by Ronan Farrow
But days beforehand, Bhutto had sat at Blair House, kitty-corner from the White House, and received an alarming briefing from CIA director William H. Webster. According to one person who was present that day, Webster walked in with a soccer ball converted into a mock-up of the kind of nuclear prototype he now knew Pakistan possessed. Webster told Bhutto that if her country continued the process of converting its gaseous uranium into solid “pits”—the cores of atom bombs—there was no way President Bush could certify that Pakistan was non-nuclear later that year. Before the end of the month, the jig was up. The CIA had irrefutable evidence that Pakistan had machined its uranium into several cores. In 1990, just a year after the Soviets’ departure from Afghanistan, George H. W. Bush became the first president to decline to certify that Pakistan remained nonnuclear. Under the terms of the Pressler Amendment, most economic and military assistance was suspended, and F-16 fighter jets ordered and paid for by Pakistan were left to collect dust in Arizona for years. To this day, the F-16s are a point of obsession for every Pakistani military official I’ve met. They symbolize a betrayal America quickly forgot—and Pakistan never did.
When the military relationship came screeching to a halt, there was little by way of meaningful diplomatic context to soften the blow. Even Milt Bearden, maestro of mujahedeen chaos, lamented the lack of dialogue: “The relationship was always shallow,” he remembered. “When the Soviets marched out of Afghanistan in February 1989, within the next year we had sanctioned them and cut off military contacts.” It set the tenor for the relationship in the following decade, with Pakistan in the role of jilted lover. “They love to love us,” reflected Bearden, “but they really deeply believe that every time the chips are down, we screw ’em.”
Absent the urgency of a proxy war, the American foreign policy establishment turned on Pakistan. The country’s support for militant Islam, once a convenience, was now a liability. When the Soviets left, the ISI attempted to install Hekmatyar, its favored extremist, into power. But after he lost a bloody fight for Kabul, the Pakistanis turned to a different solution, arming and funding another conservative movement they hoped would serve as a counterbalance to their regional rival, India: the “students of Islam,” or Taliban.
Stories of the Taliban’s hard-line social policies and brutal repression of women began to reach the Western world. Incoming secretary of state Madeleine Albright was among the ranks of establishment figures who began to rally against the regime for its deepening repression. (“I do not regret not dealing with the Taliban,” she said years later. “I am willing, however, to admit that it was very complex in terms of who really was in charge.”) That outrage gathered steam as the threat of the terrorists Taliban leaders were harboring became apparent. The 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa, and the revelation that their orchestrator, Osama bin Laden, had close ties to the Taliban, sealed the regime’s status as an international pariah. Pakistan, as the Taliban’s benefactor, shared in that reputation.
ROBIN RAPHEL WAS a lone voice of dissent. When Bill Clinton took office as president in 1993, he had tapped Raphel, his old friend from England, to become assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs. As relations between Washington and Islamabad chilled over the course of the 1990s, Raphel was a stalwart advocate for the country where she had formed so many relationships earlier in her career. When a senator named Hank Brown introduced legislation to ease restrictions on assistance to Pakistan, she worked with Pakistani diplomats for months lobbying for the bill. Its passage, in 1995, cleared the way for arms exports to Pakistan, despite the country’s growing nuclear arsenal. Raphel was also an ardent defender of Benazir Bhutto, who returned to power during Raphel’s first year as assistant secretary, and who was covertly authorizing assistance to the Taliban—while lying about it to the Americans. Raphel told me she went into the relationship with eyes open. “I didn’t believe Bhutto. I felt we needed to be talking to everyone.” Nevertheless, she argued against sanctions and helped secure assistance for Pakistan.
