admire deeply his ability to shoulder the most vexing and difficult challenges.”

David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington.

    Strong American Voice in Diplomacy and Crisis, NYT, 13.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/world/14holbrooke.html

Reality Check

December 11, 2010
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The failed attempt by the U.S. to bribe Israel with a $3 billion security assistance package, diplomatic cover and advanced F-35 fighter aircraft — if Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu would simply agree to a 90-day settlements freeze to resume talks with the Palestinians — has been enormously clarifying. It demonstrates just how disconnected from reality both the Israeli and the Palestinian leaderships have become.

Oil is to Saudi Arabia what unconditional American aid and affection are to Israel — and what unconditional Arab and European aid and affection are to the Palestinians: a hallucinogenic drug that enables them each to think they can defy the laws of history, geography and demography. It is long past time that we stop being their crack dealers. At a time of nearly 10 percent unemployment in America, we have the Israelis and the Palestinians sitting over there with their arms folded, waiting for more U.S. assurances or money to persuade them to do what is manifestly in their own interest: negotiate a two-state deal. Shame on them, and shame us. You can’t want peace more than the parties themselves, and that is exactly where America is today. The people running Israel and Palestine have other priorities. It is time we left them alone to pursue them — and to live with the consequences.

They just don’t get it: we’re not their grandfather’s America anymore. We have bigger problems. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators should take a minute and put the following five words into Google: “budget cuts and fire departments.” Here’s what they’ll find: American city after city — Phoenix, Cincinnati, Austin, Washington, Jacksonville, Sacramento, Philadelphia — all having to cut their fire departments. Then put in these four words: “schools and budget cuts.” One of the top stories listed is from The Christian Science Monitor: “As state and local governments slash spending and federal stimulus dries up, school budget cuts for the next academic year could be the worst in a generation.”

I guarantee you, if someone came to these cities and said, “We have $3 billion we’d like to give to your schools and fire departments if you’ll just do what is manifestly in your own interest,” their only answer would be: “Where do we sign?” And so it should have been with Israel.

Israel, when America, a country that has lavished billions on you over the last 50 years and taken up your defense in countless international forums, asks you to halt settlements for three months to get peace talks going, there is only one right answer, and it is not “How much?” It is: “Yes, whatever you want, because you’re our only true friend in the world.”

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, what are you thinking? Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, offered you a great two-state deal, including East Jerusalem — and you let it fritter away. Now, instead of chasing after Obama and telling him you’ll show up for negotiations anywhere under any conditions that the president asks, you’re also setting your own terms. Here’s some free advice: When America goes weak, if you think the Chinese will deliver Israel for you, you’re wrong. I know China well. It will sell you out for a boatload of Israeli software, drones and microchips so fast that your head will spin.

I understand the problem: Israeli and Palestinian leaders cannot end the conflict between each other without having a civil war within their respective communities. Netanyahu would have to take on the settlers and Abbas would have to take on Hamas and the Fatah radicals. Both men have silent majorities that would back them if they did, but neither man feels so uncomfortable with his present situation to risk that civil war inside to make peace outside. There are no Abe Lincolns out there.

What this means, argues the Hebrew University philosopher Moshe Halbertal, is that the window for a two-state solution is rapidly closing. Israel will end up permanently occupying the West Bank with its 2.5 million Palestinians. We will have a one-state solution. Israel will have inside its belly 2.5 million Palestinians without the rights of citizenship, along with 1.5 million Israeli Arabs. “Then the only question will be what will be the nature of this one state — it will either be apartheid or Lebanon,” said Halbertal. “We will be confronted by two horrors.”

The most valuable thing that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could do now is just get out of the picture — so both leaders and both peoples have an unimpeded view of their horrible future together in one state, if they can’t separate. We must not give them any more excuses, like: “Here comes the secretary of state again. Be patient. Something is happening. We’re working on a deal. We’re close. If only the Americans weren’t so naïve, we were just about to compromise. ... Be patient.”

It’s all a fraud. America must get out of the way so Israelis and Palestinians can see clearly, without any obstructions, what reckless choices their leaders are making. Make no mistake, I am for the most active U.S. mediation effort possible to promote peace, but the initiative has to come from them. The Middle East only puts a smile on your face when it starts with them.

    Reality Check, NYT, 11.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/opinion/12friedman.html

U.S. Military Chief Criticizes China Over North Korea

December 8, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK McDONALD

SEOUL, South Korea — After South Korea was spooked Wednesday morning by reports of artillery fire in the North, the two most senior military leaders from Washington and Seoul met to discuss possible responses to future provocations by the North, with the American commander lashing out at China for failing to intervene with Pyongyang diplomatically.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, sharply criticized Beijing for not condemning North Korea’s artillery barrage against a South Korean island two weeks ago. Two marines and two civilians were killed in the attack.

“China has enormous influence over the North, and therefore they have a unique responsibility,” Admiral Mullen said at a press briefing Wednesday afternoon. “Now is the time for Beijing to step up to that responsibility and guide the North, and indeed the whole region, to a better future.”

“Even tacit approval of Pyongyang’s brazen attack,” he said, “leaves all the neighbors in the region asking, ‘What’s next?’”

China has criticized the response by Washington and Seoul — joint war games in the Yellow Sea led by an American aircraft carrier battle group — rather than the North’s use of military force against civilians.

The chairman of South Korea’s Joint Chiefs, Gen. Han Min-koo, on Wednesday called the attack “an intolerable act against humanity.”

General Han said the United States and South Korea would hold further combined military exercises, and a joint statement by the two chairmen said the drills will be “designed to effectively deter North Korean aggression and strengthen the joint capabilities to respond.”

Admiral Mullen also reaffirmed the ongoing military alliance between Seoul and Washington.

“We have been at your side for six decades, and President Obama wanted me to assure you that we will be at your side for many more,” he said, adding that the alliance was distinguished by “a shoulder-to-shoulder approach.”

But he stopped short of saying there would be a wingtip-to-wingtip approach in the event of any quick South Korean response to a future North Korean provocation. Planning, yes. Planes in the air, no.

The newly appointed defense minister, Kim Kwan-jin, has said that airstrikes against the North are now one of South Korea’s options under Seoul’s new rules of engagement. The government has been severely criticized here for what is seen as a slow and even mild response to the North Korean shelling.

Admiral Mullen on Wednesday praised the South Korean response for its “restraint,” and said he has not requested that South Korean military planners “take their air assets off the table.”

He also stressed that cooperation with Japanese military forces would be essential to future stability in the region, and he planned to leave for Tokyo on Wednesday night for talks with Japanese defense officials.

“We have to get to a place where there’s much more trilateral cooperation that there has been in the past,” Admiral Mullen said.

“The Japanese, likewise, have a stake,” he added, “in seeing this threat countered.”

    U.S. Military Chief Criticizes China Over North Korea, NYT, 8.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/world/asia/09korea.html

WikiLeaks Struggles to Stay Online After Cyberattacks

December 3, 2010
The New York Times
By RAVI SOMAIYA and J. DAVID GOODMAN

LONDON — An American provider of Internet domain names withdrew its service to the WikiLeaks Web site late Thursday after a barrage of attacks by hackers threatened to destabilize its entire system. But within hours, WikiLeaks had registered its domain name in Switzerland, and it was back online by early Friday morning.

Shortly after the action by EveryDNS.net, which provides domain names for about 500,000 Web sites, the French government began seeking measures to keep the whistle blowing organization from being hosted in France. The moves follow a decision on Wednesday by Amazon.com Inc. to expel WikiLeaks from its servers. The organization remains on the servers of a Swedish host, Bahnhof.

WikiLeaks appears increasingly engaged in a game of digital Whac-A-Mole as it struggles to stay online after publicizing a huge array of some 250,000 leaked State Department documents relating to American foreign policy around the globe.

The Web infrastructure that supports WikiLeaks is deliberately diffuse and difficult to track, with servers spread through many countries in order to insulate the site from hostile states or companies. But cyberattacks and problems with service providers have kept the site and its founder, Julian Assange, moving.

“Since April of this year, our timetable has not been our own; rather it has been one that has centered on the moves of abusive elements of the United States government against us,” Mr. Assange wrote in a discussion on Friday on the Web site of the British newspaper The Guardian. “The threats against our lives are a matter of public record,” he added later, saying he and others who work on WikiLeaks were taking “appropriate precautions.” Mr. Assange is being sought for questioning in connection to alleged sex crimes in Sweden, which he has denied the allegations, and his location was not disclosed.

In a statement on its Web site, EveryDNS.net said it terminated WikiLeaks’ domain name at around 10 p.m., Eastern time for violating its terms of service.

The old domain, WikiLeaks.org, “has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks,” the company said. Such attacks usually involve bombarding a Web site with requests for access, effectively blocking legitimate users, and are designed to make a targeted Web site unavailable. When questioned about similar cyberattacks on Sunday against WikiLeaks, American officials vigorously denied any involvement.

According to WhoIs.com, the new domain, WikiLeaks.ch, is registered to the Swiss branch of the Swedish Pirate Party, a political organization that has previously worked with Mr. Assange.

In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, the Pirate Party’s leader, Rickard Falkvinge, expressed an open offer to host the WikiLeaks site because “our organizations generally share the same values — we value privacy, transparency, democracy and knowledge.” Mr. Falkvinge added that any sharing of Web services between the two organizations would offer “heightened political protection.”

“Any prosecutors will have to target a political party in us, and the price for doing that is much higher,” he said.

WikiLeaks reacted to the domain name switch on its Twitter feed, writing just after midnight on Friday morning: “WikiLeaks.org domain killed by U.S. EveryDNS.net after claimed mass attacks.”

It implored supporters to “keep us strong” and provided a link for financial donations. Hours later, a message on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed said: “WikiLeaks moved to Switzerland” and provided the new Web address.

In France, Industry Minister Eric Besson asked the French government on Friday to explore measures to “ensure that it is no longer hosted in France” after reports surfaced that WikiLeaks has servers there, according to a letter seen by Reuters. “France cannot host an internet site that violates the secrecy of diplomatic relations and endangers people,” Mr. Besson said.

Earlier this week, Amazon — which rents server space to companies in addition to its online retail business — canceled its relationship with WikiLeaks after inquiries from an aide to Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut. The company said the organization was violating the terms of service for the program.

“When companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won’t injure others, it’s a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere,” the company said.

Anna Mossberg, Bahnhof’s chief executive, said her company held “two physical WikiLeaks servers in our data hall in Stockholm.” Those servers, she said, have been attacked in recent weeks, though Bahnhof has come under no overt government pressure to abandon them. “But I know we are not the only provider of WikiLeaks’ servers — they are everywhere.”

Ravi Somaiya reported from London, J. David Goodman from New York. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

    WikiLeaks Struggles to Stay Online After Cyberattacks, NYT, 3.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/world/europe/04domain.html

Wider Window Into Iran’s Missile Capabilities Offers a Murkier View

December 3, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON — It was one of the most provocative assertions to emerge from the WikiLeaks cache — a diplomatic cable from this past February confidently describing the sale of 19 missiles to Iran by North Korea that could give Tehran the ability to strike Western Europe and Russia.

But a review of a dozen other State Department cables made available by WikiLeaks and interviews with American government officials offer a murkier picture of Iran’s missile capabilities. Despite the tone of the February cable, it shows there are disagreements among officials about the missiles, and scant evidence that they are close to being deployed.

The conflicting portraits illustrate how the batch of diplomatic documents made available by WikiLeaks can be glimpses of the American government’s views, sometimes reflecting only part of the story, rather than concrete assertions of fact.

While there are a range of opinions about the details of the weapons sale and the readiness of the missiles, what most American officials appear to agree on is that at the very least North Korea sold a number of ballistic missile parts to Tehran in 2005.

The sale set off alarms in Washington, because the parts were for BM-25 missiles, a weapon with powerful engines that — if deployed by Iran — could bolster Tehran’s ability to strike far beyond the Middle East, State Department cables show.

But five years later, American officials in interviews said that they had no evidence that Iran had used the parts or technology to actually construct a BM-25, let alone begin the years of flight testing necessary before it could reliably add the missile to its arsenal.

It is unclear why Iran appears to have had trouble with the BM-25. According to one American official, it is possible that Iran did not get complete “missile kits” from the North Koreans in 2005, or that Iranian scientists have had difficulty mastering the technology.

Both American officials and outside experts appear to agree, however, that Iran did use some of the BM-25 technology to launch a satellite into space last year, and that Iranian scientists probably used data from that launching for its military program.

