 Good afternoon. Thank you for coming to the New America Foundation. My name is Peter Bergen. This is a really wonderful event that we're going to have today for remembering Ambassador Holbrook and also the book The Unquiet American, which I think may be one of the best book titles of all time for anybody who knows Ambassador Holbrook. And we have a wonderful panel to talk with us today. We're going to be starting with Kathy Martin, who was, of course, married to Ambassador Holbrook, who has been a long-term board member of New America, who has been essential to New America's growth over the past decade. The author herself of, she's just starting on her eighth book, which is going to be a memoir to some degree of her life with Ambassador Holbrook. And after that, we'll hear from Rufus Phillips, who was Ambassador Holbrook's first boss, who went to Laos in the mid-50s as a CIA officer, was essential to setting up the civilian support program in Vietnam, was an early kind of, one of the first people to warn President Kennedy that things were not going quite as everybody, some people were suggesting in Vietnam. Then we'll hear from David Road, who's, and also Rufus Phillips has this wonderful new book, relevant new book, Why Vietnam Matters, which Ambassador Holbrook wrote the forward to. Then we'll hear from David Road, who two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who knew Ambassador Holbrook, both in Bosnia and in Afghanistan, Pakistan. He'll focus on Bosnia. And then we'll hear from Alexander Evans, who's a British diplomat, who's now an academic at Yale. In fact, he's both an interesting kind of mix of both a diplomat and an academic, who worked for Ambassador Holbrook when he was special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. And finally, from Shamayla Chowdhury, who was a senior fellow here at New America, who was also director on the NSC for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and also worked for Ambassador Holbrook. So we have a wonderful, we're really looking forward to this. Thank you for all of you for coming and doing this. Thank you, Peter. Should we speak from there, or what is the? Stand up. Stand up? Oh, okay. No uncertain terms. Well, good afternoon. Thank you, Peter, for that wonderful introduction of a really superb panel. Thank you for assembling. I can't think of a panel more qualified to speak of the many facets of this man. It always takes one minute, and I'm fine. This has been a great adventure putting this book together, because to contain this large figure within covers is not an easy task, but I think we've come close to doing that. And I need to thank Samantha Power and Derek Chalet, who both have day jobs in the White House for doing this in record time and for rounding up writers of the quality of David Road and the others, Strobe Talbot, John Alter, Roger Cohen, Richard Bernstein, et cetera. I had a minimal role. I wrote the introduction, and I was kind of a spur. But I just want to say a few words about the negotiator and the man. Many years ago, before I was married to Richard, the distinguished New York Times correspondent Richard Bernstein said I've only ever met one great man, and that was Richard Holbrook. And I said, really, why is that? And he said, well, because Richard Holbrook is changing the world. And after reading this book and after the terrible year that since he left, I agree with that. He did leave the world a different place than he found it in the following ways. Well, obviously, he ended Europe's nastiest war since the Second World War, which in itself is significant. But he also started Europe's most vibrant cultural center, which arguably the American Academy in Berlin is. But above all, I learned this past year, he changed the world by mentoring. He has left, I think his key legacy really, is that he left behind a generation of diplomats, of intelligence agents, CIA agents, humanitarian workers in the field who somehow were touched, transformed, inspired by Richard, and who will carry on that whole Brookian spirit. And what is that whole Brookian spirit? Well, Richard's brand of diplomacy was one human at a time. He was impatient with bureaucracy and with the endless diplomatic social niceties. Richard was about getting things done and about breaking down barriers between people and between cultures. The way he worked, and Shamile will tell you more about this, the way he worked, the AFPAC case, was a holistic approach. It was not about diplomacy. It was not about military. It was not about civil society. It was not about rebuilding Afghanistan's agriculture. It was not about empowering women. It was about all of that. And that's really, I observed him do that in the Balkans as well. The Dayton Accords was not about ending a war. Yes, it did end a war. But it was also about creating a new society, a new society which, however imperfect, thrives and has not reverted to those ancient ethnic hatreds that it was predicted it would revert to at the first opportunity. Not a shot has been fired in Sarajevo since 1995 in anger. So that was Richard's brand of diplomacy. And he left people to carry it on. And that, I cannot think of a better legacy than that. In recent days, there in reviews of the wonderful biography of George Kennan, there have been comparisons made between George Kennan and Richard Holbrook. And indeed they were both singular figures. And I suppose in common also neither one was Secretary of State. I would like to attack that bit of conventional wisdom about Richard's thwarted ambition for not becoming Secretary of State. Let me tell you, you don't get to be Secretary of State if the people that you back for president don't get to be president. The people that Richard backed as a Democrat were Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. So it's no mystery that none of them became Secretary of State. Richard was a very old fashioned public servant. And a president called and gave him an assignment. Richard said, I am there, sir. However impossible that assignment. And the last one was pretty close to impossible. But from what I understand, he's the things that are working on the ground there, including now finally the beginnings of negotiations with the Taliban were planted by Richard. So I think he was right to take that mission impossible and it wouldn't have occurred to me to discourage him from that. The other contrast with Kennan is that Richard was the world's most gregarious human being. George Kennan was a loner who has often been called a misanthrope and an elitist. Richard was the opposite of that. Plus Richard put human rights centrally in his brand of diplomacy, which for Kennan in some ways a more conventional and a more academic diplomat, human rights did not factor in. So I wanted to point that out. I also wanted to correct another sort of bit of conventional wisdom and that is that Richard was a kind of a bull in a china shop diplomat. Well, in fact, Richard spent a great deal of time cogitating his next move. He calibrated his moves quite precisely, even for the most part his famous eruptions were calculated for diplomatic effect, not always, but for the most part he was a disciplined thinker. And last summer, that is the summer before, I saw him when he would go into that think mode where he was unreachable, where he would kind of space out. I saw him working AFPAC, like a Rubik's Cube. And I said, what's going on there? And he said, I think I've got it. And I think I see a way to make the pieces fit. And I said, well, that's good news for all of us. Would you care to share that? And he said, no, I think I need to tell the president first. This was September 2010. And I'm not sure he did get to tell the president, but I hope so. Anyway, I am deeply grateful for the New America Foundation on whose board I proudly serve under the absolutely inspiring leadership of Steve Cole who honors us today with his presence. Thanks, Steve, for being here. Steve was just back from a great trip and has produced an absolutely fascinating and groundbreaking article in the current New Yorker about Mula Omar that I recommend. It's a great pleasure for me to be here with you and to talk about Richard. And after we hear from the distinguished panel, I hope we can exchange in a conversation and forgive my emotionalism. I'm Hungarian. Thank you. Well, that's