IntelCenter / AFP - Getty Images

This image taken from a Taliban video and provided by IntelCenter on December 7, 2010, appears to show U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl.

WASHINGTON -- The father of Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. soldier held prisoner by the Taliban since 2009, is so frustrated that more than a year of covert diplomacy has been unable to free his son that he is learning the Pashto language so he can contact militants directly.

Speaking out about his son's case after a long silence, UPS worker Bob Bergdahl urged President Barack Obama's administration to push harder for his release. 

The soldier's father added that he intends to take matters into his own hands, studying Pashto -- the language spoken in southern Afghanistan -- reaching out to regional experts and contacting the media-savvy Taliban through its website.

"I feel that I have to do my job as his father," he said. "I'm working toward a diplomatic and humanitarian solution."

Bob Berghdal said he and his wife Jani are disappointed their son, now 26, remains in danger after almost three years of captivity.

"We believe that Bowe's specific situation is not being addressed," Bergdahl told Reuters in an interview.

Peace talks suspended
The missing serviceman's fate is tied up in U.S. efforts to broker a peace deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government, a high-level, high-risk diplomatic initiative which appeared to be on the cusp of a breakthrough before the Taliban suspended preliminary talks in March.

In a separate interview with the Idaho Mountain Express, Bob Bergdahl said there was "a dynamic here that has to change."

"Everybody is frustrated with how slowly the process has evolved," he added. 

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Bob Bergdahl told the newspaper that swapping Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo for his son represents a "win-win" for the United States. He said in addition to his son's safe return, the United States could foster good will with the Afghan people.

Bergdahl, of Hailey, Idaho, was stationed in Paktika province, a hotbed of militant activity, when he disappeared in unclear circumstances on June 30, 2009. He is believed to be held by the Haqqani network, an insurgent group affiliated with the Taliban, probably somewhere in Pakistan.

The family appears even more frustrated that prospects for progress seem to have dimmed in Washington, where the idea of negotiating with the shadowy militant group has exposed the White House to political attack in the run-up to the presidential elections.

For months, U.S. negotiators were seeking to arrange the transfer of five Taliban detainees held at Guantanamo Bay military prison to the Gulf state of Qatar. The transfer was intended as one of a series of confidence-building measures designed to open the door to political talks between the Taliban and Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government.

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That move -- at the center of U.S. strategy for ending the long, costly conflict in Afghanistan -- was also supposed to lead directly to Bowe's release. The Taliban has consistently called for the United States to release those held at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for freeing Western prisoners.

The Guantanamo transfer proposal, which would have required notification to Congress, ground to a halt when the Taliban rejected U.S. conditions designed to ensure transferred Taliban would not slip away and re-emerge as military leaders.

While most American officials do not expect that proposal to be taken up again in earnest in the months leading up to the Nov. 6 presidential election, they are exploring alternative steps they hope might rekindle the process.

The prospect of a quick start to peace talks grows more unlikely just as questions mount about what the West, after over 10 years of war in Afghanistan, will be able to accomplish before NATO withdraws most of its troops at the end of 2014.

From the start, the Guantanamo transfer plan drew fire from politicians on Capitol Hill who, according to U.S. law, would have had to closely examine the proposal. The criticism came not just from leading Republicans, but also from some Democrats.

The Bergdahl family said it believes the opposition may have been too intense at a time when the administration is seeking to burnish Obama's national security credentials. "It doesn't seem like dialogue is even allowed" by Congress, Bergdahl said.

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, also has rejected the proposed transfer. "We do not negotiate with terrorists," he said in December.

'Too much risk'
The imprisonment of suspected militants at Guantanamo is an irritant in U.S. relations with Muslim nations including Afghanistan, which has long demanded the release of its citizens held since shortly after the U.S. invasion that toppled the Taliban government in Kabul in 2001.

Bob Bergdahl said he does not advocate an attempt to rescue his son by force. 

