Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir

by Christopher R. Hill

  I got up at 4:30 A.M. and tried to slip out of my room down the stairs without waking him.

  “Chris, you leaving now?” he called out from his room. “When are you back in D.C.? We need to have a good talk. Let me know.”

  “Of course. We’ll talk. We’ll talk not just about Afghanistan and Iraq, but let’s talk about other stuff, too. I miss that. How are the Knicks going to do this year? And by the way, you need to start taking better care of yourself. Get some sleep now.”

  I walked out of the townhouse, descending the half dozen steps to the brick sidewalk, streetlights still on in the pre-dawn. The walk was covered with soggy leaves from the overnight rain. It was a chilly late October morning, and I pulled my light coat up against a cold breeze. As I waited momentarily for the taxi, I reflected on how I should have been in closer contact with him while I was in Iraq. He needed me, I realized now, and I needed him, I had to admit to myself. I was determined this time to stay in better touch. Maybe we could work on something. Or maybe just go to a baseball game together.

  He died in December, before I could ever see him again.

  EPILOGUE

  A week before Richard Holbrooke died in December 2010, Steve Solarz, the congressman I worked with after my first Korean assignment, passed away as well. Steve was an energetic representative from Brooklyn who never saw a problem in the world he didn’t want to jump on and solve. A few months later in 2011, Larry Eagleburger, my first mentor, died. At his memorial service I listened to the eulogy by his mentor, Henry Kissinger. In this grim harvest of my own mentors, it was not to say that diplomacy died, but replacements for these pragmatic problem solvers were slow in coming.

  I spent thirty-three years in America’s foreign service. My dad spent three decades in it as he and my mother took their five children around the world. In all these years, what has not changed is that the world still looks to the United States to lead by example; what has changed is how we are responding to these expectations. We live in a time when ideology is hotly debated and where there is a diminished consensus, and a collapsing middle ground about who we are and what our values are and how we pursue them. One of the casualties is our willingness to talk to all sides. One might think that the logic of the old adage that one does not need to make peace with one’s friends would be enough. But having had to defend my role in talking with Milosevic in the midst of the Yugoslav wars, or in negotiating with the North Koreans, that seems not so.

  Finding practical answers to tough problems seems to take a backseat to ideology. Nowhere is this issue more pronounced than in weighing the rapid imposition of democracy against more evolving change. We must always be clear about human rights. These rights are a set of international values embraced by the United Nations Charter and many of the founding documents of our era. But human rights are not identical with democracy, which is a system of governance, certainly the best to protect those values. Our diplomats must be clear about human rights, but in a country’s choice of governance, we would do well to lower our voices and offer our help when asked. Pragmatism offers no refuge for those in need of instant gratification, but its track record in implementing those values is better than armed intervention. Diplomacy is more complex than three-dimensional chess in that time, the fourth dimension, is also a crucial factor.

  We might also focus on whether everything we know has to be shouted from the rooftops via social media. The use of new media may be a worthy effort to address the complexity of a globalized world, where states are no longer the only actors, but Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are not necessarily geared to solving problems or building trust. “Mentions,” or being “liked,” or “going viral” are really not enough in this line of work.

  Diplomacy has often had to work with the military, and that task has become increasingly complex as the military is called on to perform tasks that are more diplomatic than military in nature. In the wake of 9/11, the military has had to fight wars whose uncertain objectives make some seem endless, stretching beyond the patience of the American people, whose support is essential.

  There is an overlap, therefore, in the world of the military and the diplomat, but diplomacy is not a continuation of war by other means. Nor do our generals need to become diplomats, or our State Department and Foreign Service officers to become soldiers. The State Department and the Pentagon need to respect each other and learn from each other. Diplomats will be increasingly deployed (assigned, that is) to war zones. The State Department will find itself in the mix of interservice rivalries. This meshing of military and State Department cultures will take time and tact. In the end, we all work for our country, and ultimately for each other, a band of brothers and sisters.

