As he was wheeled into the operation theatre at a Washington hospital, Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, must have prayed the Pakistani surgeon tending to him would successfully stitch his torn aorta to save his life so he could “save” Afghanistan.
America’s senior envoy to the Balkans, Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the Dayton Accords which ended the Bosnian war in December 1995, flew to Belgrade on March 9 to negotiate a final Kosova peace deal directly with Slobodan Milosevic, confident of having finally obtained the Kosovars’ agreement.
The US admitted on December 3 that its troops in Kosova are helping the Serbs to maintain control of the region and to prevent local people from returning to their homes. That is the upshot of the US confirmation that they are providing armoured escorts to Serb police patrols in the Malisheva region, and a telling reflection of their true role in Kosova.
The true worth of the October 13 Belgrade agreement on Kosova, by which the west supposedly extracted concessions from Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic...