by Ronan Farrow
VIETNAM WAS THE FIRST modern test of American “counter-insurgency”—the strategy of securing a vulnerable population while winning its loyalty through social programs. During a Foreign Service training course, Holbrooke and his Vietnam-bound contemporaries—including Anthony Lake, who would later become Clinton’s national security advisor—whiled away sweltering nights playing a game called “fan ball,” which involved throwing a tennis ball at a ceiling fan, then scrambling to chase it as it ricocheted around the room. (They could hardly have designed a more conspicuous Vietnam metaphor if they tried.) At the time of his arrival, twenty-two-year-old Holbrooke was single and could be sent to the rural frontlines to oversee development programs. It gave him an unvarnished view of mounting failures that his superiors in Washington lacked.
He also witnessed the precipitous militarization of policymaking in Vietnam. During a trip with the 9th Marine Regiment in rural Da Nang, Holbrooke watched General Lewis Walt, commander of the Marine Amphibious Force, kneel and push away semicircles of sand in front of him, showing how the Americans would supposedly push out the Vietcong, making way for the South Vietnamese and good governance. A group of Vietnamese children looked on, chattering curiously. Holbrooke, never one to mince words, pointed out: “But the VC will just move in behind you.” The general, and Americans across Vietnam, kept on pushing for years. “Despite the hours and days of instruction they had in ‘counterinsurgency,’ despite all the briefings which emphasized the political nature of the war, they could not understand what was going on or how to deal with it,” Holbrooke wrote in one unpublished memo. The insurgents would not give up, and the locals “were not going to switch sides in return for some free soap.”
Holbrooke dissented, loudly. During his time in the provinces, he once argued openly with General William Westmoreland, the commander of US forces in Vietnam.
“How old are you?” Westmoreland finally asked, exasperated.
“Twenty-four.”
“What makes you think you know so much?”
“I don’t know,” said Holbrooke, “but I’ve been here two years and I’ve spent all of the time in the field.”
Westmoreland was reporting back to Washington his conviction that he could break the insurgency through increasing levels of force. As Holbrooke ascended to positions at the White House and State Department, he sent vigorous, often unsolicited memos to his bosses. “I have never seen the Americans in such disarray,” he wrote in one when he was just twenty-six. Forty years later, when I was working for him as the military pushed for a troop surge in Afghanistan, Holbrooke unearthed the memo and had me forward it to his Vietnam buddies.
When the Department of Defense launched the top-secret review of Vietnam eventually known as the Pentagon Papers, an official named Leslie Gelb, who went on to become the head of the Council on Foreign Relations and a lifelong friend to Holbrooke, tapped the iconoclastic young diplomat to write one volume. Holbrooke’s contributions were scathing. The counterinsurgency was “faultily conceived and clumsily executed.” The hawks, he argued, had dangerously commandeered policymaking.
When the legendary diplomat Averell Harriman headed a delegation to negotiate with the North Vietnamese, Holbrooke numbed his bosses into submission hustling for a spot on the team. He believed in the power of negotiation to end the war. “Holbrooke wants to always talk with the other side,” said Nicholas Katzenbach, the under secretary of state who was Holbrooke’s boss in the late 1960s. “He always thinks there’s some negotiation, some middle road.” But Paris was an agonizing failure. During a close presidential race, the Nixon campaign, it later emerged, worked to scuttle the talks, encouraging South Vietnam to drag its feet. Famously, the team wasted two months arguing over the shape of the negotiating table, as the war raged.
Shortly after Nixon took office, Holbrooke resigned and left government. “[I]t was neither foreordained nor inevitable that the war should continue, with another twenty-five thousand Americans and countless Vietnamese dead,” he later wrote. “A negotiated end to the war in 1968 was possible; the distance to peace was far smaller than most historians realize.” He’d seen the United States squander one chance to end a war; he wouldn’t let it happen again.