"That's too much risk, for too many people," said Bergdahl, who described Bowe as a "soft-spoken," "compassionate" young man who, as a home-schooled youth, was a skilled outdoorsman drawn to martial arts and biking.

A senior U.S. military official told The Associated Press that the Pentagon believes Bergdahl to be alive and in relatively good health. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because efforts to free Bergdahl remain sensitive.

A senior Obama administration official, also speaking on condition of anonymity because of concerns for Bergdahl's safety, told reporters that the case has been a topic at each of several direct meetings that U.S. officials have held with the Taliban. Direct contact, once taboo for the United States, began in secret last year in hopes that the channel could speed larger peace talks with the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai and ultimately end the long Taliban insurgency.

The official said the U.S. hopes to revive the Bergdahl deal with the Taliban.

Marine Col. David Lapan, spokesman for Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that the military has a "collaborative" relationship with Bergdahl's family, which is given quarterly updates from Washington. He said the family is not advised on whether to discuss the case with the news media.

"Our message to them is: We are working hard to obtain Sgt. Bergdahl's release, to bring him back into U.S. hands," Lapan said.

Asked about the family's complaint that the U.S. government has not done enough, Lapan said: "It's perfectly understandable that parents whose son has been kept in captivity for several years now are frustrated. We certainly understand that. That's why we do everything thing we can to try to keep them updated, to the extent we can."

He added: "If they are angry and/or frustrated, that is certainly understandable. I would say that our leaders are frustrated as well."

The last time the Bergdahls saw their son was the Christmas holiday of 2008, when he came home from his military service just months before shipping out to Afghanistan.

To solicit support for further action, Bob Bergdahl plans to speak at an annual demonstration to recognize prisoners of war over Memorial Day weekend in Washington. The event, organized by the nonprofit POW support group Rolling Thunder, typically attracts more than 100,000 motorcyclists to the nation's capital.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Kevin E. Schmidt / Pool via AFP - Getty Images

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping talks with local people in the home of Roger and Sarah Lande in Muscatine, Iowa.

MUSCATINE, Iowa – A young, blue-eyed Sarah Lande never thought the polite young man from China, Xi Jinping, sitting at her dining room table in 1985 would go on to become the next president of China. She simply thought of him as a gentle soul with genuine interest in her family’s Iowa roots, sharing a home-cooked meal of pork, beef and locally grown corn.

Wednesday afternoon 27 years later – he returned to the same three-story home on Muscatine’s 2nd Street and walked through the same door, but this time as China’s next president.

“Coming here is really like coming back to home,” Xi told a packed living room of familiar faces he met on his 1985 visit. “You can’t even imagine what a deep impression I had from my visit 27 years ago … because you were the first group of Americans that I came into contact with.”

“Everything was very new and fresh,” he added.

Xi’s visit is a rare glimpse at an ascending leader in China’s typically opaque and rigid Communist Party. No high-ranking official has had such direct and personal ties to the United States.

'Old friends'
Xi first visited Muscatine as a provincial official from Iowa’s sister state of Hebei almost three decades ago. Leading a delegation of four other local officials on an educational trip primarily focused on agriculture, Xi and his colleagues toured local farms and businesses as part of an exchange that began with Iowans going to Hebei in 1984. He met then- and current Iowa governor Terry Branstad and more than a dozen other Iowans in Muscatine he now calls his “old friends.”

The cover of the Muscatine Journal showing the young Xi Jinping on his visit to Iowa in 1985. The headline on the story says, "Chinese visitors receive warm welcome" and there is photo of the town mayor handing Xi the keys to the city.

Lande, who was one of the organizers of his trip, was constrained by a limited budget so she resorted to old-fashioned hospitality of home-stays and meals at home. Xi spent two nights with the Dvorchaks a few blocks away from the Landes. There, Xi slept in their son’s bedroom, decorated with Star Trek figurines and wall paper.

“I wish I had updated the room,” Eleanor Dvorchak, 72, recalled. “But he was so congenial, anything would have been fine.”

