Pakistan’s new envoy brings liberal charm but faces slim chance for diplomatic thaw

In both style and substance, Sherry Rehman was born to be a Washington diplomat and hostess. She has a designer wardrobe, a chestnut coif and camera-ready makeup. She also has a BA from Smith, a CV full of democratic credentials and the articulate self-confidence of her country’s Westernized elite.

But Rehman’s arrival as the new ambassador from Pakistan, a nuclear-armed, terrorist-plagued nation of 180 million, has come at a time of unprecedented anti-American clamor among the Pakistani public, which has been increasingly drawn to conservative Islamic values and infuriated by U.S. drone attacks and other perceived aggressions.

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The two countries are allies but their relationship has been plagued by mistrust over the last 50 years.

She has also landed in Washington at a time of deepening bilateral mistrust, marked by the covert U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the shooting of two Pakistanis by a CIA contractor and, most recently, the November attack by U.S. forces in Afghanistan that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. Ongoing tension between these two formal allies in the war on terrorism has plunged U.S.-Pakistan relations to their lowest point since the end of the Cold War.

Moreover, the civilian administration that appointed Rehman is deeply unpopular, besieged by the courts and the media, and under constant pressure from Pakistan’s powerful military establishment. The crisis has led to repeated rumors, so far unrealized, that the elected government is about to fall.

Rehman, 51, seems undaunted. She learned the art of politics at the side of the late Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s former prime minister, a liberal icon and a steel magnolia par excellence. Since taking up her post two weeks ago, the new envoy has handled her challenging portfolio with similar, purposeful charm.

“You’ll have to airbrush out the circles under my eyes. I was up all night with a Pentagon crisis,” Rehman remarked cheerfully to a photographer last week, posing for portraits in Pakistan’s embassy, a hushed and impersonal marble fortress off Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington.

The crisis in question had erupted after a stinging new comment on Pakistan’s “double dealing” by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, which Rehman spent hours attempting to spin lest it provoke an apoplectic reaction from her country’s easily offended generals.

Making her entry equally difficult are the tumultuous, intrigue-filled circumstances that led to the forced resignation of her predecessor, Husain Haqqani, in late November. That incident, a reflection of the constant plots, rumors and institutional power struggles that consume Pakistani politics, became a full-blown scandal known as “Memogate.”

Haqqani, a former journalist and academic long critical of Pakistan’s military, was ordered home and accused of treason after he was said to have written a memo asking U.S. officials for help in preventing a coup d’etat. Haqqani denied the charges, but he spent most of December and January hiding inside the prime minister’s house, saying he feared for his safety. By last week, the furor had eased and Haqqani, given back his right to travel, was reportedly heading back to the United States as a private citizen.