Where will Richard Holbrooke take us in Afghanistan?

[Aloha Spirit]

He will be working with Petraeus on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Personally, I was relieved when he wasn't appointed Secretary of State. I somewhat agree with the argument that he is too hawkish.
Perhaps he is a strategist who does better with specific tasks rather than shaping grand policies.
This is what I took away from his book, To End a War.
He has a strong desire to prove that he is THE most capable diplomat. In a kind of arrogant, "See? You should have made me SOS" way.

Now, what has he said publicly on the crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan?
January 2008:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/22/AR2008012202617_pf.html

Everyone talks about "alternative livelihoods" and alternative crops as the solution to the drug problem. This is true in theory -- but this theory has been tried elsewhere with almost no success. Poppies are an easy crop to grow and are far more valuable than any other product that can be grown in the rocky, remote soil of most of Afghanistan. Without roads, it is hard to get heavier (and less valuable) crops to market -- and what market is there, anyway? It will take years to create the networks of roads, markets and lucrative crops that would induce farmers to switch, especially when government officials, including some with close ties to the presidency, are protecting the drug trade and profiting from it. (Any Kabul resident can point out where drug lords live -- they have the largest and fanciest houses in town.)

Barnett Rubin, a leading expert on Afghanistan and a fellow at the Asia Society in New York and New York University's Center on International Cooperation, writes in a forthcoming study that "the location of narcotics cultivation is the result -- not the cause -- of insecurity." He adds, "Escalating forced eradication" -- as the U.S. Embassy wants to do -- "will only make the effort fail more quickly because it actually builds the insurgency it is trying to eliminate."

To be sure, breaking the narco-state in Afghanistan is essential, or all else will fail. But it will take years, and American policies today are working against their own objective. Couple that with the other most critical fact about the war in Afghanistan -- it cannot be won as long as the border areas in Pakistan are havens for the Taliban and al-Qaeda -- and you have the ingredients for a war that will last far longer than the war in Iraq, even if NATO sends more troops and the appalling National Police training program is finally fixed. Solving this problem requires bold, creative thinking. Consideration should be given to a temporary suspension of eradication in insecure areas, accompanied by an intensified effort to improve security, build small market-access roads and offer farmers free agricultural support.

April, 2006:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/31/AR2006033101705_pf.html

The biggest program of Washington and the European Union is the drug eradication effort. Almost 90 percent of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan. Official U.S. and U.N. reports claim that last year's programs reduced poppy production by 4 percent -- at a cost of close to $1 billion. That means the United States spent more than the entire national budget of Afghanistan to accomplish essentially nothing! Yet the failed drug policy is continuing without significant change.

If the drug program is the biggest failure, American-inspired efforts to give the women of Afghanistan a chance for a better life have the greatest potential. First lady Laura Bush deserves credit for making this a signature issue. Insisting that more than 25 percent of the seats in the National Assembly be reserved for women was risky but inspired. I met with 10 female legislators; they were more animated and more excited about their country than any of the men. If they form a women's caucus, a process that has started with encouragement from the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, they will become a powerful force for progress.

But let no one confuse progress for women at the higher levels (there is even one female provincial governor) with a significant change for the average girl or woman. Each time Afghanistan tried to advance the status of women, the men reacted with a strong backlash. They will do so again. Progress is distant and virtually meaningless to rural women. That striking symbol of Afghanistan, the head-to-toe covering of women that is known as the burqa, remains widely used everywhere. One vivacious legislator on the provincial council in Herat told me that while she did not like the burqa, she dared not let her "beautiful" 15-year-old daughter out without it. "The burqa," she said, "is my weapon." And self-immolation, forced on women by their families if they violate strict codes of conduct, is actually on the rise.

So, what creative solutions do you think they'll come up with?