One thing was for certain, no one ever expected the quiet Xi to become China’s next leader.

“Sometimes we are just in awe, that he is going to be the next leader,” Lande told NBC News in an interview ahead of the reunion.

“Nobody knew,” Dvorchak added afterward. “At the time, I was impressed what a hard worker he was.”

Clearly, Muscatine also left an indelible impression on Xi. Upon invitation back to Iowa by Governor Branstad, he requested to reunite with each person he met in Muscatine.

Small-town charm
Muscatine is the perfect, if coincidental, background to counterbalance Xi’s highly-scripted meetings in Washington. Aesthetically frozen in the 1950s, the town oozes both old-fashioned small-town charm and the harsh reality of post-industrial American economy. Many storefronts and warehouses stand empty in a place that once called itself the "pearl button capital of the world." Meanwhile, China has opened and expanded exponentially since 1985, into a roaring economy.

Kevin E. Schmidt / The Quad City Times via AP

Six-year-old Lucy Lande waits for the arrival of Xi Jinping at the home of her grandparents, Roger and Sarah Lande.

But it was friendship, not jobs, that was the complete focus of today’s reunion. Fond memories about American movies and a tour of the Mississippi river took up most of the conversation.

When Lande recalled Xi seeing puppies play in a Muscatine backyard in 1985, Xi replied, “We love puppies. We have two puppies as pets now.”

However, Xi has not always been entirely friendly to foreigners. According to a diplomatic cable leaked by Wikileaks last year, the soon-to-be-president lashed out against countries who have criticized China's human rights and trade record.

"There are some well-fed foreigners who have nothing better to do than point fingers at our affairs," Xi said at a lunch meeting in Mexico in February of 2009.

Ultimately, Muscatine citizens and leaders alike had high hopes of leaving another positive memory with Xi that would, yet again, last far beyond his time in Iowa.

“I hope we can really express the warmth and you know we’re proud of him and we look forward to really enhanced relations between China and America,” Lande told NBC News. “Let it start in the heartland.”

“So many Iowans are pleased that a man we befriended those many years ago, has risen to such a position of prominence and respect in the great nation of China,” Gov.  Branstad said in a toast to Xi tonight at an official dinner in Des Moines.

Others hope Vice President Xi’s two visits here will help push US-China relations in a more positive direction, as diplomatic tensions have escalated over trade and currency valuation.

Hope for improved relations
During the tea at her home, Lande told Xi that she hopes the US and China will “have a surge in the amount of visas that they issue, so we can have more international exchange and more trade, as we’re having here between Iowa and China.”

Others in Muscatine are hoping to contribute to leaving a warmer legacy between the two countries.

“If you meet people and treat them the way you would want them to treat you, then good things can come from that,” said Steinbach of the Muscatine Journal.

“I hope that's the case for Muscatine and that Mr. Xi would take that back to China with him and remember that in any dealings he has in the years to come with the United States,” Steinbach added. “There are people here who are honest and hardworking that you'd I'm sure find in parts in China and anywhere else.”

Xi’s stop through the Midwest also put Muscatine on the map like never before. The anticipation of Xi’s visit took the town by storm. The local paper welcomed Xi on its front page and reproduced the articles and photos that appeared in a 1985 edition, hailing his visit as a young official.

At the local high school, a classroom of students dutifully practiced their "ni hao’s” and "xiexie's" ahead of Xi’s arrival.

Jenny Juehring has been learning Mandarin for three years and today was selected to stand on the front porch of Lande’s to greet Xi and show off her language skills.

“I think he's very cool, that'd he come back here, to a place that's so small and pretty insignificant, for such a small town,” Juehring told NBC News.

Ho Xuefeng, a waiter at a Thai restaurant downtown, took the day off of work to watch Xi’s motorcade whiz by.

“I’m originally from Shenyang,” Ho told NBC News. “To see someone like him come to this little town is rare.”

The town’s McDonald’s posted a message on their marquee for their Chinese visitor: “Welcome back, Vice President Xi Jinping,” perhaps lending a new local meaning to “billions and billions served.”