“Just because the BM-25 program hasn’t progressed as far as the Iranians hoped it would, the concern remains,” said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because assessments about Iran’s missile program are classified.

The dozen cables provide a glimpse of secret discussions between the United States and a number of foreign governments about the BM-25, described earlier this week in an article in The New York Times. Their views are colored by their relationships with Iran.

The Israelis, for instance, take a more alarmist stance than the United States because Israel regards Iran as its greatest threat. Russia, on the other hand, denies that the BM-25 even exists.

In the cables, American officials argue that North Korea developed the medium-range weapon based on a Russian design, the R-27, once used on Soviet submarines to carry nuclear warheads.

The cables describe how the North Koreans, in turn, transferred “missiles” or “missile systems” to Iran. The cables do not refer to missile parts or “kits.”

But the cables, written over four years, vary in the certainty with which Americans make the claim about the technology transfer, with one cable saying Iran “has probably acquired” BM-25s and another discussing “substantial data indicating Iranian possession of a missile system.”

The public release of the cables has stirred debate among experts outside the government on the existence of the BM-25 and whether, if Iran has the weapon, it poses an immediate threat to Western Europe.

Many experts say the BM-25 has undergone no flight testing either by North Korea or Iran, and they note that traditionally it takes a dozen or so tests over several years to perfect a missile and prepare it for military deployment.

On the other hand, NATO last month agreed to establish an antimissile shield and has invited Russia to take part, suggesting growing concern in Europe of an Iranian missile threat.

One of the most knowledgeable public analysts of Tehran’s endeavors in rocketry is Michael Elleman, a missile engineer who contributed to a report on Iran’s program issued in May by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an arms analysis group in London.

That report was skeptical of Iran’s having obtained the BM-25 from North Korea. Now, Mr. Elleman said, he is less certain.

“It is possible that the BM-25 does not exist,” he said in an e-mail message. “However, it is more likely that it does, in some fashion. We just do not know, precisely, because it has never been tested.”

The first cable in the WikiLeaks cache that refers to the BM-25 came from the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, sent to Washington on May 5, 2006. The cable discusses a meeting a month earlier between Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent, and Meir Dagan, director of Mossad, Israel’s main spy agency.

According to the cable, Mr. Dagan talked of Iran’s having a medium-range missile, the Shahab-3, that “can currently carry nuclear material, and reported that Iran is also trying to adapt the BM-25 missile, which already has a longer range, for this purpose.”

American intelligence officials do not believe that Iran has yet mastered the technology to put a nuclear warhead on top of a missile.

But the most detailed discussion about the missile is contained in a cable from Feb. 24 of this year, which describes the disagreements between American and Russian officials about the missile.

The cable shows that American officials firmly believed that Iran had obtained 19 of the missiles from North Korea, and that there was direct evidence of the weapons transfer. But it goes on to indicate that the Russians dismiss that claim as a myth driven by politics.

Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, and William J. Broad from New York.

    Wider Window Into Iran’s Missile Capabilities Offers a Murkier View, NYT, 3.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/world/middleeast/03wikileaks-missile.html

Cables Obtained by WikiLeaks Shine Light Into Secret Diplomatic Channels

November 28, 2010
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and ANDREW W. LEHREN

WASHINGTON — A cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.

Some of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama administration’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. WikiLeaks posted 220 cables, some redacted to protect diplomatic sources, in the first installment of the archive on its Web site on Sunday.

The disclosure of the cables is sending shudders through the diplomatic establishment, and could strain relations with some countries, influencing international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and American ambassadors around the world have been contacting foreign officials in recent days to alert them to the expected disclosures. A statement from the White House on Sunday said: “We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information.”

The White House said the release of what it called “stolen cables” to several publications was a “reckless and dangerous action” and warned that some cables, if released in full, could disrupt American operations abroad and put the work and even lives of confidential sources of American diplomats at risk. The statement noted that reports often include “candid and often incomplete information” whose disclosure could “deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world.”

The cables, a huge sampling of the daily traffic between the State Department and some 270 embassies and consulates, amount to a secret chronicle of the United States’ relations with the world in an age of war and terrorism. Among their revelations, to be detailed in The Times in coming days:

¶ A dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel: Since 2007, the United States has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device. In May 2009, Ambassador Anne W. Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, “if the local media got word of the fuel removal, ‘they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,’ he argued.”

¶ Thinking about an eventual collapse of North Korea: American and South Korean officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North’s economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the American ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean officials believe that the right business deals would “help salve” China’s “concerns about living with a reunified Korea” that is in a “benign alliance” with the United States.

¶ Bargaining to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison: When American diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of “Let’s Make a Deal.” Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested that accepting more prisoners would be “a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.”

¶ Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government: When Afghanistan’s vice president visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying $52 million in cash. With wry understatement, a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul called the money “a significant amount” that the official, Ahmed Zia Massoud, “was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money’s origin or destination.” (Mr. Massoud denies taking any money out of Afghanistan.)

¶ A global computer hacking effort: China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said.

¶ Mixed records against terrorism: Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a generous host to the American military for years, was the “worst in the region” in counterterrorism efforts, according to a State Department cable last December. Qatar’s security service was “hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the U.S. and provoking reprisals,” the cable said.

¶ An intriguing alliance: American diplomats in Rome reported in 2009 on what their Italian contacts described as an extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and business magnate, including “lavish gifts,” lucrative energy contracts and a “shadowy” Russian-speaking Italian go-between. They wrote that Mr. Berlusconi “appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe. The diplomats also noted that while Mr. Putin enjoyed supremacy over all other public figures in Russia, he was undermined by an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignored his edicts.

¶ Arms deliveries to militants: Cables describe the United States’ failing struggle to prevent Syria from supplying arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has amassed a huge stockpile since its 2006 war with Israel. One week after President Bashar al-Assad promised a top State Department official that he would not send “new” arms to Hezbollah, the United States complained that it had information that Syria was providing increasingly sophisticated weapons to the group.

¶ Clashes with Europe over human rights: American officials sharply warned Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for Central Intelligence Agency officers involved in a bungled operation in which an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant was mistakenly kidnapped and held for months in Afghanistan. A senior American diplomat told a German official “that our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the U.S.”

The 251,287 cables, first acquired by WikiLeaks, were provided to The Times by an intermediary on the condition of anonymity. Many are unclassified, and none are marked “top secret,” the government’s most secure communications status. But some 11,000 are classified “secret,” 9,000 are labeled “noforn,” shorthand for material considered too delicate to be shared with any foreign government, and 4,000 are designated both secret and noforn.

Many more cables name diplomats’ confidential sources, from foreign legislators and military officers to human rights activists and journalists, often with a warning to Washington: “Please protect” or “Strictly protect.”

The Times, after consultations with the State Department, has withheld from articles and removed from documents it is posting online the names of some people who spoke privately to diplomats and might be at risk if they were publicly identified. The Times is also withholding some passages or entire cables whose disclosure could compromise American intelligence efforts. While the White House said it anticipated WikiLeaks would make public “several hundred thousand” cables Sunday night, the organization posted only 220 released and redacted by The Times and several European publications.

The cables show that nearly a decade after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the dark shadow of terrorism still dominates the United States’ relations with the world. They depict the Obama administration struggling to sort out which Pakistanis are trustworthy partners against Al Qaeda, adding Australians who have disappeared in the Middle East to terrorist watch lists, and assessing whether a lurking rickshaw driver in Lahore, Pakistan, was awaiting fares or conducting surveillance of the road to the American Consulate.

They show officials managing relations with a China on the rise and a Russia retreating from democracy. They document years of effort to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon — and of worry about a possible Israeli strike on Iran with the same goal.

Even when they recount events that are already known, the cables offer remarkable details.

For instance, it has been previously reported that the Yemeni government has sought to cover up the American role in missile strikes against the local branch of Al Qaeda. But a cable’s fly-on-the-wall account of a January meeting between the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the American commander in the Middle East, is breathtaking.

“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Mr. Saleh said, according to the cable sent by the American ambassador, prompting Yemen’s deputy prime minister to “joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament” that Yemen had carried out the strikes.

Mr. Saleh, who at other times resisted American counterterrorism requests, was in a lighthearted mood. The authoritarian ruler of a conservative Muslim country, Mr. Saleh complains of smuggling from nearby Djibouti, but tells General Petraeus that his concerns are drugs and weapons, not whiskey, “provided it’s good whiskey.”

Likewise, press reports detailed the unhappiness of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, when he was not permitted to set up his tent in Manhattan or to visit ground zero during a United Nations session last year.

But the cables add a touch of scandal and alarm to the tale. They describe the volatile Libyan leader as rarely without the companionship of “his senior Ukrainian nurse,” described as “a voluptuous blonde.” They reveal that Colonel Qaddafi was so upset by his reception in New York that he balked at carrying out a promise to return dangerous enriched uranium to Russia. The American ambassador to Libya told Colonel Qaddafi’s son “that the Libyan government had chosen a very dangerous venue to express its pique,” a cable reported to Washington.

The cables also disclose frank comments behind closed doors. Dispatches from early this year, for instance, quote the aging monarch of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, as speaking scathingly about the leaders of Iraq and Pakistan.

Speaking to another Iraqi official about Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, King Abdullah said, “You and Iraq are in my heart, but that man is not.” The king called President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan the greatest obstacle to that country’s progress. “When the head is rotten,” he said, “it affects the whole body.”

The American ambassador to Eritrea reported last year that “Eritrean officials are ignorant or lying” in denying that they were supporting the Shabab, a militant Islamist group in Somalia. The cable then mused about which seemed more likely.

As he left Zimbabwe in 2007 after three years as ambassador, Christopher W. Dell wrote a sardonic account of Robert Mugabe, that country’s aging and erratic leader. The cable called him “a brilliant tactician” but mocked “his deep ignorance on economic issues (coupled with the belief that his 18 doctorates give him the authority to suspend the laws of economics).”

The possibility that a large number of diplomatic cables might become public has been discussed in government and media circles since May. That was when, in an online chat, an Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, described having downloaded from a military computer system many classified documents, including “260,000 State Department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world.” In an online discussion with Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, Private Manning said he had delivered the cables and other documents to WikiLeaks.

Mr. Lamo reported Private Manning’s disclosures to federal authorities, and Private Manning was arrested. He has been charged with illegally leaking classified information and faces a possible court-martial and, if convicted, a lengthy prison term.

In July and October, The Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel published articles based on documents about Afghanistan and Iraq. Those collections were placed online by WikiLeaks, with selective redactions of the Afghan documents and much heavier redactions of the Iraq reports.

Fodder for Historians

Traditionally, most diplomatic cables remain secret for decades, providing fodder for historians only when the participants are long retired or dead. The State Department’s unclassified history series, titled “Foreign Relations of the United States,” has reached only 1972.

While an overwhelming majority of the quarter-million cables provided to The Times are from the post-9/11 era, several hundred date from 1966 to the 1990s. Some show diplomats struggling to make sense of major events whose future course they could not guess.

In a 1979 cable to Washington, Bruce Laingen, an American diplomat in Tehran, mused with a knowing tone about the Iranian revolution that had just occurred: “Perhaps the single dominant aspect of the Persian psyche is an overriding egoism,” Mr. Laingen wrote, offering tips on exploiting this psyche in negotiations with the new government. Less than three months later, Mr. Laingen and his colleagues would be taken hostage by radical Iranian students, hurling the Carter administration into crisis and, perhaps, demonstrating the hazards of diplomatic hubris.

In 1989, an American diplomat in Panama City mulled over the options open to Gen. Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader, who was facing narcotics charges in the United States and intense domestic and international political pressure to step down. The cable called General Noriega “a master of survival”; its author appeared to have no inkling that one week later, the United States would invade Panama to unseat General Noriega and arrest him.

In 1990, an American diplomat sent an excited dispatch from Cape Town: he had just learned from a lawyer for Nelson Mandela that Mr. Mandela’s 27-year imprisonment was to end. The cable conveys the momentous changes about to begin for South Africa, even as it discusses preparations for an impending visit from the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.

The voluminous traffic of more recent years — well over half of the quarter-million cables date from 2007 or later — show American officials struggling with events whose outcomes are far from sure. To read through them is to become a global voyeur, immersed in the jawboning, inducements and penalties the United States wields in trying to have its way with a recalcitrant world.

In an era of satellites and fiber-optic links, the cable retains the archaic name of an earlier technological era. It has long been the tool for the secretary of state to send orders to the field and for ambassadors and political officers to send their analyses to Washington.

The cables have their own lexicon: “codel,” for a Congressional delegation; “visas viper,” for a report on a person considered dangerous; “démarche,” an official message to a foreign government, often a protest or warning.

