Richard Holbrooke Dies At 69 Asking for the War in Afghanistan To Be Stopped
Richard C. Holbrooke, former U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, died on Monday, at the end of a surgery intended to repair a tear in his heart artery.
He felt ill at work on Friday and was taken to a hospital in Washington, where he underwent a 21-hour surgery.
As he was making preparations for surgery in Washington, the 69-year politician and diplomat was quoted to have said the words that remain as his epitaph: “You have got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”
The name of Richard Holbrooke is linked to the famous Dayton agreement between Serbs and Bosnian/Croatian military in 1995, following what was deemed as the massacre in Srebrenica, which triggered NATO’s decision to intervene by means of airstrikes.
Holbrooke was able to broker an agreement between the warring parties then, and the Dayton agreement was a decisive step toward enduring peace between the Croatians, the Serbs and the Bosnians.
In 2008, Richard Holbrooke took it upon himself to represent the interest of the United States in the most volatile zone in Afghanistan: the border zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where most attacks against the coalition forces originate.
While he was successful in the Balkans, Holbrooke found himself in a difficult position in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where his honest assessments brought him some trouble with the Afghan president Hamid Karzai, especially after alleging a fraud in the presidential elections in 2009.
Richard Holbrooke was one of the finest diplomats the United States ever had and his demise is already missed by many leaders around the world.
He died at a time when the United States is seriously revising its policy in Afghanistan and has a plan to withdraw the combat troops by 2014.
One of the last contributions to the effort to stabilize Afghanistan Holbrooke made was to work with the military to a plan to triple the civilian presence in Afghanistan in order to boost economy, agriculture and civilian institutions.
