Indian police officers patrol outside the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, India on Friday, Nov. 5, 2010. The 107-year-old hotel reopened for business in August, nearly two years after it was attacked by terrorists in 2008. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

(CNSNews.com) – A year after declaring himself “America’s first Pacific president,” President Obama embarks Friday on a 10-day Asia-Pacific trip with a crammed agenda that includes assuring some Asian countries that he means what he said.

Indonesia has been awaiting a visit by Obama since last November, when he attended an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in neighboring Singapore. Instead of making the 550-mile hop to Jakarta, the president traveled on to Japan, South Korea and China.

On three occasions since then, planned trips to Indonesia – Obama’s childhood home for several years – were canceled, as domestic issues took precedence.

Australia, a close U.S. ally and military partner for half a century, was similarly thwarted three times this year. It was struck from Obama’s travel itinerary, most recently in June, when the White House canceled due to the oil-spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico.

This time, Obama finally will travel to Indonesia, where his program includes a visit to the country’s largest mosque and a speech that aides say will highlight his outreach to the Muslim world and Indonesia’s success as a pluralistic democracy and emerging economy.

Australia has to settle for a visit this weekend by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ten months after she, too, canceled a scheduled visit, to respond to the Haiti earthquake.

The president’s tour kicks off in India, where he seeks to build on the progress achieved by the Bush administration in building a stronger partnership with the rising Asian giant.

President Bush was popular in India. A country that long felt its size and rapid development were unappreciated in the international community responded enthusiastically to his administration’s 2005 announcement of a policy to help India become “a major world power” in the 21st century.

A major step towards that goal came when Bush the following year negotiated a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, granting energy-hungry India access to American nuclear fuel and technology for the first time in 30 years.

A 10-year defense framework agreement was signed and joint military cooperation has since expanded dramatically.

There are also sensitivities in the relationship, however, including those arising from the close U.S. security ties with Pakistan, India’s historical foe and the principal source of anti-Indian terrorism for many years.

India was also uneasy when Obama, on the eve of the 2008 presidential election, pledged that as president he would “devote serious diplomatic resources” to getting an envoy to tackle the 60 year-old Kashmir conflict.

India has long rejected any outside intervention in its dispute with Pakistan over the Himalayan territory, which is divided between the two countries, claimed by both and has sparked three wars between them.

Pakistan, on the other hand, has been trying to draw the international community into the dispute for decades.

India is particularly touchy about the issue because Pakistan has well-documented links to jihadist groups operating against India from the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir.

The White House decision to accommodate Obama in a Mumbai hotel that was at the center of one of the worst attacks in Indian history – a 60-hour assault by Pakistan-based terrorists that left 166 people dead two years ago – is intended as a show of support for India’s struggle against terrorism.

“India has shown remarkable resilience in responding to terrorism,” deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes said last week during one of several White House briefings on the trip.

“The president wanted to take the time [at the Taj Mahal Hotel] to pay his respects to the victims who lost their lives and to sign the guest book there, but also to make some brief remarks to an assembled group of people who are connected to those attacks.”

Currency tensions loom

After his three-day visit to India, Obama will travel Tuesday from the world’s biggest democracy to the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, Indonesia.

Rhodes said Obama was “very popular” in Indonesia – “because of his biography in some respects, and because of his policies in others.”

In a Pew Global Attitudes Project poll last summer 67 percent of respondents in Indonesia agreed that Obama would “do the right thing in world affairs” – significantly higher than the proportion in five other Islamic countries surveyed. The equivalent score in Pakistan was just eight percent.

The poll’s America favorability rating also put Indonesia, at 59 percent, above the other five – Lebanon (52), Jordan (21), Egypt (17), Pakistan (17) and Turkey (17).

While in Indonesia, Obama plans to launch a “comprehensive partnership” with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and will discuss issues including climate change, counterterrorism, Iran and Burma, Jeff Bader, advisor on Asia affairs at the National Security Council, told a briefing.

Obama then travels to South Korea, where he will mark Veterans Day with U.S. troops in Seoul, meet with President Lee Myun-bak, and hold his seventh bilateral meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

He will attend the G20 summit of leading and emerging economies, with an agenda including managing the economic crisis and  laying the foundation for a post-crisis global economy.

Rhodes said Obama has shifted the focus of U.S. international economic cooperation away from the G8 – which groups the seven biggest economies and Russia – to the G20, which adds to those leading economies major emerging ones including China, Brazil, India and Indonesia.

Some of these emerging countries have criticized the U.S. Federal Reserve’s plan to pump $600 billion into the financial system in the coming months.

The policy, known as quantitative easing, aims to reduce long-term interest rates and encourage investment and spending, and it is certain to feature at the talks.

From Seoul, Obama goes to Japan for the summit of APEC, a grouping of  21 economies on both rims of the Pacific Ocean. There he plans to “discuss both the balanced growth agenda globally and our efforts to increase exports to Asia,” according to Rhodes.

After bilateral meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, the president will visit Yokohama’s Great Buddha statue before returning to Washington on Nov. 14.