As the war in Afghanistan raged in September 2010, the State Department Historian’s Office released the final volume in the government’s official history of Vietnam. Richard Holbrooke walked from his office to the State Department’s George C. Marshall Conference Center to deliver remarks on the publication, which contained one of his early memos. It was a gray day, and he wore a gray, rumpled suit, and stood in front of a gray drop cloth. The fluorescent lights cast deep shadows under his eyes. He paused a little more often than usual. When an audience member asked about the parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam, Holbrooke managed a wan smile. “I was wondering how long we could avoid that question.”
He spoke carefully. As Holbrooke’s contemporaries slipped from power and a new generation took hold, the word “Vietnam” increasingly registered as an unwelcome history lesson. But privately, I had heard him lay out the comparison. In Vietnam, the United States had been defeated by a country adjacent to the conflict, harboring enemy safe havens across a porous border; by our reliance on a corrupt partner government; and by an embrace of a failing counterinsurgency doctrine at the behest of the military establishment. In Afghanistan, he was witnessing echoes of all three dynamics—including yet another administration favoring military voices and missing opportunities for negotiation. “Dick Holbrooke was, of course, a friend of mine,” Henry Kissinger said. “It was a fair comparison,” he observed of the parallels Holbrooke drew between Vietnam and Afghanistan. In both cases, the United States would find itself applying frameworks that had worked elsewhere in the world with disastrous results. “Vietnam was the attempt to apply the containment principles of Europe to Asia,” Kissinger continued, “But, in Europe, containment was applied to societies that had existed for hundreds of years and whose internal structure was relatively stable except for the impact of the war.” Vietnam had proved to be another matter entirely. Likewise, in Afghanistan, the question after 9/11 was, “Can we turn Afghanistan into a democratic government which no longer supports such efforts?” as Kissinger put it. “That was the wrong question.”
That day at the State Department, Richard Holbrooke was quick to point out that Afghanistan was not Vietnam. The inciting event—an attack on American soil—made the strategic calculus different. “But structurally there are obvious similarities,” he said. “And leafing through these books here, they leap out at you. Many of the programs that are being followed, many of the basic doctrines are the same ones that we were trying to apply in Vietnam.”
4
THE MANGO CASE
SHORTLY AFTER RICHARD HOLBROOKE left behind the wreckage of Vietnam and resigned from the Nixon administration, Robin Raphel departed Cambridge and returned to Iran, taking a job teaching history at Damavand College for women. Before the fall of the shah, Tehran was cosmopolitan and welcoming. Raphel danced and acted in US-backed theater productions, including one of Anything Goes. She fell in love with a handsome, funny Foreign Service officer, Arnold Raphel; “Arnie,” to friends. In 1972, they married on the grounds of the American embassy in an interfaith ceremony bringing together his Judaism, her Christianity, and a lot of 1970s velvet.
When he was posted to Pakistan in 1975, Raphel went with him. Pakistan didn’t faze her any more than Iran had. Islamabad was a sleepy town, lush and green, with a third of its current population. “It was great,” Raphel recalled, lighting up at the memory. “It was up and coming.” She joined the Foreign Service and took a job at USAID. The young American couple cut a glamorous profile, throwing cocktail parties and hosting screenings of American movies. She slipped effortlessly into Pakistani high society, developing a network of connections that would serve—and haunt—her in years to come. For Raphel, like generations of Foreign Service officers before her, advancing American in
fluence was about friendship and conversation. “You need to be engaged and figure out what makes people tick and what motivates them,” she said. “To me that’s blindingly obvious.” She reflected on this for a moment. “But sometimes we forget. And in this post-9/11, more urgent and demanding time, we fell into finger-wagging demanding.”
Just a few years after Raphel’s first, golden days in Islamabad, a transformation swept the region. When the secular, American-backed shah of Iran fell to an Islamist revolution in 1979, it cemented America’s reliance on Pakistan as a military and intelligence partner. The United States had lost important listening stations in Iran used to monitor the Soviets. The CIA approached Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency—the ISI—which agreed to build Pakistani facilities to fill the void.