  • • •

  No diplomatic period of history, neither my father’s nor my own, has looked like a triumphant march to inevitable victory. I negotiated for several years in Bosnia, culminating at the Dayton Peace Accords, and then in Kosovo. Neither was a sure bet. For four years I negotiated in the Six Party Talks with North Korea, only to see those talks founder in the first term of the Obama administration, and subsequently be crowded out. After some five years of being shut down, the North Koreans started up the bomb-making reactor we had so laboriously worked to disable. Diplomacy failed to shut down North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

  Diplomacy doesn’t work everywhere or in every circumstance, but in the case of North Korea it was hard then and is just as hard now to understand what the alternative is. The neoconservatives fought any deal with North Korea as illusory. They did not produce a policy alternative that could accomplish anything, apart from infuriating many South Koreans and leaving the entire region wondering what the United States was thinking.

  In February 2012, I visited Shanghai to give the keynote address at a conference on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of one of America’s greatest diplomatic achievements, the breakup of the China-Soviet axis and the inauguration of better ties with the United States. The Shanghai Accords are one of the signature moments of American diplomatic history. I was twenty years old at that time. If my dad’s diplomatic career hadn’t convinced me to be a diplomat, Kissinger and his team slipping into China from Pakistan sealed the deal. In addition to ushering a new age of China-U.S. relations, those same accords ushered out the China-Soviet relationship and meant the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.

  The celebratory mood was dampened, however, when that same day in 2012, China joined Russia in casting a veto on Syria. Many U.S. commentators, both left and right, were satisfied that the veto exposed China and Russia for supporting a hideous regime. But for those of us who believe in the importance of the Sino-U.S. relationship, it was an unhappy reminder of the unfinished work ahead, the fact that a relationship too big to fail cannot find a balance. Similarly, our relations with Russia will remain fraught and burdened by a long and bitter history whose patterns will be difficult to break.

  • • •

  Iraq, bloody Iraq, remains what it has been for centuries, the badlands, the borderlands of Shia and Sunni, of Arabs and Kurds, of Arabs and Persians. That was true before our occupation and will continue to be so after our departure. Whatever political configuration Iraq eventually becomes, it will remain this dangerous conjunction of political, ethnic, and sectarian identities, whose national identity is unlikely ever to be summarized by that phrase e pluribus unum.

  Four months after I departed Baghdad, Nouri al-Maliki was confirmed on December 22, 2010, for a second term. Pressed by our successors at the embassy, his cabinet was indeed “inclusive,” to use what has become a tiresome American expression to describe the need for political balance. His twenty-eight-member cabinet included nine Sunni Arabs, including a deputy prime minister, and another six members from the Kurdish list that also included a deputy prime minister. It was about the same proportion as in Maliki’s first cabinet.

  Oil production was on the rise, security was improving, and there were good reasons to expect Iraq to continue
stumbling forward. But in 2011 and 2012 things began to fall apart. Maliki never appointed new ministers of defense and interior as he had promised to do. Instead he kept those most important of ministries for himself and his office cronies to run. The Sunnis, who had expected to have one or the other of these complained bitterly, and dialogue within the cabinet deteriorated. Maliki failed to follow through on assurances made to Kurdistan President Barzani. When I saw President Barzani in November 2011, just a year and three months after our swim in the Zab River, he was adamant in his opposition to Maliki, saying that he had not fulfilled promises made during the government formation period. Maliki went after his critics, especially the Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi and later deputy Prime Minister Rafi al-Issawi. He drove Hashimi into exile and Issawi out of the government in 2013. Whatever the transgressions of those two Sunni leaders, Maliki, bereft of allies in the region, showed little wisdom or restraint in attacking Sunni leaders. Meanwhile, President Jalal Talabani’s fragile health deteriorated until a stroke in late 2012 incapacitated him. He no longer played the role of encouraging the “good” Maliki, or of reassuring the Sunnis, whose distaste for Shia-led government never waned. Maliki turned increasingly inward, ever less interested in “inclusive” government.