Raphel also campaigned for talks with Taliban leaders. A cable summarizing one of her visits to Kabul in 1996 conveyed a rosy view of the regime, quoting one leader who told Raphel, “We are not bad people,” and optimistically describing the Taliban’s “growing awareness, previously absent, of their own limitations.” Shortly after the Taliban took control of Kabul that year, Raphel called on other countries to embrace the regime at a closed-door session at the United Nations. “They are Afghan, they are indigenous, they have demonstrated staying power,” she said. “It is not in the interests of Afghanistan or any of us here that the Taliban be isolated.” As one veteran Pakistani diplomat who worked with Raphel for many years put it: “If Robin had lasted another year as assistant secretary, there would be a Taliban embassy in Washington, DC.”
Raphel, with her fringe embrace of the Pakistanis and the Taliban, aroused suspicion, both in Washington and in the region. This was the point at which the Indian press began tarring her as “Lady Taliban,” a moniker that would stick for decades. “It was silly,” she said. “Because I did go and talk to these people. That was my job. But, because I wasn’t horrified and didn’t want to treat them like pariahs . . . people found it absolutely shocking that I thought it was perfectly normal to talk to them.” She sighed. “It was a mistake to demonize the Taliban. That might well have contributed to how they got totally out of hand. Nobody would listen to them . . . we blew them off and thought they were complete Neanderthal ragheads.” It was, in her view, the worst kind of mistake: “emotionally driven.”
Many in the foreign policy establishment later embraced those same arguments for talking to the Taliban, including Richard Holbrooke. Did Raphel have any regrets about her more isolating and controversial positions, I asked? “No,” she told me, with a laugh. “I was ahead of my time!”
At the height of Raphel’s efforts to warm relations with Pakistan in 1995, an aide from then–Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott’s team knocked on her office door and told her about a troubling development. While surveilling Pakistani officials, intelligence agents had picked up what they took to be an illicit exchange. Raphel, they claimed, was leaking classified information to the Pakistanis, revealing the sensitive details of American intelligence on their nuclear program. Raphel was shaken. She met with the State Department’s internal police, the Diplomatic Security Service, whose agents grilled her. Their investigation came up empty. Raphel wasn’t cited for any infraction, and the matter was quickly forgotten—though, it would later come to pass, not for good.
RAPHEL ROTATED THROUGH several other roles, serving as ambassador in Tunisia, and vice president of the National Defense University, and coordinating assistance in the early days of the Iraq War. But her story always arced back to Pakistan. When she left Iraq, tired, in 2005, she joined Cassidy & Associates, the glossy K-Street lobbying firm whose client list included the Egyptian intelligence services, and, on occasion, Pakistan. During Raphel’s time there, the firm had two Pakistani contracts, prompting the press—especially the Indian press—to call her a “Pakistan lobbyist.” (“Lobbyist who tormented New Delhi in the 1990s,” screamed the Times of India. “Brazenly pro-Pakistan partisan in Washington.”) Raphel laughed at this, saying she only worked on one contract “for three weeks” before the deal was canceled when Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf suspended the country’s constitution in November 2007.
At a cocktail party in 2009, Raphel ran into fellow career Foreign Service officer and then-sitting US ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson. Patterson was a small, steely woman from Fort Smith, Arkansas, who spoke in a quiet Southern drawl and didn’t mince words. She was a diplomat in the classic tradition, with decades of service from Latin America to the Middle East. In Pakistan, she was confronting a new era in one of the world’s most difficult relationships—an era in which Pakistan had once again become essential to the United States. But Americans with deep contacts within Pakistani society were hard to come by.
In the modern era, tough posts like Pakistan had become in-and-out assignments for junior officers looking to check a box and get a year or two of hazard pay (a 30 percent premium in Islamabad at the time). Someone with Raphel’s grasp of the Gordian knot of Pakistani politics could be indispensable. Patterson asked Raphel if she’d come back for one more assignment, helping to manage assistance in Islamabad.
Raphel had turned sixty-one by then. She’d been married three times—most recently to a British diplomat, a union that lasted just a few years and ended in 2004. She’d raised her two college-age daughters, Anna and Alexandra, mostly by herself. Lobbying had given her a chance to spend more time with them, and with her friends. But her mind, one sensed, was quick to turn back to public service.
