KABUL, Afghanistan


IN THE NEARLY eight years since the 9/11 attacks, the foreign policy of the United States has often appeared to be an exclusively military affair, if not always conducted by men with guns then practiced by civilians not shy in reminding their foes that they had force at their disposal. The diplomats, for the most part, watched from afar.

But Richard Holbrooke, America’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan - relentless, experienced, charismatic - seems the embodiment of a new paradigm, one that includes military force but emphasizes a wider range of tools, like diplomacy, persuasion and money. That new paradigm was evident on April 13, when President Obama demonstrated that he was willing to open the door toward greater engagement with Cuba by abandoning longstanding restrictions on the ability of Cuban-Americans to visit and send money to family members on the island.

And at an international conference on Afghanistan on March 31, Mr. Holbrooke managed a brief exchange with an Iranian counterpart. It marked the first face-to-face encounter between the Obama administration and the government of Iran.

In a rapid-fire tour across South Asia in early April, Mr. Holbrooke and his military counterpart, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with a range of people who might, in another time, have been considered enemies, or at least deeply suspect: former Taliban fighters, a former prisoner who spent three years in Guantanamo, and leaders from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the ungoverned Pakistani area that Al Qaeda’s leaders have turned into a sanctuary.

It was not just whom Mr. Holbrooke sat down with that was remarkable, but what he talked about: In gathering after gathering with ordinary Afghans, for instance, Mr. Holbrooke apologized for the inadvertent deaths of civilians at the hands of the American military.

The reassertion by civilian leaders is being led by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has promised to restore the State Department’s centrality in the making of foreign policy. In the first six years of the Bush presidency, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dominated the administration’s interactions with the world, pushing aside Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Likewise, in places like the Balkans and Iraq, the military began undertaking activities once reserved for diplomats, like overseeing reconstruction and development projects. Mrs. Clinton says she not only wants to take back those former responsibilities, but to restore diplomacy’s primary role in resolving crises. One of the centerpieces of that effort would be Iran, which the West fears is rapidly developing the capacity to build nuclear weapons.

Indeed, Admiral Mullen has himself decried what he calls the“militarization”of American foreign policy and advocated restoring some of the State Department’s influence. In 2007, when Admiral Mullen was chief of naval operations, he offered to turn over part of his budget to the State Department - an extraordinary act for a public official.“The military should be led by diplomacy,”Admiral Mullen said during his trip. (The State Department, he said, never took him up on his offer.) It is perhaps in Afghanistan and in Pakistan that the new diplomatic approach will face its toughest and most important test.

President Obama has recently ordered the deployment of 21,000 troops to Afghanistan, over and above the 40,000 already there. These are ends and means that are military, not diplomatic. But President Obama made clear that in order to defeat Al Qaeda America will have to embark on a long and expensive campaign of diplomacy and nation building in both places. In a speech last month, President Obama said he would order a“dramatic”increase in the number of civilians working in Afghanistan. He said he would spend more on communications to counter Taliban propaganda.

Regarding Pakistan, President Obama said he would ask for huge increases in economic aid to the country, much of it directed at the tribal areas along the Afghan border where Al Qaeda has found havens. Under the plan, the United States would send Pakistan $1.5 billion each year for the next five years. That would mean that economic and humanitarian assistance to Pakistan would nearly equal the amount spent on that country’s military.

Indeed, with 175 million people, most of them impoverished and illiterate, and a large store of nuclear weapons, Pakistan is potentially a far larger problem for the United States than Afghanistan.

“Even if we get everything right in Afghanistan - if we have a corruptionfree government, if we get counterinsurgency just right - we will not succeed if we do not fix Pakistan,”Mr. Holbrooke said during a recent stop in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.“Pakistan can threaten Afghanistan anytime it wants, and at very little cost.”

As if to highlight the cooperation between the military and the civilians, Mr. Holbrooke and Admiral Mullen joked recently. Standing before the clerics in Kabul, Admiral Mullen told the group that he was so concerned about the fate of the region that he had traveled here nearly once a month since becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs in October 2007.

“I’ve come to the region nine or ten times,”Admiral Mullen told the clerics.

Mr. Holbrooke jumped in.

“And each time, things have gotten worse.”Admiral Mullen, Mr. Holbroooke, and all the clerics laughed.




Richard Holbrooke, near right, with Pakistan’s foreign minister, and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, left, hope to restore some of the State Department’s influence.

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with President Hu Jintao of China in London on April 1.