A book by a former senior State Department policy expert Vali Nasr paints the Obama administration’s handling of foreign policy as fruitless, detailing destructive turf battles and policy debates that challenge the White House’s claim that its management of the Afghan war is an accomplishment.
Vali Nasr, an academic who was recruited by Richard C Holbrooke to work in the State Department, has titled his book” The Dispensable Nation,” and it would be published next month.
Chapters on Afghanistan and Pakistan are awaited as they would cover the two years when Mr. Nasr had a ringside view of the administration’s policymaking as a senior adviser for Mr. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s first special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Power struggles exist in all administrations, but, Nasr writes that those between what he describes as politically minded aides at the White House and the State Department were particularly pernicious, especially since they centered on decisions about an Afghan conflict that Mr Obama once called a “war of necessity.”
After Mr Holbrooke’s death in 2010, White House officials had made it clear that John Podesta, President Clinton’s chief of staff, was not an acceptable choice as an envoy. Hillary Rodham Clinton, then secretary of state, had been eyeing him to fill Mr Holbrooke’s post. Mr. Podesta was considered to be too high-profile and potentially difficult for the White House to manage, Nasr wrote.
The subtext for the squabbling was a deeper battle for influence over policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan. During the early months of Mr Obama’s first term, Holbrooke set up the office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP), which is still lodged in an inauspicious suite of offices near the State Department’s cafeteria.
“Turf battles are a staple of every administration, but the Obama White House has been particularly ravenous,” he writes. “Those in Obama’s inner circle, veterans of his election campaign, were suspicious of Clinton. Even after Clinton proved she was a team player, they remained concerned about her popularity and feared that she could overshadow the president.”
Though Holbrooke had not favored Obama’s “surge” of troops into Afghanistan, once it was decided he wanted to use the military buildup to create new leverage for the potential negotiations. Nasr wortes that when Obama in a speech during his election campaign in June 2011 announced that he was beginning to drawdown forces, reinforcements, the president undercut the leverage the United States would have needed to effectively pursue negotiations with the Taliban. “As we went from ‘fight and talk’ to ‘talk while leaving,’ the prospect of a good outcome began to grow dimmer,” he writes.
After his book “The Shia Revival” was published, Holbrooke, whom Nasr g admires, asked him to join Mrs Clinton’s foreign policy brain trust during her 2008 primary campaign and then brought him to the State Department.
Nasr said has that he refrained from publishing his latest book before the United States election in November to avoid the impression that he was trying to meddle in the American political debate. “I did not want it to be a political book,” he said.