  In Syria, a democracy movement sparked by the Arab Spring quickly degenerated into a sectarian knife fight, the intensity of which has yet to abate. Sunni extremists there began crossing the border into Iraq to “liberate” more “Sunni lands” from the apostate Shia. They found a mostly receptive Sunni audience, chafing under Shia rule. Those who were not so receptive were eliminated, often by execution and assassination. In 2012 and 2013 Sunni extremists launched a wave of bombing attacks against Iraq’s Shia population in an effort to discredit their Shia leaders and draw them into a sectarian battle. As if to cover up for a lack of concerted policy in Syria, from where these blood-soaked fighters came, international leaders blamed the attacks on Maliki’s political failures at Sunni outreach.

  Responsibility for Iraq’s descent into a sectarian abyss is often laid entirely at Maliki’s feet. While he surely deserves his share of the blame, the Sunnis in Iraq have done little to reconcile themselves to living under the majority rule of the Shia, whether the prime minister is Maliki or some other Shia. One-thousand-year-old enmities die hard.

  Whether Iraq eventually succeeds as a single state ever again will depend on the Iraqis themselves. It always does. The Obama administration has been wise to tread carefully, but its slowness to grasp the complexities of the region, the seeming confusion within its foreign policy team between of wars of democracy and sectarian enmity, has created a sense that Iraq and the Middle East more broadly are beyond its capacities to manage.

  The Obama administration’s difficulties in dealing with the Middle East crises and its wariness about any high-stakes engagement there has given the unrepentant neoconservatives a chance to rise from their crypt and claim they were right all along about the need for endless American war in the Middle East. But the fact remains that they never understood sectarianism either, and never understood that a majority-ruled Iraq which necessarily involves Shia leadership is unlikely, putting it mildly, to become an inspiration to the Sunni-dominated Arab Middle East.

  The failure of neoconservatives and their fellow travelers to explain what they were trying to accomplish in Iraq remains one of the most disgraceful performances by a foreign policy class in America. It has been a failure to acknowledge mistakes, and a shameful effort to shift the blame, in the case of Iraq, to nameless intelligence analysts, as if they were responsible for the full-court pressure on President Bush to convince him to go to war. They quickly attacked Obama; and like architects who blame the builder, they never tire of offering bad advice then attack the implementers for not following their plans to the letter. Despite the intellectual origins of many of their devotees, they bear much responsibility for reducing America’s own discourse on foreign policy to little more than a barroom brawl. They have much to answer for. Perhaps, for starters, they could observe a period of silence while the rest of us try to deal with the practical realities of a difficult global structure.

  • • •

  In 2011 and later in 2013 my wife, Julie, and I visited Kosovo, a place that years ago had fit Secretary Christopher’s description of the Balkans as a problem from hell. We went to the small village of Malishevo, where a dozen years before I saw its population driven into the hills, its houses and mosque burned to the ground. It had taken Tina Kaidanow, Phil Reeker, and me hours to get there over narrow roads. Now we sped down an interstate highway built by the American engineering firm Bechtel.

  “Where’s Malishevo?” I asked the driver, eager to see this town that I knew so well, and confused by the changed scenery and the fast pace of driving on an interstate highway. He pointed to a blue highway sign: MALISHEVO: EXIT 6: 2 KILOMETERS. We turned off the highway and drove into the town. The houses were all rebuilt. There was a pleasant restaurant and café nearby, and the mosque that had been hit by a tank round was also rebuilt. Children played in a swimming pool in the center of town. I learned from the village elders who gathered around me that the old man who had thanked me for returning him to his home after spending weeks in a mountain forest had died peacefully in his sleep, in his home, some months before.

