richard holbrooke

A powerful story from The Washington Post: a leading State Department foreign-service officer official in Afghanistan’s Zabul province has resigned in protest of the war, writing that he has “lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan.” Matthew Hoh’s departure was considered so damaging — probably more [...]

Politico’s Laura Rozen obtained a formal dissent filed by a senior USAID development economist, C. Stuart Callison, against the development approach for Afghanistan and (mostly) Pakistan imposed by the Obama administration’s special representative, Richard Holbrooke. Holbrooke pledged in August that he would be phasing out costly U.S. contractors in favor of working through both local [...]

Here’s the guest list for today’s White House meeting to discuss Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy. New additions to the discussion: Amb. Susan Rice, a close Obama adviser turned ambassador to the U.N.; and Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, the “war czar” who will oversee interagency policy coordination. Wait, isn’t that Richard Holbrooke’s job…?

Throughout the February and March debates about Afghanistan, I wrote what I understood the emerging Obama administration approach to be: a counterinsurgency approach in Afghanistan to achieve a counterterrorism goal in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That view was informed by a variety of talks with administration officials. And when Obama unveiled his strategy, in a speech [...]

If it’s true, as reported, that the question of the CIA’s drone strikes against al-Qaeda in Pakistan is bolstering support for the so-called counterterrorism option in the Obama administration’s Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy, then tomorrow’s meeting at the White House looks, from the attendance sheet, like it’ll debate precisely that issue. Here’s the just-released list of scheduled [...]

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, yesterday clarified that he accepts the call from Defense Secretary Robert Gates and national security adviser Jim Jones to keep his advice to the president on Afghanistan strategy private. And his aides further specified to me that he doesn’t have any additional public speaking [...]

Speaking at a celebration of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s new Pashto service — to be broadcast into the Afghan-Pakistani border region — Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, returned to one of his oft-expressed themes. “Why,” Holbrooke asked, “by and large, [is] the world’s greatest communication’s nation being out-communicated by [...]

Big scoop from Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy: right in time for that closed door briefing to the Senate on the metrics for judging progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan, here the metrics are. I can’t help but notice in light of this post that it begins with a restatement of the anti-al-Qaeda goal that the [...]

I don’t know how much credit to give this Times of London story, but it reports in detail that there was a fight between Kai Eide, the head of the United Nations’ mission to Afghanistan, and the seniormost American in the mission, former Ambassador Peter Galbraith, a lion in the human-rights community. Galbraith reportedly left [...]

Sure, the interview was Friday, but the Defense Department just released the transcript of Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ interview with Al Jazeera, and it’s hard not to notice Gates’ “correction” of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who said a few weeks ago that “we’ll know” success in Afghanistan “when we see it.” Gates, politely, attempts here to [...]