THE CALL OF ISLAMIC REVOLUTION also sounded from Iran to neighboring Afghanistan, where a Soviet-backed Marxist regime had seized control a year earlier. Under the guidance of the KGB, the Marxists had instituted secular reforms, including mandatory girls’ education. On propaganda posters, women with red babushkas and red lips held open books under Cyrillic screaming: “IF YOU DON’T READ BOOKS, YOU’LL FORGET THE LETTERS.” For conservative Afghans, it was too much. The Afghan army erupted against the communists.
Initially, the Soviets hesitated as the revolt spread. But in Moscow, diplomacy had been sidelined and the KGB’s influence had swelled. KGB chief Yuri Andropov neatly bypassed Soviet diplomats voicing caution. On Christmas Eve, transport planes loaded with Soviet troops landed at Kabul airport. The Carter administration saw the invasion as a chance to embarrass Moscow. Carter green-lit a covert war orchestrated through the United States’ military alliance with Pakistan. “It is essential that Afghanistan’s resistance continues,” National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote. “This means more money as well as arms shipments to the rebels. . . To make this possible, we must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels. This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.”
Pakistan had not been a paragon of virtue in the late 1970s. Its military dictator, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, hanged the civilian leader he had forced out of office, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and canceled elections. Pakistan was aggressively pursuing the atom bomb, resisting American calls to stand down. In the name of war with the Soviets, as was the case in the later war on terror, all those concerns were secondary.
Over the course of Reagan’s first term, Congress’s approved funding for the covert war swelled from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Zia insisted that guns purchased with those funds be dispersed entirely on Pakistan’s terms. A Top Secret Presidential Finding at the outset of the war called for the CIA to defer to Pakistan. One Islamabad station chief remembered his orders this way: “Take care of the Pakistanis, and make them do whatever you need them to do.” When Zia visited Reagan, Secretary of State Shultz wrote a memo advising that, “We must remember, without Zia’s support, the Afghan resistance, key to making the Soviets pay a heavy price for their Afghan adventure, is effectively dead.” (When I asked Shultz about his advocacy for the Pakistani regime, he was unapologetic. “Zia and President Reagan, they had a relationship. The whole idea was helping the mujahedeen get the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan,” he said, using the Arabic word for Muslim fighters engaged in jihad, like those fighting the Soviets. “And we succeeded.”) And so, as Zia insisted, weapons would be given to Pakistan’s ISI, which would hand-select the mujahedeen who received the spoils. The United States, still stinging from the complexities of managing a proxy war in Vietnam, was happy to leave the details to Pakistan.
AMID THEM URGENCY of battle with the Soviets, the partnership’s less pleasant realities were easy to overlook. Pakistani officers sold their CIA-supplied weapons on the black market—once, they even sold them back to the CIA. Pakistan continued to brazenly flaunt its nuclear development. In 1985, the Senate passed the so-called Pressler Amendment, requiring the president to certify, on an annual basis, that Pakistan didn’t possess nukes. The rule was strict: no certification, no assistance. Zia lied to President Reagan about the Pakistani nuclear program. “There is no question that we had an intelligence basis for not certifying from 1987 on,” said one veteran CIA official. But Reagan continued to certify that Pakistan was nonnuclear anyway. Ohio senator John Glenn argued that nuclear proliferation was “a far greater danger to the world than being afraid to cut off the flow of aid to Afghanistan. . . . It’s the short-term versus the long-term.” But he was a rare voice of dissent.
The covert war also required that the Americans turn a blind eye to the brutality of the jihad being armed across the border. The Pakistanis passed the American arms to the most ruthless of the Islamist hard-liners: radicals like Abdul Sayyaf and Burhanuddin Rabbani and Jalaluddin Haqqani, all with strong ties to terrorist networks. One of the ISI’s favored sons was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a vicious fundamentalist who reputedly specialized in skinning captured soldiers alive and whose men indiscriminately murdered civilians. A pugnacious CIA agent named Milt Bearden took over the program in the latter half of the 1980s. By his estimate, the Pakistanis gave nearly a quarter of the American spoils to Hekmatyar. “Hekmatyar was a favorite of the Pakistanis, but he certainly wasn’t a favorite of mine,” he told me. He added flatly: “I really should have shot him when I had the chance.”
