While the United States has achieved its primary military objective in Afghanistan by weakening the al-Qaeda terrorist network and putting an end to the Taliban regime which supported it, America now is "in serious danger of losing the peace" in that country, said Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, during a visit to Yale.

The Bush administration's decision not to expand the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan will ultimately result in the country falling "into the hands of warlords" and the terrorists' return to Afghan caves, Holbrooke told an overflow audience in Luce Hall, where he delivered the annual George Herbert Walker Jr. Lecture in International Studies on April 11.

His lecture was sponsored by the Yale Center for International and Area Studies.

In his talk on "Seven Months after 9/11: The Present Situation" Holbrooke noted how pleas by Afghanistan's interim president, Hamid Karzai, for expansion of the peacekeeping force beyond the capital city of Kabul have gone unheeded because U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon are vehemently opposed to it. The restriction of the 5,000-member peacekeeping force to Kabul is "completely inexplicable," said Holbrooke, adding that he believes the administration's decision will lead to "an unsuccessful outcome in that tormented land."

"The victories are only as good as the peace that follows them," he stated.

A more widespread peacekeeping mission, Holbrooke asserted, is important to helping establish stability in Afghanistan. He said the United States' lack of engagement in the country following the Soviet Union's military withdrawal from there in 1989 is "one of the biggest foreign policy mistakes" of the past 15 years, and argued that the same mistake should not be made again.

"We can't deal with [the terrorist] problem simply by air strikes and cleaning out caves and retreating," Holbrooke said, noting, "We need to stay there. We need to support a larger peacekeeping force that spreads out over the country, and, in my view, the United States ought to put a few hundred troops in, supported by logistics and air power, if necessary."

A failure to do so, Holbrooke argued, will likely mean a return of the terrorists to caves in the eastern part of the country and the domination of Iran in the western part of Afghanistan.

Calling the al-Qaeda "a relentless and ruthless people who are driven by deep hatred," Holbrooke said that the terrorist group will simply wait for the opportunity to return to lands from which it was driven out by American military forces.

"[T]hey'll use the caves to plot again," he predicted. "They're very patient people. They took eight years between the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001."

Holbrooke said that three potentially explosive problems in the region -- Afghanistan, the Arab/Israeli conflict in the Middle East and Iraq -- could be visualized as a "three-ring circus." Speaking about the latter country, the former ambassador said that, had the tensions between Israel and the Palestinians not reached such a state of emergency, the United States by now would have pursued the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. He maintained that the United States is "absolutely right" to seek that goal, but said the nation could not win broad international support for it during escalating tensions between Israel and the Palestinians and while American diplomacy in that conflict is necessary.

Holbrooke, a former assistant secretary of state for Europe and a former ambassador to Germany, cited the United States' "failure to finish off Saddam Hussein" during the Desert Storm operation of 1991 as "the single greatest mistake in foreign policy in 27 years."

"So much of what we've lived through in recent times is a direct consequence of that staggering mistake," Holbrooke continued.

The former U.N. ambassador, who was the chief architect of the 1995 Dayton peace agreement that ended the war in Bosnia and was President Clinton's special envoy to Bosnia and Kosovo, acknowledged that any effort to change the regime in Iraq is "easier to assert than to undertake and succeed at." However, he said, "One thing we cannot afford to do if we go after Saddam is to fail. That would be catastrophic, beyond imagination."

Holbrooke declined to comment during his talk about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict because, he said, he believes that Americans should give their support to the efforts of the Bush administration and to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was arriving in Jerusalem the day of the former ambassador's Yale visit.

Pakistan is another nation which should be on the radar screen of concerned American citizens, Holbrooke said. It is likely that a more immediate target of al-Qaeda terrorists than the United States is Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, said the statesman, describing Musharraf as an "indispensable ally" to the United States. He also cited Pakistan's conflict with India over Kashmir -- "the only confrontation between nuclear power states that is still in the world today," as another major international concern.

Holbrooke devoted part of his talk to what he described as "that other great war," the fight against HIV/AIDS, which he said is the biggest and most dangerous crisis facing the world today, as well as the worst health crisis in the past 600 to 700 years.

Noting the "soaring" rates of the disease in such countries as South Africa and Botswana, and high rates in India, Russia and China, Holbrooke said that if the disease is not stopped "it will reach the United States again ... and even if doesn't reach the United States, it will destroy these countries." He urged the members of his audience to do whatever they can at the local level and beyond to help prevent the spread of the disease and to help de-stigmatize it.

"Ninety-five percent of all people in the world who are positive [for HIV] don't know it, which means they are spreading it, wittingly or unwittingly," said Holbrooke, who also has played a key role in developing U.S. policy on AIDS.

He said a combination of leadership, education and resources can halt the spread of the disease and noted the reduction of infection rates in such countries as Uganda, Senegal, Thailand and Brazil.

On account of the various international conflicts and crises, the United States is "in for a long, protracted period of engagement in the world," Holbrooke said. He compared the period between the fall of the Soviet Union and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with the peace-time era between the two world wars, when Americans were less interested in events beyond their boundaries. The terrorist attacks have changed that attitude, he said.

"It's important that we understand that we have a vested interest in these international issues," he stated.

Holbrooke, who now works on Wall Street, said that despite some of the "downbeat" messages of his talk, "the American people need not fear the difficult-to-define enemy we've got in front of us."

He noted that the American commitment to "candor, honesty and open criticism" will be key to the nation's success in defeating terrorism.

"We will succeed in this [war on terrorism]," he told his audience. "It will take some time and we have to be open about it. But I have no question that success is going to take place."

-- By Susan Gonzalez

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