Richard C. Holbrooke’s Diary of Disagreement With Obama Administration - nytimes

WASHINGTON — In the summer of 2010,Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative forAfghanistan and Pakistan, began recording a secret audio diary, detailing his frustrations with a White House that he believed was too willing to listen to the military and too often mistook domestic political calculations for strategic thinking.

“That really is the way the White House thinks,” Mr. Holbrooke said in an Aug. 12, 2010, entry in the diary, the existence of which has not been previously reported. “They don’t have a deep understanding of the issues themselves, but increasingly, they’re deluding themselves into thinking they do.”

Mr. Holbrooke, a diplomatic troubleshooter who worked for every president since the 1960s, was widely known to be in conflict with the Obama administration. But the audio notes that he dictated on a near daily basis from August 2010 until his death at age 69 from a torn aorta in December of that year provide an usually candid, if one-sided, record of the internecine battles that troubled the administration over the direction of the war in Afghanistan.

The notes are featured in “The Diplomat,” a documentary about Mr. Holbrooke that will have its premiere on Thursday at the Tribeca Film Festival and will be shown on HBO in the fall. The New York Times viewed the film before its release.

The notes lay bare Mr. Holbrooke’s doubts that President Obama’s decision to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan would lead to an end of the war. Mr. Holbrooke was instead drawing up plans to strike a bargain with the Taliban and Afghanistan’s meddlesome neighbors, including Iran and Pakistan.  Read More at NYT

Diplomat’s Diary of Disagreement With White House