Reading this piece by Vali Nasr, it could be guessed that it is an attempt to hype interest in a new book. That is, in fact, the case. Nasr's book, from which this is an excerpt, is due out soon.  
 Nasr believes that  Barack Obama is a dithering President whose controlling tendencies and extreme risk-averse attitude to foreign policy has damaged US interests in the Middle East.
 Nasr seems to be both pushing his book and nursing a grudge.  Nasr's disparaging claims regarding Obama's advisors and the careerist and ideologically driven infighting within the administration are all quite believable. He draws a picture of Obama and the other involved players on his side as being petty political actors who are cowardly, stupid, and wrong. He stresses bad motives on their part and nothing but brilliantly inciteful, analysis, and courageous action on the parts of Holbrooke and Hillary Clinton. Even in this short extract though, he reveals some contrary evidence about his heroes with internal, to the article, contradictions. Apparently, if we are to believe Nasr, most everything in Afghanistan would be better if only Holbrooke had been able to get Obama's ear.
 Everything emphasized in bold are quotes from the article. Italics within bold are my emphasis. Following each quote are some of my reactions.

The Inside Story of How the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan
"My time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience."
BY VALI NASR | MARCH/APRIL 2013

The White House let diplomacy fail. That indicates that they saw the alternative and rejected it or at least deliberately failed allow diplomacy to succeed, thus the deep disillusionment of the learned political scholar, Nasr. Holbrooke had convinced him that they could do so much good.

Holbrooke encouraged the creative chaos. "I want you to learn nothing from government," he told me. "This place is dead intellectually. It does not produce any ideas; it is all about turf battles and checking the box. Your job is to break through all this. Anyone gives you trouble, come to me."

Holbrook seems, by this statement, to have early on set a tone of disagreement tinged with disrespect for Obama's advisors and with the thinking, and the resultant policies, of the Administration he had just begun to work for. He tells his aid that if anyone gives him trouble regarding the dismissal of the intellectually dead thinking, the thinking that his team was charged with "breaking through", to bring the trouble to him and he implies that he will straighten it out pronto.

Still, Holbrooke knew that Afghanistan was not going to be easy. There were too many players and too many unknowns, and Obama had not given him enough authority (and would give him almost no support) to get the job done. After he took office, the president never met with Holbrooke outside large meetings and never gave him time and heard him out. The president's White House advisors were dead set against Holbrooke. Some, like Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, were holdovers from George W. Bush's administration and thought they knew Afghanistan better and did not want to relinquish control to Holbrooke. Others (those closest to the president) wanted to settle scores for Holbrooke's tenacious campaign support of Clinton (who was herself eyed with suspicion by the Obama insiders); still others begrudged Holbrooke's storied past and wanted to end his run of success then and there. At times it appeared the White House was more interested in bringing Holbrooke down than getting the policy right.

 There is plenty of evidence that there was infighting and that there was political positioning and dick waving, but all fault is, in Nasr's account, placed outside of Holbrooke's control or responsibility. Of course the important truth may be that the White House was more interested in bringing Holbrooke down than getting the policy right. Maybe. There were elections, after all. Elections with life or death implications for some.

 Just before his [Holbrooke's]sudden death in December 2010, he told his wife, Kati Marton, that he thought he had finally found a way out that might just work. But he wouldn't say what he had come up with, "not until he told the president first" -- the president who did not have time to listen.

 There is the teaser. There is the real tragedy hinted at. Holbrooke had figured out a solution which he wouldn't reveal even to his wife before he revealed it to Obama. If only Obama had been wiling to listen to Holbrooke before he worked himself to an early death. I wonder if that solution involved a complete new paradigm which would be a complete surprise to his working team or if maybe Nasr could hint at its substance just a bit and make that assertion just a bit more believable. Too bad the secret plan died with Holbrooke, so many more might have lived.

Skipping around within the article a bit: THE ADMINISTRATION'S INITIAL reading of the crisis in Afghanistan was to blame it on the spectacular failure of President Hamid Karzai's government, paired with wrongheaded military strategy, inadequate troop numbers for defeating an insurgency, and the Taliban's ability to find a haven and military and material support in Pakistan. Of these, Karzai's failings and the need to straighten out the military strategy dominated the discussion. Above all, the Afghanistan conflict was seen in the context of Iraq. The Taliban were viewed as an insurgency similar to the one that the United States had just helped defeat in Iraq. And what had defeated the insurgency in Iraq was a military strategy known as COIN, a boots-on-the-ground-intensive counterinsurgency.

