US envoy Richard Holbrooke will visit Pakistan on Monday as part of his three-nation South Asia tour to stabilise Afghanistan.
US envoy Richard Holbrooke will visit Pakistan on Monday as part of his three-nation South Asia tour to stabilise Afghanistan, state department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters.
“He will head to Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, in that order. In essence this is an orientation trip,” Wood told reporters. “He’s not carrying any messages to any of these governments from either the secretary or the president. He’s not going there to lecture; he’s going there to listen. And then he will report back,” he added.
In response to Indian fears about Kashmir being dragged into the equation by Pakistan, the US said the envoy’s job extended to Afghanistan-Pakistan.
“He’s going to India because India is an important player in that region,” Wood told reporters. “Kashmir was never part of his portfolio.”
With the help of secretary Clinton and vice president Joe Biden, India managed to prune the portfolio of Obama’s South Asia envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan — eliminating Kashmir from Holbrooke’s job description. The deletion is seen as a big diplomatic concession for India.
India will use Holbrooke’s visit this week to express its dissatisfaction with Pakistan’s grudging response to the attacks on Mumbai. According to diplomats, Holbrooke will pursue US efforts to get Islamabad to shut down the infrastructure of terrorism and will not take kindly to lies and subterfuge.
Bruce Riedel, an expert on South Asia, who has worked for the CIA and Pentagon, told the New York Times that president Zardari only has notional control over the Pakistani army and the Pakistani intelligence services, which remain fixated on their “eternal enemy, India, and which believes that India wants to create a client state in Afghanistan in order to encircle Pakistan.” Riedel said Holbrooke would have his work cut out in breaking those kinds of perceptions.
Holbrooke is nicknamed “the Bulldozer” for arm-twisting warring leaders to the negotiating table as he hammered out peace in Bosnia.
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