It was a startling performance that was alternately hailed as game-changing diplomacy or dismissed as naive blather. But whether Obama’s outstretched hand and other elements of Clinton’s “smart power” mantra will add up to more than rhetoric or a bumper sticker slogan remains to be seen. Smart power adherents in the Washington foreign policy establishment say it signals a major shift in U.S. foreign policy. The concept dates back to a 2004 article in Foreign Policy by Suzanne Nossel, now the chief operating officer of Human Rights Watch. It was picked up in 2006, when the Center for Strategic & International Studies convened a commission of prominent figures to rethink American’s approach to the world. That was chaired by Harvard professor Joseph Nye, the champion of “soft power,” and Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state under George W. Bush. They looked at how the U.S. could reverse the negative trend of its declining image and influence around the world, and “smart power” was their solution that they then tried to sell to all the leading presidential candidates. “It’s meant to suggest that the U.S. needs to be more thoughtful in a strategic way and not always rely on hard power first but look at other tools—diplomacy, aid, economics,” says Carola McGiffert, director of the commission. “Protecting U.S. interests will always be our first priority—but also promoting the global public good.”
What smart power seems to amount to in Clinton’s conception is a new emphasis on diplomacy and spending on foreign aid, more engagement coupled with carrots to match the sticks so familiar from the Bush years. And the first test of the new approach will be with the country that is emerging as a top agenda item for Clinton: Pakistan.
It is arguably the most dangerous country in the world today—on numerous fronts, from international terrorism to nuclear proliferation and the future of democracy in the Islamic world. As long as Pakistan persists as a sanctuary for groups like al-Qaeda and the Taliban, it will be difficult if not impossible for NATO to stabilize Afghanistan. Pakistan has one of the fastest-growing nuclear programs in the world. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to launch predator drone attacks aimed at killing top terrorist leaders, but which have also killed innocent civilians, upsetting the Pakistani population and helping fuel a drift toward Islamic militancy.
“I would put Pakistan at the top of the list,” says Bruce Riedel, a 30-year veteran of the CIA and senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, a think tank in Washington. “The trick in all this is that there is no unilateral or military solution to the problem. We can’t invade and occupy Pakistan if we wanted to.” So Clinton’s job will be to get more co-operation from the Pakistani government. “The challenge for Secretary Clinton is to find incentives and leverage that encourage Pakistan to become a full partner in fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda instead of the half-hearted partner they have been in the last couple of decades,” Riedel says. But another huge problem is the fact that the new civilian government headed by Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in December 2007, is very weak and has only nominal control over the Pakistani army and intelligence system. “So in addition to looking for ways to get them to work with us, she has to find a way to empower them in their own country,” Riedel adds.
This is where smart power could potentially come in. Clinton’s leverage can include increasing economic and military assistance to the civilian government. Clinton and her husband are both popular in India and can also try to address some of the problems between that country and Pakistan—heightened in the wake of the Mumbai massacre in November that killed at least 173 people. And as a sign of the top priority the administration is assigning to Pakistan, it has brought in Richard Holbrooke, one of Clinton’s most trusted foreign policy advisers, as a special envoy for both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Holbrooke is a seasoned diplomat who orchestrated the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended three years of war in Bosnia. His hard-charging manner has drawn comparisons to bulldozers and bulldogs. “The appointment of Richard Holbrooke is a very powerful suggestion that this is a big complicated matter that won’t be dealt with in a business-as-usual manner,” says Frederick Barton, a former foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign and transition team who also served on the smart power commission. “He’s a diplomat with a large appetite for complex problems and is at his best when he is in the middle of one. It was done at the front end of the administration, which says this is a big one and we have to give it extra-special attention.” Barton says Clinton’s smart power approach will be to look at Pakistan as part of a regional diplomatic effort. It will mean helping provide economic opportunities for young people, encouraging the construction of cross-border energy pipelines to deal with energy challenges, and other “positive co-dependencies” in a region where people aren’t inclined to trust each other.
The emphasis on diplomacy and development will also be quickly tested in Afghanistan, where the new administration plans to almost double the U.S. troop presence to 60,000 but also ramp up spending on rebuilding the country. “The Bush administration always treated Afghanistan as second place,” says Riedel. “Iraq got all the best and brightest, more money, more troops, and more intelligence. Barack Obama has pledged since he started running for president that he would reverse the priority. The good news for him is that Iraq is moving in the right direction and it will be easier to redirect American priority toward Afghanistan than it might have looked a year ago.” Iraq remains fragile, though, and a lapse in conditions there could pose problems for Obama’s ability to transfer troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.
Still, the dual Pakistan-Afghanistan mandate for Holbrooke is a promising start, Riedel says. “In the 1980s, we at the CIA came up with ingenious ways to make life miserable for the Soviet army occupying Kabul,” he notes. “Now we find ourselves occupying Kabul and insurgents are making life miserable for us. We can learn from that experience that the key to victory is how you manage Pakistan. The Russians never came up with an answer.”
