Mr. Dobbins reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul following the 2001 invasion. Two decades later, he bemoaned U.S. mistakes as the Taliban regained power.
Mr. Dobbins straddled ideologies in Washington. He reflected interventionist instincts that the United States should be involved in “nation building” as “the inescapable responsibility of the world’s only superpower.” He also was a realist about America’s go-it-alone limits.
It began with optimism. On Dec. 16, 2001, he was acting U.S. ambassador as the Stars and Stripes — a flagby a Marine guard in 1989 — was raised at the reopened embassy in Kabul. “We are here to stay,” Mr. Dobbins promised. His prediction became a reality in August 2021 with the Taliban storming back to power after two decades of a U.S.-led war that
“But it never works,” Mr. Dobbins said. “In the history of foreign affairs, as far I know, it has never produced the desired results.”James Francis Dobbins Jr. was born in Brooklyn on May 31, 1942. His father, a lawyer with the Veterans Administration , took a position with the agency in the Philippines in 1953. The family returned to the States five years later, before Mr. Dobbins’s final year of high school.
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