a hard act. I think I was Richard's first boss, as many of you may know, but not all of you. And I need to set the circumstances under which this occurred. I had been asked by the Kennedy administration, and I was 32 at the time, to go out and see how the aid program, our economic and social assistance program, could be reorganized in Vietnam to support counterinsurgency. And at that time, I was no longer in the military or in the CIA. I was out in the private sector. And so I went out and what I found was that all of the assistance was concentrated in Saigon. And the aid mission, which had a little over 200 people in it, only three of which were outside of Saigon. Yet the whole insurgency and the whole basic problem in Vietnam was out in the countryside. So the plan that I came up with was essentially to turn the mission upside down to create a special office to put people out in the provinces who would be USAM provincial representatives working together with the province chief, Vietnamese province chief and a military advisor, and decentralized funding out there to actually support social and economic development down at the village level. And this was the program that Richard walked into. He came out in May of 1963. And I remember meeting him. He was this tall skinny, skinny kid with curly hair, who was impressed you as being very bright, but also brash, inquisitive. And so I sent him along with his companion, who also came out at the time to work with a regional representative we had. The way we set up was a very flat organization in contrast to bureaucratic hierarchies. We had the central headquarters in Saigon, which was very small, basically. And then we had some regional reps who were not directly in the chain of command. They were there to support the provincial reps. And then we had about 40 some odd people eventually down at the provincial level. And so I put him with one of the regional reps, and we really didn't have much of an orientation program. It was really learned by doing. Well, when he stepped off the plane in Saigon, he got a whiff of what this thing was all about because our executive officer went out to greet him and said, the first thing he said was, take off those ties and coats. This is a shirtsleeves outfit. And so they did. And the funny part of that is that about a week later, they paid an official call on the American embassy. And of course, they went down in shirtsleeves and they got chewed out for not appearing in ties and coats. Anyway, that was a little bit of the spirit of the place. And so he went around and observed what was going on. He obviously learned very rapidly. It turned out that the representative we had in a particular province down in the south was having problems with the province chief. And I tried to go down and straighten it out, but I couldn't. So I yanked him out. And then the thought occurred to me, well, we've got this, this young replacement, he's completely green. But if he's willing to go, I'll send him. So I called him in. And I told him this is a difficult problem and a difficult promise and a difficult promise, chief. Do you feel you can hack it? And he said, well, I'll give it one hell of a try. And so I said, well, you're it. And so I sent him down there. And he had to live like all the provincial reps on the local economy. The whole spirit of this outfit was very much like that of the Peace Corps, except it was in the war zone. And he started the programs we had had to do with building schools, with self help projects in the Hamlettson villages with with health. We helped train Hamlet militia for self defense. There was just a wide range of things that he was involved in. But he did it extremely well. And I'll never forget his coming back to Saigon, and giving me a briefing. And it was a straight on briefing that he thought he was making progress, but he saw a lot of problems. And I think that that kind of honesty was what was reflective of his career throughout the rest of his life. The other thing that I think is interesting is the kind of collegial atmosphere we had in what we call rural affairs. Because not only did we treat everybody was on a first name basis, but we treated our Vietnamese employees as colleagues. And that struck them as something different. And one of the things I'm very proud of is that one of our assistant provincial representatives who was a Vietnamese afterwards after fall of Saigon came to the US and became the first Vietnamese American elected official in the United States, a member of the city council of Westminster in California. And he ascribed his self confidence in in large part to this experience in working rural affairs. So that was a kind of spirit. And I think that Richard carried that spirit with them throughout the rest of his career. I know that some of us were concerned because we thought maybe he was over ambitious as he rose through the ladder. But I could see that he was ambitious to do something, not ambitious to be somebody. And he talked about that early experience has been in a similar one. And I think it was in that way, I think it was also in a way that he understood that these kinds of struggles, which are ultimately political in nature, decided out on the ground. They're not decided in boardroom somewhere else. And so whenever he went abroad, he would go down to the local level to try to find out what was really going on. And I ran into him. In fact, he invited me to a dinner for him in Cabo. The reason I was in Cabo is a long story, but there I was, I was a volunteer helping the Fair and Free Election Foundation of Afghanistan. But he invited me to this dinner, put me at his table. And during an emotional speech about what we were trying to do, and then talking about what he had learned from being out in the field, of course, he singled me out as he would every time I sat in an audience in which he was talking about something. And that was another, I think, very human quality that he had. He remembered his friends, he remembered his mentors, and he always kept in touch with them and would recognize them. And this is a quality that doesn't, is not common among a lot of people who achieve very high position. So in sum, I think that Richard's life trajectory reflected some of the qualities that we saw early on him, which became, of course, much grander and much more effective over time. And yet there was this human core to him. And I think what he really understood was these kinds of problems that we face in other countries are really about people above everything else. And he was a really a people person. Thank you. Hi. I had the luck of covering Richard as a journalist in, you know, I would argue his two most difficult diplomatic assignments. I was a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor in Bosnia when he arrived on the scene there. And then when he arrived in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I was working for the New York Times. I also have a special personal connection with him, and I'll describe later. I want to, there's a bunch of themes you're going to hear over and over again today, and Rufus and Katya have already mentioned them. What was amazing, I think, about Richard was that his diplomacy often was about individuals. He visited Bosnia as a private citizen first, and you may have heard this story. It's in the book. One of the reasons that he was so motivated about doing something with the war was that he actually met a man who had survived one of the camps that the Serbs had created. It was a Bosnian Muslim. Throughout his life, whether it was HIV positive women in Africa, he would meet individuals that would motivate him to develop pragmatic policies that would help change these situations. And the motor in Bosnia was this man he met, and then Katya talked about a moral threat, a caring about human rights, and a basic belief that the United States could be a force for good in the world. And that's really not in fashion these days. Frankly, post-Iraq, it's sort of, you know, chic, I would say, to think that the U.S. can't do anything positive in the world, and isolationism is much more accepted now. Richard, I think, opposed that view. We make many mistakes. We need to be much more humble, much more patient, and much more thoughtful about what we do and where we go. But I think one of the