But the drama in the cables often comes from diplomats’ narratives of meetings with foreign figures, games of diplomatic poker in which each side is sizing up the other and neither is showing all its cards.

Among the most fascinating examples recount American officials’ meetings in September 2009 and February 2010 with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half brother of the Afghan president and a power broker in the Taliban’s home turf of Kandahar.

They describe Mr. Karzai, “dressed in a crisp white shalwar kameez,” the traditional dress of loose tunic and trousers, appearing “nervous, though eager to express his views on the international presence in Kandahar,” and trying to win over the Americans with nostalgic tales about his years running a Chicago restaurant near Wrigley Field.

But in midnarrative there is a stark alert for anyone reading the cable in Washington: “Note: While we must deal with AWK as the head of the Provincial Council, he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker.” (Mr. Karzai has denied such charges.) And the cables note statements by Mr. Karzai that the Americans, informed by a steady flow of eavesdropping and agents’ reports, believe to be false.

A cable written after the February meeting coolly took note of the deceit on both sides.

Mr. Karzai “demonstrated that he will dissemble when it suits his needs,” the cable said. “He appears not to understand the level of our knowledge of his activities. We will need to monitor his activity closely, and deliver a recurring, transparent message to him” about the limits of American tolerance.

Not All Business

Even in places far from war zones and international crises, where the stakes for the United States are not as high, curious diplomats can turn out to be accomplished reporters, sending vivid dispatches to deepen the government’s understanding of exotic places.

In a 2006 account, a wide-eyed American diplomat describes the lavish wedding of a well-connected couple in Dagestan, in Russia’s Caucasus, where one guest is the strongman who runs the war-ravaged Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.

The diplomat tells of drunken guests throwing $100 bills at child dancers, and nighttime water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea.

“The dancers probably picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones,” the diplomat wrote. The host later tells him that Ramzan Kadyrov “had brought the happy couple ‘a five-kilo lump of gold’ as his wedding present.”

“After the dancing and a quick tour of the premises, Ramzan and his army drove off back to Chechnya,” the diplomat reported to Washington. “We asked why Ramzan did not spend the night in Makhachkala, and were told, ‘Ramzan never spends the night anywhere.’ ”

Scott Shane reported from Washington, and Andrew W. Lehren from New York. Reporting was contributed by Jo Becker, C. J. Chivers and James Glanz from New York; Eric Lichtblau, Michael R. Gordon, David E. Sanger, Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Ginger Thompson from Washington; and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan.

    Cables Obtained by WikiLeaks Shine Light Into Secret Diplomatic Channels, NYT, 28.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29cables.html

U.S. and South Korea Begin Joint Naval Exercises

November 27, 2010
The New York Times
By MARTIN FACKLER

SEOUL, South Korea — The United States and South Korea began naval exercises on Sunday that were meant as a warning to North Korea for recent provocations, including last week’s deadly artillery attack on a island populated by South Koreans in the Yellow Sea.

At the same time, China stepped up its diplomatic efforts to cool tempers in the region, with a senior envoy holding a meeting on Sunday morning with South Korea’s president and Beijing announcing that it had invited a senior North Korean official for talks this week. China also called for an emergency meeting of the so-called six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program, news agencies reported.

North Korean artillery was heard Sunday on the island, though no shells landed there and South Korea considered it just a drill, according to a spokesman for South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. The North Koreans also shot off artillery on Friday, after a visit by an American general to the island, called Yeonpyeong.

The announcement of the naval exercises last week raised already heightened tensions, angering both North Korea and its patron, China, and stirring intense speculation in the South Korean news media about whether the North would respond violently.

After the announcement, China warned against “any military act” in its exclusive economic zone without permission, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. But virtually all the waters to the west of the Korean Peninsula fall within that 200 nautical mile limit. It was not immediately clear if the American and South Korean flotilla, which included the United States aircraft carrier George Washington, had sailed into that area.

China’s diplomatic efforts came after days of entreaties from Washington and its allies to exert a moderating influence on North Korea.

The Chinese envoy, state counselor in charge of foreign affairs, Dai Bingguo, met with South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, as part of a previously unannounced visit to Seoul, according to a senior South Korean official.

China’s diplomatic initiative also included the planned talks with Choe Tae-bok, chairman of North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly, who will pay an official visit to China starting Tuesday.

The United States has hoped that China would use its leverage over North Korea to restrain it from any further attacks, but so far China has not rebuked the North’s leaders, at least in public. And when China did finally make a strong public statement late last week on the attack — the one warning against military actions in its economic zone — it directed its pique at the United States for the naval exercises.

The show of force was designed both to deter further attacks by the North and to signal to China that unless it reins in its unruly ally, it may see an even larger American presence in the vicinity.

The flurry of diplomacy over the weekend followed days of recriminations by both Koreas. On Saturday, North Korea accused South Korea of using civilians as human shields around military bases on the island. The accusation, reported by the North’s official news agency, is apparently an effort to redirect South Korean outrage over the barrage, which killed two civilian construction workers and two South Korean marines.

“If the U.S. brings its carrier to the West Sea of Korea at last, no one can predict the ensuing consequences,” the report said, using the Korean name for the Yellow Sea.

Also on Saturday, at least two protests were staged in Seoul that criticized both North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, for the attack and South Korea’s president for what many here see as the military’s failure to make more than a token response.

The bombardment of the island was the first attack on a civilian area since the 1950-53 Korean War, and it enraged the South Koreans far more than previous provocations by the North, including its nuclear weapons tests and the sinking in March of a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors. Despite the findings of an international investigation, North Korea denies responsibility for the sinking.

The North has said that Tuesday’s attack was carried out in response to South Korean artillery drills earlier that day on the island, which sits within sight of the North Korean mainland. On the morning of the attack, North Korea warned South Korea not to conduct the drills.

Citing those warnings, North Korea said it had made “superhuman efforts to prevent the clash at the last moment.” It also offered an uncharacteristic show of remorse, calling the civilian deaths “very regrettable.”

The comments were apparently an attempt to present the North’s view of events to the South Korean public, which has reacted to Tuesday’s attack with uncharacteristic vehemence toward the North.

Ian Johnson contributed reporting from Beijing, and Su-Hyun Lee and Sharon LaFraniere from Seoul.

    U.S. and South Korea Begin Joint Naval Exercises, NYT, 27.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/world/asia/28korea.html

G.O.P. Opposition Dims Hope

for Arms Treaty With Russia

November 16, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

President Obama’s hopes of ratifying a new arms control treaty with Russia by the end of the year appeared to come undone on Tuesday as the chief Senate Republican negotiator moved to block a vote on the pact, one of the White House’s top foreign policy goals, in the lame-duck session of Congress.

The announcement by the senator, Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican point man on the issue, blindsided and angered the White House, which vowed to keep pressing for approval of the so-called New Start treaty. But the White House strategy had hinged entirely on winning over Mr. Kyl, and Democrats, who began scrambling for a backup plan, said they considered the chances of success slim.

Winning approval of the treaty will only become harder for the White House next year, when Democrats will have six fewer seats in the Senate, forcing the administration to rely on additional Republican votes to reach the 67 needed for ratification.

The treaty, which would force both countries to pare back nuclear arsenals and resume mutual inspections that lapsed last year for the first time since the cold war, is the centerpiece of two of Mr. Obama’s signature goals: restoring friendly relations with Russia and putting the world on a path toward eventually eliminating nuclear arms. A failure to ratify the treaty could freeze both efforts and, some analysts said, undermine Mr. Obama’s credibility on the world stage.

“Failure to pass the New Start treaty this year would endanger our national security,” Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has led negotiations with Mr. Kyl, said in a statement. It would mean “no verification regime to track Russia’s strategic nuclear arsenal,” Mr. Biden said, and would sour a relationship that has helped open a new supply route to troops in Afghanistan and increase pressure on Iran to halt its nuclear program.

“Given New Start’s bipartisan support and enormous importance to our national security, the time to act is now, and we will continue to seek its approval by the Senate before the end of the year,” Mr. Biden said.

Both parties had considered Mr. Kyl the make-or-break voice on the pact, with Senate Republicans essentially deputizing him to work out a deal that would secure tens of billions of dollars to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons complex in exchange for approval of the treaty.

Over many months of negotiations, the administration committed to spending $80 billion to do that over the next 10 years, and on Friday offered to chip in $4.1 billion more over the next five years. As a gesture of commitment, the White House had made sure extra money for modernization was included in the stopgap spending resolution now keeping the government operating, even though almost no other program received an increase in money.

All told, White House officials counted 29 meetings, phone calls, briefings or letters involving Mr. Kyl or his staff. They said they thought they had given him everything he wanted, and were optimistic about completing a deal this week, only to learn about his decision on Tuesday from reporters.

Mr. Kyl said he informed the Senate Democratic leader that there was not enough time to resolve all the issues during the lame-duck session that opened this week. “When majority leader Harry Reid asked me if I thought the treaty could be considered in the lame-duck session, I replied I did not think so given the combination of other work Congress must do and the complex and unresolved issues related to Start and modernization,” Mr. Kyl said in a written statement.

Mr. Kyl declined a request to be interviewed. Asked if the senator’s statement was meant to close the door to a lame-duck vote, his spokesman, Ryan Patmintra said: “Correct. Given the pending legislative business and outstanding issues on the treaty and modernization, there doesn’t appear to be enough time.”

Some Democrats hoped there was still an opening. “I talked with Senator Kyl today, and I do not believe the door is closed to considering New Start during the lame-duck session,” said Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has presided over most of the 18 hearings on the treaty and secured endorsements from prominent Republican national security figures.

Mr. Kerry plans to hold a news conference on Wednesday with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, a Republican treaty supporter. Mr. Biden said the administration would still support the additional $4.1 billion it offered Mr. Kyl on Friday.

Since a treaty requires a two-thirds vote, the White House needs at least eight Republicans in the departing Senate and thought it had a dozen ready to vote yes if Mr. Kyl assented. Without him, though, they began melting away. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, who voted for the treaty in committee, said Tuesday he now questions whether it’s “even practical for the administration to rush passage of the Start treaty during this lame-duck session.”

A Democratic leadership aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid said, “If the Republicans’ lead negotiator says we shouldn’t consider Start during a lame duck, I think we have to take him at face value. Having said that, we are going to try and get it ratified in the lame duck.”

The Kremlin did not respond to the development, but Russian officials have expressed fear that Republican victories in this month’s midterm elections would damage relations. “We don’t have confidence that the document will secure enough votes,” Konstantin I. Kosachev, chairman of a parliamentary foreign affairs committee, said earlier in the day, according to the Russian news media. “The problem is not that the document is bad. We are confronting the fact that Republicans refuse to ratify the treaty.”

Mr. Obama had assured President Dmitri A. Medvedev during a meeting just two days earlier that winning approval of the treaty was his “top priority” in foreign affairs for the lame-duck session. If he cannot, it may embolden hard-liners in Moscow who have been skeptical of the so-called effort to “reset” the relationship with Russia.

“Start was the linchpin on which a lot of the reset was built,” said Angela E. Stent, director of Russian studies at Georgetown University. “What impact, if any, will it have on Russia’s willingness to cooperate on Iran or on Afghanistan?”

Critics have said that such worries are overstated and that the Obama administration was too willing to curry favor with Moscow at the expense of American national security.

Baker Spring, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Mr. Kyl was simply acting to ensure that the nation’s nuclear program was adequately maintained. “I do not understand why the White House would label this obstructionism,” Mr. Spring said. “It appears to be stepping away from its previous acknowledgment regarding the need to improve the nuclear weapons complex.”

If the issue carries over to the new Senate, it could be months before it is taken up again, and its chances would be even more uncertain given the Republican gains in this month’s elections.

The treaty would restore mutual inspections and prohibit both countries from deploying more than 1,550 strategic warheads and 700 launchers each. The administration hoped to follow up this treaty with another more ambitious one to reduce tactical nuclear weapons and stored strategic weapons. It also hoped to follow up by reviving the never-ratified Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. And it envisioned negotiating another new treaty that would cut off new production of fissile material.

Even as the Start treaty appeared imperiled, the administration announced on Tuesday that this weekend it expected NATO to approve, at least in concept, a European missile defense system, aimed largely at defending against an attack launched from Iran, though the alliance’s leaders will not identify by name any country they are trying to defend against.

When Mr. Obama goes to a NATO summit meeting in Lisbon this week, Ivo Daalder, the United States ambassador to NATO, told reporters, one of the major issues will be whether the alliance is prepared to defend “against armed ballistic missiles coming towards NATO territory,” and he said that “alliance leaders will answer that question positively, we expect.”

