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Anonymous ID: 4eaaee June 17, 2018, 12:38 p.m. No.1787790   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>7810 >>7815 >>7823 >>7825 >>7926

https://twitter.com/B75434425/status/1007860721647005696

 

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Vali_Nasr

 

WASHINGTON — The State Department is winding down an Obama-era office responsible for developing long-range strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan — just as the Trump administration conducts a major review of the future of America’s longest war.

 

The office of the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, which once drew experts from nearly a dozen government agencies, will be folded into the State Department’s Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, people briefed on the decision said on Friday.

 

President Barack Obama created the office in January 2009 when he named Richard C. Holbrooke, a celebrated diplomat who brokered the Dayton peace accords to end the Bosnian war, as the first special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

 

Laurel E. Miller, an analyst from the RAND Corporation who had been serving as acting special representative, departed on Friday, as did her deputy, Jonathan Carpenter.

 

In a statement, the State Department said Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson had not made a final decision about the future of the office. But it noted that he has expressed skepticism about the proliferation of special envoys during the Obama administration, saying they could strip expertise from the regional bureaus. Other officials said the process of folding in the office had already begun.

 

The special representative played a diminishing role in recent years as the Afghan war faded from the headlines. Its staff had dwindled even before Mr. Obama left office, as his secretary of state, John Kerry, weighed folding the office back into the department’s bureaucracy.

 

But the Trump administration’s decision to do so now, at the very moment it is devising a strategy for Afghanistan, underlines the Pentagon’s outsize role in the process. Last week, President Trump authorized Defense Secretary Jim Mattisto send thousands of additional troops into a war that currently engages 8,800 American troops.

 

The awkward timing was not lost on Mr. Trump’s critics.

 

“The Pentagon is contemplating more war in Afghanistan, while the State Department is shutting down the office that could give it a voice in that important development,” said Vali R. Nasr, who was a senior adviser on Pakistan in the office between 2009 and 2011.

 

Mr. Holbrooke, who died in December 2010, had a turbulent relationship with Mr. Obama’s White House. But he assembled a team of experts from the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the Agriculture Department and other agencies to devise a civilian strategy for stabilizing Afghanistan that was designed to complement Mr. Obama’s military surge of 30,000 troops in 2009.

 

Among those on Mr. Holbrooke’s staff, in addition to Mr. Nasr, were Rina Amiri, an Afghan-born woman who advocated on behalf of women’s rights in her native country, and Barnett R. Rubin, a prominent scholar on Afghanistan and the Taliban at New York University.

 

https://nytimes.com/2017/06/23/world/asia/trump-obama-afghanistan-pakistan.html

Anonymous ID: 4eaaee June 17, 2018, 12:39 p.m. No.1787810   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>1787790

Continued

 

Mr. Holbrooke also initiated contacts with the Taliban about negotiating a political settlement with the Afghan government, a process he said would have to involve neighboring Pakistan. Nine years later, many experts on Afghanistan say a settlement between Kabul and the Taliban remains one of the few options for bringing lasting peace to the country.

 

The special representative’s office “elevated the importance of the diplomatic and political equities to be on par with the military equities,” said Daniel F. Feldman, who served as Mr. Holbrooke’s deputy and later became the special representative himself. “What we’re still bereft of is any strategy for what’s going to lead to stability in Afghanistan.”

 

Mr. Trump’s decision to authorize the Pentagon to deploy more troops was a stopgap measure, driven by worries that the Taliban were making gains on the battlefield and that the government of President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan was in danger of falling. On Friday, a series of deadly bombings in Pakistan added to the sense of regional instability.

 

The White House National Security Council has met multiple times to work on a broader strategy. It is being labeled a “South Asia” policy, to distinguish it from the Obama administration’s so-called Af-Pak policy. Mr. Mattis has said he hopes to present the strategy by mid-July.

 

Mr. Tillerson and his chief of staff, Margaret Peterlin, attended at least one meeting last week, people briefed on the process said. But the State Department did not send an Afghanistan subject expert to the meeting, a practice that officials say has become commonplace under Mr. Tillerson.

 

Mr. Tillerson and Ms. Peterlin did not brief the special representative’s office about the meetings, and even now, the department’s Afghan experts are not certain what role they are supposed to play in enacting the policy.

 

The problems are compounded by a lack of senior people in the State Department’s Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. It currently has no assistant secretary, even one to serve on an acting basis, and only an acting ambassador in Kabul. In effect, there is no expert at the department on Afghanistan above the level of the Afghan office director.

 

Some diplomats said the staffing vacuum, rather than the end of the special representative’s office, is the problem.

 

“Consolidation makes a lot of sense from a policy point of view,” Mr. Carpenter said, “but in the end, it’s all about the right personnel, and I trust they have a plan to put the right senior officials in these positions.”

 

https://nytimes.com/2017/06/23/world/asia/trump-obama-afghanistan-pakistan.html