main lessons of this book and of his life is that we, you know, the United States, and even as individuals, you can do good in the world. When Richard arrived in Bosnia in 1995, then, working for the Clinton administration, as a reporter, I cannot tell you how hopeless the situation was. It was actually multilateralism at its worst. The head of the UN mission was Yasushi Akashi, a very cautious Japanese diplomat. A French general was the military commander of the UN mission, Bernard Jean Vieille, and they were completely opposed to the use of force. And, you know, one other area, and you should feel free to ask questions about this, was, you know, one question is what was Richard's view on use of force? There's questions. Shyamala might talk about his view on the surge in Afghanistan. The view I had very clearly in Bosnia was that he believed in using military force as a tool to move the parties in any conflict towards a diplomatic resolution. He was not a pacifist completely. He was also not a militarist. He knew that they were all tools to come together to hopefully end these conflicts. But we can take questions on that later. My personal link to Richard is that I am, in a sense, Ruvus is his former boss. I am, I guess, his favorite hostage. I was reporting on what turned out to be the worst massacre in Europe since World War II, the fall of Srebrenica. I found mass graves outside of the town of Srebrenica. This was a town that the United Nations had promised to protect. It had taken away the heavy weapons from the Muslims trying to defend the town, sent in several hundred poorly armed Dutch peacekeepers, and then made no effort whatsoever to stop the Bosnian Serb advance on the town. I had gotten in once to Bosnian Serb territory, found mass graves, and gotten out and written the story. I learned of more mass graves. Went in to confirm their existence. I had found survivors who described being taken to these places and somehow surviving during the executions. I was arrested at that second mass grave site. The really personal relationship to Richard and Katya as well, who at that point in 1995 was the head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, was that after I was detained by the Bosnian Serbs, my family and my editors from the Christian Science Monitor arrived at the Dayton Peace Talks and Mass. I had essentially created this nightmare for Richard, who already had this impossible diplomatic task of ending this war on the Balkans. He and Katya were tireless at pressuring Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to push the Bosnian Serbs to win my release. I was released because of their efforts after only 10 days. I was incredibly lucky. Literally, I'll never forget Milosevic's these very tall Serbian Interior Ministry troops sweeping into Bosnian Serb territory and picking me up and whisking me off to Belgrade and bringing me home. When I got home, my family regaled me with stories of Richard's very personal and almost physical diplomacy. He was constantly pressuring the Serbs. At that point, I think they would not acknowledge that they had me, so there was an initial push to get them a phone call from me. They described how I would physically loom over the different Bosnian Serb representatives at the talks. It was the vice president, a man named Nikola Koliowicz. It's difficult to describe it. My uncle describes it better, but Koliowicz was playing some sort of game about whether they would call or they would not call. One of the basic things the Serbs can understand is how could Holbrook care so much about one journalist. My uncle describes Richard picking up Koliowicz's hat and sort of toying with it in his hands. The combination of that and Richard standing over Koliowicz looming over him. It was some sort of veiled threat. You may have been there, but something like, you know, I'll take your hat hostage if you don't make this phone call happen. It was all part of this sort of incredible combination of intellect and charm and sort of physicality and tireless energy that he brought together. It worked in my case. He literally told Slobodan Milosevic that he was going to end the peace negotiations, freeze them until I was released. And that was sort of the key factor. And so was Kati's effort, defending me as a fellow journalist as well. Unfortunately, and I can talk about this later, I was kidnapped a second time during Richard's even more difficult assignment dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan. I was we were very lucky with the help of an Afghan colleague, I was able to escape from captivity. And I was flown to the US base in Bagram, Afghanistan. And I'll be honest, Richard teased me and sort of gave me a very hard time. After the Bosnia incident, we were actually sitting in a pew at a friend's wedding the summer before I went off to Afghanistan, I got kidnapped and I promised him it wouldn't happen again. My captors actually, the Taliban who had me took me into the travelers of Pakistan and they googled me. And I'll never forget early in January 2009, when I was a prisoner, they announced your best friends with Richard Holbrook. And I'd never mentioned Holbrook's name intentionally, I didn't want them to, they have these huge expectations what they could get for me. And what they had done was googled us and googled me and somehow and then also seen Holbrook's name in the news as the new special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. So when I arrived at Bagram, and I was told that Ambassador Holbrook was on the phone, and he wants to speak to you immediately. I was very nervous about the earful I was about to get. And that what I had done yet again at his is that when he already faced such incredible challenges. But instead, he was incredibly kind. And he used the seven months I spent with the Hakanis is an effort to better understand the Taliban. He just asked me questions when I got back to New York, you know, who are the Taliban? You know, why are they fighting and what do they want? I saw it as an example of maybe potentially Richard Holbrook mellowed over the years in terms of his reaction to the second kidnapping. But it was more a focus of his pragmatism. And I just want to go back to that that theme where he he just he was looking for solutions. He loved being in the field. He disdained the Washington bureaucracy. He wanted to solve problems he wanted to do, as Rufus said, and he was also driven by this this this morality. And one other thing is that he was and again in terms of our this this time we're in now, he was not a partisan. He worked with Republicans. There's a famous incident where he got Jesse Helms to pay, you know, the backdoos at the United Nations. If there was a Republican who questioned his actions, he didn't immediately question their intelligence, their morality or their patriotism. And I think that's something that's sort of sadly lacking from our politics today. And just lastly, looking at the book which came together beautifully, the best writing in it is from Richard himself. I hope younger Americans will see it as a sort of call to public service. I think he showed how much you can achieve as a public servant. And he sort of counteracts the cynicism I've talked about earlier. And I, you know, I just can't thank him enough for everything he did for me, which is not is a tiny thing compared to the tremendous contribution he made to so many people around the world and in the United States. Thanks. Well, we moved to the we moved to the 2000s. I was I negotiated a cunning 11 month sabbatical in 2009. After spending two years as a British diplomat in Pakistan, and I finally figured out how to spend five months first at Yale and then another sort of six months split between Oxford and Paris. And this is going to be my delicious year of writing and recuperating and thinking about the world. And it was not to be. Barely was I sort of four or five weeks into being at Yale. When I got a phone call from somebody who said, I think you need to think about going down to New York and meeting Richard Holbrook, which I then did. And when when he offered me a position as an advisor in his team at the state department, the principal reaction I got from people I knew in Washington, I'd worked in Washington before in the late 1990s, was commissuration. Most people leaned across and