More than a week after the attack, President Obama called Pakistan’s president on Sunday to say that the deaths were “regrettable,” stopping short of an apology that many in Pakistan have called for.
The airstrike has cast a shadow over a major diplomatic gathering Monday in Bonn, Germany, that the administration hoped would help facilitate plans to wind down the Afghanistan war. Pakistan has said that it will not attend the meeting, which brings together more than 100 countries and international organizations and whose agenda includes regional and Afghan development and peace talks with the Taliban.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will lead the U.S. delegation, unsuccessfully appealed for a change of heart in a telephone call Saturday to Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.
The U.S.-Pakistan breach has also set back Obama administration attempts to improve the brittle relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine on the eve of the Bonn meeting that he thought Kabul’s closest neighbor was trying to sabotage the possibility of peace negotiations.
Many of Clinton’s diplomatic troops see the border clash as the latest example of a disconnect between what one State Department official called short-term security objectives and long-term diplomatic goals.
The global nature of the war against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups has expanded the presence of U.S. military and intelligence personnel into countries and American embassies to the point where they often outnumber and vastly outspend their civilian counterparts, whose portfolios now involve far more security-related work than they trained for.
“In a lot of ways, diplomacy is this historical anachronism,” said the official, who spoke of diplomatic concerns only on the condition of anonymity.
The imbalance is particularly acute in Pakistan, where the Obama administration is trying to prop up the weak civilian government while lavishing funds and attention on the recalcitrant military and conducting counterterrorism operations through an extensive intelligence presence and drone attacks.
Although they share Pentagon and CIA impatience with and mistrust of the Pakistanis, American diplomats said appearances and perceptions could be as important as actions in pursuing U.S. goals — particularly because one of them is to convince a strongly anti-American public that the United States wants to help, not harm, Pakistan.
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