New U.S. representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan is critic of Biden on war

Posted by Max Fisher on May 3, 2013 at 6:00 pm

The White House has named James Dobbins, a veteran diplomat, as its new special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In late 2010, as debate raged within and without the Obama administration on what strategy the U.S. should pursue in the war in Afghanistan, James Dobbins wrote an article for Foreign Affairs that, as the journal’s Twitter account put it, “lambasted critics of COIN in Afghanistan.” COIN is military lingo for counterinsurgency, the strategy that Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus both pursued there. Dobbins, in his article, singled out administration officials who opposed the strategy, including Vice President Biden, whom he referred to as a “civilian adviser.”

The article reads as an attempt to enter, and perhaps call, the administration’s internal debate over Afghanistan, largely by criticizing and sometimes mocking the positions he attributes to “Vice President Joe Biden and other White House officials.”

Here’s the start of the article; see in particular the incredulous second paragraph (my emphasis added):