The eulogizing began immediately: The White House, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sen. John Kerry and others all celebrated his career and mourned his death.
There was almost no talk yet about a new representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, although that topic will surely creep up in the coming days.
President Barack Obama on Tuesday met behind closed doors with his National Security Team to review the administration's policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan — one day after the unexpected death of his diplomatic point man for the region.
Holbrooke's successor as Washington's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan will inherit intractable problems that not even the "Bulldozer" of US diplomacy was able to resolve.
Obama's monthly review of policy toward the pivotal region continued Tuesday with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon among those in attendance.
A long-awaited US military analysis of the war in Afghanistan is expected later this week, a year after Obama ordered additional US troops to the country as part of a strategy that could bring some forces home as soon as July 2011. Officials have said the goal is to end combat operations in Afghanistan in 2014.
Obama is scheduled to publicly discuss that review on Thursday.
Holbrooke was perhaps best known for his role as the chief architect of the Dayton Peace Accords — signed Dec. 14, 1995 — which ended the deadly ethnic conflict that erupted during the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Many are wondering how the US will end the vacuum left by his death: “Holbrooke's death could have a profound impact on the administration's efforts to implement aspects of its strategy for the war in Afghanistan, which relies not just on military gains but development assistance and diplomatic initiatives with the governments in Kabul and neighboring Pakistan that had been his principal focus,” noted Rajiv Chandrasekaran in Tuesday’s Washington Post.
But Holbrooke, as the US ambassador to the United Nations in the late 1990s, was often criticized during his long career. In October 2000 he insisted that a UN Security Council resolution criticizing the excessive use of force by Israeli occupation forces against Palestinian demonstrators revealed an unacceptable bias that put the UN “out of the running” in terms of any contributions to the peace process.
Holbrooke's assertive style worked in the Balkans, but it brought perils for diplomats in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where long stretches of chatting and tea-drinking are the norm, which were not his forte.
His efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan lead to tense disagreements with leaders of those nations and fellow US officials, and Holbrooke never stopped trying to address the insurgencies that threaten both countries.
He noted that dealing with so many foes on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border made the process difficult.
"A peace deal requires agreements, and you don't make agreements with your friends, you make agreements with your enemies," he said.
Holbrooke mentioned a range of militant groups, such as the Afghan Taleban, the Pakistani Taleban, the Haqqani Network, and Lashkar-e Taiba, and said that "an expert could add another 30."
"There's no Ho Chi Minh. There's no Slobodan Milosevic. There's no Palestinian Authority. There is a widely dispersed group of — of people that we roughly call the enemy. There's Al-Qaeda, with which there's no possibility of any discussion at all."
He was frank in his assessments about the region and officials there regarded him as abrasive, including Afghan President Hamid Karzai. In April 2009, there were reports of a heated argument between Holbrooke and Karzai after charges of fraud surfaced in the Afghan presidential election.
Karzai's office issued a brief statement Tuesday, describing Holbrooke as "a veteran and seasoned diplomat who had served greatly to the government and the people of the United States."
Afghanistan was on his mind the last moments he was conscious: “You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan,” Holbrooke told his Pakistani surgeon at George Washington University Hospital as he was being sedated for surgery, according to a senior administration official.
That was one of his final comments, the official said.
