The Taliban on Richard Holbrooke

Richard Holbrooke kept returning where he was needed most. Ron Moreau, Sami Yousafzai and Christopher Dickey report the Taliban sees his death as an omen and talk to those he negotiated with.

The Taliban are playing Richard Holbrooke’s death as an omen. After his “life of toil and fatigue,” said a communiqué from the guerrillas, the American president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan succumbed to heart problems “when his previous fame and credibility came under question after the unremitting failures of the mission.”

Waxing mystical, Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi went on to list the Russian presidents who had dropped dead one after another when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan. Looking back over the last year he recalled Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s logorrheic flameout and Gen. David Petraeus’s fainting spell before a Senate committee. Faced with a losing war and no fresh ideas, despite the current “policy review,” some American officials “lighten their burden by simply going to the other world,” said Ahmadi, while others, still in the land of the living, “choose to avoid shouldering the mission.”

But for all the smugness, even the Taliban know that Richard Holbrooke was not one to avoid a mission. Holbrooke believed that one man or woman—one diplomat—could still make a real difference in the game of nations, and in his case he was right. He never won the Nobel Prize, although he certainly should have gotten it after the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian genocide in 1995, and he never became the U.S. secretary of state, although he was a runner-up at least twice.

But what the lack of the highest accolades and most exalted positions meant, in practical terms, is that Holbrooke kept returning to the trenches, which is where he was needed most. Washington can make policy for war-torn corners of the world, after all, but it takes brilliant minds and strong personalities on the ground to make anything happen. And now that Holbrooke’s gone, it’s in those trenches that he’ll be missed the most.

When Holbrooke took up his assignment as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan early last year, trying to lay the foundations for long-term stability at the epicenter of the Obama administration’s tremulous policy, he knew as well as anyone that his mission was close to impossible.

There would be no repetition of his breakthrough in the Balkans. This was a different battlefield; these were different cultures. The United States and NATO were implicated more deeply, directly and intractably in Afghanistan than they had ever been in Bosnia. In the 1990s, Washington still had the extraordinary power and prestige that came with victory in the Cold War, and Holbrooke knew he was speaking for a powerhouse. Fifteen years later, with America enfeebled by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the country’s economy anemic, and its people deeply divided, Holbrooke didn’t have Uncle Sam watching his back any more. But Holbrooke still took the job.

The AfPak challenge was to bring about cooperation and close coordination between two governments that plainly detested each other. The regime in Kabul sees Pakistan as an ally of the Taliban, who enjoy safe havens and logistical and training bases in Pakistani territory. To the Pakistanis, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s feckless, corrupt administration increasingly looks like a satellite of India, the arch-enemy of Islamabad.

“Holbrooke was listening carefully and had enthusiasm, and we always found him very keen on talking with everyone in Pakistan,” says Ashraf Ali, director of the FATE Research Center in Islamabad. A former member of the Afghan cabinet, who didn’t want to be named, said he always found Holbrooke “very polite and experienced, but he had such soft spots for Pakistan that some time we thought he was the envoy of Pakistan.”

“Holbrooke was listening carefully and had enthusiasm, and we always found him very keen on talking with everyone in Pakistan.”

In fact, Holbrooke never gave up trying to convince Islamabad’s powerful Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, that aiding and abetting Taliban factions like the lethal Haqqani network and Mullah Omar’s ruling Quetta shura was an existential threat to Pakistan itself, and not in the country’s long-term interest.