Although commentators reporting on the passing of Richard C. Holbrooke have
stressed his role as a representative of President Barack Obama in the
Afghanistan-Pakistan war theatre and his main prior exploit as a diplomat – the
imposition of the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the brutal war in
Bosnia-Hercegovina -- Holbrooke's legacy, regardless of the obituary rhetoric,
was an ambiguous one.

Holbrooke's "resolution" of the Bosnian war was emblematic of "land for
peace" through negotiations and concessions, the latter typically to be
delivered up by the victims of aggression. Indians worried that Holbrooke might
have asked their country to hand over Kashmir to Pakistan in exchange for a
promised abatement of Pakistani jihadism and of the unadmitted but obvious
support, by powerful elements in Islamabad, for the Afghan Taliban. Such a
bargain would have closely resembled the outcome Holbrooke pressed on the
Bosnian Muslims. In exchange for peace and protection in an enclave, and
promises of future reintegration, the Bosnian Muslims had to accept partition of
their native land.

Under Dayton, about half of Bosnia's territory was retained by the so-called
"Serbian Republic" established by invasion and terror, while another third, the
Croatian section of the so-called "Muslim-Croat Federation of
Bosnia-Hercegovina," has been the subject of a similar attempt at amputation.
The Dayton Accords did not dissuade Slobodan Milosevic and his clique from
undertaking a new effort at ethnic expulsion in Kosovo in 1998-99. That resulted
in, rather than a diplomatic deal, the U.S.-led NATO military campaign against
Belgrade in 1999. But many observers on the ground in the Balkans, in the direct
aftermath of Dayton, saw that without the immediate removal of Milosevic, Kosovo
would be the next target for aggression by Belgrade. Still, Holbrooke was
notably proud of his effort "to end a war" – the phrase he adopted as the title
for his memoir, published in 1998.

Almost sixteen years after Dayton, the Bosnian Serbs today are more, rather
than less, active in their campaign to carve up Bosnia-Hercegovina once and for
all, with, the Serbs hope, international assent. In both the Middle East and the
Balkans, "land for peace" has failed in the face of aggressive radicalism.
Bosnia-Hercegovina languishes in a swamp of corruption, high unemployment, brain
drain, and, in its Muslim area, new infiltration by well-funded Wahhabi
radicals.

Having gotten Milosevic to agree to Dayton in 1995, Holbrooke expressed a
peculiar myopia about the Serbian demagogue. After the arrest of Bosnian Serb
leader Radovan Karadzic in 2008, Holbrooke commented, "One of the worst men in
the world… has finally been captured… this guy in my view was worse than
Milosevic... he was the intellectual leader," Holbrooke said. Such an argument was absurd. Milosevic had begun his
strategic preparations for war in Yugoslavia in 1987, at a time when Karadzic
was an obscure writer living in Sarajevo. Serbian-directed atrocities in the
former Yugoslavia began in Slovenia in 1991, and continued in Croatia, without
any involvement by Karadzic, before smashing Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1992.

That President Obama has a manifest interest in getting out of Afghanistan as
soon as possible may be understandable, but is a source of anxiety among many
millions in the region worried about a Taliban victory. In recent developments,
India and Pakistan alike have been offered the sweetener of American economic
cooperation. Still, defeating the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, and other
jihadist forces influential in Pakistani society, remains the most urgent issue
in South Asia's search for stability.

Some observers argue that Pakistan and India – both nuclear-armed, let us not
forget – are engaged in a proxy war in Afghanistan, with the Taliban serving
Pakistan and the U.S.-led coalition working for Indian interests. Such a
confrontation would be no more than an extension of the long Pakistani effort to
expel India from Kashmir. Cooperation between Al-Qaida, the Afghan and Pakistani
Taliban, and Pakistan-backed combat groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT or Army
of the Righteous), that focus on Kashmir, has been close and continuous. LeT was
responsible for the horrific 2008 atrocities in Mumbai, and has created
extensive networks – as has the broader Pakistani jihadi milieu – among South
Asian immigrants to the UK and U.S.

