Thedeath of Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy, comes just days before a crucial review of America’s strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan that had immersed the diplomat in often heated debates with other administration officials during the last days of his life. Holbrooke, 69, didn’t hide the fact that he disagreed with some key elements of the U.S. Afghan war policy. Still, while his voice will be missed in the upcoming strategy debate, his death will have minimal effect on the war effort in Afghanistan, South Asia experts said. “I do not think it will have much of an effect on the momentum of events in Afghanistan,” said Arturo Munoz, a senior political scientist at RAND, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington. “Although he tried to fulfill his mission with his usual vigor and decisiveness, by the time of his death, the situation had changed fundamentally and I do not think he was a key player anymore.”
His death came at a time when Afghanistan is beginning to reap the progress of his early diplomatic efforts, but with a whole new set of problems looming, said Lisa Curtis, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and South Asia specialist.
“The administration’s Afghanistan review is likely to highlight some of these battlefield gains, such as Special Forces operations that have dealt a substantial blow to the midlevel Taliban command in Afghanistan,” said Curtis, who previously worked with the CIA and State Department.
Holbrooke also played a critical role in navigating the treacherous currents between different factions of the Pakistani government that often held conflicting agendas. But there, too, some say his influence was waning.
“I think [Holbrooke] was an odd man out,” Gen. Hamid Gul, a former director of Pakistan’s spy agency who was noted in WikiLeaks documents as being directly linked to Taliban insurgents and plots against U.S. troops, told the Christian Science Monitor.
While not agreeing with that assessment, Munoz agreed that U.S. diplomacy had evolved too many channels, often with disparate goals.
“We have too many cooks in the kitchen in Afghanistan to implement our policy,” he said. “We have a U.S. ambassador, a military commander [Gen. Petraeus] and a special envoy. What does the special envoy do that the ambassador cannot do?”
On Tuesday, Taliban leadership released a statement saying “this giant of the American politics and diplomacy became ill with heart disease when his previous fame and credibility came under question after the unremitting failures of the mission of Afghanistan.”
That ungenerous assessment hinted at the key impediment to Afghan peace, still unresolved at the time of Holbrooke’s death: the efforts of the government of President Hamid Karzai to reconcile with the Taliban.
“The Afghan review will likely be cautious on the issue of political reconciliation, given that one of the recent Taliban negotiators talking with the Karzai government turned out to be an impostor,” Curtis said. “This debacle demonstrates that the strategy for political reconciliation is still undeveloped and unfocused.”
Munoz said that, in the end, Holbrooke could not overcome the problems between the United States and its chosen leader in Afghanistan.
“Unless there was behind-the-scenes diplomacy I am not aware of, I don’t get the impression that Holbrooke was able to counteract this deterioration of the relationship between the U.S. and the Karzai regime,” Munoz said. “So the bottom line is Holbrooke’s death is sad but I don’t think it makes much difference.”