[Muttocracy]

1. he spoke to SFRC on 1/31/08 (along w/James L. Jones)

link to his testimony isn't working but there's video archive

http://foreign.senate.gov/hearings/2008/hrg080131a.html

fast forward to 2:07 in to see the 2nd panel

[Aloha Spirit]

3. I found the transcript at gpoaccess.gov. says we cannot leave/ can only hope for limited success...

Thanks for your link!
As I said in an earlier thread, I myself have been uncritical of Obama's position on this issue, mostly because I still am in shock that Obama actually is President.
Call it Post Traumatic President Disorder, if you will.
My old crutch of "he's better than the other guy" is useless now.

http://frwebgate4.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/TEXTgate.cgi?WAISdocID=909979514830+0+1+0&WAISaction=retrieve
...
after the Soviets left Afghanistan,
the United States turned its back on it, in the spring of 1989,
leading to the Taliban.
We can't walk out. We are going to be in Afghanistan as
long as those people in this room in front of us, and we, are
involved in public service. And the American public should
recognize that. This is not a partisan issue. It is not part of
the Presidential campaign, as Iran and Iraq are....

... Now, I want to stress that we can succeed in Afghanistan,
we must succeed in Afghanistan, but success will not be defined
by getting out and leaving it a viable country in the
foreseeable future. That's just not an--that's not a likely
outcome. And the American public must be ready to recognize
that, as I know all of you before us today have.
We can succeed. The vast majority of Afghans that I have
talked to do not wish to see a return to what they call ``The
Black Years,'' and that's especially true of the women of
Afghanistan, who live in mortal terror of the return of the
Taliban, for reasons that we all understand.
I first visited the country in 1971, and drove throughout
the country when it was a different place; and to see what
it's--what it looks like today on my recent trip is
heartbreaking.
Now, there are three key problems, to me. I would identify
the top three problems, out of dozens, Mr. Chairman.
No. 1, the border. I would submit to you that it is not
possible for us to achieve success while Waziristan and the
northwest frontier tribal areas are safe rest/recuperation/
training areas for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And we need to
address that problem. It--you all know this, but the
administration has never put enough attention to this problem.
President Bush did have one well-publicized dinner between
Presidents Karzai and Musharraf, but there was no followup.
The second problem is drugs, and the third is police. With
your permission, I would like to focus on the drug problem
briefly...."

[Aloha Spirit]

7. Eh, you have to go to gpoaccess.gov and search for holbrooke afghanistan. first result.

these gov search engines don't seem to be able to link except for in the pdf format
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_senate_hearings&docid=f:39435.pdf

[liberalmuse]

2. I hope they lift the ban on caskets.

If we're going to have more casualties, we need to see exactly what the price of war is. I sincerely hope President Obama will lift that ban and allow photographs and reels of the war zone to be shown in the US.

[rug]

4. Only where we let him.

[Aloha Spirit]

5. It's hard to disagree with that! His phone number 212-651-6400 from whorunsgov.com...

http://whorunsgov.com/Profiles/Richard_C._Holbrooke

[Aloha Spirit]

6. I found a useful profile of him, along with links:

http://whorunsgov.com/Profiles/Richard_C._Holbrooke

[Aloha Spirit]

8. quote from Robert Gates(what a skeptic!) in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20090101faessay88103/robert-m-gates/a-balanced-strategy.html?mode=print

"I have learned many things in my 42 years of service in the national security arena. Two of the most important are an appreciation of limits and a sense of humility. The United States is the strongest and greatest nation on earth, but there are still limits on what it can do. The power and global reach of its military have been an indispensable contributor to world peace and must remain so. But not every outrage, every act of aggression, or every crisis can or should elicit a U.S. military response.

We should be modest about what military force can accomplish and what technology can accomplish. The advances in precision, sensor, information, and satellite technologies have led to extraordinary gains in what the U.S. military can do. The Taliban were dispatched within three months; Saddam's regime was toppled in three weeks. A button can be pushed in Nevada, and seconds later a pickup truck will explode in Mosul. A bomb dropped from the sky can destroy a targeted house while leaving the one next to it intact.

But no one should ever neglect the psychological, cultural, political, and human dimensions of warfare. War is inevitably tragic, inefficient, and uncertain, and it is important to be skeptical of systems analyses, computer models, game theories, or doctrines that suggest otherwise. We should look askance at idealistic, triumphalist, or ethnocentric notions of future conflict that aspire to transcend the immutable principles and ugly realities of war, that imagine it is possible to cow, shock, or awe an enemy into submission, instead of tracking enemies down hilltop by hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block. As General William Tecumseh Sherman said, "Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster."