Perhaps because he cannot avoid admitting it, Obama has several times
referred to the "cancer" of radical Islam in Pakistan. But from diagnosing this
problem to finding its cure is a challenge, and many Indian opinion leaders fear
that control over Kashmir, rather than being a pretext for ideological
manipulation by Pakistani radicals, will be identified by the White House as the
source of the malady – much as the Palestinian question is hung around Israel's
neck. The Hindustan Times, India's leading daily, opined on October 31
that instead of a partner in the Afghan struggle, India is viewed by Obama and
his cohort as a subsidiary asset available for haggling.

Indians charge that the same Washington faction that argues in favor of "land
for peace" in the Middle East – holding that there can be no end of terror in
that region until Arab demands in the name of the Palestinians are satisfied –
also believes that violence in South Asia will endure until acceptance of a
similar "solution" to Pakistani radicalism, which would involve handing Kashmir
over to Pakistan. Cutting the whole of Kashmir off from India as bait for
Pakistan may seem to Americans as yet another chapter in the long record of
conspiracy thinking in the subcontinent, and unworthy of serious discussion.

Still, Holbrooke's affinity for "land-for-peace" was visible in step after
step taken in Afghanistan since the Obama inauguration in 2009. Afghan president
Hamid Karzai, with Holbrooke's support, commenced negotiations with the Taliban.
Holbrooke complained that Karzai's Taliban talks had been overblown in media,
and only involved a few disaffected local figures who felt the pressure of
military action by the U.S.-led coalition. But whatever the immediate
appearance, appeasement of the Taliban by the Afghan and Pakistani governments,
as well as by U.S. diplomacy, will encourage, rather than ameliorate, the
ambitions of the terrorists.

Holbrooke also justified the inclusion of Iran, the domain of
nuclear-ambitious, West-hating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in negotiations on
Afghanistan's future held in mid-October. According to Holbrooke, quoted by
Reuters on October 18, "What we are discussing here is not affected by, nor will
it affect, the bilateral issues that are discussed elsewhere concerning Iran."
That was another persistent feature of the Holbrooke paradigm: ignoring the
broader context in the interest of immediate and positive-sounding details.
Tehran has claimed for years that its interests coincide with those of the U.S.
in Afghanistan. But such blandishments are merely cover for Ahmadinejad's
unrelenting attempts to aggrandize himself and his regime.

It is a near-certainty that inclusion of the Taliban and Iran in talks on
Afghanistan's future will embolden both radical forces, rather than diminishing
their aggressivity. Finally, as if direct obstruction of the anti-terror war in
Afghanistan by Pakistan and Iran were not bad enough, the Organization of the
Islamic Conference (OIC), established to "liberate" Jerusalem from Israel,
appeared on the Afghan horizon in May. The OIC held the first-ever meeting of
its Council of Foreign Ministers in a central Asian country, choosing Dushanbe,
capital of the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan. The OIC sessions dealt with
the status of Jerusalem, Kashmir, and Afghanistan, as well as the organization's
global initiative to limit free speech about Islam, which it describes as a
measure "against defamation of religion." And it proposed to open an OIC office
in Central Asia.

Like Iran, Tajikistan shares a long border with Afghanistan. Although made up
mainly of Sunni, rather than Shia Muslims, Tajikistan speaks Farsi and has
extensive cultural and economic relations with Iran. But Tajikistan also has
diplomatic relations with Israel, and underwent an underreported war between
former Communists and a coalition including Islamists imported, with Saudi cash,
via Uzbekistan, from 1992 to 1996. The victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan in
the latter year presented Tajikistan with a significant threat to their
co-ethnics, who make up almost a third of the Afghan population. The Tajik civil
war ended in a truce.

What does the OIC want in Tajikistan, if not to prepare for a backup role in
a share-out of influence in Afghanistan? With Holbrooke as America's diplomatic
representative on the ground, Afghanistan may have been destined to end up with
the fate of Bosnia-Hercegovina: the Pashtun south turned over to the Taliban
and, by proxy, Pakistan; the west and north under Iranian, Tajik, and, possibly
Uzbek domination, and an isolated zone around Kabul left for the remains of
Afghanistan's government. American lives have been lost to rid Afghanistan of
terrorism and keep its territory whole. Obama should not be allowed, by
imitating Holbrooke, to deal with Pakistan, the Taliban, Iran and other
neighbors of Afghanistan in a manner that dishonors that sacrifice and leaves
Afghanistan poor and mutilated.