Speaker for the dead? Nasr indicts Obama's AfPak policy in Holbrooke's name

Vali Nasr, a former aide to the late Richard Holbrooke when he was Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan, has put the gist of his book-length brief against the Obama administration's conduct of foreign policy in a j'accuse published in Foreign Policy.

In Nasr's narrative, Obama's conduct of war and diplomacy in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- Holbrooke's bailiwick --  was controlled by a narrow coterie of White House staff. The policy, according to Nasr, was overmilitarized, diplomatically disengaged, driven mainly by domestic political considerations, and undermined by Obama's timeline and swift withdrawal. The wound that drives the whole is Nasr's conviction that his patron, master diplomat Richard Holbrooke, was undercut at every turn and never given a chance to operate.

The heart of the strategic indictment (motive is a separate story) is that the admnistration first slow-walked and then mis-timed and undercut its negotiation with the Taliban, which Holbrooke had urged almost from the start. Here's the gist:

Afghan Taliban: "Symbiotic" with, or sick of, al Qaeda?

Not to pretend to any great insight here, but this gives me vertigo:

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said bin Laden's killing near Pakistan's capital vindicated his government's growing opposition to U.S.-led combat operations in the Afghan countryside.

"Osama was not in Afghanistan: they found him in Pakistan," Mr. Karzai said. "The war on terror is not in Afghan villages…but in the safe havens of terrorism outside Afghanistan." 

That has been true for many years. Woodward's Obama's Wars begins with Mike McConnell briefing President-elect Obama on the 150 terrorist havens strung through Pakistan's tribal areas -- a network far outstripping that available to bin Laden before 9/11.   It's hard not to wonder: If Karzai is itching to get the troops out and strike a deal with the Taliban, by what Kafkaesque logic would we persist in working against his will to transform his government into something it will never be and clear out adversaries he regards as compatriots? And how can we drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan when they're so comfortably ensconced across the border?

What Peter Bergen got wrong about Woodward's "Obama's Wars"

The current home page of The New Republic lures the reader to Peter Bergen's rather shapeless review of Obama's Wars  with a home page teaser:  "What Bob Woodward got wrong about Afghanistan and Obama." Well, what?  I'm still not sure. Notwithstanding Bergen's omniscient narrator stance, I didn't come away from his review feeling I understood more either about Woodward's book or about U.S. AfPak policy and its prospects for success. It's not that Bergen really in any way misrepresents what Woodward is about.  But his emphases struck me as off, or beside the point, on several fronts:

1) Bergen takes a swipe at the book, in tandem with Woodward's four prior books, for not being what it's not: an in-depth look at the history and conditions on the ground in the war zone. The book is focused on what Bergen admits it does a superb job relaying: the internal deliberations of the administration and the contest between rival points of view within it, represented chiefly (according to Bergen, anyway) by Biden's minimalist "counterterrorism-plus" and McChrystal-Petraeus's fully-resourced COIN.  The beside-the-point "lack of context" slam is further marred by war zone snobbery: Bergen laughs at Woodward for professing anxiety upon finding himself on the ground in the well-fortified Camp Leatherneck.

2) Bergen dismisses Biden's approach to the AfPak conundrum, but his only real evidence that it's wanting -- or that the book's lack of external context is a serious flaw -- is in his own brief against the hypothesis that a resurgent Taliban would not welcome al Qaeda or other terrorist groups back into Afghanistan.  This  argument does have some force, based on the undeniable facts that the Taliban welcomed an array of terrorist groups when it was in power, and that various Taliban groups, particularly the Haqqani network, now share safe harbor with al Qaeda and "a menagerie of jihadist groups" in the ungoverned regions of Pakistan. But those facts cut two ways. Holbrooke and Brennan use them to argue the opposite side of the coin from Bergen:

Like Biden, Holbrooke believed that even if the Taliban retook large parts of Afghanistan, al Qaeda would not come with them. That be "the single most important intellectual insight of the year," Holbrooke remarked hours after the first meeting. Al Qaeda was much safer in Pakistan. Why go back to Afghanistan, where there were nearly 68,000 U.S. troops and 30,000 from other NATO counties? [sic]... (170).

