Insurgency

The much-touted July 2011 date for the beginning of a withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan, a center piece of the administration's "AfPak" strategy announced by President Obama in December 2009, now seems unlikely to amount to much.

According to a senior U.S. administration official, there is presently "no judgment on the scale or pace of those reductions." Translation: Don't expect a significant drawdown of American forces in the summer of 2011.

The job offer was suitably Holbrookean: I was standing in my kitchen in DuPont Circle about a year and half ago and the cell rang. On the other end an unmistakable voice boomed, "I'm calling from a plane flying from Riyadh to Washington. I want you to work for me. I land at Dulles in four hours. I need your answer by then." I mumbled something about needing to speak to my wife and my various bosses at CNN and the New America Foundation, and Ambassador Holbrooke quickly hung up. In the end the job offer never panned out, but I felt honored that Holbrooke had even considered it.

Despite tangible military progress in Afghanistan in recent months, the success of the Obama administration's strategy for Afghanistan will be determined by the measure of political and economic progress it brings.

For the last two years, American strategy in Afghanistan has followed the framework of "fight then talk." Under this thinking, the Taliban needed to be weakened before negotiations would begin.

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke valued human relationships so deeply that he believed they could change the world.

For Holbrooke, listening was an elevated art. In public, he willingly waded into the planet's thorniest standoffs. And he solved them. He is best known for his success as chief architect of the Dayton Accords, where he successfully brokered the end of the war in Bosnia in 1995.

There will probably never be another American diplomat like Richard Holbrooke. The reason is partly personal. Most diplomats are careful, reserved, discreet… diplomatic. Holbrooke was the opposite. He didn't merely court reporters; he stalked them. And when they didn't write enough about him, he wrote about himself. He did not do subtle. When he bore down on people, he had about as much respect for personal space as Lyndon Johnson in a men's room. As Democratic doyenne Pamela Harriman once put it, "he's not entirely housebroken."
 

We live in a cynical age that doesn't often allow us to call certain public servants "wise men" or among the "best and brightest," at least not without ironic edge. But that is what Richard Holbrooke was, a tribute to the proposition that the country needs some of its best talent to look out for American interests overseas, and make the world a safer place.

It was not easy to construct a quiet hour or two with Richard Holbrooke. I saw him regularly, as did other journalists and researchers who worked on Afghanistan and Pakistan, but a long sit-down took some effort. Holbrooke was an accessible, open, and attentive person, but he was also in perpetual motion. He moved from meeting to meeting, conversation to conversation, and if you managed to sequester him somewhere for fifteen minutes or more, his cell phone was sure to ring—Islamabad, Kabul, the Secretary of State, somebody.

America’s strategic interest in Afghanistan and South Asia extends beyond the immediate denial of a safe haven for al-Qaeda.  In a wider context, strategic opportunities converge in Afghanistan that could help to stabilize the region, expand a lucrative market for U.S. investors and exporters, help restore America’s credible influence in the Islamic world, reduce narcotics production, and maintain an environment nonconducive to extremism.

Is Hamid Karzai crazy? Maybe. But to several senior U.S. and NATO officials, civilian and military, the Afghan president's mental state is, at the moment, the least of their worries. Their bigger fear, triggered by an interview that Karzai gave on Nov. 13 to the Washington Post, is that his goals in the war are very different from U.S.

In late May, some 16 miles down a dirt road from the main town in the isolated tribal region of North Waziristan, a missile from an unmanned Predator drone slammed into a house owned by local tribesmen and killed Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, a founding member of al-Qaeda and its top operational leader in Afghanistan. His wife and several of their children were also killed.