Inside, line cooks and high school-aged cashiers peered out the drive-through windows hoping to catch a glimpse of Xi’s motorcade whizzing by.

Some protests
But the trip wasn’t without minor hiccups. Free Tibet supporters lined the block leading to the home where Xi was hosted for tea and waved Tibetan flags, often chanting opposite equally animated college students from mainland China responding with “We love China!” across the street.

Just minutes before Xi’s arrival at the Lande home, security officials rerouted the vice president’s motorcade to arrive on the other side of the house, where the Tibetan flags were far from sight.

Agile protestors questioning the Chinese government’s human rights record slipped past police barricades, waving signs that read “Stop Prosecuting the Falun Gong” in English and Mandarin. They were quickly ushered away by Iowa State Troopers and a Chinese government representative.

But overall, the visit was exactly how many in Muscatine hoped it would be: friendly, smooth and memorable.

As Xi departed the Lande home in the evening rain, he peered through the window of his bullet-proof limousine, waving and waving to his “old friends” until his motorcade turned the corner.

Clad in a red silk jacket emblazoned with Chinese characters, Lande waved after the polite young man who came over for that pork and corn dinner 27 years ago.

“Wow, I just can’t believe it!” she said.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Barack Obama, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Jordan's King Abdullah II walk to East Room of the White House before making statements on the Middle East peace negotiations in Washington in September, 2010.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - About 18 months before the Egyptian uprising that would doom Hosni Mubarak, a U.S. diplomatic cable was sent from Cairo. It described Mubarak as the likely president-for-life and said his regime's ability to intimidate critics and rig elections was as solid as ever.

Around the same time, another dispatch to the State Department came from the American Embassy in Tunisia. In a precise foreshadowing of the revolts to come, it said the country's longtime leader, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, had "lost touch" and faced escalating anger from the streets, according to once-classified memos posted by Wikileaks.

So what was it? Was America blindsided or bunkered down for the Arab Spring?

The case is often made that Washington was caught flatfooted and now must adapt to diminished influence in a Middle East with new priorities. But there is an alternative narrative: that the epic events of 2011 are an opportunity to enhance Washington's role in a region hungry for democracy and innovation, and to form new strategic alliances.

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There is no doubt that Washington was jolted by the downfall of its Egyptian and Tunisian allies. The revolutions blew apart the regimes' ossified relationships with the U.S. and cleared the way for long-suppressed Islamist groups that eye the West with suspicion.

But declaring a twilight for America in the Mideast ignores a big caveat: The Persian Gulf. There are deep U.S. connections among the small but economically powerful and diplomatically adept monarchies, emirates and sheikdoms, which so far have ridden out the upheavals and are increasingly flexing their political clout around the Arab world.

The Gulf Arabs and America are, in many ways, foreign policy soul mates. Both share grave misgivings about Iran's expanding military ambitions and its nuclear program. The Gulf hosts crucial U.S. military bases — including the Navy's 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain — and is an essential part of the Pentagon's strategic blueprint for the Mideast after this year's U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

In summary: America's influence took blows from the Arab Spring, but also remains hitched to the rising stars in the Gulf.

Transformation
"America has lost the predictability of friends like Mubarak," said Sami Alfaraj, director of the Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies. "But, at the same time, its allies in the Gulf are on the rise. So I would call it a shuffle for America. Maybe a step back in some places, but not in others."

Led by hyper-wealthy Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the Gulf rulers have stepped up their games in various ways as the region's political center of gravity drifts in their direction.

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NATO's airstrikes in Libya got important Arab credibility from warplane contributions by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The Gulf's six-nation political bloc also has tried to negotiate an exit for Yemen's protest-battered president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and has taken the lead in Arab pressures on Syria's Bashar Assad, one of Iran's most critical partners.