Later, Brennan widens the sphere of rival havens for al Qaeda:

[Brennan] said...Why would al Qaeda want to go back to Afghanistan, where the U.S. and NATO already had 100,000 ground troops.
       No, Brennan said, they needed to think about places like Yemen and Somalia, which are full of al Qaeda. And al Qaeda is taking advantage of these ungoverned spaces where there is little or no U.S.troop presence..."We're developing geostrategic principles here, and we're not going to have the resources to do what we're doing in Afghanistan in Somalia and Yemen," Brennan said (227-28).

A hole in the bucket: Holbrooke's read on the AfPak strategy

We may never know the tone or real context of Richard Holbrooke's alleged final words, spoken to his Pakistani surgeon as he was beginning anesthesia: "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan."

Most likely, too, we won't know his final or dominant assessment of the strategy Obama charted in Afghanistan. Perhaps it was something of a kaleidoscope, as most people's would be, shifting with the daily flicker of events. He was by all accounts a man of extraordinarily intense will, with an optimism fed by a refusal to not succeed.

But there is a constant hue to Bob Woodward's portrayal in Obama's Wars of Holbrooke's assessment of the emerging strategy, and the possibility of the U.S. securing stability in Afghanistan: gray-to-black.  Throughout Woodward's exhaustive account of the Obama team's exhausting deliberations from September through November 2009, and once more in retrospect in May 2010, Holbrooke knocks down several core assumptions regarding the rationale, progress to date, and prospects for success of U.S. attempts to stand up the Karzai regime. Below, a sampling.

The Taliban will not harbor al Qaeda (Sept. 13, 2009)

Like Biden, Holbrooke believed that even if the Taliban retook large parts of Afghanistan, al Qaeda would not come with them. That be "the single most important intellectual insight of the year," Holbrooke remarked hours after the first meeting. Al Qaeda was much safer in Pakistan. Why go back to Afghanistan, where there were nearly 68,000 U.S. troops and 30,000 from other NATO counties? [sic]...

Astonishingly to Holbrooke, that key insight had neither been in [Bruce] Riedel's report [presented in March '09], nor had it been discussed that Sunday morning [Sept. 13]. Where was the no-holds-barred debate? The president had told them not to bite their tongues. Holbrooke had to bite his because he worked for the secretary of state, who was unsure of what course to recommend. But where were the others? (170)

Woodward's tribute to Richard Holbrooke

So sad to read of great-hearted Richard Holbrooke's untimely death.  I'm no expert on his career, but I'd just like to flag (actually repost) one rather uncanny, somewhat backhanded tribute from Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars:

In one discussion about the tensions between Pakistan and India, Holbrooke introduced a new angle. "There's a global warming dimension of this struggle, Mr. President," he said.

     His words baffled many in the room.
     There are tens of thousands of Indian and Pakistani troops encamped on the glaciers in the Himalayas that feed the rivers into Pakistan and India, he said. "Their encampments are melting the glaciers very quickly." There's a chance that river valleys in Pakistan and perhaps even India could be flooded.
     After the meeting, there were several versions of one question: Was Holbrooke kidding?
     He was not. Holbrooke subsequently detailed his concerns in a written report. The diplomat--sensing that he was on the outs with Obama--was trying as hard as he could to say something distinctive that would impress the president (210-211).

The story segues into further evidence of Holbrooke's failure to connect with Obama. Is the irony intentional? Woodward's preface to Obama's Wars is dated July 25, 2010. The catastrophic floods struck Pakistan on July 22, 2010.

Whether the account of that conversation was a late interpolation or not, I believe that in general Woodward awards an unspoken sagacity palm to those in his account whose conclusions regarding Obama's chosen strategy are best summed up by three words he attributes to Richard Holbrooke: "it can't work."