said, well, terribly sorry, it's going to be dreadful. Haven't you heard about what a horrible man he is to work for? He's beastly. Yeah, he's egotistical. He'll demand slavish loyalty. You really won't enjoy it. You'll have no influence. And it was striking just how negative an awful lot of people were. What they knew was the myths about Richard Holbrook, what they didn't know was the man. And it was striking too that one of the people who did know him very well took me aside and said, you will have a wonderful time and this is an important thing to do. And he said, there's one thing you need to recognize about Richard Holbrook. Everything that's written about him is true. And he paused for dramatic effect before repeating one word, everything. And the doomssters were wrong. And in fact, I worked for him for the final year of his life and he was never at any time unpleasant to me. So the myth of Holbrook, the bruiser, is incorrect. I rather like later on coming across a Henry Kissinger quote about Holbrook, which I think is quite apt. It sits on my wall at Yale and it says the following. Kissinger says, I yell at my staff but not at negotiators. Richard Holbrook probably is nice to his staff but yells at the people he negotiates with. And that also was not always true but I think he reserved most of his bark for people outside the group of people who worked for him or indeed the group of people who worked with him. There are five things I really deeply admired Richard Holbrook for and this is after reflecting on the period working in the State Department, particularly as a British person. The idea that you can bring in a random Brit to join a group of Americans to also join a group of people who were outsiders. He was and I think the first thing I admired deeply about him was his intellectual confidence. And that's not just about the ability to think intelligently about the world or about the policies you're dealing with. It's also having a confidence to invite external expertise and to have people around you who don't even share your views or each other's views about what policy course to take. And he wasn't frightened about that level of debate, that level of robustness in policy dialogue. And I think you compare and contrast that to many others who might have the intellectual capacity but wouldn't necessarily have the confidence to deal with that kind of level of debate. I think the second thing and this echoes what's already been said was his commitment to impact. He wasn't just interested in diplomacy for the sake of being a once upon a time a nice office in the State Department. It wasn't a particularly nice office when we were there. He was really interested in what effect would diplomacy have. And he was able I think to distinguish between the ritual, the routine and the real in diplomacy. He knew when routine and ritual had its part to play but he was very focused on trying to get to the real. How would you actually achieve something? That did mean him that he was somewhat intolerant let's say of bureaucracy and not always tolerant of some of the ways that people did things because that was a way that people did things at the State Department. I think the third thing is, and this is perhaps not being commented on so much, I think he showed enormous dignity when his critics inside the Beltway found ways to criticize his performance or his views. Usually unfairly. And I never heard him say anything mean about the people who were saying mean things about him. And that's a striking note of character I think. It's pretty difficult if your efforts are under attack, not to respond in kind, at least in private with the people you work with if not in public with others as well. I think the other thing was he's a role model for people who want to have a career in public affairs and I think now teaching students at Yale to think about careers in diplomacy whether with the United States or with international organizations or other countries. The model of a career in which he had such impact is a real kind of it offers you insights in a way of modeling a career that isn't just based on punching your ticket and getting an identity card to work in a particular bureaucracy. And finally he had what Isaiah Berlin always said was very important in any individual which is he had excellent judgment and I echo the point about that but he cogitated he did think about things. He held his cards to his close to his chest a lot of time so he wasn't necessarily going to reveal his game plan for solving the problem of the day or indeed the problem of the job. But he did think deeply about how to approach it. I think more over his life demonstrated two truths about US foreign policy. The first is that a revolving door really enriches policymaking. If it's used in the right way. If you have somebody like Richard who went off and did so many different things. But rather than just doing each thing in and of itself accumulated the contacts and knowledge and expertise and experiences and then use that in his subsequent public public roles. I think the other thing is how weak institutional memory can be in Washington and that's the negative consequence of a revolving door. And I think having somebody like Richard who was so conscious of the history of US foreign policy and engagement on a range of different issues. The history of US engagement in peace processes in a range of different places. And he was able to bring that knowledge to bear and also recognize when he didn't know but know who he could reach out to whether it was a journalist like David or others he could reach out to. There were of course things he wasn't so great at. He wasn't great at suffering bureaucrats. He didn't always have patients for paper warriors or plodders. And that occasionally showed. But I think his strengths massively outweighed those weaknesses. And actually you want somebody like Richard Holbrook when you're dealing with a problem as complex and as challenging as Afghanistan and Pakistan has been for the United States in recent years. So in conclusion I think Richard Holbrook was a statesman not a bureaucrat. And we should celebrate him for that. And I would say at a personal level I miss him. So I met Richard during his first day as a strap at the State Department. And he had requested a briefing from the Pakistan team and had specifically asked for desk officers to to participate. I was one of those desk officers. And this is something that he was known for. He didn't want to talk to the bosses. He wanted to talk to the people who he knew were working on the issues day to day twenty four seven thinking about these things. Ready to staff ready to brief. So I was one of those fortunate or unfortunate folks. And I have to admit I was nervous. As Alex mentioned there are all these stories floating around about him. One I can remember is that he threw a shoe at someone. Everyone knows the story. And I don't know if it's true or not. But so you know as I was preparing for the briefing. You know I had various colleagues come by my office and say you know he threw a shoe at someone. So just be careful and people were scaring us. So I was nervous. But I prepared and I planned and I studied with my colleagues. And but only when I met him did I realize how much more nervous I should have been. He was a very daunting figure as all of you know. He physically towered above most people and a casual glance from him was by no means casual. He could see right through you and know exactly what you were thinking and maybe know what you were thinking. You know five steps ahead. And he always asked the question that you couldn't answer or the question that you didn't want asked. So I thought OK I can fight fire with fire. I know how to deal with a person like this. So in the briefing he asked very provocative questions and I offered provocative answers. And for those of you who don't know the State Department is not a place where that's exactly discouraged. But it's rarely it's rarely rewarded there. So Holbrook rewarded me by giving me more work. I went home that day and I got a call inviting me to participate in another briefing the next day on Pakistan this time with Secretary Clinton. So I had more homework to do and I was yet I was nervous again. And during the briefing with the Secretary I found myself speaking up