Ambassador Richard Holbrooke has passed on.
He served in the Obama Adminstration in the capacity of United States Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He served in diplomatic leadership roles since the 1970’s and was most renowned for being the architect of the Dayton Peace Accords, the framework that ended the Bosnian War in 1995.
The new of his passing broke about ten minutes ago–it’s just a little past 8pm EST. Ambassador Holbrooke fell ill on Friday and upon a rushed hospitalization was diagnosed to have suffered a tear in his aorta. A 21 hour surgery followed, a sudden, oscillating affair: only this evening he was reported to be in critical but stable condition. And now this.
Ambassador Holbrooke’s death comes as a shock, as would nearly any other death. Nevertheless, there is something grand in the mix of the story of a man and his politics: the roles he had occupied seemed to have made him a legend. After all, his nickname was “The Bulldozer.”
The New York Times ran an AP piece in the first instance. There is a now a fully fleshed out Times piece up.
There will certainly be more news to come. A profusion of remembrances and eulogies. But the past is written in prose; the future is a foreign country. Indeed, one wonders who will take his place in the annals of storied U.S. diplomatic success and, perhaps more importantly, tested effort. One wonders who will take his place in leading the U.S and NATO negotiation for a settled peace in Afghanistan.