But Turkey has balked at aspects of the plan, for fear of angering Iran. The declaration this coming weekend will leave unclear what form the missile defense system will take, and will also remain silent on the future of tactical nuclear weapons still based in Europe.

Mark Landler and David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington, and Clifford J. Levy from Moscow.

    G.O.P. Opposition Dims Hope for Arms Treaty With Russia, NYT, 16.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/world/europe/17start.html

U.S. Struggles

to Restore Middle East Talks

The New York Times
November 10, 2010
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — With tensions between the United States and Israel flaring again over Jewish settlements, the Obama administration and its allies worked feverishly on multiple fronts Wednesday to put Middle East peace talks back on track.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reiterated President Obama’s criticism of Israel’s new housing plans in East Jerusalem, calling them “counterproductive” to the peace process. But she discouraged the Palestinian Authority from unilaterally declaring an independent state, an action that Palestinian officials have threatened to take in recent weeks as the talks have remained paralyzed.

“We do not support unilateral steps by either party that could prejudge the outcome of such negotiations,” Mrs. Clinton said to reporters after meeting Egypt’s foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, and its intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman. They discussed ideas for getting the Israelis and Palestinians back to the table.

“Each party has a very strong set of opinions about the way forward,” she said. “There can be no progress until they actually come together and explore where areas of agreement are and how to narrow areas of disagreement.”

Mr. Aboul Gheit also criticized Israel as not doing enough to keep the process alive. He said Egypt, which has been in talks with both sides, was concerned by the deepening impasse and was focused on renewing the talks and keeping them going.

Though he did not disclose Egypt’s proposals, American and Israeli officials said they focused on gestures Israel could make toward the Palestinians, like pulling security forces out of parts of the West Bank or guaranteeing no Israeli incursions in areas where the Palestinians already provide security.

On Thursday, Mrs. Clinton is to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York. Israeli and American officials played down hopes for the session, which may end up being yet another attempt to clear the air after the announcement of 1,000 new Jewish housing units for a contested part of East Jerusalem.

While some administration officials seemed eager to tamp down the clash, Mrs. Clinton pointedly raised it just before announcing an additional $150 million in American financial aid for the Palestinian Authority.

“This announcement was counterproductive to our efforts to resume negotiations between the parties,” she said. “We have long urged both parties to avoid actions which could undermine trust, including in Jerusalem.”

Mr. Netanyahu, who was meeting businesspeople in New York, said Tuesday that the dispute was “overblown.” His argument was echoed by at least one senior American official: Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who had his own meetings on Wednesday with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

Speaking from Tel Aviv, Senator Kerry said that, based on his discussions, he believed the United States could devise a formula that would persuade the Palestinians to return to negotiations even without an extension of the freeze on settlement construction, which the Palestinians have demanded.

At the same time, he said he did not rule out the possibility that Mr. Netanyahu would extend the freeze for a brief period, despite being constrained by a right-wing coalition that opposes any further halts to building.

“Is it difficult? Yeah,” Senator Kerry said in a telephone interview. “Is it a moment of disagreement? Yes. But it doesn’t have to be a showstopper by any means.”

He added, “There is a way to clarify the road forward, and to meet the needs of both parties,” though he declined to offer details. He made the comments after meeting with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and Israel’s president, Shimon Peres.

The administration had asked Mr. Kerry to go to the Middle East, amid growing signs of instability in Lebanon as well as the deadlock in the peace talks. He said he told Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, that the United States would watch closely for evidence that Syria was trying to discredit an international tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri.

Reports of Syria’s efforts to undermine the tribunal have led lawmakers and even some administration officials to question the wisdom of American efforts to engage Damascus. But Senator Kerry said, “I remain absolutely convinced there is an opportunity to have a different relationship with Syria.”

    U.S. Struggles to Restore Middle East Talks, NYT, 10.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/world/middleeast/11diplo.html

Obama Nears a Deal

to Reduce Trade Imbalance

November 10, 2010
The New York Times
By SEWELL CHAN
and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

SEOUL, South Korea — Obama administration officials said Thursday that they were close to securing a compromise agreement to help reduce vast trade imbalances, a step that could ease conflict among the major world economies over commerce, currency and monetary policies.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said he believed that the world’s leading economies, which will meet in Seoul on Friday, would agree that they should monitor and seek to reduce acute trade surpluses or deficits that threaten economic and financial stability.

China and Germany, among others, sharply criticized an earlier American proposal to set numerical limits to such imbalances. The new compromise appears devised to eke out a modest agreement on principles that each country would adhere to voluntarily.

While the agreement is unlikely to lead to bold new steps by individual countries, Obama administration officials say an accord on broad goals may help calm fears that a flurry of recriminations over who is responsible for trade imbalances could lead to a competitive devaluations or trade war.

“I think it overstates the level of disagreement about the challenges we have ahead,” Mr. Geithner told reporters on the way from Singapore to Seoul for the Group of 20 summit meeting. “We expect we’ll see broad support for the type of cooperative framework the ministers of finance first introduced two weeks ago.”

A senior Obama administration official, speaking in Seoul, said the advance draft of a joint communiqué under consideration by the member nations would adopt a set of “indicative guidelines” that set common standards for assessing trade balances and prompting diplomatic discussions about them when they grow too large.

As with all Group of 20 communiqués, this one relies on peer pressure and the perception of shared long-term interests; it is not legally binding. But the group plans to ratify calls for the International Monetary Fund to a play a stronger and more prominent role in monitoring the trade imbalances and, when necessary, publicizing them, a process that still must be worked out.

Word of the possible compromise came as American officials scrambled to cool tensions that had flared over the United States Federal Reserve’s decision to pump $600 billion into the economy to stimulate growth, which China, Germany, Brazil and other major exporters fear is intended to push down the value of the dollar and give the United States an advantage in global trade.

President Obama, in a letter to the Group of 20 released Wednesday, appealed for calm, while also imploring other world leaders to shift global economic demand away from its historical reliance on American consumption and borrowing.

“We all now recognize that the foundation for a strong and durable recovery will not materialize if American households stop saving and go back to spending based on borrowing,” Mr. Obama wrote. “Yet no one country can achieve our joint objective of a strong, sustainable and balanced recovery on its own.”

In an opinion article for the Asian edition of The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Geithner, joined Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the finance minister of Singapore, and Wayne Swan, the treasurer of Australia, in warning that a “two-track recovery will dominate the global economy for a long time to come” and would require new forms of cooperation.

Together, Mr. Obama’s letter and Mr. Geithner’s article laid out a strategy that combined an appeal to reason, an avoidance of confrontation and more than a little humility. The benefit of their approach, they said, would be higher overall growth in the long term.

It remained to be seen how a vague commitment to reduce imbalances would affect China and Germany, which have the world’s two most powerful surplus economies. Both countries rely on exports for much of their growth and have relatively low rates of consumption, while the United States has high consumption and runs a large trade deficit.

Mr. Obama’s letter indirectly defended the Fed’s move to try to stimulate more growth by injecting fresh monetary stimulus into the economy. The president said the world needed a robust United States recovery even though it should no longer depend on the American consumer to serve as the mainstay of demand.

“A strong recovery that creates jobs, income and spending is the most important contribution the United States can make to the global recovery,” Mr. Obama wrote in the letter. “The dollar’s strength ultimately rests on the fundamental strength of the U.S. economy.”

A few hours after Mr. Obama’s letter was released, the Commerce Department reported that American exports grew 0.3 percent in September while imports fell 1 percent. Exports through the first nine months of the year are up nearly 18 percent from the same period a year ago.

“Our renewed focus on trade promotion is helping to grow exports, which are critical to our continued economic growth,” the commerce secretary, Gary Locke, said in a statement from Yokohama, Japan, where Mr. Obama is to travel on Friday evening for meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

In his article with Mr. Tharman and Mr. Swan, Mr. Geithner said trade and currency adjustments now required broad collective action.

“Currency issues were once left to the United States, Europe and Japan, but that will no longer work in the new world economy,” they wrote, acknowledging that the days in which American officials could more or less dictate global monetary policy had ended.

The three men wrote that “the currencies of the major advanced economies are roughly in alignment with each other today” and that the major nations should avoid currency volatility, but they added that “emerging economies need to allow their exchange rates to reflect the substantial growth they have achieved in their economies over the last decade.”

The pair of new American statements also acknowledged the anxiety felt by fast-growing emerging markets like South Korea, the host of this year’s Group of 20 meeting, over the surge of capital flows that have been entering their economies, driving up currencies, interest rates and inflation and raising the risk of unsustainable asset bubbles.

Despite the more conciliatory tone, many analysts argue that the struggle over monetary policy is unlikely to be resolved quickly.

Uri Dadush, who directs the international economics program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the system of flexible exchange rates that had existed since 1971 was at risk of breaking down.

“At the heart of the problem is the unwillingness of the big players — and here I would single out the United States, Germany and China — to deal with their own domestic problem,” Mr. Dadush said.

He said that the United States needed to stimulate demand in the short run but curb its addiction to borrowing in the long run; that China needed to reduce its reliance on exports and allow its consumers to buy more and save less; and that Germany needed to wean itself off the fixation on frugality and productivity that helped it through reunification in 1990 but that now posed a threat to the economic integration of Europe.

Mr. Dadush’s view is the mainstream one, and one shared by the United States. As Mr. Obama put it, “Just as the United States must change, so too must those economies that have previously relied on exports to offset weaknesses in their own demand.”

    Obama Nears a Deal to Reduce Trade Imbalance, NYT, 10.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/business/global/11group.html

Obama Warns North Korea in Speech

November 10, 2010
The New York Times
By MARTIN FACKLER

SEOUL, South Korea — In a Veterans Day speech at a United States Army base in central Seoul, President Obama said Thursday that America remains committed to defending South Korea, and warned North Korea that it faces continued isolation unless it fulfills its commitments to give up nuclear weapons.

While Mr. Obama is in South Korea for a Group of 20 meeting on fixing the stricken global economy, relations with North Korea are also expected to be on the agenda, particularly in talks with the host nation. The United States and its allies are seeking ways to get North Korea to return to six-party talks aimed at convincing the North to drop its weapons program.

Mr. Obama will meet later Thursday with the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, whose country’s relations with the North have become even more tense since the sinking in March of a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, apparently by a North Korean torpedo.

There are signs that there could be movement afoot as to the approach of the United States and its allies toward the reclusive regime of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il. Earlier this week, Mr. Lee dropped demands that the North apologize for the Cheonan’s sinking as a precondition of talks.

In a strongly worded statement made before thousands of soldiers and Marines gathered on a chilly morning, Mr. Obama called North Korea a starving nation whose economic failures were visible even from space, where at night “the brilliant lights of Seoul” can be seen giving way “to the utter darkness of the North.”

“But there is another path available to North Korea,” Mr. Obama said. “If they choose to fulfill their international obligations and commitments to the international community, they will have the chance to offer their people lives of growing opportunity instead of crushing poverty.”

During the speech, Mr. Obama also honored the 37,000 Americans and far larger number of South Koreans who died fighting the North during the 1950-53 Korean War. He also led the audience in a standing ovation for 62 veterans of that war who attended the speech at the Yongsan base, in the center of this city of gleaming skyscrapers and modern highways.

“Gentlemen, we are honored by your presence,” Mr. Obama said. “We are grateful for your service. And the world is better off because of what you did here.”

    Obama Warns North Korea in Speech, NYT, 10.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/world/asia/11korea.html

In Jakarta Speech, Some Hear Cairo Redux

November 10, 2010
The New York Times
By NORIMITSU ONISHI

JAKARTA, Indonesia — In a much-anticipated speech focusing on development, democracy and religion, President Obama sought on Wednesday to strengthen America’s ties with Indonesia, a rising Asian power with the world’s largest Muslim population. But his intended audience was also elsewhere in the Muslim world, especially in the Middle East, where he began talking last year of a fresh start between the West and the Islamic world.

Muslim leaders here praised Mr. Obama’s knowledgeable and warm approach to Indonesia but expressed doubts that his speech would resonate in the wider Muslim world. Too few concrete changes in American foreign policy, they said, had followed previous speeches in Egypt and Turkey.

“President Obama didn’t offer any new major points,” said Azyumardi Azra, a prominent Muslim thinker and the director of the graduate school at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University. “There is no breakthrough, for example, to accelerate a peaceful resolution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.”

“Many people had been expecting that he would address one of the stumbling blocks to the peace process, like Israel’s construction of new housing,” Mr. Azra added.

