As a postscript to my Richard Holbrooke piece, a weird exchange came last night at Amb. Holbrooke’s appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations when a reporter for Voice of America asked if Holbrooke’s portfolio included helping Afghanistan and Pakistan resolve some lingering border disputes. “Are you talking about More…
Maybe this post requires an addendum. The Pakistani Supreme Court just took a major step toward ousting beleaguered President Asif Ali Zardari:
Pakistan’s top court has declared an amnesty that had protected the president from corruption charges was illegal, state and private TV outlets reported. The ruling Wednesday
As I report in my piece on Pakistan this morning, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke is taking pains to avoid “demand[ing] a sovereign country,” say, go after the Afghan Taliban in Baluchistan or al-Qaeda and the Haqqani network in North Waziristan. The Obama administration believes that would be counterproductive. Instead, the More…
Congress may have appropriated the first installment of a $7.5 billion aid package for Pakistan, but Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, urged an even greater increase in assistance to “broaden out” the U.S. relationship with a nation he called crucial to the U.S.’s More…
State Department officials have been assuring reporters for the last week that by January, more than 1,000 diplomats, development workers and other U.S. government civilians will be positioned in Afghanistan to help their soon-to-be-100,000 uniformed counterparts in an effort dubbed the “civilian surge.” Indeed, just this morning, Paul Jones, the More…
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy wasn’t the only Obama administration official who addressed the American Enterprise Institute this morning. She was joined by Paul Jones, Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke’s deputy at the State Department, and Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, the head of the More…
Chances are President Obama will announce a readjusted Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy shortly after the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s very likely that strategy announcement will come paired with an announcement of a troop escalation. Before that happens, however, Obama will host one last all-hands-on-deck meeting with his national security team. Just added to More…
Because The New York Times is reporting that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is now the Obama administration’s indispensable interlocutor with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Lots of gauzy quotes:
“It is critical Obama develops a channel to Karzai where hard messages can go both ways,” said Bruce O.
Lots of blind quotes are coming out from the Obama administration expressing strong support for Amb. Karl Eikenberry. I reported earlier today that there was anger with him at the White House after the press leak of his cabled recommendations to hold off troop escalation until Hamid Karzai’s government More…
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 More…
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