Repeating: Above all, the Afghanistan conflict was seen in the context of Iraq. The Taliban were viewed as an insurgency similar to the one that the United States had just helped defeat in Iraq. And what had defeated the insurgency in Iraq was a military strategy known as COIN, a boots-on-the-ground-intensive counterinsurgency. The statement assumes, and invites us to believe, that we actually did win in Iraq and that boots-on-the-ground-intensive counterinsurgency was the winning method. The exact meaning of who believes this statement is a bit ambiguous but Nasr himself seems to believe that we won in Iraq and that the Obama people thought we could win in Afghanistan with the same methods. later he bounces around with his opinion as to whether the same methods would have worked in Afghanistan depending on where he is directing blame.

By September 2012, when violent anti-American protests swept the Muslim world, claiming the lives of four members of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya and dozens of demonstrators, it became clear that we had gotten the broader Middle East badly wrong.

No kiddin'! It doesn't take this guy long to look at a horse shoe! After studying a hundred years of history this event makes it all clicked into place for this foreign policy expert.

 The American people are tired of war -- rightly so -- and they welcome talk of leaving the region. The president has marketed the U.S. exit from Afghanistan as a foreign-policy coup, one that will not only unburden America from the region's problems but also give the country the freedom it needs to pursue other, more pressing national security concerns.

This is an illusion. Ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the broader, ill-defined "war on terror," is a very good idea, provided it is done properly and without damage to U.S. interests or the region's stability. But we should not kid ourselves that the rhetoric of departure is anything more than rhetoric; the United States is taking home its troops and winding down diplomatic and economic engagement -- but leaving behind its Predators and Special Forces. We should not expect that the region will look more kindly on drone attacks and secret raids than it did on invasion and occupation.

Yeah, we sure don't want to damage the regions stability and leaving is a good idea, but it has to be done right. That is always the argument of those who want to leave later [if they even honestly want to leave ever] rather that sooner. That, and that U.S. interests, no matter how poorly conceived, must always be pre-eminent.

During the 2009 strategic review, Clinton had supported the additional troops but was not on board with the deadline Obama imposed on the surge, nor did she support hasty troop withdrawals.

Clinton thought those decisions looked a lot like cut-and-run and would damage America's standing in the world. Add this to where she came out on a host of other national security issues -- including pushing Obama to go ahead with the Abbottabad operation to kill or capture bin Laden and breaking with the Pentagon to advocate using U.S. air power in Libya -- and it is safe to say she was, and remains, tough on national security issues.

Yes, it is safe to say that Clinton covered all the bases on various Afghanistan proposals but most important for Nasr to say here, using cliche talking points like 'cut and run' is that she is "tough on national security issues".  That will be important background if she is healthy enough to run in 2016. It is obvious that Nasr hopes that she will be.

Tha main thesis is that Holbrooke and Clinton were for diplomacy, the particular diplomacy which Nasr supports, but both internal and external cynical politics over-ruled that wisdom and the fault for that lies with Obama. That wise diplomacy is described as best leveraged by a big military commitment and a willingness to convince the world we will persevere forever with military engagement if necessary in our quest to disentangle.

The White House worried that talking to the Taliban would give Holbrooke a greater role. For months, the White House plotted to either block reconciliation with the Taliban or find an alternative to Holbrooke for managing the talks. Lute, who ran AfPak at the White House, floated the idea of the distinguished U.N. diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi leading the talks. Clinton objected to outsourcing American diplomacy to the United Nations. Pakistan, too, was cool to the idea.

Notice that here it is Clinton who objects to diplomatic outreach by a U.N. representative and it could be easily believed that her objections were because any credit for any success would not be laid at her feet unless her team was seen to be in total control. Plus, The "stop Holbrooke" campaign was not only a distraction -- it was influencing policy. That is almost treason. They let their bickering influence policy? I'm shocked, shocked I say. Politics influencing policy? Definitely beyond the pale. Holbrooke must lay uneasy.

