February 14, 2009

PRESIDENT Obama’s trouble-shooter for Pakistan and Afghanistan, the colourful and much-hyped Richard Holbrooke, wasted no time in rushing to the area of his jurisdiction to assert his authority.

Obama had appointed him within two days of stepping into the White House, apparently to let the world know how serious he was about his agenda for Afghanistan — a resolve he had frequently articulated during his campaign.

Two days later, the first drone attack of the Obama presidency was unleashed on Pakistan’s tribal area, thus leaving no doubt that Obama intended to keep the heat on Pakistan to at least the same level of intensity, if not more, as Bush had. The Pakistanis were sent a clear message: the stick will be the same as in the Bush era; as for the carrots, watch out for what kind Holbrooke brings in his bag to you.

Holbrooke brings impressive credentials to his new assignment. A veteran diplomat, from the early ’60s vintage, he rose rapidly up the Foreign Service ladder, becoming the youngest ever Assistant Secretary of State for Asia, at 36, in 1977 under President Jimmy Carter. He’s also the only career diplomat to have headed both the Asian and European Divisions at the State Department. Mr Holbrooke later also branched out into journalism and Wall Street.

One couldn’t grudge President Obama for having picked up a man of such a versatile background to become his principal ‘mover-and-shaker’ on Pakistan and Afghanistan, an area in the cross-hairs of Washington long before Obama entered the White House. Holbrooke is also a close confidant of Hillary Clinton who has brought him and a clutch of several other foreign policy ‘wizards,’ of mostly Jewish roots, in tow behind her to the State Department. Richard Holbrooke, in fact, was Hillary’s principal foreign policy advisor during her unsuccessful bid for the White House.

But Mr Holbrooke’s real claim to fame came in 1995 when, under President Clinton, he managed to hammer out a deal at Dayton, Ohio, and rammed it down the throats of the Serbs and the Bosnians. What was so extraordinary that Holbrooke is credited to have achieved, single-handedly like a knight-in-shining-armour, at Dayton? There he was dealing with two combatants, Serbs and Bosnians, who had been at each other’s throats for four years and were thoroughly exhausted by the longevity of their bloody conflict. They were both rife with in-fighting within their ranks and anxious to salvage whatever they could at the conference table arranged by the lone superpower of the day.

Dayton may have been tailor-made for Holbrooke’s aggressive diplomacy. What his fawning hagiographers admire most in him is his style of arm-twisting and bone-crunching. That may be the stuff of a folk-lore hero in America’s gung-ho culture where a macho shooting from the hip still stirs imaginations. However, for the diplomatic nightmare that Afghanistan could be for even the most persuasive and savvy diplomatic pundit, this vintage cow-boy diplomacy has all the potential of turning into a farce, if not a disaster.

That Afghanistan is a nettlesome problem would be stating the obvious. Holbrooke himself admitted at the Nato Security Conference in Munich, Germany, just before flying to Islamabad, that Afghanistan will be a far tougher thing than Iraq. Obama’s war strategy for Afghanistan, which is going to see the numbers of American troops there swelling to 60,000 from the current 30,000 is no guarantee, in the minds of all independent observers of the scene, that US fortunes there would brighten up.

The problem between the Serbs and the Bosnians was a racial and religious conflict that had been aggravated by centuries of Serb hatred of Muslims in their neighbourhood. The Dayton Accords provided the basis for satisfying to the extent possible the respective aspirations of the warring parties, although it didn’t quite make the terrain safe for Bosnian Muslims.

In Afghanistan the problem is neither racial nor religious, although it could be argued that the internecine war there is pegged, to a large extent, on what interpretation of Islam should hold sway over the people of Afghanistan.

The Afghan imbroglio in its current phase — the one that began with the American onslaught against the then-ruling Taliban in Kabul, in early October 2001, on the heels of the cataclysm of 9/11 — is a three-way bloody conflict. It has pitched the dethroned Taliban against the US-led Nato forces on the one-hand, and their proxy puppet regime of Hamid Karzai in Kabul, on the other.

