Robert Dreyfuss: The Thirty Years' War (Today's Holbrooke-O-Rama in DC)

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The Thirty Years' War
posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 08/12/2009 @ 2:31pm



With great anticipation, I trucked over to the posh St. Regis Hotel, just north of the White House, to see Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and his team at an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress. I shouldn't have bothered.

The weird thing about the event is that in the room were literally hundreds of the Washington foreign policy elite, current and former officials, people with lots of experience in the Middle East and South Asia, and, of course, journalists, too. And Holbrooke brought with him literally his entire team, minus a few who couldn't be there: top regional experts such as Barnett Rubin and Vali Nasr, and about a dozen other members of Holbrooke's Af-Pak task force. But the session was boring, pedestrian, and so mind-numbingly simplistic that it seemed like Holbooke and Co. were talking to third graders.

And their goal was to convince us that the "civilians" involved in the Thirty Years' War in Afghanistan can rebuild that shattered nation from the ground up. They didn't convince me.

The ten members of the Holbrooke team on the stage spoke for about two minutes each, giving them time to spout a few platitudes and pass the mike. Not a soul ventured into controversy. No one made news, or said anything newsworthy. Halfway through, it was clear that Holbooke had organized this event solely for the bank of TV cameras arrayed in the back of the room, to provide a visual demonstration of the sheer brilliance of his high-wattage staff.

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John Podesta, the event's host and president of the Center for American Progress, asked the key question at the start: what are US objectives in the war and how are they defined? And he didn't get a good answer. President Obama has stated that the objective is to defeat and destroy Al Qaeda, but Holbrooke leap-frogged from that objective to the much broader one of defeating "the Talibans," and he didn't explain at all why, if America's goal is to crush Al Qaeda, we have to spend decades rebuilding the entire country. The prevailing view, it seems, is that we have to ensure that both Afghanistan and the neighboring provinces of Pakistan (the tribal areas, or FATA, and Baluchistan) are yanked by the Yanks into the 21st century. If so, that could take until the 22nd century.

<snip>

Listening to Holbrooke and Co., I couldn't help thinking that the brutalized, raped and genocide-stricken people of Rwanda and eastern Congo must be wishing that they had an Osama bin Laden of their own hiding in the central African jungles, so another US special envoy would assemble a team of nation-builders and scramble up $4 billion a month to rebuild Africa, too. It's not that we can't afford it: we can. A nation that spends $1 trillion here and there to bail out criminal banks ought to be able to find a few tens of billions a month to make sure that people in the Fourth World have vaccinations, clean drinking water, decent schools, good roads, free health clinics, and the like.

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http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/461776/the_thirty_years_war