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Bush dinner tastes sour for Obama - PMO decision to entertain former President causes hurt in Washington K.P. NAYAR Washington, Oct. 24: Preparations for Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington on November 24 have begun on a negative signal to the Obama administration with a decision by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to host former President George W. Bush for dinner at Singh’s residence at the end of this month. Bush is visiting New Delhi on October 30 and 31 at the invitation of an Indian newspaper and will speak at a conference organised in New Delhi on October 31 on...

<p>WASHINGTON — After a bombing killed 19 U.S. airmen at a barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the Clinton administration struck back by unmasking Iranian intelligence officers around the world, significantly disrupting Iranian-backed terrorism, according to a high-level U.S. official and a former top official who was serving at the time of the operation.</p>

A participant on the sidelines of talks in Berlin between Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Richard Holbrooke, a would-be secretary of state in a John Kerry presidency, told a story about the meeting and the theme of how a Kerry-friendly Europe would leap to America's aid in bringing stability to Iraq. (Or maybe hide under the bed.) "Schröder," the American said, "asked Holbrooke what Kerry would do if he were elected. Holbrooke replied one of the first things would be to get on the phone and invite him and President Jacques Chirac to the White House. The chancellor laughed out loud....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Even as prosecutors build a case against the Army private suspected of passing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, the State Department is promoting a documentary film that celebrates Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Amid its struggle to contain damage from the WikiLeaks revelations, the State Department announced Saturday that "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" has been selected as one of 18 films that will tour the world this year as part of its "American Documentary Showcase" program. Ellsberg, whom the film portrays as a whistleblower of conscience,...

‘The Post,” the new movie starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, is three things: a film about the Pentagon Papers, classified documents about the Vietnam War that were leaked to the media in 1971, a film about the press and Donald Trump, and, finally, an indictment about Harvey Weinstein and sexism in Hollywood. According to Streep, who is interviewed on December 14 in the Washington Post, the film is mostly about sexism. Streep says that the new film came from a place of “grievance” about sexism.  “People were really scared and demoralized [after Trump was elected],” Streep told the Post. But...

I don't know whether Gen. Wesley Clark is qualified to be president, but Peter J. Boyer's profile in this week's New Yorker—which paints him as scarily unqualified—is an unfair portrait as well as a misleading, occasionally inaccurate précis of the 1999 Kosovo war and Clark's role in commanding it.Boyer relies heavily on some of Clark's fellow retired Army generals who clearly despise him. The gist of their critique, as Boyer summarizes, is that Clark, while a brilliant analyst, "had a certainty about the rightness of his views which led to conflicts with his colleagues and, sometimes, his superiors." I have...

Newly released State Department emails help reveal how a major Clinton Foundation donor was placed on a sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no obvious experience in the field, a decision that appeared to baffle the department’s professional staff. The emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to “protect the name” of the Secretary, “stall” the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later. Copies of dozens of internal emails were provided to ABC News by the conservative political group Citizens United, which obtained...

President Obama delivered a soaring eulogy for the late Richard Holbrooke today, calling him a "leading light" of U.S. diplomacy. But ... the president's warm remarks belie a far more complex relationship between the President and Holbrooke...Attention also turned to his tumultuous final years, when Holbrooke was portrayed as a disruptive force within the Obama administration, whose relationship with top American and foreign officials had chilled, and whose professional tenure was nearly over... The authors mine interviews with people who knew Holbrooke in Kabul, Islamabad, New York, Brussels, and Washington—including his wife Katie Marton, Gen. David Petraeus, and Secretary of...

Vali Reza Nasr, a senior Obama administration advisor on Iran, has come to Iran. Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani and former parliament speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel may be behind the visit. "President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was informed well after Nasr entered the country," Tabnak reported on Wednesday. Nasr was appointed senior advisor to Richard Holbrooke -- the special US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Tabnak and Fararu claim the unannounced trip by the US official to be linked to the recent release of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi.

The insider-account of the damaging divisions between the White House and the State Department comes as diplomats around the world wait to see if John Kerry, the new US secretary of state, can persuade Mr Obama to greater engagement on Syria, Egypt and the wider Middle East. Vali Nasr, a university professor who was seconded in 2009 to work with Richard Holbrooke, Mr Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, records his profound disillusion at how a "Berlin Wall" of domestic-focused advisers was erected to protect Mr Obama. "The president had a truly disturbing habit of funnelling major foreign policy...

The Taliban may be prepared to renounce terrorism and sever links with al Qaeda, accept a power sharing role in a new Afghan government and even tolerate American bases in their country, according to a new report. A panel of four experts from the Royal United Services Institute interviewed four senior figures - each one part of the "pragmatic" or "moderate" part of the Islamist movement - at a secret location in the Arabian Gulf. The four figures, among them two former Taliban ministers, a Mujahideen commander and a well-connected negotiator, surprised the experts by insisting that they had no...

