BY VALI NASR
It was close to
midnight on Jan. 20, 2009, and I was about to go to sleep when my iPhone
beeped. There was a new text message. It was from Richard Holbrooke. It said,
"Are you up, can you talk?" When I called, he told me that Barack
Obama had asked him to serve as envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He would
work out of the State Department, and he wanted me to join his team. "No
one knows this yet. Don't tell anyone. Well, maybe your wife." (The Washington Post reported
his appointment the next day.)
I first met
Holbrooke, the legendary diplomat best known for making peace in the Balkans
and breaking plenty of china along the way, at a 2006 conference in Aspen,
Colorado. We sat together at one of the dinners and talked about Iran and
Pakistan. Holbrooke ignored the keynote speech, the entertainment that
followed, and the food that flowed in between to bombard me with questions. We
had many more conversations over the next three years, and after I joined him
on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2007, we spoke frequently by
phone.
Now, making his
sales pitch, Holbrooke told me that government is the sum of its people.
"If you want to change things, you have to get involved. If you want your
voice to be heard, then get inside." He knew I preferred to work on the
Middle East and in particular Iran. But he had different ideas. "This
[Afghanistan and Pakistan] matters more. This is what the president is focused
on. This is where you want to be."
He was
persuasive, and I knew that we were at a fork in the road. Regardless of what
promises candidate Obama made on his way to the White House, Afghanistan now
held the future -- his and America's -- in the balance. And it would be a huge
challenge. When Obama took office, the war in Afghanistan was already in its
eighth year. By then, the fighting had morphed into a full-blown insurgency,
and the Taliban juggernaut looked unstoppable. They had adopted a flexible,
decentralized military structure and even a national political organization,
with shadow governors and district leaders for nearly every Afghan province.
America was losing, and the enemy knew it. It was a disaster in the making.
But Holbrooke,
who would have been secretary of state had Clinton won the presidency but had
been vetoed by Obama to be her deputy when she accepted the State Department
job instead, now insisted to me that he relished the chance to take on what he
dubbed the "AfPak" portfolio. "Nothing is confirmed, but it is
pretty much a done deal," he told me. "If you get any other offers,
let me know right away." Then he laughed and said, "If you work for
anyone else, I will break your knees. This is going to be fun. We are going to
do some good. Now get some sleep."
Two months
later, I was at my desk at SRAP, as the office of the special representative
for Afghanistan and Pakistan quickly became known. Those first few months were
a period of creativity and hope. Holbrooke had carved out a little autonomous
principality on the State Department's first floor, filling it with young
diplomats, civil servants, and outside experts like me, straight to the job
from a tenured post at Tufts University. Scholars, journalists, foreign
dignitaries, members of Congress, and administration officials walked in daily
to get their fill of how AfPak strategy was shaping up. Even Hollywood got in
on SRAP. Angelina Jolie lent a hand to help refugees in Pakistan, and the
usually low-key State Department cafeteria was abuzz when Holbrooke sat down
for coffee with Natalie Portman to talk Afghanistan.
People started
early and worked late into the night, and there was a constant flow of new
ideas, like how to cut corruption and absenteeism among the Afghan police by
using mobile banking and cell phones to pay salaries; how to use text messaging
to raise money for refugees; or how to stop the Taliban from shutting down
mobile-phone networks by putting cell towers on military bases. SRAP had more
of the feel of an Internet start-up than a buttoned-up State Department office.
Holbrooke
encouraged the creative chaos. "I want you to learn nothing from
government," he told me. "This place is dead intellectually. It does
not produce any ideas; it is all about turf battles and checking the box. Your
job is to break through all this. Anyone gives you trouble, come to me."
On his first visit to SRAP, Gen. David Petraeus, then Centcom commander, mused,
"This is the flattest organization I have ever seen. I guess it works for
you."
Still, Holbrooke
knew that Afghanistan was not going to be easy. There were too many players and
too many unknowns, and Obama had not given him enough authority (and would give
him almost no support) to get the job done. After he took office, the president
never met with Holbrooke outside large meetings and never gave him time and
heard him out. The president's White House advisors were dead set against
Holbrooke. Some, like Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, were holdovers from George W.
