Scott Smith’s Foreign Policy Take Down of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s Erroneously Alleged Competence in Afghanistan — Is a Worthwhile Read for “Wannabe” Leaders

28 March 2013

Citation — to Scott Smith’s article

Scott Smith, The bull in Afghanistan's china shop, Foreign Policy (27 March 2013)

Roughly three years ago — using Vice President Dick Cheney and (now deceased) Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as examples — I made the point that gravitas does not necessarily equate with the ability to deliver competent analysis or wise policy—

Yesterday, Afghanistan-wise Scott Smith critiqued Ambassador Holbrooke’s performance in Afghanistan on equivalent grounds — providing a detailed example of the man’s ebullient conceit and ruinously unwise diplomatic ways.

“Who is Scott Smith, and why might we give a darn what he thinks?”

Mr. Smith sums his pertinent background this way:

In 2009, I was the Special Assistant to Kai Eide, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General and the head of the UN mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

I already had some experience in the Afghanistan. I had first visited Afghanistan in 1994 for a French NGO. I returned in 1995, when I spent a year running a humanitarian project for the same NGO, and returned again in the summer of 1997 to do research.

From 2001 to 2011, I worked almost exclusively on Afghanistan for the UN, and had been part of the UN team that set up the 2004 elections. By 2009, when I went to Kabul to work for Eide, I had some knowledge of the country, its recent history, and its elections.

So, we’re talking about a guy who has a decade plus, culturally relevant, experience in that war-torn land.

What Smith has to say about Ambassador Holbrooke’s unhelpful blundering

Holbrooke, who apparently didn’t mind being occasionally undiplomatically abrasive, got off to a bad start with the United Nations’ head in Afghanistan (and Smith’s boss) Kai Eide:

[S]hortly after his appointment Holbrooke made disparaging public remarks about Eide's leadership at the annual Munich security conference.

Eide . . . complained immediately to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and National Security Advisor Jim Jones (with whom he had excellent relationships).

A few days later Holbrooke came to Kabul. Holbrooke clearly had no intention to "reset" his relationship with Eide.

His first comment on meeting Eide was, "When does your contract expire?"

Similar jackassery allegedly characterized Holbrooke’s inept handling of the 2009 presidential election that embroiled Hamid Karzai in 2009. According to Smith, Holbrooke made it clear, early on, that he wanted to unseat Karzai by encouraging other candidates to run against him in the two round election system.

According to Smith, Holbrooke miscalculated his get rid of Karzai strategy on two important grounds. The prominent politicians, whom he hoped would unseat President Karzai, didn’t like being used as disposable pawns in an American game. And Karzai was politically stronger than the Ambassador had estimated.

When Ambassador Holbrooke saw that Karzai was going to get the plurality of votes in the first go-round, he changed tactics — “[I]nstead of getting rid of Karzai, it became desirable for Karzai to not win the first round, and go to a run-off instead.”

Against the advice of people who knew both President Karzai and the political situation, Holbrooke explicitly raised the issue of a second election with President Karzai himself:

Karzai was understandably apoplectic.

Most of the votes were still being counted. Hardly any preliminary results had come in. Yet Holbrooke was already dictating what outcome would be legitimate and what would not.

This seriously damaged an already patchy relationship.

[A]n election cannot be a means of humiliation.

I don’t see any diplomatic skill on display here, do you?

Holbrooke apparently was not content with letting his evidently clumsy king-making end there. When it became clear that fraud had characterized some of the first round election results, two election commissions agreed to find and eliminate those fraudulent votes — thereby avoiding a limited time redo of that already painful process.

This was not easy to pull off, Smith recalls. Karzai and his leading opponent had to be convinced that the audit had been correctly done. And President Karzai had to be persuaded that (a) he had actually polled below the required 50 percent and (b) he would have to undergo a second election round.

With winter coming on, the international community’s time in which to carry out this persuasion, and to schedule the second election round, was limited. Unfortunately, Ambassador Holbrooke’s abrasiveness had already damaged the foreigners’ reputations, which made everything that more difficult to accomplish under the time constraints.

Then, somewhat incredibly from a chain of diplomatic command perspective, the person who finally persuaded President Karzai to undergo a second election was Senator John Kerry:

Senator Kerry, while visiting Kabul that week, had managed to earn Karzai's trust.

Karzai asked him to extend his stay while the negotiations over the elections continued. Kerry had become an accidental diplomat, but he played his unexpected role with great skill.

Holbrooke, the professional diplomat, had spent all his powder in the early stages of the game.

I have no idea where he was when the great Afghan electoral crisis of 2009 was finally resolved, but he was nowhere near the action in Kabul.

Why does any of this still matter?

President Karzai remains suspicious of American meddling, a la Holbrooke, in the coming 2014 election. Which, presumably, makes him more difficult to work with, while the United States and the International Security Assistance Force plan their 2014 exit from the war.

The moral? — What you think you see is not always what you get

Mr. Smith’s account of Ambassador Holbrooke’s blundering serves to reiterate my caveat about the Gravitas Illusion. Holbrooke’s reportedly unskillful diplomacy parallels the gaps in competent analysis that I detected in his answers to Rachel Maddow’s questions in July 2010.

In sum, just because people like former Vice President Dick Cheney and deceased Ambassador Richard Holbrooke come across as both powerful and intelligent — does not mean that they are perceptively thoughtful or analytically competent.

Self-aggrandizing blowhards are dangerous. They make damaging leaders.

Given our culture of cultivated illusion, we need (frequently) to remind ourselves of that.

PeteFree.com

Scott Smith’s Foreign Policy Take Down of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s Erroneously Alleged Competence in Afghanistan — Is a Worthwhile Read for “Wannabe” Leaders