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: