Is Holbrookes “bulldozer” style working?
Reuters 03/12/2010 Dubbed the “bulldozer” for his tough guy tactics in Balkan negotiations, U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke has been making waves in South Asia recently. U.S. embassies in New Delhi and Kabul have been scrambling over the past week to deal with local fallout from statements made by the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Statements that often go by unnoticed in Washington are parsed word for word in a region where there are deeply-held suspicions over U.S. intentions across South Asia. One such example is Holbrooke’s comments at a forum at Harvard last week where he was asked about re-integration efforts with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Holbrooke made clear – as he has many times before – that the United States was not in talks with the Taliban but offered up that almost every family of the southern Pashtun tribes had someone involved with the Taliban. “There are plenty of indirect contacts between Pashtun on both sides – almost every Pashtun family i
