Richard Holbrooke

Do today’s politics allow for it?

In February, 2009, Richard Holbrooke was the Obama administration’s brand-new envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. At the Munich Security Conference, he delivered a bracingly frank assessment of the job he’d taken on. I wrote about those remarks here.

Hillary Clinton knows Stephen Harper has trouble getting Barack Obama’s attention

Nothing has changed since I wrote this post nearly three months ago.

Paul Wells: U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan asked for a Canadian rep six months ago

From the print edition, which this week is ridiculously entertaining in many ways, my column, about how things are changing on this side of the Atlantic, in response to events on the other side.

It’s impossible to know what will happen next in Afghanistan, but it’s obvious new leadership is needed to turn the situation around.

More from Holbrooke’s press briefing:

A roundup of a busy weekend on the Afghanistan/Pakistan file

This is the last bit I’ll have for you on the blog from this weekend’s Munich Security Conference. My extended column in the next issue will be about all the fun, and I’ll be a guest on Politics with Don Newman today at 5 p.m. Eastern on Newsworld to dish. (Remember, if you miss the broooadcast, you can always download the pooodcast.) Below is the last intervention of the three-day conference, at the end of the panel discussion that included Peter MacKay and David Petraeus. This is Richard Holbrooke, who was Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the U.N. and his special envoy for Bosnia (the Dayton Accords). He would probably have been secretary of state if Hillary Clinton had managed to become president, but instead he’s her (and her boss’s) special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. “We often call it Af-Pak,” he told the Munich crowd, “and not only to save eight syllables,” which is good because it would save six. Parts of this transcript led the news after Sunday’s conference, but I wanted to give you nearly all of it, so you can really get a sense of the sense of foreboding Holbrooke left the crowd with.