"Don't call me Dick"

In one discussion about the tensions between Pakistan and India, Holbrooke introduced a new angle. "There's a global warming dimension of this struggle, Mr. President," he said.

His words baffled many in the room.

There are tens of thousands of Indian and Pakistani troops encamped on the glaciers in the Himalayas that feed the rivers into Pakistan and India, he said. "Their encampments are melting the glaciers very quickly." There's a chance that river valleys in Pakistan and perhaps even India could be flooded.

- Bob Woodward, Obama's Wars

Was he kidding? "He was not," Woodward reports, further explaining that Holbrooke was "trying as hard as he could to say something distinctive that would impress the president."

As absurd as it seems, while it wasn't a bulls-eye he was at least on target. The President outlined his priorities for the nation in a recent Rolling Stone interview: "It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election," he told Jann Wenner (who described him as speaking "with intensity and passion, repeatedly stabbing the air with his finger"). "Everybody out there has to be thinking about what's at stake in this election and if they want to move forward over the next two years or six years or 10 years on key issues like climate change..." Global warming is an outdated term - banished as surely as global war on terror from the White House stylebook. While perhaps not considered as "out of it" as then-National Security Adviser Jim Jones, Richard Holbrooke never really fit in with the kewlest of the kewl kidz in the Obama administration.

But that election belongs to the past now, too - as does (sadly) Obama's first envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. "Richard Holbrooke dies: Veteran U.S. diplomat brokered Dayton peace accords," reads the headline over Rajiv Chandrasekaran's well-crafted memorial to the man in Woodward's own Washington Post.

Mr. Holbrooke's most significant achievement occurred in 1995, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton, Ohio, when he forged a deal among bitter rivals to end three years of bloody sectarian war in the former Yugoslavia that killed an estimated 100,000 people.

The talks, which lasted 20 days, would not have taken place had he not spent three months shuttling among the principal Serbian, Croatian and Muslim leaders to cajole, arm-twist and threaten, while also employing the bone-jarring power of U.S.-led NATO airstrikes.

Perhaps that's a fitting epitaph for a man who died of a broken heart. It's certainly a testament to the persuasiveness of strategic bombing on modern nation-states lacking desirable natural resources and the ability to strike back. (Albeit a reminder that also raises the troubling questions where can you bomb stone age people back to, and why?)

That's a point with some bearing on his more recent challenges:

As Mr. Holbrooke was sedated for surgery, family members said, his final words were to his Pakistani surgeon: "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan."

Although the consequences of his forceful personality were laid bare in his efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan, leading to tense disagreements with leaders of those nations and fellow U.S. officials, Mr. Holbrooke never stopped trying to address the insurgencies that threaten both countries.

Fine phrasing for a requiem. Perhaps - given the circumstances - few could have done the job better. While others in the current administration could certainly claim to be Holbrooke's equals, when it came to Afghanistan few exceeded his ability to identify problems and recognize the difficulty of solving them. Maybe his death will spare him any additional tarnish from the eternal phase two of such operations: the assigning of the blame - but given the history (and eye towards the future) of the individuals comprising this particular "team of rivals" it's wise to acknowledge the likelihood of the opposite effect.

An example of never stopped trying, from Woodward:

Holbrooke had just spoken with Biden, who was pessimistic and more convinced than ever that Afghanistan was a version of Vietnam. Holbrooke, in a bleak mood himself, asked if there was an Afghan example of "clear, hold, build and transfer" actually happening.

Not yet, McChrystal said.

Was there a way to actually have a transfer? Holbrooke inquired. For example, in the three-month-old Marja operation involving 15,000 U.S., British and Afghan troops, was there a way to take out, say, one U.S. company made up of just several hundred soldiers and transfer their responsibilities to the Afghans? "It would prove the concept," Holbrooke said. "It would prove we are not trapped."

"That's a good idea," McChrystal replied. He paused, and thought hard for a long time...

...and then said "no." Those who believe in building for results will always butt heads with those who appreciate the importance of fabrication for show. Not long after that conversation McChrystal was out by presidential decree, now Holbrooke's voice will also be unheard during the December review. (Though perhaps Obama's Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, like Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, the Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan, had something prepared in advance. "Let's start building the scheduled strategic review," Woodward reports Lute told his team last May. "There's no reason to work the weekends in November... I can tell you what the outcome's going to look like.")

But to others the future seems less certain, and grim - so let's turn to the past, and happier times. The first example, from Chandrasekaran:

Soon after Hillary Clinton was elected to the Senate in 2000, Mr. Holbrooke became her self-appointed senior foreign policy adviser and, in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, he cast his lot with Clinton, hoping to become her secretary of state. When she lost the nomination, he sought to ingratiate himself with Obama's camp. But when Clinton got the job he wanted, she turned to him to help resolve one of Obama's most intractable problems.

Shortly after being appointed special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Holbrooke phoned Husain Haqqani, a casual acquaintance and the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. since since 2008. He invited him to lunch and was prepared to negotiate on the restaurant.

"I believe you are very media-savvy," Holbrooke said. "You and I should have lunch somewhere public so it gets reported in the newspaper, if you don't mind."

"I don't mind," Haqqani said.

What about the Hay-Adams Hotel across from the White House?
<...>
The northern view from the Hay-Adams Hotel second-floor dining room looks across Lafayette Square to the White House gates. In a touch of discretion, the elegant tables are spaced so that eavesdropping is nearly impossible. The Hay-Adams, as advertised, is a place to be seen, not heard...

The lunch ended after two hours. Holbrooke's strength, Haqqani realized, was his fierce and desperate desire to succeed. It wasn't clear to Haqqani who his primary contact would be on U.S. foreign policy toward Pakistan.

Yet Holbrooke had failed in one of his first missions - to get his tête-à-tête with Haqqani into the media. No journalists, bloggers or gossips reported on their lunch. Apparently, no one had noticed.

Perhaps it's late, but the least I can do is put that account into a blog post now. Likewise, this simple request seems easy enough to respect:

It wasn't until well into the Obama presidency that Holbrooke learned definitively how much the president didn't care for him. When the president had announced Holbrooke's appointment a couple of days into the administration, the two had a private moment.

"Mr. President, I want to ask you one favor," Holbrooke had said, expressing gratitude for the highly visible assignment. 'Would you do me the great favor of calling me Richard, for my wife's sake?" It was her preference. She disliked the name "Dick," which the president had been using.

At the ceremony, Obama referred to Holbrooke as "Richard." But later, the president told others that he found the request highly unusual and even strange.

"Holbrooke was horrified," Woodward recounts, "when he learned that his request - which he had repeated to no one - had been circulated by the president."

Still, compared to the man's last request, that seems simple enough to grant.

Postscript: updated official government version of Holbrooke's last words here and here. I guess his family's version got someone upset.