Holbrooke on Success in Afghanistan: Like Pornography "We'll Know It When We See It"

At a Center for American Progress event today with almost his whole barrel-of-monkeys interagency team, Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke had the astounding quote regarding success in Afghanistan that "We'll know it when we see it." Wow. That's almost certain to be the quote of the event. No wonder we can't come up with metrics. These are the supposed experts? It's an impressive list of names, but between them they can't come up with a strategy or a way to gauge success?

We shall see if anything useful comes out of this event. But gatherings like these seem to show that rather than "Rumsfelding" Afghanistan we are taking the opposite approach: over thinking everything and not coming to any decisions. I'm glad discussions are going on now, but the experts on Holbrooke's team so far are just increasing my pessimism about the mission in Afghanistan.