again. I just couldn't help it. There was too much to say about the State of Affairs when it came to US Pakistan relations. And this time around I was yet again rewarded with more work. I received an offer the next day to join the Secretary's policy planning staff. And so after obviously I accepted the position and after accepting the position I recalled how Ambassador Holbrook had shot me a huge thumbs up after the briefing. This was essentially his silent approval for speaking up. It had paid off. I had gotten a much better job and he had clearly set me up. So it was just a matter of being in the right place and the right time with him. And he might just change the course of your career or your life. And I thought you know to think he did this with dozens of folks over the course of his career for so many of us from Vietnam to New York to the Balkans Afghanistan Pakistan and now Washington D.C. But these moments of opportunity as we all know did not come free. There was a huge service fee and a rather hefty one at that. So working for him was not very easy especially on Pakistan. The issues were challenging and working for him was just as challenging. And I think if you look at the AFPAC essays in the Unquiet American they clearly indicate that he had a full grasp of the challenges that were coming from Pakistan and the failures of U.S. diplomacy in the region well before he had his job as SRAT. And so he had been waiting on the sidelines for so long that when he finally jumped into the ring he was moving too fast for the bureaucracy to catch up. No idea was revolutionary enough and no and no approach was ambitious enough. He seemed to be telling us at the State Department at the State Department that we simply weren't good enough and we weren't working hard enough to take on the task at hand. He was saying that Pakistan and Afghanistan was a unique problem set and it required an even more unique set of solutions and we had been ignoring that for years. And I think he was right. His public service record on the U.S.-Pakistan relationship specifically tried very hard to offer that unique set of solutions. Unfortunately he wasn't able to see that through. But given the terrible state of affairs between the two countries right now I thought it might be useful to revisit two important strategies he deployed in hopes of offering some guidance for the future. First develop personal relationships with your counterparts at any expense even at the expense of your own patients. Now this might sound contradictory to Holbrook style especially when you look at AFPAC and there's reporting on his difficult relationship with President Karzai. I saw something very different time and time again I saw him throwing himself at people that he knew he was in conflict with or were difficult to work with or simply did not like him. But he knew he had to do it to achieve the broader policy goal. The U.S.-Pakistan relationship today could afford to rebuild some of those personal relationships. Second take action and responsibility when the policy heads in the wrong direction. A lot of this Richard did behind the scenes and no one really saw it. He worked tirelessly to troubleshoot the many problems in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. The government in Pakistan was very weak. Civilians were weak especially as it related to you know helping the United States promote certain issues and interests. One example is the Kerry Luger Berman legislation. This package was intended to be a very historic piece of legislation focused on the Pakistani people but it became a central conflict between the Pakistani civilians and the military. And for those of you know the legislation the military was criticized in the legislation. They felt very threatened by it. There were conditions and what we saw happen in Pakistan was that the military put the pressure on the civilians in response. So instead of letting this problem fester in this already very negative space Richard did something else because he knew letting the problem fester would not advance U.S. interests. He worked very closely with the leadership in Pakistan, talked with Foreign Minister Koreshi who took an emergency trip to Washington to iron out the details with the State Department and Congress so that he could take something more palatable back to his government. Now some may call this meddling it's not our business this is a domestic issue but I call this cleaning up your mess and some of it belonged to others. It wasn't all Richard's mess but he had he felt a strong sense of responsibility to fix this particular issue because if he didn't it would affect all these other issues that were important to the United States. So criticisms of the legislation aside it eventually did stabilize the situation. And I think this is particularly important now it's a huge stark contrast to this past November's NATO strike where neither the U.S. nor Pakistan have yet to give a clear statement on the situation. The conflict has dragged out even until this week when the Pakistani government has denounced the official U.S. findings and the U.S. has yet to formally apologize for the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers. And I don't think Richard would be surprised by the current state of affairs. He already knew when he worked on there's an essay in the Unquired American in the Washington Post from 2006 the one on Afghanistan the long road ahead. He knew when he wrote that that the United States would be in Afghanistan for a long time. And a large part of that was because of the enormous crisis in U.S. relations with Pakistan. And even though President Obama has announced an initial drawdown of troops in Afghanistan we still don't know for sure how long we will be in the region nor how to truly address the Pakistan problem. So hopefully we all have a little bit of Holbrook left in us those of us that still work on U.S.-Pakistan relations. So we can start fixing this very important relationship. Thank you very much. So we'll open it to questions and if you have a question just wait for the mic. Where is the microphone? Oh, maybe we don't OK, OK, OK. Go ahead. The differences in the roles in the Secretary's state versus state ambassadors and what circumstances does one supersede the other or if possible come to conflict with different approaches to the same problem? I'm happy to answer it. I think it's a. The Secretary of State is the boss. The diplomats, the ambassadors work for the Secretary of State. So there's a very clear hierarchy once once the policy is set by the secretary by who ultimately gets who ultimately collaborates with the president and the National Security Council. The the ambassadors carry carry out that that policy. Obviously, personal relationships are enormously important. And in the specific case of Richard, he had a very close relationship with with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. So there was a there was a great deal of collaboration between the two of them. I think I think Hillary had much to do with with Richard getting this this job, which was arguably President Obama's most challenging diplomatic assignment, which he gave to a man he didn't have any personal relation prior personal relationship to. So but but the the Secretary of State is is ultimately the boss. So raise your hand for in the back, Jennifer. If you could just identify yourself in your affiliation, that would be great. Thank you. I'm Zach Bogovsky from the United Nations Information Center. And I will direct my question to Miss Martin. What was the attitude of Mr. Holbrooke towards the United Nations and how satisfied was he serving as an ambassador in the United Nations? Richard considered the United Nations absolutely indispensable to the world and considered it an imperfect organization as how could it not be imperfect when when it's only as strong as it's hundred and ninety three, I believe now, member states want it to be. He absolutely loved his his two years as ambassador and considered it probably the most fun he ever had in in in public service. We we we had a great time. We we visited 15 African nations on one on a single trip. And it was during that trip that that that Richard was struck by the unbelievable tragedy of HIV AIDS and then succeeded upon returning to the Security Council in in