Richard Holbrooke (NATO Photo)

In his first appearance before Congress as the Obama administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke made a forceful, unequivocal and wide-ranging endorsement of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on Tuesday afternoon, intended to dispel rumors that the administration was backing away from the current elected government of Pakistan.

“Our goal must be unambiguously to support and stabilize a democratic Pakistan headed by its elected president, Asif Ali Zardari,” Holbrooke said, opting to dodge several questions relevant to concerns over the viability of Zardari’s ability to govern.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Over the past several weeks, the administration has established ties to Zardari’s chief political rival, Nawaz Sharif, and it has been reported that the chief of U.S. Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus, has told legislators in private that the recent Taliban advances from the Swat Valley into the Buner district near Islamabad challenge the viability of the government.

Holbrooke confirmed U.S. outreach to Sharif but compared it to the ties the U.S. maintains with David Cameron, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, and said that President Barack Obama’s personal invitation to Zardari to attend trilateral talks in Washington with Afghan President Hamid Karzai that formally begin tomorrow proves the administration’s commitment to his government.

“We should not allow comments about how serious the issue is to be confused with predictions of collapse,” Holbrooke said. “Pakistan is not a failed state. It is a state under extreme test.” He averred that the United States is “strongly opposed” to a military coup and “have made that clear to all parties, in public and privately.”

Tomorrow, both Zardari and Karzai will travel to the State Department and then the White House for both individual talks with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama and joint trilateral sessions, which Holbrooke called “historic.” He said that the interior ministers of Afghanistan and Pakistan have never before met, despite U.S. insistence that Pakistan and Afghanistan have a joint security threat from al-Qaeda and the Taliban that has implications for U.S. national security.

Holbrooke, who occasionally appeared impatient with the legislators, made a forceful case that the United States had “vital” national interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan that justified a broad long-term commitment to both countries. “The goal has to be to defeat al-Qaeda,” he said in response to Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.). “We can’t let them take over an even larger [amount of] terrain.” Asked for an exit strategy by Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.), who warned that Congress may only give the administration a grace period of a year to demonstrate progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan before growing weary of the war effort, Holbrooke replied, “There is a difference between an exit strategy and an exit timetable.”

Several members of Congress pressed for linking aid to Pakistan, which is the subject of a recently introduced funding bill written by the committee’s chair, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), to U.S. access to the Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan, who ran a nuclear proliferation ring before the Pakistanis placed him under house arrest in 2004. Holbrooke rejected the linkage as unproductive but said he “found it inexplicable that A.Q. Khan was not immediately made available to the U.S.” The Pakistanis have forbidden U.S. officials from interviewing Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program and a national hero, despite frequent U.S. protests.

Holbrooke refused to speak in open session about several issues that have caused concern in the United States during the Taliban’s march this year from the Pakistani tribal areas to nearly 60 miles northwest of the capital, Islamabad. He said it would be inappropriate to discuss the Pakistani military’s control over its nuclear-weapons arsenal; the Pakistani intelligence service’s ties to elements of the Taliban; and efforts to stop money flowing from Saudi Arabia into radical madrassas. He disclosed that the Obama administration does not currently have a strategy for curbing foreign money from reaching the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan but said the development of one was a “top priority” for the administration. (Defense Secretary Bob Gates is currently in Saudi Arabia seeking to solicit Saudi influence against the Taliban in Pakistan.)

Holbrooke also appeared to soften the administration’s opposition to Berman’s Pakistan bill — its Senate counterpart, introduced yesterday by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), authorizes $7.5 billion in aid to the Pakistani government and civil society over five years — expressed last week by Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, who told the House Armed Services Committee that the bill was “too inflexible.” Holbrooke said that while the administration still had concerns over “some privisos” in the bill that conditioned funding upon a certification from the administration that Pakistan was unambiguously combatting al-Qaeda and Taliban efforts in Pakistan, it represented a “big improvement” over previous efforts that only gave aid to the Pakistani military. “We hope that it will be passed,” he said, offering to meet with lawmakers to resolve administration concerns about the bill’s conditions.

And while Holbrooke said that “we have long felt that our friends in Pakistan could put more resources into the struggle in the west” against the insurgency instead of remaining focused on Pakistan’s traditional threat from India on its eastern border, he suggested that the “momentum” may be shifting away from the Taliban beginning with Monday’s military push to drive the Taliban out of the Swat valley. “Until yesterday, the momentum did not appear be to be in the right hands,” Holbrooke said. “The army has now begun a major offensive… we will have to wait and see how this goes.”