She told Anne Patterson that she’d think about it.
5
THE OTHER HAQQANI NETWORK
THE DAY AFTER PRESIDENT CLINTON announced Robin Raphel’s nomination as assistant secretary of state in 1993, she’d boarded a flight to Sri Lanka, en route to the funeral of the country’s recently assassinated president. Seated near her were Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif and a thirty-six-year-old Pakistani diplomat named Husain Haqqani. In the years that followed, Haqqani would become a fixture of US-Pakistani relations. His critics would come to know him by some of the same labels ascribed later to Robin Raphel: turncoat, traitor, spy.
Haqqani was urbane and charming and a flatterer. “As you know well,” he often said with a feline smile. “As a man of your experience of course understands.” He grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Pakistan’s commercial hub, Karachi. His parents were Indian migrants: his mother, a schoolteacher; his father, a lawyer, who arrived in Pakistan with few professional contacts and turned to representing the poor and needy. The Haqqanis lived in a barracks for families uprooted by Pakistan’s partition from India. Young Husain was fourteen before he lived in a real house. Like Holbrooke, he wasn’t born among elites—he clawed his way up.
He received both a traditional Islamic education and a secular modern one. A quintessentially Pakistani fault line ran through him: between church and state, old and new, East and West. When he enrolled at Karachi University, he became a student leader associated with the Jamaat-e-Islami party, joining a new generation of Muslims sparking change around the region. But he was torn. He spent hours at the American Center in Karachi’s US consulate, devouring the books in its library. He soaked in Western perspectives and grew disenchanted with his peers’ rising anti-Americanism. When an angry mob enflamed by anti-American sentiment burned down the US embassy in Islamabad in 1979, student leaders in nearby Karachi approached Haqqani and asked him to lead the charge. As he tells the story, he gave a dramatic speech, citing the Quran to dissuade them from further violence. One ulterior motive he didn’t tell the angry students about: he wanted to protect his beloved library inside the consulate, and the Western books on its shelves.
Like Holbrooke, Haqqani was drawn to journalism and diplomacy. He wrote for the Far Eastern Economic Review, and later worked with Pakistani state-run television, sometimes burnishing the legacy of Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime. By his early thirties, Haqqani had built a reputation as a silver-tongued communicator with a knack for moving between Western and Pakistani audiences.
AFTER BENAZIR BHUTTO became prime minister on a progressive, secular platform in 1988, the conservative opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, tapped Haqqani to develop his media strategy. By Haqqani’s own admission, Sharif was exploiting xenophobia and anti-Americanism, but Haqqani felt Sharif “might be able to bring some balance to the country, after almost a decade of military rule.”
It wasn’t long after Sharif took power (and after, in the conventional cycle of Pakistani politics, Bhutto was ousted on corruption charges) that Haqqani found himself at loggerheads with his boss. In 1992, as the Soviet war faded and the United States became more brazen in its misgivings about Pakistan, the State Department asked Haqqani to help deliver a message to Sharif: The United States knew that Pakistan was providing “material support to groups that have engaged in terrorism” and lying about it. It had to stop, or the US would add Pakistan to its official list of state sponsors of terrorism, triggering crushing sanctions. Sharif gathered his cabinet for a conversation that pitted Islamist generals against progressives like Haqqani. The ISI chief at the time, Lieutenant General Javed Nasir, reflected a traditional Pakistani outlook: the letter was the fault of an “Indo-Zionist” lobby and a Jewish ambassador (that the ambassador, Nicholas Platt, was, in fact, a Protestant was the least of Haqqani’s concerns).
As Haqqani told the story, he made the case that Pakistan should reconsider its use of proxy relationships in favor of a greater emphasis on diplomacy. When Sharif sided with the intelligence and military voices, Haqqani threatened to quit. Sharif made him take the ambassadorship to Sri Lanka instead—a way of neutralizing him without negative press. It was the Pakistani equivalent of exile to Siberia. A year later, he resigned.