making a health issue, an agenda issue for the Security Council for the first time. And that has radically altered the way the UN deals with HIV to this day and has had much to do with with with turning that that epidemic around. So it was it was it was a great run. He also got as as as David mentioned, he also got the arch enemy of the United Nations, the Republican Senator Jesse Helms to to come to the UN and to and and ultimately to to to pay nine hundred million dollars in in back dues that the US shamefully owed the UN. So it was again, as as so often with Richard, it was a it was a brief period, but an intense period and and one that was that was really focused on on achieving very concrete results in a in a very short time. And that was kind of Richard's specialty. My name is Tara McKelvie and I'm a correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast. And I wanted to ask you, I remember I was in Pakistan around the time after the floods and Richard Holbrook was very excited about the possibility of building US-Pakistan relations from the development work that was being done. I want to know if you could tell me what he was worried about about Pakistan, what he talked about you know, in the past year. So maybe that will give us some indication of what to look forward or not to Dredd. I have a mild constraint, which is I'm still serving British officials, so which means I can say nothing in particular but say it extraordinarily well. But I think I think on Pakistan, I mean, I think what was interesting about his approach to Pakistan was a, his curiosity. I mean, he was really interested in understanding not just Pakistan as it is now, but Pakistan as it was and the sort of successive debates about the US-Pakistan relationship and about democracy in Pakistan. I think he emphasized on the positive side obviously things like responding to the floods, but also this intimate, personalized diplomacy with Pakistan's civilian leaders as well as the military. He was pragmatic about the role of the army in Pakistan. He realized that the army in Pakistan was a presence, an institutional presence that was perhaps outsized. But he was also very emphatic about the relationship needed to be with civilians and the civilian leadership in Pakistan. I think he shared the same worries about Pakistan that everybody has in Washington. But he was conscious of the need to actually have a substantive dialogue in private with the Pakistanis and that actually private diplomacy rather than megaphone diplomacy might not solve all the problems with Pakistan but it did at least allow you to have a substantive policy discussion that could perhaps lead to resolution in time. Just to piggyback off of what Alex said because I am free to speak. I've left the US government. Richard used to describe the relationship with Pakistan as two sets of issues. There are issues that are above the waterline and below the waterline and you have to focus on both of them and if done well and correctly, they reinforce each other. What does that mean? So all of the issues that are kind of above the waterline are development issues and responding to crises day to day, aid legislation. These were all things that he knew were important because the relationship was important for other reasons as well, the issues below the waterline which were predominantly security issues, counter-terrorism, the need for Pakistan's cooperation on US interests in Afghanistan and you couldn't have one without the other. You couldn't feasibly ask for Pakistani cooperation on al-Qaida and fighting the Taliban if you didn't address the strategic interests of the country writ large and I think that was the right approach and that will continue to be the right approach whether we're able to actually implement that and move forward within the timeframe that is beneficial to US interests or Pakistani interests. I think that remains a question but I think he was well before his time on this one and I think it's because, and you see it in the book, he had been thinking about these issues for so long, years before and he was able to identify the weaknesses and the vulnerabilities on American diplomacy in Pakistan and in the region and where we needed to focus on and that's why when he came in, he came in so strongly on the relationship side of things. I used to sit in his office and he would call 10 different people all at once while he was having two meetings with us and two separate meetings in the office and calling President Zardari or talking to the ambassador or calling General Petraeus in Afghanistan and some Pakistan related issue. I mean, this was his way of managing a very complex set of issues that were above and below this waterline. Now, in the absence of somebody doing that, it's very hard to manage this type of relationship and sometimes you don't have that type of person and you're lucky if you do and I think when Richard passed away, we really saw it as a unique set of problems requiring a unique set of solutions but it also requires a unique interlocutor and that's who he was indeed and those of us that work on these issues on US-Pakistan relations, it requires a lot of patience and it requires a long-term approach and he had that, ironically enough, for somebody who a lot of us thought was not patient and everything was urgent for him. I think he had that forward-looking vision which you need with a country like Pakistan and I would argue with a region like South Asia. That was beautifully expressed and I just wanna say that Richard treated people with dignity. He did not believe in humiliating people. He believed that every culture deserved to be treated with dignity and he felt that of course Pakistan was a troubling and troublesome ally but that we had no choice but to be intensely engaged and you don't pick your friends in the field. You are dealt a certain set of cards and you have to work them and I know that the day after the Bin Laden assassination, Richard would have been on a plane to Pakistan and he would have been all over that country and working, he knew everybody up and down the chain of command and he would have been intensely refocused on that. You don't wait for a crisis before you present yourself. You preempt that crisis by personal dealings and plus he also didn't want Pakistan to feel that it was a transactional relationship. He wanted the Pakistanis to feel as he once put it to me that there was marriage at the end of courtship, that this was not about a one night stand. In other words, it was a friendship of equals, even if it wasn't. I just wanted to ask Farah Ifshahane who is a distinguished member of parliament in Pakistan and also the spokesman for President Zidari and also the wife of Ambassador Hussain Akhane who is now of course in Pakistan because of the so-called MemoGate controversy and Farah, go ahead. If you had any kind of comments or observations. I just want to say that what everyone here has said about Richard, as a member of the Pakistani parliament, I had the honor and privilege of knowing Ambassador Holbrook at the Pakistani end as a member of President Zidari's team and I also knew him here in Washington as Hussain Akhane's wife and Ambassador Holbrook typified all that was grandest about America and his entire process, his way of dealing with Pakistan and wanting to bring a better relationship between those two is missed and felt painfully, I believe in my personal view, on both sides, no disrespect to anybody in their current positions but Richard broke all boundaries and he really did historic things and I was lucky enough to see a lot of that up close and he and his entire team really made a difference and I think the history books will reflect that. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, I'm Jeremy Harrington. I'm a graduate of the Fletcher School. I'm wondering about the panelists' recollections of Mr. Holbrook's views on US policy during the Vietnam conflict, where he saw the lessons learned, the mistakes, the missed opportunities and how those views evolved during the conflict and the lessons he took in its aftermath. I apologize for not reading his introduction to Mr. Phillips' book to kind of preface this question but I'm sure there are a lot of conversations that took place privately over the years. Richard had, I think, developed a pretty complex view of the old Vietnam social situation. He understood pretty quickly that once we became so directly involved with US troops that this was the situation that was not gonna work out, that if there was any chance that the South Vietnamese could have pulled themselves together and developed something in South Vietnam that the South Vietnamese people were supportive and were fighting for, that was one situation. But when we had essentially taken over the war, I think he saw that it was a situation that was not going to end well. He did everything he could to try to focus our attention in efforts in Vietnam on what was called the pacification side of the effort rather than to try to defeat the North Vietnamese militarily, which of course was an impossible task. I think that he probably would have agreed with an observation, although I never heard him say this exactly, that Maxwell Taylor made towards the end of his life, and that was that we were in a situation in which we didn't understand the enemy, we didn't understand our South Vietnamese allies, and we didn't understand ourselves, and by that, our own limitations. Thank you. My name is Zach Moldavium, an Afron journalist working with The Points of America. We talked about the negotiator, and I was in Afghanistan by the time Richard Horbrook was a special envoy for Afghanistan. He didn't talk to Taliban really, while he was negotiating somehow for the peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And I remember he had one of the most difficult relationship with President Karzai, particularly during the presidential election that were marred with fraud and other irregularities. I'm wondering if you have any reflections on his position, difficult position with Karzai, and being unable to talk to one side of the conflict was the Taliban. In Afghanistan, also people were saying at that time that there was no actually diplomacy on going in regards to Taliban. The trellis was the commander of ISAF, and that Biden, the military logic, was predominant. And in a way that wasn't leaving enough room for diplomacy to be part of the process, if you have any reflections on that. Thank you. You know, I mean, just for what it's, you know, I think that what we're seeing today with the Taliban establishing the office in Qatar, and I mean, right from the beginning, and correct me, I'm from Rong Alex, or Shamila, or Caddy, you know, one of the first things that Richard Horbrook did, even before he became special representative, was to bring Barney Rubin, who is arguably the world's greatest expert in Afghanistan. I was part of a task force at the Asia Society, even before Ambassador Horbrook was appointed special representative. And he was doing a lot of thinking about how to deal with the Taliban. And Barney Rubin is still the point person, as far as I can tell, for, and obviously much of this is, you know, for very good reasons, isn't widely advertised. Barney has been absolutely essential to the effort to bring not just the Taliban into the negotiations, but people who can deal with the Taliban. I mean, a lot of the problems that we've been having with this negotiation, we don't even know, I mean, we have a better sense now, perhaps, but who exactly are we negotiating with isn't very clear sometimes. I mean, for instance, somebody called Mullah Mansour, who turned out to be a shopkeeper from Qatar, was presenting himself as the number two in the Taliban. I think that sort of speaks for itself. So there was part of the problem was trying to identify the people in the Taliban that might actually speak for Mullah Omar. And I think to some degree, that has been sort of solved. But I think Richard was instrumental in laying the foundations for this process. Now, how the process will develop over time, I think is, we don't know. It took 30 years for the IRA to come to an agreement with the British. And in a sense, this is a much more complex conflict. But I think, Alex, you and Shamaila should chime in, but my impression very strongly is that this was one of Richard's Ambassador Holbrook's legacies was what we're beginning to see the germs of some kind of negotiation today. I mean, all I would have very briefly is, I can't comment on the relationship with President Ahmad Karzai, but I think he was very clear from early on that you require a political settlement in Afghanistan and a political settlement that involves regional partners. I think he was very clear about that vision. I think connecting back to the Vietnam analogy, he was repeatedly, I think, pains to say that Afghanistan is not Vietnam. This is not a direct analog because I think sometimes people attempted to see echoes of US foreign policy past in the present. But he was very interested in what lessons could you learn from the experience of Vietnam? And certainly one of those lessons, it seemed to be that political processes take a lot of time and they take a lot of preparation. And I think that echoes Peter's comments and comments that have been made in the book and by Catty and elsewhere, but this was all about the preparation for a political process. And hopefully we end up with a political process that yields a result. I just wanna add something about Hamid Karzai because Ambassador Holbrook told me in great detail rather directly, rather critical scene with Hamid Karzai, which took place as the very flawed election was happening. And he and Ambassador Eikenbrie went to Karzai and basically Karzai was saying, I've won. This was not all the returns that come in. And Ambassador Holbrook said, well, what if you don't get, I mean, what if it's below 50% and Karzai said, well, I already know it's 54%. He said, how do you know these are not all the returns have come in? And Ambassador Holbrook was very, very insistent with Karzai that basically not only would he be in contravention of his own constitution, but essentially the whole American project and the whole Allied project in Afghanistan would go south if he didn't sort of recognize the fact that there would have to be a runoff election. He was very, very firm with Karzai on this point. Of course, Karzai was quite resistant, but when it came to it, you know, Hammack Karzai did say, well, you know, yeah, we'll have to go to the runoff election. And as it happens, it never went to the runoff because Dr. Abdullah, who was the number two candidate, basically stepped aside. But I think part of the kind of, you know, the reason that there was tension between Hammack Karzai and Ambassador Holbrook was because there were reasons for the tension. It wasn't just that it was a difficult relationship, but there was sort of a substantive reason. I think that that was at the heart of this. And Cady, I don't know if you haven't. I would just like to ask which envoy or foreign minister has an easy relationship with Hammack Karzai? Perhaps. If I can just add, Richard Holbrook was following the policy of his superiors when he was sort of tough with Karzai on the election. He had clear instructions from Washington to do that. There was a belief, I think, at a higher level of the administration that there was a need to get tough with Karzai, that the Bush administration wasn't tough enough. It wasn't, this is one of those, again, those stories that somehow he's too abrasive. That wasn't what happened. And he wasn't super abrasive in that meeting. There were media accounts afterwards that exaggerated the level of the conflict. And in terms of negotiations, it's my understanding he supported negotiations all along. He was skeptical of the surge. He believed in an A surge, probably not one as large as it turned out to be, but in higher level officials did not wanna begin negotiations in 2009. They wanted to let the military effort play itself out. And he played his cards very close to his chest and he advised Secretary Clinton and the president when he could and he followed orders. And that doesn't fit the stereotype, but I think that's true. I'll just say one thing on the reconciliation issue. Before Richard came to the State Department, there was probably some discussion on reconciliation and the concept of talking to the Taliban, but it was not, you could say it wasn't socially acceptable or politically palatable. We just weren't there. And no one was willing or wanted to or ready to sell that concept. And so we saw it happening