Bush's administration and thought they knew Afghanistan better and did not want
to relinquish control to Holbrooke. Others (those closest to the president)
wanted to settle scores for Holbrooke's tenacious campaign support of Clinton
(who was herself eyed with suspicion by the Obama insiders); still others begrudged
Holbrooke's storied past and wanted to end his run of success then and there.
At times it appeared the White House was more interested in bringing Holbrooke
down than getting the policy right.
Holbrooke, however, kept attacking the problem
from all angles. It was as if he were trying to solve a Rubik's cube -- trying
to bring into alignment what Congress, the military, the media, the Afghan government,
and America's allies wanted and how politicians, generals, and bureaucrats were
likely to react. Just before his sudden death in December 2010, he told his
wife, Kati Marton, that he thought he had finally found a way out that might
just work. But he wouldn't say what he had come up with, "not until he
told the president first" -- the president who did not have time to
listen.
OBAMA HAS EARNED plaudits
for his foreign-policy performance. On his watch, the United States has wound
down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it finally killed Osama bin Laden.
In tune with the public mood, he has largely kept America out of costly
overseas adventures.
But my time in
the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience.
The truth is that his administration made it extremely difficult for its own
foreign-policy experts to be heard. Both Clinton and Holbrooke, two incredibly
dedicated and talented people, had to fight to have their voices count on major
foreign-policy initiatives.
Holbrooke never
succeeded. Clinton did -- but it was often a battle. It usually happened only
when it finally became clear to a White House that jealously guarded all
foreign policymaking -- and then relied heavily on the military and
intelligence agencies to guide its decisions -- that these agencies' solutions
were no substitute for the type of patient, credible diplomacy that garners the
respect and support of allies. Time and again, when things seemed to be falling
apart, the administration finally turned to Clinton because it knew she was the
only person who could save the situation.
One could argue
that in most administrations, an inevitable imbalance exists between the
military-intelligence complex, with its offerings of swift, dynamic,
camera-ready action, and the foreign-policy establishment, with its seemingly
ponderous, deliberative style. But this administration advertised itself as
something different. On the campaign trail, Obama repeatedly stressed that he
wanted to get things right in the broader Middle East, reversing the damage
that had resulted from the previous administration's reliance on faulty
intelligence and its willingness to apply military solutions to problems it
barely understood.
Not only did
that not happen, but the president had a truly disturbing habit of funneling
major foreign-policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively
inexperienced White House advisors whose turf was strictly politics. Their
primary concern was how any action in Afghanistan or the Middle East would play
on the nightly news, or which talking point it would give the Republicans. The
Obama administration's reputation for competence on foreign policy has less to
do with its accomplishments in Afghanistan or the Middle East than with how
U.S. actions in that region have been reshaped to accommodate partisan
political concerns.
By September
2012, when violent anti-American protests swept the Muslim world, claiming the
lives of four members of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya and dozens of
demonstrators, it became clear that we had gotten the broader Middle East badly
wrong.
The American
people are tired of war -- rightly so -- and they welcome talk of leaving the
region. The president has marketed the U.S. exit from Afghanistan as a
foreign-policy coup, one that will not only unburden America from the region's
problems but also give the country the freedom it needs to pursue other, more
pressing national security concerns.
This is an
illusion. Ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the broader,
ill-defined "war on terror," is a very good idea, provided it is done
properly and without damage to U.S. interests or the region's stability. But we
should not kid ourselves that the rhetoric of departure is anything more than
rhetoric; the United States is taking home its troops and winding down
diplomatic and economic engagement -- but leaving behind its Predators and
Special Forces. We should not expect that the region will look more kindly on
drone attacks and secret raids than it did on invasion and occupation.
Yet this is
exactly the path that the White House has laid out. What follows is the story
of how Barack Obama got it wrong.
THE
ADMINISTRATION'S INITIAL reading of the crisis in Afghanistan was to blame
it on the spectacular failure of President Hamid Karzai's government, paired
with wrongheaded military strategy, inadequate troop numbers for defeating an
insurgency, and the Taliban's ability to find a haven and military and material
support in Pakistan. Of these, Karzai's failings and the need to straighten out
the military strategy dominated the discussion. Above all, the Afghanistan
conflict was seen in the context of Iraq. The Taliban were viewed as an
insurgency similar to the one that the United States had just helped defeat in
Iraq. And what had defeated the insurgency in Iraq was a military strategy
known as COIN, a boots-on-the-ground-intensive counterinsurgency.