UPDATE/postscript/epitaph: incredibly enough:

Family members said his last words before he headed into surgery were: "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan," according to the Washington Post.

Update 2: seems the context of those final words is uncertain, to say the least. Here's the Washington Post's account:

He underwent a 21-hour operation that ended on Saturday to repair his aorta.

As Mr. Holbrooke was sedated for surgery, family members said, his final words were to his Pakistani surgeon: "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan."

Obama, blame not your Lute

When Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars was released, Mike Allen wrote that despite its portrayal of deep divisions within the administration's foreign policy team, the portrayal was a "net positive" for Obama. I disagree.

On one level, Obama's extended agon with the military leaders -- Petraeus, McChrystal, Mullen, and to an extent, Gates - is impressive. Relentlessly, he questioned assumptions and insisted on being presented with real alternatives to McChrystal's proposed troop surge and counterinsurgency. When the military leaders proved unwilling or unable to flesh out any real alternative, Obama built his own, changing the shape of the proposed surge in essential ways -- speeding entry and exit of the additional troops, eschewing full-blown counterinsurgency, seeking a handfhold for a "handoff" of responsibility to the Karzai regime, defining the mission down from defeating to "degrading" the Taliban and preventing their full takeover of the country. The "terms sheet" in which he laid out detailed conditions represented a concentration of presidential input that Petraeus, for one, saw as unprecedented: "There's not a president in history that's dictated five single-spaced pages in his life" (327).  And Obama insisted that the entire team sign on, as it were-- to the "hard cap" on troop totals, the withdrawal date, the limited mission, etc. -- before he went public with it.

And yet. While Woodward takes no explicit point of view in the book, I suspect it would be hard to find a reader who doesn't come away feeling that the preponderance of evidence and strong argument is with those members of the team who ring variations on Richard Holbrooke's stark verdict: "It can't work" (p. 333). (In fact, Woodward's narrative shaping is arguably concentrated in his portrayal of Holbrooke: odd man out, lacking the president's confidence, but right in almost every utterance, including an uncanny forecast of the Pakistan floods of July 2010.)

I cataloged in a prior post the strong evidence aired throughout the deliberations (in Woodward's account) that standing up a stable government in Afghanistan was mission impossible -- that the Karzai government was hopelessly corrupt, that hand-off of responsibility to Afghan forces was impossible, that the Pakistanis were supported and sheltering the Taliban, who had safe passage from their safe havens in North Waziristan. In the book's final chapters, two assessments are I think close to definitive (aside from Holbrooke's brief one).

Richard Holbrooke, prophet of doom

A remarkable (and no doubt widely remarked?) moment, in hindsight, from Woodward's Obama's Wars:

In one discussion about the tensions between Pakistan and India, Holbrooke introduced a new angle. "There's a global warming dimension of this struggle, Mr. President," he said.
     His words baffled many in the room.
     There are tens of thousands of Indian and Pakistani troops encamped on the glaciers in the Himalayas that feed the rivers into Pakistan and India, he said. "Their encampments are melting the glaciers very quickly." There's a chance that river valleys in Pakistan and perhaps even India could be flooded.
     After the meeting, there were several versions of one question: Was Holbrooke kidding?
     He was not. Holbrooke subsequently detailed his concerns in a written report. The diplomat--sensing that he was on the outs with Obama--was trying as hard as he could to say something distinctive that would impress the president (210-211).

The story segues into further evidence of Holbrooke's failure to connect with Obama. Is the irony intentional? Woodward's preface to Obama's Wars is dated July 25, 2010. The catastrophic floods struck Pakistan on July 22, 2010.

With Kafka in Obama's War Council

Once more, indulging in the vice of commenting on a book while still reading it...