right before, we knew he was coming, but right before he started his job, this discussion started actually internally in the government and it had never happened before and it slowly became part of our psyche whereas before it never had been. And what I think Richard was trying to do was to sell this concept internally just like you have to sell any kind of war or any kind of political resolution or process. He, I think this was one of his main objectives in taking this job was maybe he wasn't going to be the negotiator, but this was to him an acceptable piece and we had to go there. The timing for that maybe, who knows? And these things do take a long time as Peter said and even now we shouldn't be, we shouldn't think that we're done. This could take 10 years, it could take 15 years, no one knows, but I would credit him with socializing at least the US bureaucracy on this concept. If it didn't translate when he went overseas, I think that's because of taking orders or following directives from his superiors. So. I'd like to comment on something. I think, well I'll just recount and this is nannied up. Last time I saw Richard was at a dinner for someone who'd been out in Saigon and it was held at the press club and there were a lot of press people who'd been out in Vietnam. So during the dinner we was all chit chat and recollections and a lot of funny stuff about what happened during Vietnam, but as we got up to go, I went up to him and I said to him, I said, Richard, does anybody at the top of this administration understand how long this is gonna take? And he said, he looked at me and he thought for a moment and he said, they're gonna learn the hard way. And so, you know, he was a realist and he'd gone through it with the North Vietnamese in Paris and he understood how long these things take with a very, very difficult opponent and with a essentially sort of vastly unglued situation in the country, you know, that you're trying to get into the negotiation process on both sides. So that's just a side comment, but. We have about five minutes so let's just maybe collect some questions and we'll let everybody. So, Jennifer, if you'd just collect, we'll just. Hi, my name's Dennis Grubb and I'm an ex Peace Corps volunteer and part of Richard's curricula is being the Peace Corps director in Morocco in the 60s after he finished in Vietnam as a pacification officer. And I'm wondering whether or not he recounted any of those stories about the Peace Corps to the panel because the pictures I love of Richard Holbrook are, you know, sleeves rolled up as you say, you know, just clogging, slogging along wherever and that reminds me of my Peace Corps days. So I wondered if he had recollected the stories to you all. Great, and just behind. My name's Jonathan Morgenstein and I kind of growing up was in my late high school college years during the Balkans and I always found inspiration since then in Holbrook's work. My question is, if any of you can recall in the last few years him looking back and saying, I wish I had done this differently at Dayton or is this, you know, looking at Bosnia and Kosovo and how it turned out, maybe we didn't fully finish the job and there's something else we could have done either at Dayton or since then. Thank you. I'm behind you, Jennifer. Oh, Daburdin, I came to know Richard in the last 10 years and he struck me as being a hybrid between Brzezinski and Kissinger. One thing Kissinger, I mean, deck dead, he traveled to the Gulf to places like Abu Dhabi and Qatar and he got the Abu Dhabians to really commit large resources for Pakistan and Afghanistan and it was due to the skill to the astuteness to his great mind that I think people should realize that his involvement was not just Afghanistan, Pakistan, he traveled, he spent lots of time. Keri, I'd just like to ask you a question from knowing Richard. He was one of the first American experts who began to question the policy on Iraq within two months. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah, good question, and then here in front. Stefan Brathwaite with the Brown University Alumni Club of Washington, DC. I'd like to thank you all for such touching remarks and assure you that the many in the Brown community share a sense of loss for Ambassador Holbrook's incredible service. My question touches on a different geographic zone which is Germany. I'm interested in any reflections you may have concerning his role with the Academy in Berlin. Thank you. Many of those seem to be directed for you. I think... Are we running out of time? We're kind of... One more, one more, okay? No. It's all in the back, there's no affiliation. Richard Holbrook leaves a rich legacy of accomplishments and a rich model for the good public servant. Is there some way to institutionalize this model and his attributes? Well, these are all great questions and I can't thank you enough for your continued interest and your continued memories and keeping him alive and the panel particularly has been extraordinary. I was coming from the first meeting this morning of the American Academy in Berlin Holbrook Center and so this has been a day drenched in Richard's memory so difficult but I feel that some of you share the loss and that's very helpful to me but this is a difficult day. On the subject of Morocco and the Peace Corps, he kept that very much alive and in fact took all of us, the family, on a Peace Corps kind of nostalgia tour several Christmases ago and we drove across the Atlas Mountains and you know what, even today there are people in the souk in Marrakesh who remember him, he was a great bargainer so we went into places and came back with, I could open a Moroccan bazaar from all the stuff that he negotiated for us so the Peace Corps was very important and in fact there is an effort to, I don't know if you're aware of this, to give a prize in his memory for someone who is serving in that mold. It's wonderful to see you old friend and on the subject of Iraq, Richard was absolutely appalled by the reckless execution of that war. He was in favor of, not Richard of course, unlike Bush administration senior officials, Rumsfeld, Powell, Cheney obviously and the president was not privy to intelligence. However, he felt that Saddam Hussein was a true monster and one of the great human rights violators of our time so therefore he was not opposed to deposing him for on that score but he was appalled at the arrogant lack of preparation for the post-war period and really that was a very painful time for him because he was outside the government unable to serve and watching this disaster unfold because of arrogance and lack of preparation. Let's see, what am I missing here? Brown University, that was lovely. Bosnia, yes, regret for Bosnia. I think he regretted that he agreed to the name, the use of the name Republika Srpska because that was so resonant with nationalism and a backward policy as opposed to healing and nationalism but under the circumstances and I was with him for much of the negotiation, there were so many players and you were dealing with some of the worst people in the world and to get them to agree to anything was not a foregone conclusion by any means. There were a number of times during those talks when it looked like nothing would come of them and in fact the night before the agreement was struck Richard instructed all of us to pack our bags because we were leaving and that was and within minutes bags were outside the American delegation's rooms and the Serbs who were the, actually it wasn't the Serbs who were the Recalcitrant ones at the last. Milosevic wanted a deal, it was the Bosnians who were the holdouts but there were so many pieces it was, I cannot tell you the complexity of those talks and how they were being written every night. The legal papers, the drawing up the boundaries, the drawing up how this new tripartite parliament would work. It was much more than just getting everybody to lay their weapons down. It was building a nation under very intense circumstances and I think he was, I'm happy to say that I did go to Sarajevo with him the year before he died for the first time and wow, that was something. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for coming and thank you to our panel to Rufus Phillips, David Road, Alexander Evans, Shamaila Chaudhary, and to Cady Martin. Thanks. Thank you.