But deciding
what exactly to do soon turned into the Obama administration's first AfPak
disaster: the torturously long 2009 strategic review. To conduct it, the
president sat with his national security team through 10 meetings -- 25 hours
-- over three months, and there were many more meetings without the president.
At SRAP, we managed the State Department's contribution to the paper deluge,
working long hours preparing memos, white papers, maps, and tables. But still
more was needed.
Early in the
process, Holbrooke came back from a meeting at the White House. "You did a
good job," he said. "The secretary [Clinton] was pleased with her
material but wants her folders to be as big as [those of Defense Secretary
Robert] Gates. She wants color maps, tables, and charts." Clinton,
continued Holbrooke, "does not want Gates to dominate the conversation by
waving his colorful maps and charts in front of everybody. No one reads this
stuff, but they all look at the maps and color charts." Everyone in the
office looked at him. "So who does read all this?" I asked, pointing
to a huge folder on his desk. "I'll tell you who," he said. "The
president reads them. He reads every folder."
The amount of
time spent seemed absurd. Every time Holbrooke came back from the White House,
he would say, "The president has more questions." Frustration was
written all over Holbrooke's and Clinton's faces as the process dragged on.
Obama was dithering. He was busybodying the national security apparatus by
asking for more answers to the same set of questions, each time posed
differently.
Holbrooke
thought that Obama was not deciding because he disliked the options before him,
and that the National Security Council (NSC) was failing the president by not
giving him the right options. What Holbrooke omitted from his assessment was
that Obama was failing to press the NSC to give him other options.
The night before
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who in June 2009 was installed as the new U.S.
commander in Afghanistan, was to release the report outlining what he needed to
fight the war, Holbrooke gathered his team in his office. We asked him what he
thought McChrystal would request. He said, "Watch! The military will give
the president three choices. There will be a 'high-risk' option" --
Holbrooke held his hand high in the air -- "that is what they always call
it, which will call for maybe very few troops. Low troops, high risk. Then
there will be a 'low-risk' option" -- Holbrooke lowered his hand --
"which will ask for double the number they are actually looking for. In
the middle will be what they want," which was between 30,000 and 40,000
more troops. And that is exactly what happened.
The alternative,
which Vice President Joe Biden favored, was a stepped-up counterterrorism
effort, dubbed "CT-plus," that would involve drone strikes and
Special Forces raids, mostly directed at al Qaeda's sanctuary in Pakistan's
wild border region near Afghanistan. But this looked risky -- too much like
"cut and run" -- and there was no guarantee that CT-plus could work
without COIN. Like Biden, Holbrooke thought COIN was pointless, but he was not
sold on CT-plus. He thought you could not have a regional strategy built on
"secret war." Drones are no substitute for a political settlement.
During the
review, however, there was no discussion at all of diplomacy and a political
settlement. Holbrooke wanted the president to consider this option, but the
White House was not buying it. The military wanted to stay in charge, and going
against the military would make the president look weak.
So Obama chose
the politically safe option that he did not like: He gave the military what it
asked for. Months of White House hand-wringing ended up with the administration
choosing the option that had been offered from day one: fully resourced COIN
and 30,000 additional troops. But Obama added a deadline of July 2011 for the larger troop commitment to work; after
that the surge would be rolled back. In effect, the president said the new
strategy was good for a year.
FROM THE OUTSET, Holbrooke
argued for political reconciliation as the path out of Afghanistan. But the
military thought talk of reconciliation undermined America's commitment to
fully resourced COIN. On his last trip to Afghanistan, in October 2010,
Holbrooke pulled aside Petraeus, who by then had replaced McChrystal as
commander in Afghanistan, and said, "David, I want to talk to you about
reconciliation." "That's a 15-second conversation," Petraeus
replied. "No, not now."
The commanders'
standard response was that they needed two more fighting seasons to soften up
the Taliban. They were hoping to change the president's mind on his July
deadline and after that convince him to accept a "slow and shallow"
(long and gradual) departure schedule. Their line was that we should fight
first and talk later. Holbrooke thought we could talk and fight. Reconciliation should be the ultimate
goal, and fighting the means to facilitate it.
