POLITICO.COM : Richard Holbrooke against a “surge” of troops into Afghanistan in 2009 and arguing for a speedy peace deal with the Taliban. AfPak reminded him of Vietnam - Obama’s Vietnam

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The uselessness of being harsh and tough with Pakistan, the nation that has the key to end the AfPak war and produce the necessary reconciliation.

POLITICO.COM
Richard Holbrooke's last campaign
By BEN SMITH
May 19, 2011


Richard Holbrooke's last campaign


Some excerpts :

Nicholas Kristof’s Sunday column in The New York Times was a classic of a certain genre: A prominent, respected administration figure stuns the White House and rattles the apparatus by going on record to criticize U.S. policy.

That Richard Holbrooke has been dead for nearly six months hardly diminished the impact. Indeed, the public airing of Holbrooke’s posthumous concerns that Afghanistan had become a Vietnam-like quagmire put the administration in a particularly difficult position: It’s hard to spin against the saintly departed, a twist that Holbrooke, his friends say, would have positively relished.

The column, full of Holbrooke’s private remarks to his wife, Kati Marton, to Kristof, and selected tidbits from his private notes, marked a sort of milestone in what is shaping up to be Holbrooke’s last campaign, one with typically high stakes. The goal, Marton and other friends say, is twofold: to advance Holbrooke’s goal of a negotiated solution to the nearly decadelong war and to secure his legacy as a visionary who worked himself to death for a vital cause — and not as the isolated old lion some in the administration have portrayed.

“It’s so characteristic of Holbrooke that he would be no longer among us but still very much in the argument,” said Peter Osnos, his longtime editor, whose imprint, PublicAffairs, will publish a book of essays on Holbrooke later this year.

The posthumous Holbrooke is weighing in on an argument, Kristof wrote, that he’d lost while serving as the administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan: pushing back against a “surge” of troops into Afghanistan in 2009 and arguing for a speedy peace deal with the Taliban.

Holbrooke, Kristof wrote, “chafed at aspects of the White House approach [to Afghanistan]” and “winced at the over-reliance on military force, for it reminded him of Vietnam.”

Marton is quoted as saying Holbrooke saw the conflict as “Obama’s Vietnam,” a combustible phrase for a Democratic president.

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“I want to spur that and also to raise a voice of concern regarding the temptation to throw up our hands and tell the Pakistanis where to get off,” she said. “I’m very familiar with his thinking, and I’m also familiar with what he was trying to do, … and what he was trying to do was to prepare the ground for reconciliation.”

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