Richard Holbrooke, a former United Nations ambassador, was chosen Thursday for the post of special envoy to Pakistan and India.

Holbrooke has more than 45 years of foreign policy and diplomatic experience, including brokering a peace pact between warring factions in Bosnia that led to the 1995 Dayton peace accords.

Holbrooke, who supported Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Democratic primaries, is good friends with two early supporters of Barack Obama: James Johnson, who headed Obama's vice-presidential search team, and Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning human rights expert. And Holbrooke took pains to avoid criticism of Obama.

Holbrooke served under President Jimmy Carter as assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs and under President Bill Clinton as assistant secretary of state for European affairs and then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

In a scant 17 months at the United Nations, Holbrooke has made himself an unapologetically assertive proponent of American interests at the United Nations, pulling off some feats that many diplomats believed were doomed to fail.

"You can do jobs like this the safe way, the completely reckless way or the calculated-risk way," Holbrooke said at the time. And by his own measure, in the world after the Cold War, "we have more room for taking risks."

Shamshad Ahmad, the ambassador from Pakistan, said Holbrooke brought to the United Nations the same high-energy diplomacy that enabled him to hammer together a peace accord for Bosnia in 1995.

"He is fond of missions impossible," Ahmad said.

To break down the animosity that had developed over the years between Congress and the United Nations, Holbrooke brought members of Congress to the UN headquarters as well as escorting ambassadors from the world organization to Capitol Hill.

"The men and women involved on this in New York and Washington are not evil people," Holbrooke said, but "at opposite ends of the shuttle, people viewed each other as malignant."

Early in his career, he served as Peace Corps director in Morocco in 1970, and as editor of Foreign Policy magazine from 1972 to 1976. Currently he is vice chairman of Perseus, a private equity firm.

He was passed over for secretary of state in 1996, when Clinton instead chose Madeleine Albright. His intensity sometimes alienates people.

Holbrooke is extremely well known in the Washington foreign-policy establishment. During the conflict in August between Russia and Georgia, he was one of the first Americans to fly to Tbilisi to meet with the Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili, a friend.

He was born April 24, 1941, in New York City and graduated from Brown University in 1962.

© International Herald Tribune