By Steve Hynd
In an interview with the German press (Google translation here) which isn't going to help the Obama administration win friends and influence people at NATO, Richard Holbrooke is blaming the allies to push the "we're starting from scratch, not in the ninth year" BS the White House seems to think is good political framing.
Holbrooke, special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told Germany's daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung that international cooperation since the deployment in Afghanistan in 2001 had often been chaotic.
"The issue of responsibilities was difficult. The British were to have dealt with drugs, the Germans with training and the Italians with the justice system," he said, in remarks published in German.
"The whole thing was uncoordinated and did not get us very far. The upshot is that in the ninth year of the war we are starting from scratch."
Look, how many variations can the U.S. play on the Scooby Doo Villain excuse: "we'd have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those pesky kids"?
In both Iraq and Afghanistan we've seen those "pesky kids" that are always upsetting the masterplan identified as, at various times over the last decade: the local governing elite, the insurgents who "won't fight fair" (ditto), the common people who won't acknowledge that America is always right and the allies who made a mess of things.
But in both instances, there was only one nation that decided it would be a good idea to invade, drum up a coalition of the willing to help, parachute in some puppet officials and then set about nation building by occupation.
The folk who came up with the masterplans, the people who were supposed to be doing the co-ordination, were always Americans, in both cases. It'd be nice to see some more recognition of that fact.
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