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| Fata toughest challenge for Obama, says Holbrooke |
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Sunday, January 25, 2009
News Desk
RAWALPINDI: The newly-appointed US special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, has said that the Obama administration had to face many tough challenges with regard to the war in Afghanistan and global peace but the toughest was the insurgent sanctuaries in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
Richard Holbrooke expressed these views in an article, which appeared in the Foreign Affairs magazine recently.
He said the situation in Afghanistan was far from hopeless. But as the war enters its eighth year, Americans should be told the truth: it will last a long time — longer than the United States’ longest war to date, the 14-year conflict (1961-75) in Vietnam. Success will require new policies with regard to four major problem areas: the tribal areas in Pakistan, the drug lords who dominate the Afghan system, the national police, and the incompetence and corruption of the Afghan government.
He maintained that all were immensely difficult challenges, but the toughest was the insurgent sanctuaries in the tribal areas of western Pakistan.
He said Afghanistan’s future couldn’t be secured by a counterinsurgency effort alone; it will also require regional agreements that give Afghanistan’s neighbours a stake in the settlement. That includes Iran — as well as China, India, and Russia. But the most important neighbour is, of course, Pakistan, which can destabilise Afghanistan at will — and has. Getting policy toward Islamabad right will be absolutely critical for the next administration — and very difficult. The continued deterioration of the tribal areas poses a threat not only to Afghanistan but also to Pakistan’s new secular democracy, and it presents the next president with an extraordinary challenge.
He said the new president will inherit leadership of a nation that is still the most powerful in the world — a nation rich with the continued promise of its dynamic and increasingly diverse population, a nation that could, and must, again inspire, mobilise, and lead the world.
He said the new president would have to reshape policies on the widest imaginable range of challenges, domestic and international. He will need to rebuild productive working relationships with friends and allies. He must revitalise a flagging economy; tame a budget awash in red ink; reduce energy dependence and turn the corner on the truly existential issue of climate change; tackle the growing danger of nuclear proliferation; improve the defence of the homeland against global terrorists while putting more pressure on al-Qaeda, especially in Pakistan; and, of course, manage two wars simultaneously.
He said the presidency of the United States is the most extraordinary job ever devised, and it has become an object of the hopes and dreams — and, at times, the fears, frustration, and anger — of people around the world. Expectations that the president can solve every problem are obviously unrealistic — and yet such expectations are a reality that he will have to confront. A successful president must identify meaningful yet achievable goals, lay them out clearly before the nation and the world, and then achieve them through leadership skills that will be tested by pressures unimaginable to anyone who has not held the job.
He said in order to restore the United States to its proper world leadership role, two areas of weakness must be repaired: the domestic economy and the United States’ reputation in the world.
He said the president should address both issues as early as possible in order to strengthen his hand as he tackles pressing strategic issues, including the five neighbouring countries at the centre of the arc of crisis that directly threatens the United States’ national security — Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
Richard Holbrooke said that Obama believed that military victory, as defined by Bush and McCain, was not possible — a judgment shared by the US commanders in Iraq. He finds unacceptable the costs to the United States of an open-ended commitment to continue a war that should never have been started. Obama concludes that in the overall interest of the United States, it is necessary to start withdrawing US ground combat troops at a steady but he emphasizes, “careful” pace.
He said that at the heart of the United States geo-strategic challenge lie five countries with linked borders: the United States’ Nato ally Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In this arc of crisis, incoherence has marked US policy since 2003. This five-nation area falls into three different regional bureaus in the State Department. Washington preaches different policies on democracy in neighbouring countries, confusing everyone — pressuring Israel and the Palestinians, for example, into letting Hamas, the ‘terrorist organisation’, run in the 2006 Palestinian elections, with disastrous results, while backing away from democracy promotion in Egypt. There is little coordination or integration of policies toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, although the two countries now constitute a single theater of war. No single concept beyond the vague “global war on terror” — defined in any way that suits the short-term needs of the administration — has guided US strategy. Relations with all five countries have deteriorated.
Richard Holbrooke emphasized the need for starting a dialogue process with Iran to make Tehran stop nuclear agenda and to stop its overt anti-Israel activities, which pose an existential threat to the Jewish state.
He said if Tehran rebuffs an opportunity to have meaningful talks with Washington, it will increase its own isolation and put itself under greater international pressure, while the United States will improve its own standing. Of course, this journey, once begun, will require adjustments along the way. Diplomacy is like jazz — an improvisation on a theme. Let it begin next year, as part of a new foreign policy in which diplomacy, conducted with firmness and enhanced by US power, and consistent with American values, returns to its traditional place in the United States’ national security policy.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