Mixing the personal, political and religious, Mr. Obama spoke of Indonesia’s history of religious tolerance and its commitment to democracy and diversity before a receptive audience of 6,500 mostly young people at the University of Indonesia. In a 30-minute speech, the president underscored the shared values between the United States and Indonesia, which is known for its tradition of moderate Islam.

Mr. Obama spoke about hearing the “call to prayer across Jakarta,” where he lived for four years as a boy. He referred several times to his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, who, he said, “was raised a Muslim” but “firmly believed that all religions were worthy of respect.”

Slamet Effendi Yusuf, a deputy chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama, one of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organizations, liked the speech “because it showed that Obama knows about the people of Indonesia, our cultures and traditions, and mentioned what we have in common.”

“He was arguing against the people who say that there is something incompatible between Islamic and Christian civilizations,” he said.

Although 90 percent of Indonesia’s nearly 240 million citizens are Muslim, the country’s constitution recognizes the world’s major religions, and for decades political Islam had little role here. But in the last two decades, as Indonesians have become increasingly religious, events in the Middle East and other Muslim regions have gained more traction here.

Mr. Obama talked about the “issues that have caused tensions for many years,” mentioning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. He said that the United States had made “some progress” in those areas since Mr. Obama gave his first speech on the United States and Islam 17 months in Cairo.

But Din Syamsuddin, the head of Muhammadiyah, one of Indonesia’s biggest Islamic organizations, said the president offered nothing fresh here.

“His speech in Cairo raised a lot of hopes, but his speech today was repetitive and redundant,” Mr. Din said.

Anis Matta, the secretary general of the Prosperous Justice Party, Indonesia’s biggest Islamist political party, said that Mr. Obama’s outreach to Muslims here and elsewhere would be influenced by a single issue.

“What will Obama do in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?” Mr. Matta said. “If we don’t see any progress, what he says is just a speech.”

Some experts said Mr. Obama’s premise of reaching out to the wider Muslim world by showing that the United States and Indonesia share values was flawed. Despite the big population of Muslims here, Indonesia’s influence has never extended beyond Southeast Asia.

“Of course, Indonesia does have a seat in the Muslim world, but to what extent it can influence political processes in the Muslim world’s heartland is a big question,” said Rizal Sukma, executive director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent policy-oriented group in Jakarta. “Basically, we are not perceived as sitting at the main table in the Muslim world.”

Becoming the United States’ model Muslim democracy also made some Indonesians uneasy.

“The U.S. is trying to use Indonesia as an arena from where it could rebuild its relations with the Muslim world, but that’s dangerous,” said Bantarto Bandoro, a political scientist at the University of Indonesia. “Indonesia might be seen as being co-opted by the United States.”

In his speech, Mr. Obama won fans with stories about growing up in a Jakarta that existed before most of the audience members were born. “Indonesia is a part of me,” he said, doubling the effect by delivering the line in Indonesian.

Harish Muhammad, 18, a computer science major, said he had always believed that the United States was “anti-Islam” but that Mr. Obama had made him rethink his assumptions.

Others remained skeptical, however.

“Obama talked about how Indonesia is part of him,” said Agustina Retnaningsih, 37, a graduate student in pharmacology. “But it makes me wonder: Which part? Where do you put Indonesia and Islam in you and your policy?”

    In Jakarta Speech, Some Hear Cairo Redux, NYT, 10.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/world/asia/11indo.html

Obama, in Indonesia,

Pledges Expanded Ties

With Muslim Nations

November 9, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

JAKARTA, Indonesia — President Obama, renewing his call for better relations between the United States and the Muslim world, used a long-awaited homecoming trip to this island nation to make a symbolic visit on Wednesday morning to the largest mosque in southeast Asia — even as he declared that “much more work needs to be done” to fulfill the promise he made 17 months ago in Cairo of a “new beginning.”

Indonesia is the world’s largest majority Muslim nation, and Mr. Obama, on a 10-day, four-country trip through Asia, used his brief stay here to hold it up as an example of diversity, tolerance and democracy.

He closed his remarks at a news conference on Tuesday evening with the Muslim greeting “salaam aleikum” and said he intended to reshape American relations with Muslim nations so they were not “focused solely on security issues,” but rather on expanded cooperation across a broad range of areas, from science to education.

In a speech on Wednesday morning to an enthusiastic audience of 6,500 people at the University of Indonesia, he also harked back to his Cairo message.

“I said then, and I will repeat now, that no single speech can eradicate years of mistrust,” Mr. Obama said. “But I believed then, and I believe today, that we do have a choice. We can choose to be defined by our differences, and give in to a future of suspicion and mistrust. Or we can choose to do the hard work of forging common ground, and commit ourselves to the steady pursuit of progress.”

Earlier, at the Istiqlal Mosque, Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, followed the Islamic custom of removing their shoes; Mrs. Obama wore a head shawl with beads. They walked along a courtyard on a pale blue carpet escorted by the grand imam, who told Mr. Obama that there was a church next door and that during Christmas parishioners use the mosque’s parking lot because the church does not have enough space.

Mr. Obama turned to reporters and said, “That is an example of the kind of cooperation” between religions in Indonesia.

For Mr. Obama, who suffered a backlash at home this year when he said he favored the right of Muslims to build a proposed Islamic center in Lower Manhattan — and whose personal history makes him the target of anti-Muslim sentiment — the outreach effort is a delicate one. Jakarta is the place that has given rise to many of the myths about Mr. Obama, including the rumor that he is Muslim (he is Christian); that he attended a madrasa that was connected to radical Islam (he attended two schools here, one Roman Catholic and one secular, although most of the students were Muslim); and that he was not born in the United States (he was born in Hawaii).

In his speech, Mr. Obama tried to correct the misperceptions and he spoke about Indonesia’s ability to bridge religious and racial divides. “As a Christian visiting a mosque on this visit,” he said, “I found it in the words of a leader who was asked about my visit and said: ‘Muslims are also allowed in churches. We are all God’s followers.’ ”

The last time Mr. Obama was in Indonesia, in 1992, he spent a month holed up in a rented beachside hut in Bali, where he swam each morning and spent afternoons writing “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that later became a best seller. In it, he shared memories of his life here as a boy, “running barefoot along a paddy field, with my feet sinking into the cool, wet mud, part of a chain of other brown boys chasing after a tattered kite.”

He has chased after a few other things since then — notably the presidency — and when he returned here, he got the kind of rock-star welcome he no longer receives in the United States.

When Air Force One touched down on Tuesday in a typical Jakarta afternoon thunderstorm, a huge cheer went up inside the State Palace complex — not from average Indonesians, but from the local press corps, watching on television. “Finally, he arrived!” exulted Glenn Jos, a cameraman.

After descending the steps of his plane, Mr. Obama, in a dark suit, accompanied by his wife walked the red carpet that had been laid out for them and stepped into a black Cadillac limousine. He poked his head out the door to give a short wave.

“Yes!” the reporters shouted.

Indonesians have prepared three times previously for a visit from the president, only to be disappointed. Last year, the White House hinted that Mr. Obama might tuck in an Indonesia stop on a November trip to Asia, but it did not materialize.

Then, in March, Mr. Obama, his wife and daughters canceled a trip at the last minute so that he could shepherd his health care bill through Congress. In June, another Indonesia trip was canceled, this time so the president could deal with the BP oil spill.

And once Mr. Obama finally arrived, a cloud of volcanic ash played havoc with his schedule, forcing him to leave a few hours earlier than planned on Wednesday so that he could make it to Seoul, South Korea, to attend the Group of 20 conference of economic powers.

Mr. Obama spent four years, from ages 6 to 10, in Indonesia, living here with his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and stepfather, Lolo Soetoro. In his memoir he writes richly of the experience. He described the markets: “the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betelnut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms.”

He wrote of his introduction to the food: “dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy).” And the menagerie in his backyard: “chickens and ducks running every which way, a big yellow dog with a baleful howl, two birds of paradise, a white cockatoo and finally two baby crocodiles.”

Mr. Obama said Tuesday that he had come to “focus not on the past but the future,” but Indonesians seemed to have both in mind. At a state dinner, Mr. Obama was served Indonesian dishes he said he loved as a boy. And in a gesture that Mr. Obama said left him “deeply moved,” President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono presented him with a gold medal in honor of his mother, who worked here for years as an anthropologist and pioneer in microcredit for the poor.

Jakarta has undergone a transformation since Mr. Obama first moved here in 1967. The tallest building he remembered, a shopping mall, has been eclipsed by skyscrapers. Mr. Obama recalled riding on “little taxis, but you stood in the back and it was very crowded” or on bicycle rickshaws.

“Now,” he lamented, “as president I can’t even see all the traffic, because they block all the streets.”

At the university, Mr. Obama sprinkled his speech with Indonesian phrases, mimicking the sing-song sounds of street vendors. Then, in this country’s native tongue, he said, “I’m home.”

    Obama, in Indonesia, Pledges Expanded Ties With Muslim Nations, NYT, 9.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/world/asia/10prexy.html

Obama Visits a Nation That Knew Him as Barry

November 8, 2010
The New York Times
By NORIMITSU ONISHI

JAKARTA, Indonesia — The two houses where he spent part of his boyhood stand pretty much the way they did when he went back to Hawaii four decades ago. The two schools he attended have grown larger but, in spirit, remain unchanged. Some of his old friends can still be found around the neighborhood.

Near one of his homes here, the same family still runs a wooden stall selling gado-gado, an Indonesian salad covered in peanut sauce. Agus Salam, who took over the business from his mother years ago, played soccer with the American boy everybody here called Barry.

“His house — all the houses around here — haven’t changed,” said Mr. Salam, 56.

When President Obama visits Jakarta on Tuesday, he will find a city that, in some ways, has changed beyond recognition. A city of one luxury hotel and one shopping mall when Mr. Obama lived here between 1967 and 1971, Jakarta is now the overextended and overcrowded capital of the world’s fourth most populous nation. But Jakarta’s neighborhoods, including the two where Mr. Obama lived, retain enough of their former selves that the president would quickly find his bearings.

Jakarta regards Mr. Obama as a local boy made good, and he remains extremely popular throughout Indonesia. But his last-minute postponements of three previously planned visits here have clearly sapped the enthusiasm surrounding his homecoming, even among his most ardent supporters.

“He’s not as popular here as he was before,” Mr. Salam said.

In 1967, Indonesia was still reeling from the aftershocks of an attempted Communist coup that led to the killing of at least 500,000 people. Suharto, the general who would rule Indonesia through the late 1990s, was about to assume power and launch an authoritarian era called the New Order.

Mr. Obama, his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, moved into a one-story house in a district called Menteng-Dalam. At the time, it was a new neighborhood where natives of Jakarta, known as Betawis, lived with an increasing number of newcomers from different corners of Java and Sumatra, the main islands in Indonesia. The area was connected to the electric grid only a couple of years before Mr. Obama moved in.

“It was a very poor area when the family came here,” said Coenraad Satjakoesoemah, 79, a retired airline manager and a neighborhood leader. “There were still dirt roads, only a few houses and lots of large trees.”

In Mr. Satjakoesoemah’s living room, Mr. Obama’s mother taught English to the neighborhood women, including his wife, Djumiati. While the residents regarded Mr. Obama’s mother as a “free spirit,” Barry, who was chubby, was referred to as the “boy who runs like a duck,” said Mrs. Satjakoesoemah, 69.

Mr. Obama, the couple said, attended school with children who could not afford to buy shoes.

The school — Santo Fransiskus Asisi, a Roman Catholic school that had been founded just in 1967 — is still located a couple of blocks away. When the 6-year-old Barry entered the school, there were only three grades with a total of 150 students. Now, about 1,300 students from kindergarten through high school study there, said the principal, Yustina Amirah. Mr. Obama has spoken about growing up here and hearing the Muslim call to prayer, but Ms. Amirah said that since the school’s founding, everyone had hewed to the institution’s official religion.

“Barry followed church services like everybody else,” Ms. Amirah said.

Sometime in the third grade, after his family moved to a different part of the city, Mr. Obama transferred to Elementary School Menteng 1, possibly the most famous primary school in Indonesia. Founded as a Dutch colonial school in 1934, it has long drawn the children of the country’s ruling class because of its location in Menteng, traditionally the wealthiest residential neighborhood in Jakarta.

Nowadays, though many wealthy Indonesians send their children to international schools here, the Menteng public school still draws the children of the elite, so much so that the principal, Hasimah, said she could “count on one hand” the students, out of a total of 400, who are not driven to school every day by their parents or drivers.