Repeatedly over the last century, Americans averted their eyes in the belief that events in remote places around the world need not engage the United States. How could the assassination of an Austrian archduke in the unknown Bosnia and Herzegovina affect Americans, or the annexation of a little patch of ground called Sudetenland, or a French defeat in a place called Dien Bien Phu, or the return of an obscure cleric to Tehran, or the radicalization of a Saudi construction tycoon's son?

In world affairs, "what seems to work best," the historian Donald Kagan wrote in his book On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, ". . . is the possession by those states who wish to preserve the peace of the preponderant power and of the will to accept the burdens and responsibilities required to achieve that purpose."

[Aloha Spirit]

9. TIME publishes piece on Holbrooke, suggesting that my thread is more relevant than those other ones.

truly shameless kick

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1873902,00.html

To understand the scale of the challenge facing him as President Obama's envoy to promote U.S. interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke might consider the story of Amjad Islam. Islam, a school teacher in the town of Matta, refused to comply when local Taliban leaders demanded that he hike up his trousers to expose his ankles in the manner of the prophet Mohammad. The teacher knew his Muslim teachings, and had earned his jihadist stripes fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Their edict was wrong, Islam told the Pakistani Taliban enforcers, and no such thing had been demanded even by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan during the '90s. A scuffle resulted that left Islam's body hanging in the town square. To drive home their warning to the locals, the militants also shot the teacher's father.

Another Piece on what we would be leaving behind if we withdrew, June 2008:

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1819125,00.html

According to a new Pentagon report released on Friday, Taliban militants in Afghanistan have regrouped after their fall from power and "coalesced into a resilient insurgency." That resilience, according to military officials in Afghanistan, has a lot to do with their ability to find sanctuary in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas along the border. The day before the report's release, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in a press briefing that he had "real concern" that Pakistan was contributing to Afghanistan's instability by failing to prevent militants from crossing into Afghanistan to carry out attacks on coalition forces. Cross-border attacks on U.S. troops in eastern Afghanistan have gone up 40% over the past several months. Gates attributes the increase to Pakistani cease-fire accords with Islamist militants in which the country's coalition government agreed to pull the military out of the militants' areas in exchange for a promise not to attack government institutions. The deals meant that "the pressure was taken off" the militants, who are now "free to be able to cross the border and create problems for us," Gates said./div]

[ShortnFiery]

10. The Bomb Manufacturers will be kept sated. We must have our amorphous "enemy" to bomb

lest our blessed Military Industrial Complex would rust. :(

[Aloha Spirit]

12. Obama will be addressing climate change in an hour, but I swear, if he doesn't start engaging people

on our foreign policy in the next couple weeks, it's gonna get ugly.

Maybe they're working on a plan right now.

That plan better not include indefinite smart bombs and drone missiles, because unfortunately, we Americans have not much stomach left for that approach, even if it could in some case be the right tool.

[Aloha Spirit]

11. If you want to post in this thread, please avoid using the following words,

as they may be interpreted as smear words to stifle discussion and advance one's own reputation of close-mindedness:

bipartisan
nazi
appeasement
vietnam
democratization
occupier
freedom
soviet


edit: I kid. :grouphug:

[roody]

13. Decriminalize poppies.

[Aloha Spirit]

14. Buy up the opium. Bush was too brain damaged to do it.

[Aloha Spirit]

15. Must read reuters piece on Karzai's thoughts, from last week

NATO and the U.S. military which have some 70,000 troops in Afghanistan must "review the military and security strategy" by coordinating operations with the Afghan government in order to cut the number of civilian casualties, Karzai said.

The president said he had raised the issue of civilian casualties and good governance with U.S. Vice President-elect Joe Biden during his visit to Afghanistan last week. Biden proposed the formation of a bilateral commission to tackle the issues, Karzai said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/joeBiden/idUSISL387034

[Aloha Spirit]

16. Here's a The Nation article from January 14th that has lots of links, for anyone who wants to learn

about what the congress critters are thinking.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/396968/escalation_without_a_plan

[Aloha Spirit]

17. Petraeus says we have struck deals with several states surrounding Afghanistan last week.

General David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, said Tuesday that Washington had struck deals with Russia and several Central Asian states close to or bordering Afghanistan during a tour of the region in the past week.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/23/asia/23afghan-414761.php