The Taliban were
ready for talks as early as April 2009. At that time, Afghanistan scholar
Barnett Rubin, shortly before he joined Holbrooke's team as his senior Afghan-affairs
advisor, traveled to Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. In Kabul Rubin met with
former Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who laid out in detail a
strategy for talks: where to start, what to discuss, and the shape of the
settlement that the United States and the Taliban could agree on. Zaeef said
the Taliban needed concessions on prisoners America held at Guantánamo Bay and
removal of the names of some Taliban from U.S. and U.N. blacklists sanctioning
terrorists. Back in Washington -- on the day he was sworn into government
service -- Rubin wrote Holbrooke a memo regarding this trip. That afternoon the
two sat next to each other on the U.S. Airways shuttle back to New York.
Holbrooke read the memo; then he turned to Rubin and said, "If this thing
works, it may be the only way we will get out." That was the beginning of
a two-year campaign to sell the idea of talking to the Taliban: first to
Clinton and then to the White House and Obama.
The White House,
however, did not want to try anything as audacious as diplomacy. It was an art
lost on America's top decision-makers. They had no experience with it and were
daunted by the idea of it.
While running
for president, Obama had promised a new chapter in U.S. foreign policy: America
would move away from Bush's militarized foreign policy and take engagement
seriously. When it came down to brass tacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
however, Clinton was the lonely voice making the case for diplomacy.
During the 2009
strategic review, Clinton had supported the additional troops but was not on
board with the deadline Obama imposed on the surge, nor did she support hasty
troop withdrawals. Clinton thought those decisions looked a lot like
cut-and-run and would damage America's standing in the world. Add this to where
she came out on a host of other national security issues -- including pushing
Obama to go ahead with the Abbottabad operation to kill or capture bin Laden
and breaking with the Pentagon to advocate using U.S. air power in Libya -- and
it is safe to say she was, and remains, tough on national security issues.
But Clinton
shared Holbrooke's belief that the purpose of hard power is to facilitate
diplomatic breakthroughs. During many meetings I attended with her, she would
ask us to make the case for diplomacy and would then quiz us on our assumptions
and plan of action. At the end of these drills she would ask us to put it all
in writing for the benefit of the White House.
Holbrooke and
Clinton had a tight partnership. They were friends. Clinton trusted Holbrooke's
judgment and valued his counsel. They conferred often (not just on Afghanistan
and Pakistan), and Clinton protected Holbrooke from an obdurate White House.
The White House kept a dossier on Holbrooke's misdeeds, and Clinton kept a
folder on churlish attempts by the White House's AfPak office to undermine
Holbrooke, which she eventually gave to Tom Donilon, Obama's national security
advisor. The White House tried to blame Holbrooke for leaks to the media.
Clinton called out the White House on its own leaks. She sharply rebuked the
White House after journalist Steve Coll wrote in the New Yorker about a highly
secret meeting with the Taliban that he was told about by a
senior White House official.
Whenever
possible, Clinton went to the president directly, around the so-called Berlin
Wall of staffers who shielded Obama from any option or idea they did not want
him to consider. Clinton had regular weekly private meetings with the
president. She had asked for the "one-on-ones" as a condition for
accepting the job in hopes of ensuring that the White House would not
conveniently marginalize her and the State Department.
Even then,
however, she had a tough time getting the administration to bite. Obama was
sympathetic in principle but not keen on showing daylight between the White
House and the military. Talking to enemies was a good campaign sound bite, but
once in power Obama was too skittish to try it.
On one occasion
in the summer of 2010, after the White House had systematically blocked every
attempt to include reconciliation talks with the Taliban and serious regional
diplomacy (which had to include Iran) on the agenda for national security
meetings with the president, Clinton took a paper SRAP had prepared to Obama.
She gave him the paper, explained what it laid out, and said, "Mr.
President, I would like to get your approval on this." Obama nodded his
approval, but that was all. So his White House staff, caught off guard by
Clinton, found ample room to kill the paper in Washington's favorite way:
condemning it to slow death in committee meetings. A few weeks after Clinton
gave Obama the paper, I had to go to an "interagency" meeting
organized by the White House that to my surprise was going to review the paper
the president had already given the nod to. I remember telling Clinton about
the meeting. She shook her head and exclaimed, "Unbelievable!"