A mosque was built on the school grounds in 2002, a sign of the growing influence of Islam in Indonesia’s public life. But the school four decades ago did not even have a prayer room, in keeping with the state’s secularism at the time, Ms. Hasimah and students from the era said.

During the presidential campaign of 2008, right-wing American groups spread rumors that Mr. Obama had attended a radical madrasa while living here. Though most of the Menteng school’s students have always been Muslim, Rully Dasaad, 49, a former classmate, chuckled at the idea that of all schools in the country, Menteng was equated with a madrasa.

“I was brought to school in a Cadillac,” Mr. Dasaad said.

But Mr. Obama’s family did not live in the exclusive Menteng district. The family stayed instead in a far humbler neighborhood called Matraman-Dalam, on a short block of single-story, detached houses, a stone’s throw from a traditional Indonesian neighborhood of narrow, winding streets.

Though he lived in that neighborhood for only two years, Mr. Obama left a lasting impression because of his outgoing and sometimes rowdy personality.

“Barry was so naughty that my father even scolded him one time,” said Sonni Gondokusumo, 49, a former neighbor and classmate.

Mr. Obama’s family rented the guest house inside a compound belonging to a prominent physician. There, according to the neighborhood’s longtime residents, the young Obama, who had already experienced differences in class and religion in his short stay in Indonesia, was exposed to another aspect of Jakarta’s diversity.

His nanny was an openly gay man who, in keeping with Indonesia’s relaxed attitudes toward homosexuality, carried on an affair with a local butcher, longtime residents said. The nanny later joined a group of transvestites called Fantastic Dolls, who, like the many transvestites who remain fixtures of Jakarta’s streetscape, entertained people by dancing and playing volleyball.

In the compound, Mr. Obama often played with the two sons of the physician’s driver.

One time, recalled the elder son, Slamet Januadi, now 52, Mr. Obama asked a group of boys whether they wanted to grow up to be president, a soldier or a businessman. A president would own nothing while a soldier would possess weapons and a businessmen would have money, the young Obama explained.

Mr. Januadi and his younger brother, both of whom later joined the Indonesian military, said they wanted to become soldiers. Another boy, a future banker, said he would become a businessman.

“Then Barry said he would become president and order the soldier to guard him and the businessman to use his money to build him something,” Mr. Januadi said. “We told him, ‘You cheated. You didn’t give us those details.’ ”

“But we all became what we said we would,” he said.

    Obama Visits a Nation That Knew Him as Barry, NYT, 8.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/world/asia/09indo.html

Obama Backs India

for Seat on Security Council

November 8, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

NEW DELHI — President Obama announced here on Monday that the United States would back India’s bid for a permanent seat on an expanded United Nations Security Council, a major policy shift that underscores their strengthening partnership.

Mr. Obama made the announcement — a priority for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — during a late afternoon speech to Parliament.

“The just and sustainable international order that America seeks includes a United Nations that is efficient, effective, credible and legitimate,” the president said. “That is why I can say today, in the years ahead, I look forward to a reformed U.N. Security Council that includes India as a permanent member.”

Members of Parliament reacted with sustained applause. But neither the president nor his top advisers offered a timetable for how long it would take to reform the council, or specifics about what steps the United States would take to do so.

Last month, India won a two-year nonpermanent seat on the council, which has five permanent members: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States. But expanding the body will be a complicated endeavor that will require the cooperation of other countries and could easily take years. Analysts say China has been especially cool to the idea of permanent Security Council membership for rival Asian powers Japan and India.

“This is bound to be a very difficult process and it’s bound to take a significant amount of time,” William J. Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, said here.

Mr. Obama is on a 10-day trip to Asia that will take him to four countries, all democracies; it is no accident that China is not on the list. The president’s announcement on Monday underscored how the United States is trying to promote India as a global power at a moment when both countries are concerned about the increasing influence and assertiveness of China.

“In Asia and around the world, India is not simply emerging,” Mr. Obama said in his speech, echoing a line he used earlier in the day at a joint news conference with Mr. Singh. “India has emerged.”

Many Indian officials had worried that the Obama administration was less interested in India than China, and that the bilateral relationship was lacking a “big idea,” like the landmark civilian nuclear agreement between the two countries under former President George W. Bush.

American foreign policy experts have expressed much the same concern. In a recent report, the Center for a New American Security, a research institution in Washington, warned that “the rapid expansion of ties has stalled,” and encouraged the Obama administration to address the problem by supporting India’s effort to win a security council seat.

India’s foreign policy establishment had been divided on the issue, with some arguing that the United Nations is increasingly outdated compared with groups like the Group of 20, where India is a major player. Mr. Obama and Mr. Singh will meet again at the G-20 meeting in Seoul, South Korea, later this week.

“A country of our size, with our civilization heritage, I don’t think we should be canvassing or banging the door to get in,” Ronen Sen, who recently retired as India’s ambassador to the United States, said before Mr. Obama spoke. “Why should we be bothered? Maybe it is a colonial hangover. We want to get into every club.”

Lalit Mansingh, a retired Indian diplomat, said Mr. Obama’s announcement was as critical to the United Nations as it was to India, because Indian officials were beginning to doubt the relevance of the global body and were placing more importance on the G-20, where India plays a significant role.

“It is a key moment both for India and the future of the United Nations,” Mr. Mansingh, who also is a former ambassador to the United States, said as Mr. Obama prepared to address Parliament. “If you defer this much further, I don’t think people will be excited about the U.N. It is not a key player in Iraq. It is not a key player in Afghanistan. It is beginning to lose its relevance and might.”

The idea of Security Council reform has been under negotiation for years, with no real end in sight. But a rough outline of what it might look like is on the table.

The changes would basically include adding five permanent members and expand the number of elected members to 15, raising the overall number of seats around the table to 25 from 15. Although proposals have included giving the five new permanent members veto power, that has been a sticking point in negotiations and is generally given slim chances of happening.

The five permanent members now — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — are unlikely to accept extending the veto to any new members. Still, a permanent seat would bring significant leverage in terms of influencing the council’s agenda and how it votes.

Turkey and Brazil, for example, recently used their seats as elected members to try to forge a compromise with Iran over its nuclear program before the council imposed new sanctions in June.

Of the five permanent members, Britain and France are the most enthusiastic about the potential changes, viewing them as enhancing the council’s relevance even as their own global power has faded since they gained their seats at the end of World War II.

While the rough idea of expanding the number of seats is widely accepted, the difficulty in reaching any reform would be agreeing who gets permanent seats. Each emerging power that might seem a natural has a regional competitor likely to try to undermine the bid.

In Asia, Pakistan would take a dim view of India gaining a seat, while in Africa Nigeria would not be enthusiastic about assigning a spot to South Africa. Mexico might object to Brazil, while in Europe, where Germany’s economic would seem to have earned it a seat, Italy might object.

The Security Council that begins in January is being seen as a dry run because so many potential new members have won elected seats — including Brazil, Germany, India and South Africa. Major emerging powers like India have resisted paying higher amounts for the annual budget of the United Nations, saying they deserve a larger voice in exchange.

Earlier on Monday, Mr. Obama also strongly endorsed the Federal Reserve Board’s decision last week to pump $600 billion into the American economy and issued a veiled rebuke to China for maintaining a huge trade surplus.

“We can’t continue to sustain a situation in which some countries are maintaining massive surpluses, others massive deficits and there never is the kind of adjustment with respect to currency that would lead to a more balanced growth pattern,” Mr. Obama said.

Looking ahead to the Group of 20 meeting, Mr. Obama made the comments — his first on the Fed’s move — at a joint news conference here with Prime Minister Singh. Mr. Singh, for his part, strongly defended the practice of outsourcing, which makes many Americans uneasy and has come up repeatedly during the president’s visit here.

“India is not in the business of stealing jobs from the United States of America,” the prime minister declared.

The two leaders’ comments came on the third day of Mr. Obama’s 10-day swing through Asia — a journey the White House is characterizing as an economic mission. Asked about the Fed’s decision, Mr. Obama noted that the Federal Reserve is an independent entity, and said he did not comment on its actions. But then he proceeded, in effect, to do so.

“The worst thing that could happen to the world economy — not just ours, but the entire world’s economy — is if we end up being stuck with no growth or very limited growth,” the president said. “I think that’s the Fed’s concern, and that’s my concern, as well.”

With unemployment in the United States stuck at 9.6 percent, some economists are arguing that the economy needs an additional boost, but the prospects for another stimulus package are dim on Capitol Hill. The Fed announced recently that it would spend $600 billion buying up Treasury bonds — a move that would keep interest rates low and, officials hope, spur consumer spending.

But it might also lower the value of the dollar, leading to criticism that the United States government — which has long complained about China’s currency devaluation — is acting hypocritically. Mr. Obama made his remarks in response to a question about comments by the finance minister of another surplus nation, Germany, who in a recent interview with Der Spiegel called the Fed’s decision “undermining the credibility of U.S. financial policy.”

The minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, went on, “It doesn’t add up when the Americans accuse the Chinese of currency manipulation and then, with the help of their central bank’s printing presses, artificially lower the value of the dollar.”

Coming off a bruising midterm election that he has said was a referendum on the economy, Mr. Obama has sought to use his time in India to spotlight his efforts to create American jobs, by announcing business deals between American and Indian companies and liberalizing restrictions on the ability of American companies to export sensitive technologies to India.

But India is a delicate place for Mr. Obama to talk about jobs, given American concerns about outsourcing — and the president’s own rhetoric as a candidate. On Monday, he faced questions from the Indian press about his comments — and argued that he has not complained about outsourcing, at least not here.

“I don’t think you’ve heard me make outsourcing a bogeyman during the course of my visit,” the president said, adding that the practice has “enormous win-win potential” for creating jobs in both nations.

Pakistan — a country that arouses deep suspicion in India — was also on the table when the president and prime minister met before the news conference.

Mr. Obama has been under some pressure here to toughen his language on Pakistan and has resisted doing so while here; instead, he is trying to nudge India and Pakistan toward working together. So while Mr. Singh called Pakistan a “terror machine” on Monday, Mr. Obama reiterated his careful rhetoric.

“Both Pakistan and India have an interest in reducing tensions between the two countries,” the president said. While the United States “cannot impose a solution to these problems,” he said he had told the prime minister that his government was “happy to play any role that the parties think is appropriate in reducing these tensions.”

Jim Yardley and Lydia Polgreen contributed reporting. Neil MacFarquhar contributed from the United Nations.

    Obama Backs India for Seat on Security Council, NYT, 8.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/world/asia/09prexy.html

In India,

Obama Courts Corporate America

November 6, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
and VIKAS BAJAJ

MUMBAI, India — President Obama, fresh off a stinging electoral defeat for Democrats, opened a 10-day tour of Asia on Saturday with a courtship of corporate America, including private meetings with American business executives who are here for his visit and an announcement that he will lift longstanding restrictions on exports of closely held technologies to India.

After an election season dominated by voter dissatisfaction with his management of the economy, the president is casting the four-nation trip, which will also take him to Indonesia, South Korea and Japan, as an economic mission. His agenda is heavy on taking steps to open foreign markets to American goods; he hopes to come home from South Korea, for instance, with a renegotiated free trade pact.

Here in Mumbai, Mr. Obama lavished attention on American business leaders who coordinated their visit with the White House. He announced that, as part of the trip, American and Indian companies signed or are about to sign 20 deals worth about $10 billion that will help create more than 50,000 jobs at home, although many of the deals have been in negotiations for some time and some have yet to be completed despite 11th-hour negotiations before his trip.

In addition, the easing of the so-called “dual use” restrictions, which bar American export of technologies that might be used to build weapons, represents a policy change that is a high priority for companies here and in the United States.

“As we look to India today, the United States sees an opportunity to sell our exports in one of the fastest-growing markets in the world,” Mr. Obama told a gathering of political leaders and Indian and American executives. “For America, this is a jobs strategy.”

Accompanied by his wife, Michelle, Mr. Obama began his day here on a somber note, paying homage to victims and survivors of the 2008 terrorist siege in Mumbai carried out by Pakistani militants. But the president failed to mention the terror threat to India that emanates from Pakistan — an omission that drew some criticism in the media here. He also made a brief stop at the home, now a museum, where Mahatma Gandhi stayed while fighting for his country’s independence.

But such symbolic acts quickly gave way to Mr. Obama’s diplomatic and business agenda, aimed at strengthening ties between the two nations at a time in which China is more aggressively pursuing power in the region.

India has operated under the high-tech export barriers since its nuclear test in 1998, and has long sought a loosening of the export restrictions more for political reasons than economic ones — the country does not want to be viewed as a rogue state.

