December 15, 2010
ON THE OTHER HAND...:
Holbrooke's Hole (Investors' Business Daily, 12/14/10)
Recorded as Holbrooke's crowning achievement are the Dayton Accords of 15 years ago, ending the Bosnian war. In fact, what this supposed peacemaking magician did then was identify the weakest link — the Muslim Bosniaks — and bully them into submission. And it didn't hurt that Holbrooke's talk was accompanied by U.S. action — in the form of airstrikes.Funny how President Obama never sent the self-satisfied, condescending Holbrooke to try working his magic on convincing Tehran to abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions. Bullying achieves nothing when there's no muscle behind it. It's telling that Holbrooke's brief, unplanned encounter at The Hague with Iran's deputy foreign minister in March 2009 came to nothing.
In Afghanistan, Holbrooke's curious job has been to annoy the government of President Hamid Karzai. In the spring, this diplomat's diplomat quite undiplomatically quipped that "almost every Pashtun family has someone involved with" the Taliban.
Karzai is a Pashtun himself, and as the American Enterprise Institute's Ahmad Majidyar pointed out, Afghan lawmakers accused Holbrooke of "inflaming ethnic and language conflict among Afghan people," and of making a statement "detrimental to the unity and solidarity between ethnic groups living in Afghanistan."
With some 40 million Pashtuns on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, Holbrooke soon had to issue a "clarification" on the Web site of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, assuring Afghans that "I was not suggesting that all Pashtuns are part of the Taliban or all Taliban are Pashtuns."
As Majidyar noted, "The frequency of Holbrooke's meetings with Karzai's opponents led the Afghan president to believe President Obama wanted to oust him."
...at least he didn't actually help overthrow our ally, the way JFK and Henry Cabot Lodge did in Vietnam.