BUT HAQQANI WAS NOTHING if not resilient. After new elections brought Bhutto back into power, he became her spokesperson. He stood by her after she was, like clockwork, ousted again on corruption charges, and grew more public in his criticism of Pakistan’s military and its vice grip on power as civilian leaders came and went.
It won him few fans. In 1999, Pakistani intelligence agents pulled him off a crowded street, threw a blanket over his head, and pushed him into a waiting car. On a cell phone secreted in his pocket, he dialed a friend, who alerted the media. He credits the call with saving his life, though he remained jailed for two and a half months on trumped-up corruption charges. When General Pervez Musharraf seized power, Haqqani realized he couldn’t live safely in his homeland during its frequent bouts of military rule. “He didn’t look very kindly on my writings at the time,” he said of Musharraf. “I felt very pressured, because it was military rule again. So I left. I came to the US.” Husain Haqqani Americanized. He took an associate professorship at Boston University, decrying Pakistan’s military leadership from a safe distance.
Haqqani and Benazir Bhutto, in the midst of her own exile in Dubai, often talked about the future of Pakistan. She had him draft a paper outlining a new vision for Pakistani foreign policy, should she return to power. He argued that the military-to-military relationship had reinforced Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism. Pakistan had become a “rentier state: it lived off payments from a superpower for its strategic location and intelligence cooperation” rather than its aligned interests. The flow of easy cash from the United States fueled the disproportionate power of Pakistan’s army and intelligence services and blunted the potential for reform. Bhutto liked the paper, and “the idea of a new relationship with the United States that would be strategic rather than tactical.”
FOR ONE MOMENT, it looked like she might get a chance to make that vision a reality. After years of diplomatic pressure from the Americans and the British, Musharraf allowed Bhutto to return to seek election. There were plenty of people who wanted her dead, and she asked for more security after narrowly escaping one bombing. Musharraf granted only some of the requested reinforcements. If anything were to happen, she emailed her lobbyist, Mark Siegel, “I wld hold Musharaf responsible.”
On December 27, 2007, as shadows lengthened in the late afternoon, Bhutto left Liaqat National Park in Rawalpindi, less than two miles from the headquarters of the Pakistan Army, after a stump speech calling for democracy. Supporters swarmed her white Toyota Land Cruiser. Bhutto, wearing her trademark white headscarf and a purple kameez over simple white cotton pants and black flats, climbed onto the backseat, poked her head out of the sunroof, and waved, like Eva Peron on the balcony. Gunfire cracked through the air, accompanied by the deafening explosion of a suicide bomber detonating his payload. A Getty photographer, John Moore, activated his camera’s high-speed motor drive, capturing the out-of-focus chaos: an orange fireball; frightened faces, surging through sparks and smoke; survivors stagger
ing among bodies.
Bhutto was dead. Her will passed leadership of her political party to her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, known by critics as “Mr. Ten Percent” as a result of long-standing corruption allegations. Her grieving supporters swept him into the presidency.
During Bhutto’s exile, Haqqani had grown almost as close to Zardari as to her. When Zardari and his prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, were looking for a new ambassador to the United States after the election, they asked their old party spokesperson, Husain Haqqani.
He accepted. In June 2008, he headed to Washington and presented his credentials to George W. Bush.
Haqqani was back in power, but many Pakistanis regarded him with suspicion. His switching sides to work for Bhutto—a woman he once campaigned against—was a mark against his loyalty. And some viewed his flight to America as a Rubicon. Days after Bhutto’s assassination, Musharraf had anatomized what he viewed as her failure. One all-important rule she broke: “Don’t be seen as an extension of the United States.” Haqqani, fresh from years of American exile, was picked for the ambassadorship for precisely that unforgivable quality.
Years later, Pakistan’s Express Tribune opened a profile of Haqqani with George Orwell’s description of Squealer in Animal Farm: “a brilliant talker, and when he was arguing some difficult point, he had a way of skipping from side to side.”