Richard Holbrooke Under Consideration for South Asia Envoy

By GottaLaff

We had a feeling he'd end up somewhere:

President -elect Barack Obama is seriously considering appointing former ambassador Richard Holbrooke as his special envoy for south Asia, a move that would put one of America's most prominent diplomatic troubleshooters in charge of trying to resolve the thorny and interrelated problems surrounding India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to several sources familiar with the transition.

The appointment would represent early recognition by Obama that the region poses perhaps the biggest foreign policy challenge for his incoming administration. [...]

The move would also represent another example of Obama's willingness to look beyond his circle of supporters to fill key posts. [...]

Holbrooke's hopes for a top job in the new Democratic administration initially seemed unlikely to be realized, particularly because his aggressive diplomacy and bureaucratic maneuvering had alienated some of Obama's closest advisers over the years. But his star seemed to rise again after Obama settled on Clinton to be secretary of state and gave her leeway to assemble her own team at the department.

Holbrooke is perhaps best known as the broker of the Dayton accords, which ended the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, but he has long experience across the globe, having served as assistant secretary of state in charge of East Asia policy (during the Carter administration) and in charge of Europe policy (during the Clinton administration.) In recent years, he has written extensively about the war and political problems in Afghanistan, which would be a key focus of the new job.