The Holbrooke Afghanistan conference you can’t go to

Sure, there are more Afghanistan conferences in Washington than you can shake a stick at. But, to paraphrase Woody Allen, the only one you really want to go to is this one, and, sorry, you’re not invited.

Obama’s Af-Pak czar Richard Holbrooke is headlining the invite-only and off-the-record pow-wow at the U.S. Institute of Peace Thursday. Cosponsors include the Asia Society, New York University’s Center on International Peace, and Harvard’s Carr Center on Human Rights, now headed by a British diplomat turned Afghanistan humanitarian and writer Rory Stewart, who is also speaking.  

Other speakers: the Atlantic Council’s Shuja Nawaz, the Asia Society’s Jamie Metzl, NYU’s Barnett Rubin, Canadian Liberal Party acting leader and intellectual Michael Ignatieff, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald Neumann, CSIS’s Teresita Schaffer, USIP president Dick Solomon and Afghanistan expert J. Alex Thier, the U.S. Marine Corps University’s Amin Tarzi, and Tamin Samee of Turquoise Mountain, the Afghanistan humanitarian organization Stewart helped found.

"It’s basically to get a lot of smart people in the same room and try to hash out deeper questions about Afghanistan and Pakistan policy," the Carr Center’s Tyler Moselle said. "It’s off the record and limited to a certain group" — a mixture of Washington, international, and Afghan and Pakistani experts and humanitarians. "We hope the ideas symbiotically go back and forth."

Reporters recently asked White House spokesman Robert Gibbs about a meeting Holbrooke allegedly planned to hold with a slate of Afghan presidential candidates in Washington this week. But that does not appear to be this meeting, people involved with it said.

A senior Afghan official who asked for anonymity complained however that the event contained many of the usual international conference circuit cast of speakers, and about the exclusiveness of the event for those left out. "The administration has spoken to these individuals listed many many times," he said by e-mail. "While this group claims to express the views of the Afghans in fact they are drowning out the authentic Afghan voices and mix in their own.   

"The very academics and consultants that constantly preach, ‘there needs to be greater Afghan ownership,’ or that ‘we need to listen to the Afghans,’ … they have in essence organized a conference in which local Afghan have no say," he added. "So for whose benefit is this? All will claim it is for Afghans, but the Afghans are getting tired of an industry that is built on the claim that they are building the capacity of the Afghans while in reality they use Afghans to build their own capacity and generate more paper or add lines to their resumes…"

To be fair, several of the speakers, including Thier and Stewart, have spent significant time on the ground.

The Carr Center said it will put a program from the conference up Friday, the day after it occurs, and issue a report.