VCU news

By Brian McNeill

James Dobbins, a former U.S. ambassador to Europe who most recently served in the Obama administration as the U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, will visit Virginia Commonwealth University to speak on the past, present and future of Afghanistan.

Dobbins will deliver his lecture, titled "Afghanistan: What Have We Accomplished, What Have We Learned, and What Should We Expect?" at 7 p.m. on Oct. 22 in room 1107 of the Academic Learning Commons, 1000 Floyd Ave. The event will be free and open to the public.

His talk is sponsored by the Department of Political Science in the College of Humanities and Sciences.

Dobbins served as the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan from May 2013 to July 2014. When Dobbins stepped down from his post, Secretary of State John Kerry called him "simply one of the finest foreign service officers of his generation."

"He has been at the forefront of our work in Afghanistan and Pakistan," Kerry said in a July 2 statement. "He has played an outsized role on the ground negotiating the [bilateral strategic agreement with Afghanistan], making preparations for historic elections, growing our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan, and planning for a transition for the Afghan people after more than a decade of progress."

Dobbins is now a senior fellow at the RAND Corporation, having previously served as director of the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center. He has held State Department and White House posts, including assistant secretary of state for Europe, special assistant to the president, special adviser to the president and secretary of state for the Balkans, and ambassador to the European community.

He has also led a number of crisis management and diplomatic troubleshooting assignments as the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations' special envoy for Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia.

His diplomatic assignments have included the withdrawal of American forces from Somalia, the American-led multilateral intervention in Haiti, the stabilization and reconstruction of Bosnia, and the NATO intervention in Kosovo.

Following Sept. 11, 2001, Dobbins was named the Bush administration's representative to the Afghan opposition and given the task of putting together and installing a broadly based successor to the Taliban regime. He also represented the United States at the Bonn Conference that established the new Afghan government.