The Obama administration's approach to reconciliation, however, is not exactly what Holbrooke had in mind for a diplomatic end to the war. Holbrooke thought that the United States would enjoy its strongest leverage if it negotiated with the Taliban when the country had the maximum number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan. He had not favored the Afghanistan surge, but once the troops were there, he thought the president should use the show of force to get to a diplomatic solution.

Again, and again, let's have it both ways.

THE TRUE KEY TO ending the war, Holbrooke often told us, was to change Pakistan. Pakistan was the sanctuary that the Taliban insurgency used as a launching pad and a place to escape U.S. retaliation. But to convince Pakistan that we meant business, we first had to prove that America was going to stay.

So, Holbrooke died and his secret plan that would probably solve the situation died with him, but we do know that he believed that to get out of Afghanistan we had to convince Pakistan that we were going to stay. Nobody said that diplomacy was easy.
And what did 'staying' mean?  As Nasr says:

Already in 2009, half the U.S. diplomatic mission in Pakistan worked on intelligence and counterterrorism rather than diplomacy or development. The U.S. Consulate in Peshawar was basically bricks shielding antennas. And it paid big dividends. The CIA collected critical intelligence in Pakistan that allowed for drone strikes against al Qaeda targets and on more than one occasion prevented a terrorist strike in the West. So the Obama administration began carrying out drone strikes in Pakistan on an industrial scale, decimating al Qaeda's command-and-control structure and crippling the organization.

And it paid big dividends and on more than one occasion prevented a terrorist strike in the West. really? What were the big dividends? What terrorist strikes in the West were prevented?

During my early days working with Holbrooke, when we were crafting a new Pakistan policy, one of Holbrooke's deputies asked him, "If we are going to seriously engage, shouldn't we make some changes to the drone policy, perhaps back off a bit?" Holbrooke replied, "Don't even go there. Nothing is going to change."

 The new paradigm that was to be developed outside the box, while ignoring all thinking currently being done by the dead-end non-thinkers in Washington, but was not to even consider trying to change the drone strike policy which is so obviously causing severe blow-back. "Don't even go there". Brilliant!

In one of Clinton's first meetings with Pakistan's military and intelligence chiefs, she asked them point blank to tell her what their vision for Pakistan was: "Would Pakistan become like North Korea? I am just curious. I would like to hear where you see your country going." The generals were at a loss for words.

Wow! That is tough. She asked them point blank, right to their surprised faces. She asked a question that tough. Point blank. They couldn't even respond. The Iron Maven puts them on the spot big time. I bet she even frowned at them.

After the 2011 bin Laden operation in Abbottabad, Washington was in no mood to soft-pedal what it saw as Pakistani duplicity. Pressure started to build on Pakistan. Gone were promises of aid and assistance, strategic partnership, and long-lasting ties. The administration threatened to cut aid and shamed and embarrassed Pakistan through public criticisms and media leaks. Some leaks retold familiar tales of Pakistan's reluctance to cooperate; others revealed dark truths about how Pakistani intelligence had manipulated public opinion and even gone so far as to silence journalists permanently.

Yeah, some leaks retold familiar tales of Pakistan's reluctance to cooperate; others revealed dark truths about how Pakistani intelligence had manipulated public opinion and even gone so far as to silence journalists permanently. Those dirty dogs. How ya gonna deal with folks like those? Folks whose intelligence services do dark deeds and who manipulate public opinions? Do they really even try to silence journalists? I wouldn't put it past them. Do they even crack down brutally on whistle blowers? Dothey have no democratic values at all regarding free speech and truth-telling that might be encouraged to flourish so that democracy could itself flourish? Did our governments leaks of their duplicity really make them ashamed of themselves? Might our own government ever have that same reaction" Na, I doubt it.

Mine is a meandering, disjointed, poorly constructed critique of a poorly constructed excerpt from what is probably a poorly written book. While I suspect that much of what is asserted in the article is correct, that does not save it from being one sided propaganda which is a part of the political infighting, and which is at the same time a comically ironic example of the very kind of political infighting which he blames for the failure which is featured in his title.  In my opinion, Nasr is revealed in this instance to be a political and intellectual hack who is trying to sell a book which will make him a few bucks and burnish his history and pad his resume. I don't think he offers much valuable insight. I am for diplomacy first and second but I would appreciate much better information than is provided here on what that better diplomacy might offer.

Arta, I am not supposing that you support everything or even anything in this article. I'm glad you linked to it and I am glad that I read it.