International Islamists were attracted like moths to the fires of extremism stoked by the Pakistanis and Americans. A wealthy Saudi patron named Osama bin Laden moved to Pakistan in the mid-1980s and drew close to some of the ISI’s favored jihadis, including Hekmatyar and Sayyaf. He offered cash stipends to fighters from the ISI’s training camps, and eventually established his own, modeled closely after the ISI’s.
And it worked. Within a few years, the CIA declared the covert war cost-effective. The true costs became apparent later.
ROBIN AND ARNOLD RAPHEL had moved to Washington, DC, just before the war with the Soviets broke out and “a lot of stuff went south,” as she would later put it. This was an accurate description of events in both the US-Pakistani relationship and her own. She wanted children; Arnold didn’t. They divorced in the early 1980s. Raphel would have two subsequent marriages, and two daughters. But friends described Arnold as the love of Robin Raphel’s life. One sensed she’d sooner jump out of a window than cop to such sentimentality.
Arnold, still a rising star in the Foreign Service, returned to Pakistan as US ambassador. On a hot afternoon in August 1988, he joined President Zia in a stretch of desert near the provincial city of Bahawalpur for a demonstration of the American Abrams tank—the latest offering to be purchased with Pakistan’s still-ongoing flood of assistance—and then accepted a last-minute invitation to join Zia in his American-made C-130 Hercules, for the commute back to Islamabad. They were joined by Zia’s chief of staff and ISI chief General Akhtar, who had hand-selected the mujahedeen supported by America’s covert war, along with General Herbert M. Wassom, who oversaw US military assistance to Pakistan. Exactly five minutes after they took off, the plane plunged into the desert and exploded into a massive fireball. All thirty souls aboard were dead, including Zia-ul-Haq and Arnold Raphel.
The incident is, to this day, one of the great unsolved mysteries of Pakistani history. Although an American ambassador had been killed and the FBI had statutory authority to investigate, Secretary of State Shultz ordered FBI investigators to stay away. Milt Bearden, likewise, kept the CIA away. The only Americans allowed on the site, seven Air Force investigators, ruled out mechanical failure in a secret report. The only possibility was sabotage. A canister containing VX nerve gas or a similar agent could have wiped out the plane, perhaps. A long-standing conspiracy theory held that nerve gas was secreted in a case of mangoes, loaded onboard before takeoff.
For Pakistan, the crash deepened mistrust of the Americans. Gener
al Beg, who seized power afterwards, was as committed as Zia to Pakistan’s nuclear development and support for terrorist proxies—but less friendly to the United States. For Robin Raphel, the tragedy severed her from those early, hopeful days in Tehran. When I asked about losing Arnold, she gave a small, brittle laugh. “It would be difficult for anyone. But life goes on.”
That was the year the last of the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan. The CIA station in Islamabad’s cable relating the news read, simply, “we won.” But the lack of broader strategic dialogue between the United States and Pakistan hit hard and fast once the Red Menace subsided.
FOUR MONTHS LATER, when Pakistan’s new prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, made her first official trip to the United States, the cracks were already beginning to show. Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the prime minister over whose hanging Zia had presided, had returned to Pakistan after years of exile. Harvard-educated and just thirty-five years old, she cut a glamorous profile. Wearing a white headscarf, a gold and pink salwar kameez, and literally rose-colored aviator glasses, she stood in front of the American flag at a joint session of Congress and quoted Lincoln, Madison, and Kennedy. “Speaking for Pakistan, I can declare that we do not possess nor do we intend to make a nuclear device,” she said emphatically.