President -elect Barack Obama is seriously considering giving former ambassador Richard Holbrooke a key role in handling diplomacy in south Asia, a move that would put one of America’s most prominent international troubleshooters in the middle of trying to resolve the thorny and interrelated problems surrounding India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to several sources familiar with the transition.

Good for the country, good for the region, good for Holbrooke, good for progressives. One might say it’s all good!

While being mindful of President-elect Obama’s admonition yesterday against the Obama-versus-Clinton meme, Steinberg almost assuredly isn’t whom Clinton would have picked on her own. Like Greg Craig, Steinberg has roots in the Clinton administration but gravitated toward Obama during the primaries. Steinberg, who was on the progressive side of the Clinton administration, can hardly be considered a loyalist. If anything, he’d be a good bridge-builder between the two of them, and a likely candidate to smooth over any feathers that get ruffled. The pick probably portends a healthy working relationship, as the Washington Post indicated today.

But perhaps the more interesting aspect of Greg’s reporting is that the Obama people don’t want to see progressive bete noire Richard Holbrooke in the deputy job:

“They don’t want him,” the source said of the Obama team. “The collateral damage that he brings is too great for them to want to deal with. There will be a role for Holbrooke, but not as deputy.”

May I suggest a role for Holbrooke? This speaks very, very well of Obama. Holbrooke is an extremely talented diplomat — possibly the best of his generation when it comes to crisis management — who is better suited to forcing implementation of Obama’s policies than helping shape it. (How’s that for diplomatic?)

Take a look at what’s on that ambassador’s plate. From my piece:

Most important, there isn’t a stable national or sectarian consensus about the composition of the Iraqi government. Crucial — even existential — questions remain about how much power should be concentrated in Baghdad; whether and how the Shiite-led government could absorb tens of thousands of the mostly-Sunni militiamen known as the Sons of Iraq, and who will govern large areas in northern Iraq claimed by both Arabs and Kurds. If that isn’t enough, the so-called Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the U.S. and Iraqi governments demands that the U.S. military withdraw from cities and large towns by mid-2009 and gives the Iraqi government wide latitude over U.S. military operations.

Is there any U.S. diplomat more qualified than Holbrooke — a former U.N. ambassador, among other things — to preside over and cajole the creation of a national sectarian political compact in Iraq? Unlike anyone else in the U.S. foreign policy community, Holbrooke actually did this before, in the middle of a Balkan shooting war, and he’s given a lot of thought to the ways in which his Balkan experience is relevant to Iraq. If we’re to take seriously the idea that the U.S. needs energetic diplomatic action to broker a political settlement in Iraq to accompany withdrawal, there isn’t really anyone else for the job.

It should be said that lots of presidents appoint their deputy secretaries as well as cabinet secretaries. If President-elect Barack Obama is doing so here, he’s not venturing outside the norm. And it’s also true that Steinberg became the foreign policy equivalent of a made man under Bill Clinton, where he served as deputy to national security adviser Sandy Berger. But it’s interesting to wonder whether Clinton would rather have put, say, a true loyalist like Richard Holbrooke as her second-in-command. And whether she thinks Obama is planting one of his people at Foggy Bottom to keep tabs on her — much as Dick Cheney did when he made John Bolton undersecretary of state to watch over the wily Colin Powell.

For that matter, where does Holbrooke in particular land? As perhaps the noir-est of progressive foreign-policy betes noire, a man of Holbrooke’s stature can’t easily take a position lower than deputy secretary. As U.N. ambassador in the Clinton administration, he was practically a cabinet secretary; and before that he was an assistant secretary of state, so he can’t go back to that. (Or, at least, “can’t” according to the odd social rules of the Washington foreign-policy establishment. Logically there’s no reason why he can’t.) Holbrooke is distrusted by the left for a variety of reasons — he’s pretty much the definition of an establishment Democrat, although he has a record of accomplishment few can match — but he’s a first-class troubleshooter. If you wanted to, say, negotiate a broad accord with Iran or broker a cross-sectarian political settlement in Iraq, he’s top of the list of the guys you send.

And for similar reason, he’s also the guy you want watching your back in a cabinet post. The man’s nickname is The Bulldozer. You want a guy like that chewing up your rivals in deputies’ meetings — er, I mean, forcefully asserting the interests of your department as you productively debate with your counterparts across the government. Wendy Sherman and Jamie Rubin and Lee Feinstein are all talented people and loyal Clintonites, but none of them ever got dictators to lift sieges on cities.