Pakistan has been caught with its foot in the Afghan door because of its geography. To make the case against Pakistan more plausible—and paint it as the villain responsible for the western allies’ inability to tame the Taliban and brow-beat Al Qaeda — both Nato and its client Kabul government, with its writ not even enforced within the municipal limits of the capital, have been routinely accusing Pakistan of fanning the insurgency from the alleged safe havens for the insurgents on the border land it shares with Afghanistan.

What could an arm-twisting and bone-chewing Mr Holbrooke achieve in a situation as fluid and turbulent as Afghanistan?

Sure, he wouldn’t have a hard time when it comes to twisting the arms in either Kabul or Islamabad. While the former has been a pliant government from the day Hamid Karzai’s corrupt and inept claptrap was installed there, the latter’s ruling elite of the day is easy pickings for their western mentors.

Apparently, Holbrooke will be leaning hard on both regimes, in Kabul and Islamabad, to tailor their policies to fit neatly into Obama’s strategy of going after the Taliban and Al Qaeda with a big stick. Otherwise it makes no sense for Washington under Obama doubling its military muscle in Afghanistan within the next few months.

Obama is obviously flushed by the success of General David Petraeus’ tactical ‘surge’ in Iraq. But that could prove to be a misleading paradigm and quickly turn sour in Afghanistan. In Iraq the ‘surge’ worked because Moqtada Al-Sadr, the maverick Shiia leader with a highly motivated legion of Al-Mehdi freedom fighters, held back his forces and allowed the Americans a free hand. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are not only resurgent but in no mood to show any kind of restraint or concession to the Americans beefing their ranks. The ‘surge’ in Afghanistan could, very quickly, turn into a quagmire.

The latest BBC-ABC public opinion poll released on the eve of Holbrooke’s maiden mission to the region paints a dismal picture of the Afghans sinking into despair about their future and expressing deep reservations and doubts about the ability of Hamid Karzai to pull them out of the rut. How would an arm-twisting Holbrooke square the circle in Kabul? Well, he could engineer Karzai’s political demise at the elections later this year. But how would he ensure that Karzai’s successor, whoever it is, will be any better?

For Islamabad, Holbrooke brings his master’s demand, plainly articulated at President Obama’s first news conference since moving into the White House, that it should join hands with the Americans and their Nato allies in Afghanistan to ferret out the Al Qaeda leaders and other ranks still ensconced, in his words, in Fata.

This is exactly the same demand as was oft-repeated by Bush and his cronies, except that Obama is ready to back it up with more American boots on the ground, next door in Afghanistan, and probably making drone visitations to the Pakistani soil even more frequent and more deadly, although the snowballing casualty toll has always been regretted as collateral damage.

Naming a man like Holbrooke, known for his robust, head-knocking, diplomacy is Obama’s signal to Islamabad and Kabul to sign on his agenda to deliver a massive punch to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. So the much-touted ‘change’ is going to be not in favour of diplomacy-for-peace but diplomacy-for-war. A cavalier Holbrooke would, no doubt, deliver this message without mincing his words. The denizens of the corridors of power in Islamabad may have already tasted his bitter medicine.

Whatever leeway for optimism the Pakistanis may have been tempted to eke out of Holbrooke also casting his net wider to rope in the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan has been quickly punctured by the hawks ruling the roost in Delhi.

With a lot of help in Washington from the powerful Jewish and Israeli interest- groups, Delhi has stolen all the wind from Holbrooke’s sails as far as Kashmir is concerned. Official clarifications weren’t late in coming that Mr Holbrooke will have nothing to do with the unending saga of Kashmir.

So the Indians have clearly won, by twisting arms in Washington. This should be a wake-up call for the current ruling elite in Islamabad. They shouldn’t fancy that the Obama White House would be any more sensitive to Pakistan than Bush ever was. There’s a triumvirate of common interests — cynics and Cassandras might well call it an ‘axis — rapidly taking shape between Washington, Tel Aviv and Delhi. The Pakistanis should be alive to its implications for their security as well as for the region.

It just doesn’t bode well for them, now or in the years to come. Richard Holbrooke is just a stentorian tribune of this new conglomeration of power. Islamabad has no place on this chessboard and should be thinking of building its own defences against it in cahoots with neighbours likewise threatened.

The writer is a former ambassador.