The Inside Story of how the White House let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan

[alybaba]

The Inside Story of How the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan - By Vali Nasr | Foreign Policy

A really long piece, but worth the read.

After reading this

Obama and the White House

They basically threw Holbrooke and his team into the bushes (because he was a huge Clinton supporter, so they didn't trust him), tried to take over AfPak policy through the military and the CIA, and were mainly worried about how it would play domestically than the ground reality. After campaigning on "talking to our enemies", Obama was too p*ssy to do it when he was in office.

Respect for Clinton for trying to help Holbrooke get his ideas in there.

Funnily enough, the person who comes off the best in this piece is Kayani, the Pakistani Chief of Army Staff.

Some excerpts:

But my time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience. The truth is that his administration made it extremely difficult for its own foreign-policy experts to be heard. Both Clinton and Holbrooke, two incredibly dedicated and talented people, had to fight to have their voices count on major foreign-policy initiatives.

Holbrooke never succeeded. Clinton did -- but it was often a battle. It usually happened only when it finally became clear to a White House that jealously guarded all foreign policymaking -- and then relied heavily on the military and intelligence agencies to guide its decisions -- that these agencies' solutions were no substitute for the type of patient, credible diplomacy that garners the respect and support of allies. Time and again, when things seemed to be falling apart, the administration finally turned to Clinton because it knew she was the only person who could save the situation.

One could argue that in most administrations, an inevitable imbalance exists between the military-intelligence complex, with its offerings of swift, dynamic, camera-ready action, and the foreign-policy establishment, with its seemingly ponderous, deliberative style. But this administration advertised itself as something different. On the campaign trail, Obama repeatedly stressed that he wanted to get things right in the broader Middle East, reversing the damage that had resulted from the previous administration's reliance on faulty intelligence and its willingness to apply military solutions to problems it barely understood.

Not only did that not happen, but the president had a truly disturbing habit of funneling major foreign-policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisors whose turf was strictly politics. Their primary concern was how any action in Afghanistan or the Middle East would play on the nightly news, or which talking point it would give the Republicans. The Obama administration's reputation for competence on foreign policy has less to do with its accomplishments in Afghanistan or the Middle East than with how U.S. actions in that region have been reshaped to accommodate partisan political concerns.

But Clinton shared Holbrooke's belief that the purpose of hard power is to facilitate diplomatic breakthroughs. During many meetings I attended with her, she would ask us to make the case for diplomacy and would then quiz us on our assumptions and plan of action. At the end of these drills she would ask us to put it all in writing for the benefit of the White House.

Holbrooke and Clinton had a tight partnership. They were friends. Clinton trusted Holbrooke's judgment and valued his counsel. They conferred often (not just on Afghanistan and Pakistan), and Clinton protected Holbrooke from an obdurate White House. The White House kept a dossier on Holbrooke's misdeeds, and Clinton kept a folder on churlish attempts by the White House's AfPak office to undermine Holbrooke, which she eventually gave to Tom Donilon, Obama's national security advisor. The White House tried to blame Holbrooke for leaks to the media. Clinton called out the White House on its own leaks. She sharply rebuked the White House after journalist Steve Coll wrote in the New Yorker about a highly secret meeting with the Taliban that he was told about by a senior White House official.

Turf battles are a staple of every administration, but the Obama White House has been particularly ravenous. Add to this the campaign hangover: Those in Obama's inner circle, veterans of his election campaign, were suspicious of Clinton. Even after Clinton proved she was a team player, they remained concerned about her popularity and feared that she could overshadow the president.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until September 2011, told me Clinton "did a great job pushing her agenda, but it is incredible how little support she got from the White House. They want to control everything." Victories for the State Department were few and hard fought. It was little consolation that its recommendations on reconciliation with the Taliban or regional diplomacy to end the Afghan war eventually became official policy -- after the White House exhausted the alternatives.

The White House campaign against the State Department, and especially Holbrooke, was at times a theater of the absurd. Holbrooke was not included in Obama's videoconferences with Karzai, and he was cut out of the presidential retinue when Obama went to Afghanistan. At times it looked as if White House officials were baiting Karzai to complain about Holbrooke so they could get him fired.

Afghans and Pakistanis were not alone in being confused and occasionally amused by the White House's maneuvers. People in Washington were also baffled. The White House encouraged the U.S. ambassadors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to go around the State Department and work with the White House directly, undermining their own agency. Those ambassadors quickly learned how easy it was to manipulate the administration's animus toward Holbrooke to their own advantage. The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, in particular became a handful for the State Department. In November 2010, Obama and Clinton went to Lisbon for a NATO summit, planning to meet with Karzai there. When Eikenberry asked to go as well, Clinton turned down his request and instructed him to stay in Kabul. He ignored her and showed up in Lisbon.

IN OCTOBER 2010, during a visit to the White House, General Kayani gave Obama a 13-page white paper he had written to explain his views on the outstanding strategic issues between Pakistan and the United States. Kayani 3.0, as the paper was dubbed (it was the third one Pakistanis had given the White House on the subject), could be summarized as: You are not going to win the war, and you are not going to transform Afghanistan. This place has devoured empires before you; it will defy you as well. Stop your grandiose plans, and let's get practical, sit down, and discuss how you will leave and what is an end state we can both live with.

Kayani expressed the same doubt time and again in meetings. We would try to convince him that we were committed to the region and had a solution for Afghanistan's problems: America would first beat the Taliban and then build a security force to hold the place together after it left. He, like many others, thought the idea of an Afghan military was foolish and that the United States was better off negotiating an exit with the Taliban.

In one small meeting around a narrow table, Kayani listened carefully and took notes as we went through our list of issues. I cannot forget Kayani's reaction when we enthusiastically explained our plan to build up Afghan forces to 400,000 by 2014. His answer was swift and unequivocal: Don't do it. "You will fail," he said. "Then you will leave and that half-trained army will break into militias that will be a problem for Pakistan." We tried to stand our ground, but he would have none of it. He continued, "I don't believe that the Congress is going to pay $9 billion a year for this 400,000-man force." He was sure it would eventually collapse and the army's broken pieces would resort to crime and terrorism to earn their keep.

Kayani's counsel was that if you want to leave, just leave -- we didn't believe you were going to stay anyway -- but don't do any more damage on your way out. This seemed to be a ubiquitous sentiment across the region. No one bought our argument for sending more troops into Afghanistan, and no one was buying our arguments for leaving. It seemed everyone was getting used to a direction-less America.

 

[Shogun]

Will read later, thanks

 

[thekingsmen]

Don't need to read a piece about U.S. Diplomacy Failing...see it in action.

 

[theworldismine13]

Wow, that article is trash, it's just some dude swinging from Holbrooke's nutsack