Indians have argued the restrictions became outdated when they signed a groundbreaking civil nuclear cooperation deal with the United States when President George W. Bush was in office. That deal ended a long moratorium on providing India with the fuel and technology for desperately needed nuclear power plants.

Mr. Obama is also taking Indian defense research and space agencies off the United States’ “entities list,” clearing the way for greater cooperation. Executives here welcomed the moves.

“It is a signal, No. 1, about India as an ally, and No. 2, it has a business potential,” Anand Mahindra, managing director of the Indian conglomerate Mahindra & Mahindra, said in an interview. “Both of these are important.”

Still, Mr. Obama seemed mostly to be aiming his message at American business leaders. Many executives during the recent political campaign accused the White House of being antibusiness and poured money into the coffers of Republican candidates and groups that aimed to defeat the Democrats.

More than 200 American executives timed a business conference here to coincide with Mr. Obama’s arrival in Mumbai — and the president worked hard to reciprocate.

The chief executive officer of Boeing, Jim McNerney, who also leads the President’s Export Council, greeted Mr. Obama when Air Force One touched down, and then was whisked downtown aboard the presidential helicopter. Later, Mr. Obama met privately with American chief executives, among them Jeffrey R. Immelt of General Electric, who has been critical of the White House in the past.

“It’s unprecedented,” Mr. Immelt said in an interview, praising Mr. Obama for talking up trade, a politically risky move for a Democrat. “I don’t remember President Bush ever having a mission like this. I think it’s quite rare and I hope the first of many.”

Mr. Obama decided early on that his predecessor had not paid enough attention to Asia, and it is no coincidence that the four countries Mr. Obama is visiting are all democracies. It is also no coincidence that China is not on the agenda; by building ties with emerging economies, like India and Indonesia, and strengthening them with longtime allies like South Korea and Japan, the administration hopes to dilute China’s growing power in the region.

India’s economy is expected to grow at an annual rate of more than 8 percent through 2015, and with a population of 1.2 billion, the White House views it as a prime market for American goods.

“The United States sees Asia and especially India as a market of the future,” the president said in a speech to the U.S.-India Business Council. “We don’t simply welcome your rise as a nation and people, we ardently support it. We want to invest in it.”

In the afternoon, Mr. Obama met with a group of 25 Indian executives, including entrepreneurs who are working on startup companies involved in electric cars and water purifying companies. Mr. Obama told the group that he wanted to hear from them about new ideas that could help create jobs in the United States and emerging markets like India, said Shaffi Mather, a young Indian businessman who attended the meeting.

“He spoke in the background of the electoral pressures,” Mr. Mather said, “but he still clearly set the goal of economic growth not only of the U.S. but also of India.”

India is a politically delicate place for Mr. Obama to talk about jobs, given American concerns about outsourcing. As a candidate, Mr. Obama often lamented the tax incentives and lack of educational opportunities in the United States that, as he liked to say, forced children from Boston to compete for jobs with children from Bangalore. Here in Mumbai, he steered clear of the Boston-Bangalore analogy, as he made the case that investment overseas can create jobs at home.

“There still exists a caricature of India as a land of call centers and back offices that cost American jobs,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s a real perception. But these old stereotypes, these old concerns ignore today’s reality: In 2010, trade between our countries is not just a one-way street of American jobs and companies moving to India. It is a dynamic, two-way relationship that is creating jobs, growth, and higher living standards in both our countries.”

Mr. Obama is spending an unusually long time — three days — in India, the longest amount of time he has spent in any foreign country as president.

Soon after Air Force One touched down early Saturday afternoon, he and the first lady headed to the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, which bore the brunt of the terror attacks on Nov. 26, 2008.

The president and his entourage are staying at the hotel, which is home to a memorial for the more than 160 people killed during the highly coordinated attacks over four days.

“To those who have asked whether this is intended to send a message, my answer is, simply, absolutely,” Mr. Obama said, after he and Mrs. Obama signed a guest book at the memorial and met briefly with victims of the attacks. “Ever since those horrific days two years ago, The Taj has been the symbol of the strength and resilience of the Indian people. So we use our visit here to send a very clear message that in our determination to give our people a future of security and prosperity, the United States and India stand united.”

Mr. Obama expressed similar sentiments in the guest book, writing that the United States “stands in solidarity with all of Mumbai and all of India in working to eradicate the scourge of terrorism, and we affirm our lasting friendship with the Indian people.”

He signed his name and the date; Mrs. Obama signed her name next to his. Each left behind a white rose.

    In India, Obama Courts Corporate America, NYT, 6.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/world/asia/07prexy.html

Obama Invokes Gandhi, Whose Ideal Eludes Modern India

November 6, 2010
The New York Times
By JIM YARDLEY

NEW DELHI — Not long after Barack Obama was elected president, the United States Embassy in India printed a postcard showing him sitting in his old Senate office beneath framed photographs of his political heroes: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln and the great Indian apostle of peace, democracy and nonviolent protest, Mohandas K. Gandhi.

The postcard was a trinket of public diplomacy, a souvenir of the new president’s affinity for India. Now that Mr. Obama is visiting India for the first time, on a trip pitched as a jobs mission, his fascination with Gandhi is influencing his itinerary and his message as he tries to win over India’s skeptical political class.

“He is a hero not just to India, but to the world,” the president wrote in a guest book on Saturday in Gandhi’s modest former home in Mumbai, now the Mani Bhavan museum.

Yet if paying homage to Gandhi is expected of visiting dignitaries, Mr. Obama’s more personal identification with the Gandhian legacy — the president once named him the person he would most like to dine with — places him on complicated terrain.

Gandhi remains India’s patriarch, the founding father whose face is printed on the currency, but modern India is hardly a Gandhian nation, if it ever was one. His vision of a village-dominated economy was shunted aside during his lifetime as rural romanticism, and his call for a national ethos of personal austerity and nonviolence has proved antithetical to the goals of an aspiring economic and military power.

If anything, India’s rise as a global power seems likely to distance it even further from Gandhi. India is inching toward a tighter military relationship with the United States, once distrusted as an imperialist power, even as the Americans are fighting a war in nearby Afghanistan.

India also has an urbanizing consumer-driven economy and a growing middle class that indulges itself in cars, apartments and other goods. It is this economic progress that underpins India’s rising geopolitical clout and its attractiveness to the United States as a global partner.

Gandhi is still revered here, and credited with shaping India’s political identity as a tolerant, secular democracy. But he can sometimes seem to hover over modern India like a parent whose expectations are rarely met.

Mr. Obama, too, has experienced the clash of those lofty expectations with political realities. When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, even as he was conducting two wars, he described himself as “living testimony to the moral force” of the nonviolent movement embodied by Dr. King and Gandhi.

“But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation,” he continued, “I cannot be guided by their examples alone.”

That paradox was on vivid display on Saturday when Mr. Obama arrived in Mumbai, an event carried live on national television, celebrating Gandhi’s legacy but also selling military transport planes and bringing along 200 American business leaders.

India’s political establishment, if thrilled by the visit, is also withholding judgment. Mr. Obama was faulted in New Delhi for some early missteps, including his comment that China should play an active role in South Asia. His battering in the midterm elections has raised concerns about his political viability. And many Indian officials still hold a torch for former President George W. Bush, who was popular for pushing through a landmark civilian nuclear deal between the two countries.

Mr. Obama’s visit is intended to dispel those doubts and deepen a partnership rooted in shared democratic values. Since taking office, he has already met several times with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as well as with other delegations of Indian officials. On several occasions, he has cited his deep admiration for Gandhi, perhaps as evidence of his fondness for India.

“The impression on the Indian side is every time you meet him, he talks about Gandhi,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express, a leading English-language newspaper, adding that the repeated references struck some officials as platitudinous.

In praising Gandhi, Mr. Obama has often cited the influence of Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaigns on the civil rights movement in the United States. Dr. King visited India in 1959, more than a decade after Gandhi’s death, seeking to draw from the taproot of his moral power, in a trip publicized in India and the United States.

“The trip for King was very much about laying claim to the Gandhian legacy,” said Nico Slate, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University who has researched the linkage between the two men.

Unlike Mr. Obama, Dr. King and Gandhi had the advantage of never having to govern. And even Dr. King learned the limits of Gandhi’s influence in an India confronted with the realities of global politics. When he was invited to make an address on Indian radio, Dr. King condemned the cold war arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, suggesting that India should set a higher, Gandhian standard by demilitarizing. Indian officials quickly rejected the idea.

“It was very Gandhian, but in many ways very unrealistic, at least from the vantage point of the Indian establishment,” Mr. Slate said. “Even King came to realize that India, in some ways, was never Gandhian.”

Dr. King also visited Gandhi’s home in Mumbai and, like Mr. Obama, signed the guest book. “Pretty cool,” Mr. Obama said Saturday when a museum administrator showed him Dr. King’s entry. “Nineteen-fifty-nine. What a great book.”

On Sunday, Mr. Obama will fly to New Delhi and, like Dr. King, visit the Rajghat, the black marble memorial on the spot where Gandhi was cremated after his assassination in 1948. Today, the Rajghat attracts about 10,000 visitors a day and is a requisite stop for visiting foreign leaders, regardless of political ideology: Mr. Bush and former President Bill Clinton have visited. So has the Dalai Lama. But so has the Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin; the president of authoritarian China, Hu Jintao; and, more recently, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, the leader of the ruling military junta in Myanmar.

Ramachandra Guha, a Gandhi biographer, said Indian officials approached him three months ago seeking suggestions for Gandhi-related sites for Mr. Obama’s visit. Mr. Guha recommended an ashram in rural central India where Gandhi once lived, a suggestion rejected because of concerns over security and distance, he said.

To Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a grandson of Gandhi, the fact that his grandfather inspired the American president demonstrated the continued vibrancy of Gandhi’s message. If he bemoaned the corruption and money contaminating Indian politics, he said Gandhi’s spirit could still be found among the Indian civil society groups helping the poor and protecting the environment.

“Today, the need for a practical idealism is recognized throughout the world,” he said.

The word practical seemed especially relevant.

    Obama Invokes Gandhi, Whose Ideal Eludes Modern India, NYT, 6.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/world/asia/07gandhi.html

Exporting Our Way to Stability

November 5, 2010
The New York Times
By BARACK OBAMA

AS the United States recovers from this recession, the biggest mistake we could make would be to rebuild our economy on the same pile of debt or the paper profits of financial speculation. We need to rebuild on a new, stronger foundation for economic growth. And part of that foundation involves doing what Americans have always done best: discovering, creating and building products that are sold all over the world.

We want to be known not just for what we consume, but for what we produce. And the more we export abroad, the more jobs we create in America. In fact, every $1 billion we export supports more than 5,000 jobs at home.

It is for this reason that I set a goal of doubling America’s exports in the next five years. To do that, we need to find new customers in new markets for American-made goods. And some of the fastest-growing markets in the world are in Asia, where I’m traveling this week.

It is hard to overstate the importance of Asia to our economic future. Asia is home to three of the world’s five largest economies, as well as a rapidly expanding middle class with rising incomes. My trip will therefore take me to four Asian democracies — India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan — each of which is an important partner for the United States. I will also participate in two summit meetings — the Group of 20 industrialized nations and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation — that will focus on economic growth.

During my first visit to India, I will be joined by hundreds of American business leaders and their Indian counterparts to announce concrete progress toward our export goal — billions of dollars in contracts that will support tens of thousands of American jobs. We will also explore ways to reduce barriers to United States exports and increase access to the Indian market.

Indonesia is a member of the G-20. Next year, it will assume the chairmanship of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — a group whose members make up a market of more than 600 million people that is increasingly integrating into a free trade area, and to which the United States exports $80 billion in goods and services each year. My administration has deepened our engagement with Asean, and for the first eight months of 2010, exports of American goods to Indonesia increased by 47 percent from the same period in 2009. This is momentum that we will build on as we pursue a new comprehensive partnership between the United States and Indonesia.

In South Korea, President Lee Myung-bak and I will work to complete a trade pact that could be worth tens of billions of dollars in increased exports and thousands of jobs for American workers. Other nations like Canada and members of the European Union are pursuing trade pacts with South Korea, and American businesses are losing opportunities to sell their products in this growing market. We used to be the top exporter to South Korea; now we are in fourth place and have seen our share of Korea’s imports drop in half over the last decade.

But any agreement must come with the right terms. That’s why we’ll be looking to resolve outstanding issues on behalf of American exporters — including American automakers and workers. If we can, we’ll be able to complete an agreement that supports jobs and prosperity in America.

