Nobody who is interested in the fate of the American enterprise in Afghanistan should fail to read George Packer’s illuminating profile of Richard Holbrooke in the Sept. 28 issue of the New Yorker.
Holbrooke is the extremely talented, irascible, nakedly ambitious, and controversial diplomat whom President Obama has chosen as his top civilian envoy to the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater.
Holbrooke is best remembered for knocking Balkan heads together to solve the Bosnian quandary, ending with the Dayton Accords in the 1990s. But Holbrooke admits he cannot yell and bully Afghans and Pakistanis the way he did to the Serbs at Dayton, and he can’t bomb them either.
What comes through in the New Yorker article is how much Holbrooke is haunted by America’s failure in Vietnam, in which he served as a young man. Packer's article is entitled: “The Last Mission,” for as Holbrooke, now 68, says: "Those of us who were born in the thirties and forties are running out of time. A new generation, for whom Vietnam is as long ago and far away as World War I is coming into its own."
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