It’s not his fault, but Richard Holbrooke died at an inopportune time.
On Tuesday, Obama is scheduled to meet with his top national security advisers to finalize an assessment of his Afghanistan strategy in the year since he announced the deployment of 30,000 additional troops and an expanded counterinsurgency effort last December.
The president, along with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, has already made his views clear.
“We are in a better place now than we were a year ago,” Obama said late last month at a NATO summit. Progress, Clinton said, has been confirmed “by all accounts.”
He was one of our most accomplished diplomats. A look at his full career could serve as the starting point for a debate over the merits of American foreign policy from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. He was one of the authors of the Pentagon Papers. He served in Vietnam and he was part of the 1968 Paris Peace Talks delegation. He helped on the normalization of relations with China. During Clinton’s first term, he helped promote the eastward expansion of NATO. He was the leading force behind the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia. He brokered the deal with Jesse Helms to get America to pay its U.N. dues.
Here is a nice tribute to Holbrooke, written on Saturday by his good friend Steve Clemons while there was still a sliver of hope that he might survive.