  Kosovo is on its way to a better future, as are Macedonia, Bosnia, Croatia, and even Serbia. But the memories of those difficult days seem to stay fresh. In 2011, my wife and I were driven to Macedonia from Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, where I had met with the prime minister, now in a gray pinstripe suit that fit him better than the military fatigues of twelve years before. The car sped down through the canyon whose every turn in the road I knew so well, and to the border for the last thirty minutes to Skopje. I showed Julie where the Stenkovac camp had once stood, packed with thousands of refugees who had streamed down this same canyon road, clutching what they had been able to grab of their belongings. In the restfulness of a brilliant mid-September day, I had a hard time recalling or even imagining the dark mood of weeks when nothing was clear about the future. I paused for a second to look out on the now-peaceful rolling hills and the small farms, the grain harvest under way, and Stenkovac, an unmarked place along the road.

  The driver said, “Mr. Ambassador, sorry to interrupt, but I was in that camp for two months. My family and I had waited at the border for days. We thought we might all die those days. The Americans saved my life. They saved all our lives. My sister. My brother. My parents. All of us. We are all well today, all well because you saved our lives. I just want to say thank you now because I will never get a better chance. Sorry to interrupt you.”

  • • •

  In the fall of 2013, I met a student who had just enrolled at the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies, where I had become dean. I noticed his accent was from the Balkans, and I guessed correctly he was from Bosnia. He was now an American citizen, born to a Serb father and a Bosnian Muslim mother, hailing from a small town in eastern Bosnia that would never be the same again, since the war had torn it apart. His parents had taken him to the United States, where he learned English in elementary school and had become a football and baseball fan. He wanted to study international relations. I asked what he wanted to do once he gets his master’s degree.

  “I want to become an American diplomat,” he answered.

  I looked at him. “Maybe I can help you with that.”

  1. 1960. The Hill family, aboard the SS America en route back to my dad’s assignment in Yugoslavia. Traveling by ship for Foreign Service families soon became a relic of the past.

  2. 1975. Cameroon, Africa. As a Peace Corps volunteer visiting the credit union in a palm oil plantation.

  3. July 1991. Tirana, Albania. With Mother Teresa and the pilot of a C-141 carrying aid supplies. Mother Teresa expressed concern that the aircraft was “too big to fly.”

  4. October 1991. U.S. Embassy Tirana, Alb
ania. Raising the flag with Mrs. Agani. Her husband had worked for the U.S. Embassy in 1946 and was later shot by the communist authorities after U.S. diplomats departed.

  5. August 1995. President Clinton conducting a meeting in the chapel at Fort Myers (Arlington, Virginia) immediately after a memorial service for Bob Frasure, Joe Kruzel, and Nelson Drew, our three colleagues killed on Mount Igman Road near Sarajevo. (I am at left in front of the bookcase.)

  6. September 1995. With Ambassador Dick Holbrooke en route to the Balkans on the peace shuttle. A mentor and a tormentor.

  7. November 12, 1995. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Visiting with Slobodan Milosevic in his suite in the Visiting Officers Quarters.

  8. November 20, 1995. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Discussing the map of Bosnia. From left: myself, Dick Holbrooke, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, President Izetbegovic, and Slobodan Milosevic.

  9. 1997. Macedonia. Up along Macedonia’s border with Serbia visiting U.S. troops who were patrolling under a UN command.

  10. March 25, 1999. Skopje. Embassy Skopje attacked by thousands of demonstrators on the first day of the Kosovo War. They never got through the door despite using our flagpole as a battering ram.

  11. April 1999. Skopje. With Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott (at right) visiting President Gligorov (shaking my hand) and Macedonian defense minister Handziski (in profile at rear of photo). The smiles belied tough discussions about Macedonia’s willingness to take in a quarter million Kosovo refugees.

  12. May 1999. Skopje. First Lady Hillary Clinton conducting an NGO meeting in the residence living room. That day in the dining room she signaled to Christiane Amanpour that she was interested in running for the Senate. She later returned with her husband and announced more economic assistance for Macedonia.