Holbrooke’s future unclear as fallout from Karzai rift reaches Washington: report

“The optics are not great surrounding him right now,” one fellow diplomat said yesterday. A close Washington confidant of Mr Holbrooke’s admitted: “It would be understandable if people thought he was somewhat missing in action.” His staff retort that during the most intense US foreign strategy review since Vietnam, he needs to be in Washington — advising his immediate boss, Mrs Clinton, but also briefing President Obama privately and without her knowledge.
Yet the case against Mr Holbrooke involves more than geography. He has “needlessly antagonised” the one man with whom he should have cultivated a rapport, aides to a former US Ambassador to Kabul say. He has also misused six months, from April to September, that should have been spent planning for the dire political contingencies that he knew were looming.
Mr Holbrooke confronted President Karzai over his failure to arrest the warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum last year and encouraged opposition figures to run against him. In August he refused to join in President Karzai’s celebrations after his first-round election win, insisting that a second round would be required.
By some accounts this inadvertently sabotaged an opposition move to unite behind a single candidate, and it took Senator Kerry to make President Karzai accept the idea of a second ballot.
Team Holbrooke, meanwhile, is accused of having a confused decision-making apparatus with memos and analysis more notable for enthusiasm than acuity. Mr Holbrooke’s lack of knowledge of Afghanistan has also been noted in Kabul and Washington.
“Somehow the political element never got it together and said, ‘What is the Plan B and Plan C?’ an ally of the envoy told The Times. “‘What do we do if there’s a legitimacy crisis?’” Faced with just such a crisis, many in Washington now believe that Mr Holbrooke will have to take the blame.(The Times)