Obama Administration Fills Foreign Plate With Growing Threats in Pakistan and Iran

As the Obama administration tries to end three decades of a diplomatic stalemate with Iran, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is sounding the alarm on the threat of a growing insurgency in Pakistan, a nuclear nation she says is vulnerable to a takeover by the Taliban.

The effort to deal with both countries at once evokes the image of a family trying to redecorate its home while a fire sweeps through the house next door. But foreign policy analysts say America has no choice.

"Pakistan right at this minute is a more acute problem than Iran," said David Pollock, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who served as an adviser in the Clinton and Bush State Departments.

"But Iran is also pretty serious and quite an urgent problem as well," he said. "I don't think we have the luxury of putting Iran on hold while we deal with Pakistan. ...We have to really be able to try to work on a number of different issues at the same time."

Iran has been high on the list of foreign priorities for the U.S. because of its nuclear program. Oil-rich Iran says it is building nuclear reactors to generate electricity, but Washington believes it is secretly aiming to build atomic weapons, in violation of Tehran's treaty commitments. .

Pakistan, which is supposed to be a key ally of the U.S. in the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, is already rich in nuclear weapons. And Clinton said Wednesday that the Pakistani government is "basically abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists."

The secretary of state's comments came after Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari approved Islamic Shariah law in the northwestern Swat valley, which has been overtaken by Taliban forces.

President Obama has invited Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai to the White House early next month, and Clinton made clear that Washington expects Zardari in particular to take a much harder line against extremists.

Richard Perle, former chairman of President George W. Bush's Defense Policy Board and now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said the Obama administration needs to be working around the clock on Pakistan "because that's a very serious situation."

But Perle said he doesn't believe the administration's efforts toward Iran are taking up much time.

"If Clinton and others were shuttling around the globe to put together a coalition with the Iranians, you could argue that it is a drain on resources," he said. "But I don't think there's a lot of heavy lifting."

Clinton said the administration is working to convince the Pakistani government that its traditional focus on India as a threat has to shift to the Islamic extremists.

Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, noted the Bush administration failed to get Pakistan to shift its focus away from India and said, "The Obama administration faces a similarly difficult task."

But, he said."That's not an argument for not trying."

Preble said Pakistan should be part and parcel of engagement with Iran, explaining that Iran helped the U.S. when America deposed of the Taliban in Afghanistan and it isn't enthused to see the Taliban rise in Pakistan.

"I don't think it makes sense to put Iran on a back burner," he said. But Preble added that the U.S. does not have a lot of leverage.

"We might have thought once upon a time that we have leverage," he said. "But the events of the last seven years should have showed us that we don't."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.