U.S. diplomats court new Pakistani leaders

ISLAMABAD: Two top American officials arrived in Pakistan to hold talks with the new political leadership in a changing political environment as Yousaf Raza Gilani, the newly elected prime minister, was sworn in Tuesday.
John Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, arrived in the country early Tuesday with Richard Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, officials said. Negroponte met with President Pervez Musharraf, whom the United States considers an important ally in its war against terrorism, and was to meet later with Gilani, who now leads a coalition government dominated by anti-Musharraf politicians.
Gilani - a longtime aide to former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in December - was administered the oath of office Tuesday by Musharraf. After he had been sworn in, supporters of Gilani and his Pakistan People's Party rose up and shouted, "Long live Bhutto!"
Gilani, wearing a traditional Pakistani sherwani, appealed for national unity to tackle the crises facing Pakistan, particularly economic problems. "We have to give supremacy to the Parliament so that we can jointly take the country out of these crises," he said, according to The Associated Press.
"I congratulate Yousaf Raza Gilani, and my cooperation will always remain with him," Musharraf told state-run television after the swearing-in.




Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister and bitter Musharraf opponent whose party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, emerged from the general elections last month as the second-biggest in Parliament, also met Tuesday with Negroponte. Ahsan Iqbal, the Pakistan Muslim League-N's information secretary, said the U.S. officials had asked for Sharif's opinion of the relationship with Washington.
"We told them it's a democratic coalition and we will develop our policies through consultations and debate in the Parliament," Iqbal said. "Earlier, all policies were made by one man," he said, referring to Musharraf.
Iqbal said the U.S. officials had exerted no pressure on Sharif, who has argued that Musharraf's counterterrorism policies have failed and has called for negotiations with militants in the semiautonomous tribal areas near the Afghan border.
Both Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto's widower and the head of the Pakistan People's Party, said in recent interviews with The New York Times that they favored holding talks with the militants to try to stop the spate of suicide bombings that have plagued Pakistan in recent months. Reports of official U.S. concern about those remarks have evoked a strong response in the Pakistani news media, as has the timing of the U.S. diplomats' visit.
In an editorial Tuesday titled "Hands off please, Uncle Sam," The News, one of the country's leading dailies, urged U.S. officials to "realize the need to give the democratic government in Pakistan time and space" to implement a "thoughtful plan of action without any effort to intervene in their working or curtailing their right to independently decide what is best for Pakistan and its people."
"They seem to be in a great rush to come to Pakistan," Omar Quraishi, op-ed editor of The News, said of the U.S. officials in an interview. "I think they are here to ensure that Pakistan's support in the war against terrorism is not jeopardized in any way," Quraishi said, but he added that the timing of the visit, just as the new prime minister was being sworn in, "will reflect badly on the American officials."
Zardari was also expected to meet with Negroponte on Tuesday.
While popular opinion has been critical of perceived U.S. influence on Pakistani governments in the past, some portrayed the meetings with the U.S. diplomats as merely a process of getting to know one another.
"It is clear that the United States recognizes that there is a substantive change of political actors on the Pakistani stage," said Husain Haqqani, a professor of international relations at Boston University and an adviser to the Pakistan People's Party.
"If I can use an American expression, there is a new sheriff in town," Haqqani said. "There is a new political order in Pakistan, and Americans have realized that they have perhaps talked with one man for too long and now there is a new political team."