Woodward's Obama's Wars is structured as a kind of coming-of-age novel:  can Obama assert his authority over the military? Can he avoid simply acquiescing to their favored course of action in Afghanistan -- a fully resourced counterinsurgency? I've just passed what seems to be the climax of this plot: when Obama protests that the four-option menu they've drawn up at his insistence is really only one option: two choices are utterly unrealistic, and one of the remaining ones is a minor variant of the military's favorite plan, differing in little semantics -- tinkering with the mix and timing of a 40,000 troop surge.  And the denouement is already clear: Obama narrows the mission, speeds up the timetable, adds the controversial draw-down date, and reduces the American troop commitment.

And yet to me, the closely narrated grueling deliberations that are the guts of this hero's journey have a Kafkaesque feel.  That's because the commitment to a counterinsurgency mission -- however stripped down -- remains intact, despite clear and often repeated articulation -- by Biden, Eikenberry, Holbrooke, Peter Lavoy of the DNI, and General James Cartwright, of the following facts and uncontradicted hypotheses:

1) The Taliban itself is not a danger to the U.S.  

Biden:..asked, "Is there any evidence the Afghan Taliban advocates attacks outside of Afghanistan and on the U.S., or if it took over more of Afghanistan it would have more of an outward focus?"
     No evidence, Lavoy said (187).

2) The Karzai government is not a viable partner.

Are we aligned with the Kabul government? [Eikenberry] asked. We assume yes. "I would challenge that assumption," he said. They were severely hindered by Karzai's weakness as president, the absence of a strong central government.
     "Right now, we're dealing with an extraordinarily corrupt government" (218).

Biden broke in for a question. "If the government's a criminal syndicate a year from now, how will troops make a difference?
     No one recorded an answer in their notes (221).

Gates...[said] that he had little confidence in a civilian surge or in serious governance reforms by Karzai (258).

3) The Taliban feeds on our presence.

The two weakest links were corruption and the Afghan police. "Our presence is the corrupting force," Holbrooke announced. All the contractors for development pay the Taliban for protection and use of the roads, so American and coalition dollars help finance the Taliban. And with more development, higher traffic on roads, and more troops, the Taliban would make more money (226).

Obama, Clinton, Woodward, Branch

Much chatter today about Bob Woodward's portrayal in his forthcoming Obama's Wars of division and debate in Obama's foreign policy team. The Times' Peter Baker emphasizes the negative:  Biden calls Holbrooke "the most egotistical bastard I've ever met." Holbrooke says the strategy in Afghanistan can't work, Gates says that Jim Jones' deputy Thomas Donilon would be "a disaster" as national security advisor. Bush apologists like Mark Thiessen are having a field day.

I recall reading The Agenda, Woodward's book on Bill Clinton's first year in office, which makes the tortuous process by which the administration shaped its first budget and squeaked it through Congress look like a chaotic, raggedy mess. That was the budget that put the U.S.on course for its greatest peacetime economic expansion in decades. Of the process and Woodward's treatment of it, Clinton had this to say to Taylor Branch, as reported in Branch's The Clinton Tapes:

What upset him was an obsessive focus on style above substance, especially in media discussion of The Agenda.  Debates within his administration were lampooned as contests of seesaw mismanagement suited to a romper room, full of temper tantrums and panicky showdowns pitting "true Democrats" against coldhearted bankers, or realists against doctrinaire liberals. The president objected first to exaggeration. He said fierce argument is healthy for free government--and infighting inherent--even on small matters. "It's the nature of the beast," he said. By fair comparison with the hacks of many administrations, or even the talented backstabbers around Lincoln and FDR, the president called his budget advisers models of decorous public service. Their victory in Congress had momentous stakes for every citizen. Could the package really tame our deficit? Might we dare to balance the national budget for the first time in two generations?  At what cost? How would it affect tomorrow's grandchildren to be spared trillions in public debt? [Ai!] Clinton lamented that the Woodward reviews ignored these core questions. They buried the central issue under a mountain of finger pointing and factional score-keeping (166).