Clinton got
along well with Obama, but on Afghanistan and Pakistan the State Department had
to fight tooth and nail just to have a hearing at the White House. Had it not
been for Clinton's tenacity and the respect she commanded, the State Department
would have had no influence on policymaking whatsoever. The White House had
taken over most policy areas: Iran and the Arab-Israeli issue were for all
practical purposes managed from the White House. AfPak was a rare exception,
and that was owed to Holbrooke's quick thinking in getting SRAP going in
February 2009, before the White House was able to organize itself.
The White House
resented losing AfPak to the State Department. It fought hard to close down
SRAP and take it back. That was one big reason the White House was on a warpath
after Holbrooke. But Holbrooke would not back down, especially not when he
thought those who wanted to wrest control of Afghanistan were out of their
depth and not up to the job.
Turf battles are
a staple of every administration, but the Obama White House has been
particularly ravenous. Add to this the campaign hangover: Those in Obama's
inner circle, veterans of his election campaign, were suspicious of Clinton.
Even after Clinton proved she was a team player, they remained concerned about
her popularity and feared that she could overshadow the president.
Adm. Mike
Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until September 2011, told me
Clinton "did a great job pushing her agenda, but it is incredible how
little support she got from the White House. They want to control
everything." Victories for the State Department were few and hard fought.
It was little consolation that its recommendations on reconciliation with the
Taliban or regional diplomacy to end the Afghan war eventually became official
policy -- after the White House exhausted the alternatives.
The White House
campaign against the State Department, and especially Holbrooke, was at times a
theater of the absurd. Holbrooke was not included in Obama's videoconferences
with Karzai, and he was cut out of the presidential retinue when Obama went to
Afghanistan. At times it looked as if White House officials were baiting Karzai
to complain about Holbrooke so they could get him fired.
The White House
worried that talking to the Taliban would give Holbrooke a greater role. For
months, the White House plotted to either block reconciliation with the Taliban
or find an alternative to Holbrooke for managing the talks. Lute, who ran AfPak
at the White House, floated the idea of the distinguished U.N. diplomat Lakhdar
Brahimi leading the talks. Clinton objected to outsourcing American diplomacy
to the United Nations. Pakistan, too, was cool to the idea. The "stop
Holbrooke" campaign was not only a distraction -- it was influencing
policy.
Another example
was when Donilon's predecessor as national security advisor, James Jones,
traveled to Pakistan for high-level meetings without Holbrooke (not even
informing the State Department of his travel plans until he was virtually in
the air). Again, the message was "ignore Holbrooke." It was no surprise
that our AfPak policy took one step forward and two steps back.
During one trip,
Jones went completely off script and promised Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani,
Pakistan's top military man, a civilian nuclear deal in exchange for Pakistan's
cooperation. Panic struck the White House. It took a good deal of diplomatic
tap-dancing to take that offer off the table. In the end, one of Kayani's
advisors told me that the general did not take Jones seriously, anyway; he knew
it was a slip-up. The NSC wanted to do the State Department's job but was not
up to the task.
Afghans and
Pakistanis were not alone in being confused and occasionally amused by the
White House's maneuvers. People in Washington were also baffled. The White
House encouraged the U.S. ambassadors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to go around
the State Department and work with the White House directly, undermining their
own agency. Those ambassadors quickly learned how easy it was to manipulate the
administration's animus toward Holbrooke to their own advantage. The U.S.
ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, in particular became a handful for
the State Department. In November 2010, Obama and Clinton went to Lisbon for a
NATO summit, planning to meet with Karzai there. When Eikenberry asked to go as
well, Clinton turned down his request and instructed him to stay in Kabul. He
ignored her and showed up in Lisbon.
PURSUING
RECONCILIATION WAS difficult against the combined resistance of the
Pentagon, the CIA, and the White House. It took a massive toll on Holbrooke. Still,
Rubin, his Afghan-affairs advisor, provided the intellectual capital for him,
arguing in ever greater detail that the Taliban would come to the table and
that Karzai and many Afghans favored talking to them. Holbrooke and Rubin were
sure a deal that would sever ties between the Taliban and al Qaeda and bring
peace in Afghanistan was within reach.
