James F. Dobbins, an American diplomat whose career took him to Haiti, Afghanistan and many points in between, and who was both respected as a peace negotiator and widely regarded as the world’s leading authority on nation building, died on Monday in Washington. He was 81.
His sons, Christian and Colin Dobbins, said he died in a hospital from complications of Parkinson’s disease.
Until the 1990s, Mr. Dobbins was best known for his behind-the-scenes role in some of the Cold War’s most delicate trans-Atlantic issues, including trade negotiations and the movement of nuclear weapons around the chessboard of Western Europe.
His trajectory changed In 1993, when he was asked to oversee the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia. Though he had no previous experience in the field, or in Africa, he was later assigned to oversee all of the peacekeeping-related issues at the State Department, including the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide.
A stint as a special envoy in Haiti followed, during the U.S. intervention in 1994 and 1995. In the late 1990s, he was assigned to postwar Bosnia and Kosovo.
Each time, Mr. Dobbins deepened his experience with reconstructing war-torn societies, developing insight into an immensely complex foreign-policy conundrum. He managed the diplomatic side of the NATO air campaign in Kosovo in 1999 and then helped manage peacekeeping and reconstruction efforts there.
The United States had rebuilt nations before, notably postwar Germany and Japan. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the old world order, nation building moved to the top of the foreign-policy agenda.
Mr. Dobbins became its leading practitioner. He drew on America’s earlier experiences, but he also recognized that the difficulties the country faced at the turn of the millennium — involving security, economic and political challenges simultaneously — were different from those it faced after World War II.
“He had an insatiable appetite for understanding the concepts, the theory at hand,” Douglas Lute, the former U.S. ambassador to NATO, said in a phone interview. “And he coupled that with a very sharp instinct for how to actually do it on the ground.”
He counseled pragmatism, warning that there was no single solution for every country’s problems. Still, he repeatedly emphasized the need to establish security first, after which, he said, political and economic redevelopment could flow safely.
When the United States invaded Afghanistan after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Dobbins was selected as envoy to the anti-Taliban opposition, and then to the new government. On a rainy day in Kabul, in December 2001, he proudly presided over the reopening of the U.S. Embassy, which had been closed in 1989.
“We are here, and we are here to stay,” he said.
Despite playing that central role, he was later critical of the government’s efforts in Afghanistan, and later in Iraq — especially after he retired in 2002, when he became the director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan think tank.
“His quality of analysis was not compromised by his personal involvement,” said Meghan O’Sullivan, the director of the Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs at Harvard. “He was able to distinguish his hopes from his analysis, which is something that many people in the arena struggle to do.”
A prolific author, Mr. Dobbins wrote a series of practical guides for nation building, then drew on those insights in speeches, opinion pieces and long essays to make the case that the efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq were coming up short.
“In a country like Iraq where the governmental structure has collapsed, the first priority is to establish public security,” he wrote in The New York Times in 2004. “The Pentagon focused more on hardware than software, on improving infrastructure rather than social structures.”
Mr. Dobbins was never as well known among the public as contemporaries like Richard C. Holbrooke or Zalmay Khalilzad, who also served as special representatives to Afghanistan. But he was widely regarded as one of the best Foreign Service officers of his generation.
“He was not the sort of president’s friend’s political appointee,” Robert B. Zoellick, a former deputy secretary of state who got to know Mr. Dobbins in Europe, said by phone. “Jim was the type of committed government official that is critical for America’s success and standing in the world.”
James Francis Dobbins Jr. was born on May 3, 1942, in Brooklyn. His father was a lawyer for the Veterans Administration; his mother, Agnes (Bent) Dobbins, was a homemaker.
When Jim was 10, he moved with his family to Manila, where his father had been transferred. That experience, which involved weeks of first-class travel by train and ship, left him with a lifetime love for life abroad.
He returned to Washington for his senior year of high school, then enrolled at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. During his senior year there, in 1963, he passed the Foreign Service exam, but he had already enlisted in the Navy.
After graduation, he served for three years aboard the Bon Homme Richard, an aircraft carrier supporting America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam. He was on duty during critical moments in the clash with North Vietnamese forces near his ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, which effectively opened the Vietnam War.
Mr. Dobbins joined the Foreign Service after his discharge and was assigned to Paris. At a party given by the U.S. Embassy’s Marine detachment, he met a Norwegian model, Toril Kleivdal. They married in 1968. She died in 2012.
Along with his sons, Mr. Dobbins is survived by his brothers, Peter and Andrew; his sisters, Victoria Dobbins and Elizabeth Fuller; and two grandchildren.
Through the 1970s and ’80s Mr. Dobbins held a number of diplomatic positions of increasing importance, including ambassador to the European Community, the forerunner of the European Union.
His career almost derailed in the late 1990s, when two members of Congress accused him of lying under oath while testifying about Haitian death squads. An internal investigation cleared him of lying, but concluded that he had been “reckless” in his choice of words.
Mr. Dobbins claimed that the investigation’s final report had been tweaked to please the politicians. He appealed, and in March 2001 received what he called “a sizable financial settlement.”
The incident had no long-term impact on his career, though he believed it closed off the possibility of being named to a Senate-confirmed position.
After a decade at RAND, Mr. Dobbins returned to government service in 2013 as the U.S. special representative for Iraq and Pakistan.
“He is simply one of the finest foreign service officers of his generation, a man who has dedicated his life to public service and earned respect throughout the region and in Washington,” John Kerry, then the secretary of state, said when Mr. Dobbins stepped down a year later.
He returned to RAND, where he continued to turn out analyses and reports. He was still at it a few weeks before his death, when, despite the advanced state of his disease, he was one of the authors of a report on rebuilding Ukraine.
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