A veteran State Department diplomat and longtime Pakistan expert is under federal investigation as part of a counterintelligence probe and has had her security clearances withdrawn, according to U.S. officials. The FBI searched the Northwest Washington home of Robin L. Raphel last month, and her State Department office was also examined and sealed, officials said. Raphel, a fixture in Washington’s diplomatic and think-tank circles, was placed on administrative leave last month, and her contract with the State Department was allowed to expire this week. Two U.S. officials described the investigation as a counterintelligence matter, which typically involves allegations of spying...

Late Richard Holbrooke, the first US special Af-Pak envoy, was fully aware that the Pakistani generals were lying to him on their support to the Islamic extremist groups against India, but he was against cutting off military aid to Islamabad, a new book has said. In his latest book "Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East", the two-time Pulitzer winner David Rhode said Holbrooke wanted massive aid for Pakistan and launch some signature big projects there, in the absence of which he increasingly became frustrated with the USAID. "While publicly praising the Pakistanis, he was tough- minded...

"My time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience." It was close to midnight on Jan. 20, 2009, and I was about to go to sleep when my iPhone beeped. There was a new text message. It was from Richard Holbrooke. It said, "Are you up, can you talk?" When I called, he told me that Barack Obama had asked him to serve as envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He would work out of the State Department, and he wanted me to join his team. "No one knows this yet. Don't tell anyone. Well, maybe...

ISLAMABAD: The US has established contacts with Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar to negotiate an end to the conflict in Afghanistan, a media report said on Tuesday. Abdul Haqiq, a former Afghan Taliban spokesman who used the alias Mohammad Hanif, played a key role in helping Washington reach out to Mullah Omar, The Express Tribune newspaper quoted a source as saying. Haqiq was arrested by US and Afghan intelligence agents in Afghanistan in June 2007. He was one of the high profile Afghan Taliban spokesmen along with Yousuf Ahmadi, appointed after chief spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi was arrested in...

US Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke had requested talks with Mullah Omar during his July visit to Pakistan. During the visit, Holbrooke, asked Pakistani officials to make the effort in bringing either the Taliban leader or his special representative to the negotiating table.Holbrooke's request is being considered in Taliban's leadership council by Mowlavi Abdul Kabir and Mowlavi Abdul Latif Mansour, the report adds. According to a member of Taliban's leadership council, during his Islamabad visit in July, Holbrooke opposed suggestions by Pakistani officials that his appeal for talks with the Taliban leader should be made public. Holbrook then demanded that the...

OF the many notable Americans we lost in 2010, three leap out as paragons of a certain optimistic American spirit that we also seemed to lose this year. Two you know: Theodore Sorensen, the speechwriter present at the creation of J.F.K.’s clarion call to “ask what you can do for your country,” and Richard Holbrooke, the diplomat who brought peace to the killing fields of Bosnia in the 1990s. Holbrooke, who was my friend, came of age in the Kennedy years and exemplified its can-do idealism. He gave his life to the proposition that there was nothing an American couldn’t...

The death of the veteran diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke last week shocked Americans and his many colleagues around the world. Mr. Holbrooke, 69, was a larger-than-life figure, a fearless and robust man who was apparently struck down without warning. He became ill on a Friday, and was dead by Monday. According to government officials, the cause was a tear in his aorta, the artery that carries blood from the heart to vessels that feed the rest of the body. Mr. Holbrooke underwent 21 hours of surgery from Friday to Saturday to repair the damage, and then another seven-hour operation on...

Reading "Masters and Commanders," Andrew Roberts's magnificent account of British and American leaders in World War II, I was struck by how many of them, working prodigious hours and under great strain, were struck down by heart attacks while in their 60s. This doesn't happen anymore, I thought, with the blood pressure and cholesterol medicines many of us routinely take. But it does, as we were reminded by the sudden death at age 69 this week of Richard Holbrooke, who was working prodigiously as Barack Obama's special representative for AfPak, i.e., Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke was known in cynical Washington...

This week, the Globe and Mail asked General Lewis McKenzie (Retired) to write the obituary of American diplomat Richard Holbrooke. It was a good idea. The two men had crossed paths more than once on the global stage of the Great Game. McKenzie declined. Holbrooke had just died and the general knew that what he had to say would hardly produce the standard panegyric. When I caught up with McKenzie, he was shoveling snow after a spell away from home. I asked for an interview and to my surprise, he agreed. “I’m just going to tell you what I thought...