Our Man in Afghanistan

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke is a man in a hurry, working in a land that can seem to defy time. His mission, as special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, is to achieve some measure of success in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and to prevent a nuclear-armed country from collapsing. He feels that he's under pressure to achieve something positive by next summer. If he can't, he says, political support in the United States will slip away. The question is whether Holbrooke's relentlessness—his sheer force of -personality—will make a real difference in countries that can seem immune to progress.

"Impatience will not solve this problem," says journalist Ahmed Rashid, who has written three respected books on the region. "And Holbrooke is an impatient guy." At least one Pakistani official has felt that firsthand. "He'll call you up, and after two minutes he'll say, 'I've got to go, I've got to go,' " recalls the official, who did not want to be named discussing personal interactions. "He's always got nine other things he's working on at the same time, texting people in the middle of a conversation." One of Holbrooke's close advisers, speaking in confidence about his boss, doesn't disagree: "Yes, he does kick Pakistan's ass, and they don't like it." Holbrooke's particular head-knocking skills may not be perfectly cast for this job, the hardest of his life. On the other hand, who else has the right mixture of grandiosity and smarts to even try?

Holbrooke doesn't look anything like an ornately costumed diplomat as he pads, barefoot, around his government jet, wearing yellow pj's, and eating a banana. Still, in some ways, he is a throwback to the old days of the ambassador plenipotentiary—the type of envoy whose word was imperial writ in far-flung places. True, Holbrooke is encumbered by a ubiquitous, buzzing cell phone and required to work with about eight different government agencies (State, Defense, Treasury, CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, Agriculture, and USAID). But he has a way of making everyone work for him. Last week The New York Times reported that the Defense Department had a plan to reform Afghanistan's prisons. The idea (as Holbrooke is not shy about admitting) came from him. Holbrooke had been appalled to discover that jihadists were allowed to keep their cell phones in the local jails. Upon taking his assignment last winter, Holbrooke decided that eradicating poppy crops in Afghanistan to stop the opium trade was futile and only hurt poor farmers. It was only a matter of time before USAID, intelligence, and the military changed their strategy to target only big-time opium dealers.

Holbrooke has been studying great envoys "all my life," he says. In high school, he wrote a paper on Lord Kitchener, the much-beribboned proconsul sent to Sudan by Victorian Britain. "He was a pompous windbag," jokes Holbrooke. At 21, fresh out of Brown, Holbrooke joined the Foreign Service. This was 1962, during the "twilight struggle" of the Cold War, when American hubris was peaking. As a young State Department officer in the Mekong Delta, Holbrooke encountered the CIA's Col. Edward Lansdale—the model for Colonel Hillandale in the novel The Ugly American. He says today we would describe Lansdale as "sort of a successful con man."

Holbrooke learned from watching failure. He notes that one of his heroes and role models, Ambassador Averell Harriman, whom Holbrooke admiringly describes as "tenacious," failed to get a peace treaty with the North Vietnamese. He dislikes Vietnam analogies to Afghanistan but keeps coming back to them in conversation. Choosing his words carefully, he says, "I don't feel burned by Vietnam. I feel informed by it."

The clearest lesson Holbrooke took from Vietnam is that military success is useless without winning the hearts and minds of the population. He is obsessed with the problem of civilian casualties in Afghanistan—it is "the big issue," he says, "which could cost us the war." Of the hour and a half he recently spent with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new ground commander, most of the time was consumed by Holbrooke hammering away at "civ cas," as Holbrooke calls them, using the military acronym. (An Air Force general who declined to be identified says that McChrystal was sensitive to the issue before he talked to Holbrooke.)