Yet the Gulf rulers' desire for change stops at their own borders. In March, they authorized a Saudi-led military force to help their neighbor, Bahrain, defend its 200-year-old unelected Sunni dynasty against pro-reform protests by the island's Shiite majority.

And here lies one of the paradoxes for U.S. statecraft in the Middle East: to align with rulers who are firmly vested in the status quo, but not be cast as the spoilers of the Arab uprisings.

"No one is immune from the waves of change," said Nicholas Burns, a former No. 3 official at the State Department. "There's certainly an effort to advise the Gulf Arabs to continue to get on the side of reform."

Burns believes the Arab Spring has taught U.S. diplomats valuable lessons in patience and perspective.

"We are witnessing something that is transformative and whose full impact will play out over years, maybe decades, ahead," said Burns, a professor of diplomacy and international politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Here is one of those times when the U.S. has to not overact and overreact."

But when events move fast, that may not be the easiest advice to follow. Mubarak was a loyal guardian of Egypt's groundbreaking 1979 peace treaty with Israel, and there is no certainty that whoever succeeds him will do likewise. Meanwhile, the Palestinians have overridden U.S. objections and asked the U.N. for statehood.

"Our ability to influence is limited today more than at any time in the last 35 years," said Graeme Bannerman, a former State Department analyst on Mideast affairs, at a conference in November co-sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace.

That assessment may have some traction in places such as in Tunisia or Egypt, where the U.S. is widely viewed as tainted by its long alliance with Mubarak. A burning U.S. flag is still a common sight in Cairo's Tahrir Square, epicenter of the Egyptian uprising.

'No longer Big Brother'
But ask about America's pull in other Mideast points — the free-spending Gulf, the new proto-state in Libya, even slow-healing Iraq and its Iran-friendly government — and the conversation is different. It is more measured about how the U.S. fits into the new Mideast. There is more talk about the arc of history rather than the latest sound bite.

"It's too early to tell whether U.S. influence has diminished or indeed any change will happen because the Arab Spring is still in process," said Nawaf Tell, former director of the University of Jordan Strategic Studies Center.

Tell sees the Arab Spring as the death rattle of the Arab revolutions and coups defined by the all-powerful state and embodied by winner-take-all leaders: Egypt's Gamal Abdel-Nasser (1954), Libya's Moammar Gadhafi (1969), the 1970 putsch in Syria that brought Hafez Assad to power in Syria and now a dynasty-in-peril under his son, Bashar, and so on.

"These regimes have exhausted their revolutionary credibility and have seen their legitimacy go bankrupt," Tell said. And as with any big unraveling, there are new rules in the aftermath.

This may mean a less privileged position for U.S. interests and more legwork for Washington's envoys, said Morris Reid, managing director of the Washington-based BGR Group, which works often in liaison roles between Mideast officials and U.S. companies.

The U.S. approach to the region "will be better," he said. "Not necessarily stronger."

"The U.S. will have to work harder for intelligence, diplomatic relations, commercial deals," said Reid after meetings in mid-November at the Dubai Airshow, where Boeing Co. made a slew of deals including a record $18 billion order from the fast-growing air carrier Emirates. "The U.S. will now have to prove their value as allies."

A showcase for that in the coming year is likely to be Iraq, and the contest for influence between neighboring Iran and the U.S. after U.S. military forces are gone. That rivalry in turn is influenced by events in Syria, Iran's main Arab ally, and the concerns of emirates and sheikdoms that lie just across the Persian Gulf from Iran.

"Look at it this way: If you accept that the Arab Spring is a once in a four- or five-generations moment, then, of course, it will reorder the entire game of influence and politics by the big powers," said Salman Shaikh, director of The Brookings Doha Center in Qatar.

"U.S. leadership does matter," he continued. "It's naive to say it will become irrelevant. But it's also wrong not to notice that America's era as the region's diplomatic superpower is coming to an end. The Arab Spring has brought much more independent-minded diplomacy by nations and a new empowerment among Arab people. America is a big player, but no longer Big Brother."

Associated Press writer Dale Gavlak in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.

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