South Korea is also the host of the G-20 economic forum, the organization that we have made the focal point for international economic cooperation. Last year, the nations of the G-20 worked together to halt the spread of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. This year, our top priority is achieving strong, sustainable and balanced growth. This will require cooperation and responsibility from all nations — those with emerging economies and those with advanced economies; those running a deficit and those running a surplus.

Finally, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Japan, I will continue seeking new markets in Asia for American exports. We want to expand our trade relationships in the region, including through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to make sure that we’re not ceding markets, exports and the jobs they support to other nations. We will also lay the groundwork for hosting the 2011 APEC meeting in Hawaii, the first such gathering on American soil since 1993.

The great challenge of our time is to make sure that America is ready to compete for the jobs and industries of the future. It can be tempting, in times of economic difficulty, to turn inward, away from trade and commerce with other nations. But in our interconnected world, that is not a path to growth, and that is not a path to jobs. We cannot be shut out of these markets. Our government, together with American businesses and workers, must take steps to promote and sell our goods and services abroad — particularly in Asia. That’s how we’ll create jobs, prosperity and an economy that’s built on a stronger foundation.

Barack Obama is the president of the United States.

    Exporting Our Way to Stability, NYT, 5.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/opinion/06obama.html

Obama Is Not Likely

to Push India Hard on Pakistan

November 5, 2010
The New York Times
By LYDIA POLGREEN
and MARK LANDLER

NEW DELHI — Senior American military commanders have sought to press India to formally disavow an obscure military doctrine that they contend is fueling tensions between India and Pakistan and hindering the American war effort in Afghanistan.

But with President Obama arriving in India on Saturday for a closely watched three-day visit, administration officials said they did not expect him to broach the subject of the doctrine, known informally as Cold Start. At the most, these officials predicted, Mr. Obama will quietly encourage India’s leaders to do what they can to cool tensions between these nuclear-armed neighbors.

That would be a victory for India, which denies the very existence of Cold Start, a plan to deploy new ground forces that could strike inside Pakistan quickly in the event of a conflict. India has argued strenuously that the United States, if it wants a wide-ranging partnership of leading democracies, has to stop viewing it through the lens of Pakistan and the Afghanistan war.

It is also a victory for those in the administration who agree that the United States and India should focus on broader concerns, including commercial ties, military sales, climate change and regional security. However vital the Afghan war effort, officials said, it has lost out in the internal debate to priorities like American jobs and the rising role of China.

“There are people in the administration who want us to engage India positively,” said an administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal deliberations. “They don’t care about Afghanistan. Then there are people, like Petraeus, who have wars to fight.”

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Afghanistan, is among those who have warned internally about the dangers of Cold Start, according to American and Indian officials. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, share these fears.

The strategy calls for India to create fast-moving battle groups that could deliver a contained but sharp retaliatory ground strike inside Pakistan within three days of suffering a terrorist attack by militants based in Pakistan, yet not do enough damage to set off a nuclear confrontation.

Pakistani officials have repeatedly stressed to the United States that worries about Cold Start are at the root of their refusal to redeploy forces away from the border with India so that they can fight Islamic militants in the frontier region near Afghanistan. That point was made most recently during a visit to Washington last month by Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

The administration raised the issue of Cold Start last November when India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, visited Washington, Indian and American officials said. Indian officials told the United States that the strategy was not a government or military policy, and that India had no plans to attack Pakistan. Therefore, they added, it should have no place on Mr. Obama’s agenda in India.

For at least the president’s first stop, in the commercial capital, Mumbai, it almost certainly will not. With a huge delegation of more than 200 business executives trailing Mr. Obama, the emphasis will be on how the United States and India can expand economic ties in a way that benefits both countries.

The two countries are expected to sign a $5.8 billion deal to supply Boeing C-17 transport planes to the Indian military, one of several lucrative multiyear agreements to supply India with military hardware. The United States is eager to strengthen military ties with India, partly to make it a counterweight to China, which is flexing its muscles militarily and economically.

“President Obama intends this trip to be — and intends our policy to be — a full embrace of India’s rise,” Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, said to reporters on Air Force One en route to India.

For Mr. Obama, politically wounded by the midterm elections and high unemployment at home, such deals are also important to bolster his argument that the relationship between the United States and India can create American jobs rather than simply siphoning them away.

“There is a lot of money to be made there,” said Daniel S. Markey, a senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The big question is whether we have the ability to forge a defense and trade relationship with India that is symbiotic.”

For all the talk of shared interests, India still lies at the nexus of America’s greatest foreign policy crisis. Its archrival, Pakistan, is a crucial but deeply troubled American ally in the war in Afghanistan. The United States has struggled to find a way to mediate between them.

Some administration officials have argued that addressing Cold Start, developed in the aftermath of a failed attempt to mobilize troops in response to an attack on the Indian Parliament by Pakistani militants, could help break the logjam that has impeded talks between the countries.

But India has mostly declined to discuss the topic. “We don’t know what Cold Start is,” said India’s defense secretary, Pradeep Kumar, in an interview on Thursday. “Our prime minister has said that Pakistan has nothing to fear. Pakistan can move its troops from the eastern border.”

Indian officials and some analysts say Cold Start has taken on a nearly mythical status in the minds of Pakistani leaders, whom they suspect of inflating it as an excuse to avoid engaging militants on their own turf.

“The Pakistanis will use everything they can to delay or drag out doing a serious reorientation of their military,” said Stephen P. Cohen, an expert on South Asia at the Brookings Institution.

India’s response to terrorist attacks has been slow-footed. After Pakistani militants attacked Parliament in 2001, India’s ponderous strike forces, most of them based in the center of the country, took weeks to reach the border. By then Western diplomats had swooped in, and Pakistan made conciliatory statements, deflating Indian hopes of striking a punitive blow.

The military began devising a plan to respond to future attacks. The response would have to be swift to avoid the traffic jam of international diplomacy, but also carefully calibrated — shallow enough to be punitive and embarrassing, but not an existential threat that would provoke nuclear retaliation.

For now, there are no signs that Cold Start is more than a theory, and analysts say there is no significant shift of new troops or equipment to the border.

But American military officials and diplomats worry that even the existence of the strategy in any form could encourage Pakistan to make rapid improvements in its nuclear arsenal.

When Pakistani military officials are asked to justify the huge investment in upgrading that arsenal, some respond that because Pakistan has no conventional means to deter Cold Start, nuclear weapons are its only option.

Still, many analysts are skeptical that Cold Start could be the key for the Obama administration to promote talks between India and Pakistan, which have been stalled since Pakistani militants attacked Mumbai in 2008.

“They are grasping at straws because they have a predicament in the Afghan theater that they cannot fix without Pakistan’s help,” said Ashley J. Tellis, a former diplomat and South Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They are looking at India to do something to placate the Pakistanis.”

Lydia Polgreen reported from New Delhi, and Mark Landler from Washington. David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington.

    Obama Is Not Likely to Push India Hard on Pakistan, NYT, 5.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/world/asia/06india.html

Working With India

November 5, 2010
The New York Times

President Obama will spend three days in India beginning on Saturday — the longest foreign stay of his presidency. Indians are still feeling anxious and insufficiently loved. But the trip is a clear a sign of the importance that Mr. Obama places on the relationship. As he should.

The Clinton and Bush administrations talked that way, too. President George W. Bush was so eager to woo New Delhi that he gave away the store in a 2006 nuclear energy deal. It is up to Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to take this complex relationship to a more sustainable level. Ahead of the trip, much of the focus has been on defense and trade deals that will produce jobs. Those are undeniably important. But the trip will be a failure if it does not also deal with strategic issues.

India is anxious about America’s plans for Afghanistan and Washington’s close ties with Pakistan — base for insurgencies that threaten all three countries. The Indian-Pakistan nuclear rivalry remains dangerous. And so long as Pakistan’s army sees India as its main threat, it will never fully take on the Taliban.

India would gain credibility and make the world safer if it worked harder to reduce tensions with Pakistan.

The Indians have made clear that they don’t want Washington as a mediator. Mr. Obama still needs to nudge India to resume serious talks with Pakistan over Kashmir and take other steps to help calm Pakistan’s fears including pursuing a trade agreement.

Mr. Obama also needs to press Pakistan a lot harder to bring the Mumbai bombers to justice.

New Delhi did not retaliate after the 2008 attack — a testimony to Mr. Singh’s wise leadership. We hope that the president’s top aides have a plan for how they would tamp things down if Pakistani-based terrorists strike India again. There are many other challenges, including managing the rise of China, that can be dealt with more effectively if Washington and New Delhi work together.

The Indians seem conflicted. In recent news reports, some complained that Mr. Obama has not shown India enough attention. Others worried about getting overly entangled with Washington.

There are many positive trends. Military and counterterrorism cooperation are substantial. India holds more defense exercises with the United States than any other country. And it will soon purchase $5.8 billion worth of American-made C-17 military transport planes and more sales are expected.

There are also real differences that need to be addressed. Mr. Obama is pushing New Delhi to lift a cap on foreign investment in the defense sector. India wants more visas so high-tech workers can move to the United States. The two countries need to find ways to cooperate on trade liberalization and climate change.

The Bush administration overturned 30 years of nonproliferation policy when it signed the deal to sell nuclear fuel and reactors to India. A promised benefit — nuclear contracts for American companies that would create jobs at home — never materialized after India adopted a liability law that American firms say exceeds international standards and leaves them too exposed.

It is a grim irony that the nuclear deal, which was sold as essential to removing a serious irritant in Indian-American relations, is now causing new tensions. The two sides must find a way to resolve them.

    Working With India, NYT, 5.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/opinion/06sat1.html

4 U.S. Citizens Killed

in Separate Attacks in Mexico

November 1, 2010
Filed at 12:58 a.m. ET on November 02, 2010
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) — Four U.S. citizens were shot to death in separate attacks in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexican authorities said Monday.

Chihuahua state prosecutors' spokesman Arturo Sandoval said Edgar Lopez, 35, of El Paso, Texas, was killed Sunday along with two Mexican men when gunmen opened fire on a group standing outside a house.

On Saturday, a 26-year-old U.S. woman and an American boy were slain shortly after crossing an international bridge from El Paso. Giovanna Herrera and Luis Araiza, 15, were shot to death along with a Mexican man traveling with them just after 11 a.m., Sandoval said.

Sandoval said authorities also identified a 24-year-old woman killed Friday inside a tortilla shop as Lorena Izaguirre, a U.S. citizen and El Paso resident. A Mexican man was also found dead in the store.

Sandoval did not provide any information about possible motive in any of the slayings.

U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley confirmed three of the killings but did not have any information about Izaguirre. He said officials had been in touch with the victims' families but offered no other details.

Ciudad Juarez has become one of the world's deadliest cities amid a turf war between the Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels. More than 2,000 people have been killed this year in the city, which is across the border from El Paso.

Also Monday, federal police said they arrested a U.S. man accused of being a member of the Aztecas gang, whose members work as hitmen for the Juarez cartel and operate on both sides of the border. Angel Martinez, 24, was arrested Saturday in Ciudad Juarez when he was traveling with another gang member, the department said.

Elsewhere, three city police officers were gunned down early Monday in a drive-by shooting as they patrolled the heart of Acapulco's upscale tourist district, authorities said.

Another officer was wounded, according to a statement from the Public Safety Department in southern Guerrero state, where Acapulco is located.

The officers were patrolling the Puerto Marques area around 1 a.m. when they were ambushed by suspects shooting assault rifles from inside a car, police said.

Violence continues to escalate in the Pacific resort city, days after Mayor Jose Luis Avila Sanchez warned people to stay indoors after dark. Ten other people were killed between Sunday and Monday around the area. Authorities also were trying to determine whether a burned corpse found in a car was the body of a Canadian businessman who disappeared last week.

Meanwhile, the remains of seven people were found Sunday in a mass grave in Nogales, on the Arizona border. Mayor Jose Angel Hernandez said a family walking near the site noticed what appeared to be part of a body sticking up in a riverbed. Officers recovered six bodies and a severed head in the grave. A seventh headless body was found nearby.

In the border city of Tijuana, state police seized more than 14 tons (13 metric tons) of marijuana in two vehicles at a house in the same neighborhood where gunmen killed 13 people at a drug rehab center 10 days ago.

___

Associated Press reporters Sergio Flores in Acapulco and Felipe Larios in Hermosillo contributed
to this article.

    4 U.S. Citizens Killed in Separate Attacks in Mexico, NYT, 1.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/11/01/world/americas/AP-LT-Drug-War-Mexico.html