Word: showings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...news was that Clinton allowed herself to be hammered with hostile questions from students, talk-show hosts and Pashtun elders - and that, on occasion, she pushed back, raising incredibly sensitive issues, like why no one in the Pakistani government knew where Osama bin Laden was, even though he had been in the country since 2002. Press accounts either emphasized the embarrassment of a Secretary of State's getting pummeled or fixed on Clinton's undiplomatic bluntness. But they missed the point: her candor, her willingness to listen to and acknowledge criticism, had begun to undermine the prevailing Pakistani image...
...White House argues that some progress has been made: Iran is on the defensive, and North Korea has said it will return to the six-party talks. Clinton argues, correctly, about the need for "strategic patience." But the only thing Obama really has to show for his efforts so far is a Nobel Prize for Potential and - no small thing - the wisdom to have refrained from doing anything so wildly stupid as invading Iraq. The President has been willing to use military force - the Predator drones that have decimated al-Qaeda's leadership testify to his lack of squeamishness...
There is also a growing sense that the President's inexperience is beginning to show - not in his overall policy, which represents the views of a broad, moderate national-security consensus ranging from Brent Scowcroft to John Kerry, but in his execution of the details. The Afghan strategy review has been too public and taken too long; the Middle East peace hunt has become a wild goose chase. A letter to Iran's Supreme Leader is a productive gesture only if it gets a response; if it doesn't, it seems weak and supplicatory. A call for the Israelis...
...Administration was clear in Pakistan. She wowed a public so skeptical that it had been questioning the $7.5 billion in purely economic and humanitarian aid the Administration had promised. "How much damage control have you been able to do on this trip?" asked Meher Bokhari, a television-news-show host, at the end of Clinton's meeting with Pakistani women. The Secretary seemed nonplussed by the bluntness of the question. "I don't know," she said. "I hope some...
...election. And that will also provide an opportunity for the Obama Administration to use the leverage offered by Afghanistan's security and economic dependency to press Karzai to do better. "If we can start pressuring him to start cracking down on high-profile criminals and drug traffickers to show that he actually cares about rule of law, then he starts gaining legitimacy," says Dempsey. "Afghanistan is still going to be a basket case five years from now, but at least the perception that the head leadership is trying to move the country in the right direction will give people faith...