Holbrooke asked
Rubin to put his ideas into a series of memos that Holbrooke then fanned out
across the government. After Holbrooke died, Rubin put those memos in one
folder for the White House. In early spring of 2012 at a White House meeting,
Clinton would push the idea one more time. Donilon replied that he had yet to
see the State Department make a case for reconciliation. So Clinton asked Rubin
for every memo he had written going back to his first day on the job. The
3-inch-thick folder spoke for itself.
All told, it
took more than a year of lobbying inside the administration to get the White
House to take the idea seriously. It was close to 18 months after Rubin wrote
his first memo that Clinton could finally publicly endorse diplomacy on behalf
of the administration, in a February 2011 speech at the Asia
Society.
The Obama administration's
approach to reconciliation, however, is not exactly what Holbrooke had in mind
for a diplomatic end to the war. Holbrooke thought that the United States would
enjoy its strongest leverage if it negotiated with the Taliban when the country
had the maximum number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan. He had not
favored the Afghanistan surge, but once the troops were there, he thought the
president should use the show of force to get to a diplomatic solution.
But that did not
happen. The president failed to launch diplomacy and then announced the troop
withdrawal in a June
2011 speech, in effect snatching away the leverage that would be
needed if diplomacy were to have a chance of success. "If you are leaving,
why would the Taliban make a deal with you? How would you make the deal stick?
The Taliban will talk to you, but just to get you out faster." That
comment we heard from an Arab diplomat was repeated across the region.
Yet it was
exactly after announcing the U.S. departure that the administration warmed up
to the idea of reconciliation. Talks with the Taliban were not about arranging
their surrender, but about hastening America's departure. Concerns about human rights, women's rights,
and education were shelved. These were not seen as matters of vital U.S.
interest, just noble causes that were too costly and difficult to support --
and definitely not worth fighting an insurgency over.
The White House
seemed to see an actual benefit in not doing too much. It was happy with its
narrative of modest success in Afghanistan and gradual withdrawal -- building
Afghan security forces to take over from departing U.S. troops. The goal was to
spare the president the risks that necessarily come with playing the leadership
role that America claims to play in this region.
THE TRUE KEY TO ending the
war, Holbrooke often told us, was to change Pakistan. Pakistan was the
sanctuary that the Taliban insurgency used as a launching pad and a place to
escape U.S. retaliation. But to convince Pakistan that we meant business, we
first had to prove that America was going to stay.
But how?
Pakistan's double-dealing was in part a symptom of its bitterness over having
been abandoned and then treated as a rogue state after a previous Afghan war,
against the Soviets, had been won in 1989. Pakistan was also deeply insecure
about India's meteoric rise and growing strategic value to the West. Pakistanis
were playing things very close to the vest. We had to get them to open up.
Could we convince them that their strategic interests in Afghanistan could be
addressed? If so, perhaps in time they might reassess their interests in a way
more favorable to ours.
Holbrooke
understood that the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA wanted Pakistan to
cut ties with the Taliban and do more to fight terrorism. That would never
happen, however, without at least some semblance of a normal relationship
between Pakistan and the United States. Already in 2009, half the U.S.
diplomatic mission in Pakistan worked on intelligence and counterterrorism
rather than diplomacy or development. The U.S. Consulate in Peshawar was
basically bricks shielding antennas. And it paid big dividends. The CIA
collected critical intelligence in Pakistan that allowed for drone strikes
against al Qaeda targets and on more than one occasion prevented a terrorist
strike in the West. So the Obama administration began carrying out drone
strikes in Pakistan on an industrial scale, decimating al Qaeda's
command-and-control structure and crippling the organization.
But hunting
terrorists was unpopular in Pakistan, and drone strikes in particular angered
Pakistanis. In public the authorities denied making any deal with the United
States, but it was obvious to citizens that the drones flew with the
authorities' knowledge and even cooperation. The anger would only get worse as
the number of drone attacks grew. But drones were a deeply classified topic in
the U.S. government. You could not talk about them in public, much less discuss
whom they were hitting and with what results. Embassy staffers took to calling
drones "Voldemorts," after the villain in the Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort: "he who
must not be named."
We knew from
early 2009 that the drone problem meant the crucial intelligence relationship
with Pakistan was headed for trouble. During my early days working with
Holbrooke, when we were crafting a new Pakistan policy, one of Holbrooke's
deputies asked him, "If we are going to seriously engage, shouldn't we
make some changes to the drone policy, perhaps back off a bit?" Holbrooke
replied, "Don't even go there. Nothing is going to change."
To create a new
narrative, Holbrooke started by calling together a meeting in Tokyo of the
newly created Friends of Democratic Pakistan, an international gathering to
help Pakistan rebuild its economy and strengthen democratic politics. He got $5
billion in pledges to assist Pakistan. "That is a respectable IPO,"
Holbrooke would brag, hoping that the opening would garner even more by way of
capital investment in Pakistan's future. But if we wanted to change Pakistan,
Holbrooke thought, we had to think even bigger -- in terms of a Marshall Plan.
After a journalist asked him whether the $5 billion in aid was too much for
Pakistan, Holbrooke answered, "Pakistan needs $50 billion, not $5
billion." The White House did not want to hear that -- it meant a fight
with Congress and spending political capital to convince the American people.
Above all else, it required an audacious foreign-policy gambit for which the
Obama administration was simply not ready.
Yet in reality
we were spending much more than that on Afghanistan. For every dollar we gave
Pakistan in aid, we gave $20 to Afghanistan. That money did not go very far; it
was like pouring water into sand. Even General Petraeus understood this. I
recall him saying at a Pakistan meeting: "You get what you pay for. We
have not paid much for much of anything in Pakistan." In the end, we
settled for far more modest assistance: The 2009 Kerry-Lugar-Berman legislation
earmarked $7.5 billion in aid to Pakistan over five years -- the first
long-term civilian aid package. It was no Marshall Plan.
Holbrooke also
believed we needed more aggressive diplomacy: America had to talk to Pakistan
frequently and not just about security issues that concerned the United States,
but also about economic and social issues the Pakistanis cared about. So
Holbrooke convinced Clinton that America had to offer a strategic partnership
to Pakistan, built around a formal "strategic dialogue" -- the kind
of forum that America holds with a number of countries, including China and
India.
In one of
Clinton's first meetings with Pakistan's military and intelligence chiefs, she
asked them point blank to tell her what their vision for Pakistan was:
"Would Pakistan become like North Korea? I am just curious. I would like
to hear where you see your country going." The generals were at a loss for
words. So was a group of senior journalists when, during a 2009 interview in
Lahore, she pushed back against their incessant criticism of U.S. policy,
saying: "I can't believe that there isn't anybody in the Pakistani
government who knows where bin Laden is." She was tough. But she was just
as serious about engaging Pakistanis on issues that mattered to them.
The White House,
however, was not all that taken by the diplomatic effort, and the CIA and the
Pentagon decided on America's goals vis-à-vis Pakistan. These were predictably
narrow in scope and all terrorism-focused. They set a pugilistic tone for
America's talks with Pakistan but then bore no responsibility for the outcome.
I remember Holbrooke shaking his head and saying. "Watch them [the CIA]
ruin this relationship. And when it is ruined, they are going to say, 'We told
you: You can't work with Pakistan!' We never learn."
Holbrooke knew
that in these circumstances, anyone advocating diplomacy would have to fight to
be heard inside the White House. He tried to reach out to Obama, but his
efforts were to no avail. Obama remained above the fray. The president seemed
to sense that no one would fault him for taking a tough-guy approach to
Pakistan. If the approach failed (as indeed it did), the nefarious,
double-dealing Pakistanis would get the blame (as indeed they did).
After the 2011
bin Laden operation in Abbottabad, Washington was in no mood to soft-pedal what
it saw as Pakistani duplicity. Pressure started to build on Pakistan. Gone were
promises of aid and assistance, strategic partnership, and long-lasting ties.
The administration threatened to cut aid and shamed and embarrassed Pakistan
through public criticisms and media leaks. Some leaks retold familiar tales of
Pakistan's reluctance to cooperate; others revealed dark truths about how
Pakistani intelligence had manipulated public opinion and even gone so far as
to silence journalists permanently.
It quickly
became common for White House meetings on Pakistan to turn into litanies of
complaints as senior officials competed for colorful adjectives to capture how
back-stabbing and untrustworthy they thought Pakistani leaders to be. The most
frequently stated sentiment was "We have had it with these guys." But
they had also had it with us.
IN OCTOBER 2010, during a visit
to the White House, General Kayani gave Obama a 13-page white paper he had
written to explain his views on the outstanding strategic issues between
Pakistan and the United States. Kayani 3.0, as the paper was dubbed (it was the
third one Pakistanis had given the White House on the subject), could be
summarized as: You are not going to win the war, and you are not going to
transform Afghanistan. This place has devoured empires before you; it will defy
you as well. Stop your grandiose plans, and let's get practical, sit down, and
discuss how you will leave and what is an end state we can both live with.
Kayani expressed
the same doubt time and again in meetings. We would try to convince him that we
were committed to the region and had a solution for Afghanistan's problems:
America would first beat the Taliban and then build a security force to hold
the place together after it left. He, like many others, thought the idea of an
Afghan military was foolish and that the United States was better off
negotiating an exit with the Taliban.
In one small
meeting around a narrow table, Kayani listened carefully and took notes as we
went through our list of issues. I cannot forget Kayani's reaction when we
enthusiastically explained our plan to build up Afghan forces to 400,000 by
2014. His answer was swift and unequivocal: Don't do it. "You will
fail," he said. "Then you will leave and that half-trained army will
break into militias that will be a problem for Pakistan." We tried to
stand our ground, but he would have none of it. He continued, "I don't
believe that the Congress is going to pay $9 billion a year for this
400,000-man force." He was sure it would eventually collapse and the
army's broken pieces would resort to crime and terrorism to earn their keep.
Kayani's counsel
was that if you want to leave, just leave -- we didn't believe you were going
to stay anyway -- but don't do any more damage on your way out. This seemed to
be a ubiquitous sentiment across the region. No one bought our argument for
sending more troops into Afghanistan, and no one was buying our arguments for
leaving. It seemed everyone was getting used to a direction-less America.
How painful then
to remember that, for Obama, Afghanistan had started out as the "good
war." A war of necessity that America had to wage to defeat al Qaeda and
ensure that Afghanistan never harbored terrorists again. Obama's stance was
widely understood at home and abroad to mean that America would do all it could
in Afghanistan -- commit more money and send more troops -- to finish off the
Taliban and build a strong democratic state capable of standing up to
terrorism.
Four years
later, Obama is no longer making the case for the "good war."
Instead, he is fast washing his hands of it. It is a popular position at home,
where many Americans, including many who voted for Obama, want nothing more to
do with war. They are disillusioned by the ongoing instability in Iraq and
Afghanistan and tired of more than 10 years of fighting. They do not believe
war was the right solution to terrorism, and they have stopped putting stock in
the scaremongering that the Bush administration used to fuel its foreign
policy. There is a growing sense that America has no interests in Afghanistan
vital enough to justify a major ground presence.
It was to court
public opinion that Obama first embraced the war in Afghanistan. And when
public opinion changed, he was quick to declare victory and call the troops
back home. His actions from start to finish were guided by politics, and they
played well at home. Abroad, however, the stories the United States tells to
justify its on-again, off-again approach do not ring true to friend or foe.
They know the truth: America is leaving Afghanistan to its own fate. America is
leaving even as the demons of regional chaos that first beckoned it there are
once again rising to threaten its security.
America has not
won this war on the battlefield, nor has the country ended it at the
negotiating table. America is just washing its hands of this war. We may hope
that the Afghan army the United States is building will hold out longer than
the one that the Soviet Union built, but even that may not come to pass. Very
likely, the Taliban will win Afghanistan again, and this long, costly war will
have been for naught.
***
When Holbrooke died
in December 2010, Clinton kept his office alive, but the White House managed to
take over AfPak policy, in part by letting the Pentagon run Afghanistan and the
CIA, Pakistan. Clinton wanted John Podesta, an influential Democratic Party
stalwart who served as President Bill Clinton's chief of staff, to succeed
Holbrooke. But Podesta was too influential (including with the president) and
too high-profile, and that would have made it difficult for the White House to
manage him and snatch AfPak policy. The
White House vetoed the choice.
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