War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence

by Ronan Farrow

  “None of this, of course, is to draw a comparison to the esteemed Mr. Husain Haqqani,” the profile continued, “after all, Squealer remained loyal to the pigs throughout.”

  6

  DUPLICITY

  RICHARD HOLBROOKE had been a prodigiously young assistant secretary of state for East Asia during the Carter administration before departing to Lehman Brothers during the years of Republican leadership between his diplomatic posts. As in all his roles, he grew close to the journalists around him while working on East Asia. As luck would have it, that included Strobe Talbott, who had, as predicted at Oxford, gone on to a career in journalism, covering foreign affairs for Time.

  Holbrooke’s contacts in the Clinton administration were thin. He had backed Al Gore in the 1988 primary, and sat out the Clinton campaign almost entirely, though not for a lack of trying. He badgered friends from Vietnam with better proximity to Clinton—like Anthony Lake, to whom he sent an unsolicited memo describing the brewing conflict in Bosnia as “the key test of American policy in Europe” and warning of the danger of inaction. Holbrooke watched, frustrated, as plum positions went to Lake and other peers. It was only after lobbying from Talbott, who was appointed deputy secretary of state, that Holbrooke was asked to take the post of ambassador to Germany. And it was only by sheer willpower that he ascended to assistant secretary of state for Europe, and then to the defining role of his career, as the administration’s negotiator in the Bosnia conflict.

  The ethnic slaughter sparked by the disintegration of Yugoslavia had, for years, been an intractable problem at the periphery of American interests. By 1995, at least 100,000 people—and upwards of 300,000, according to some estimates—had been killed. Faltering efforts at mediation, including one led by Jimmy Carter, had barely interrupted Serbian forces’ aggressions against the region’s Muslims and Croats. It was only after the massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica drew international outrage that the United States shifted from its conviction that the violence was a “European problem” and green-lit a more aggressive diplomatic push.

  Holbrooke had always viewed the conflict in grand terms—as a test of NATO with potentially dramatic consequences for the future of Europe and, by extension, American strategic interests. When the Clinton administration was deciding who would lead the new intervention, Holbrooke campaigned for the position, hard. He was disliked, but some saw his maverick style as a positive. “The very qualities for which he was sometimes criticized—aggressiveness, impolitic interaction with adversaries, a penchant for cultivating the media—were exactly what the situation required,” Secretary of State Warren Christopher said. The parties to the conflict—Serbian President Slobodan Miloševic´, Croatian president Franjo Tuđjman, and Bosnia’s Alija Izetbegovic´—were scrappers with a history of underhanded tactics. Richard Holbrooke was a rare figure who could meet them toe to toe. Years later, President Clinton toasted Holbrooke with a gentle jab: “Everyone in the Balkans is crazy and everyone has a giant ego. Who else could you send?”

  Over a three-month period in 1995, Holbrooke alternately cajoled and harangued the parties to the conflict. For one month, he all but imprisoned them at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio—a stage where he could precisely direct the diplomatic theater. At the negotiations’ opening dinner, he seated Miloševic´ under a B-2 bomber—literally in the shadow of Western might. At a low point in the negotiations, he announced that they were over, and had luggage placed outside the Americans’ doors. Miloševic´ saw the bags and asked Holbrooke to extend the talks. The showmanship worked—the parties, several of them mortal enemies, signed the Dayton Agreement.

  It was an imperfect document. It ceded almost half of Bosnia to Miloševic´ and the Serbian aggressors, essentially rewarding their atrocities. And some felt leaving Miloševicć in power made the agreement untenable. A few years later, he continued his aggressions in Kosovo and finally provoked NATO airstrikes and his removal from power, to face trial at The Hague. The night before the strikes, Miloševic´ had a final conversation with Holbrooke. “Don’t you have anything more to say to me?” he pleaded. To which Holbrooke replied: “Hasta la vista, baby.” (Being menaced by a tired Schwarzenegger catchphrase was not the greatest indignity Miloševic´ faced that week.)

  But the agreement succeeded in ending three and a half years of bloody war. In a sense, Holbrooke had been preparing for it since his days witnessing the Paris talks with the Vietnamese fall apart, and he worked hard to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Crucial to the success of the talks was his broad grant of power from Washington, free of micromanagement and insulated from domestic political whims. And with NATO strikes authorized, military force was at the ready to back up his diplomacy—not the other way around. Those were elements he would grasp at, and fail to put in place, in his next and final mission.

  Dayton made Holbrooke a bona fide foreign policy celebrity. The next year, he received a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. A Time magazine political cartoon envisioned him as Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, dangling on a wire over the region, sweating bullets. But just a year after Dayton, he was passed over as secretary of state in favor of Madeleine Albright. Holbrooke, devastated, accepted a post as US Ambassador to the UN instead. “I know he wanted to be Secretary of State,” Albright said. “But I was. It was kind of a surprise to many people but I think [especially] to him.” Al Gore later said Holbrooke would have been “first in line” to be secretary of state in a Gore administration in 2000. Circumstance always just managed to snatch away the job he wanted most.

  WHEN RICHARD HOLBROOKE PRESIDED over the signing of the Dayton Agreement in 1995, the United States had only just begun slashing away at diplomatic spending and the shift to military and intelligence dominance that took place after 9/11 was years away. In the years between that triumph in Bosnia and Holbrooke’s next attempt to end a war, the United States’ place in the world would change dramatically. Afghanistan and Pakistan were at the epicenter of those changes.

  Before the 9/11 attacks, the CIA had already collaborated with Pakistan in efforts to capture Osama bin Laden. And so it was little surprise that, afterwards, the United States took a narrow, tactical approach, working through Pakistan’s military and intelligence agency. By the morning of September 12, 2001, deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage was meeting with General Mehmood Ahmad, the director-general of the ISI, attempting to lock down Pakistan’s support for American retaliation in Afghanistan. Mehmood pledged that support—and an end to Pakistani collaboration with the Taliban—to Armitage. Musharraf did the same to Colin Powell. Just like that, Pakistan went from foe to friend again. Sanctions that had accumulated over Pakistan’s nuclear program and Musharraf’s coup evaporated. “I called President Musharraf after we suggested it was time to make a strategic decision to move away from” support for the Taliban, Powell later said. “And he reversed the direction in which Pakistan was moving.”

  This was wishful, if not magical, thinking. The ISI had spent the years leading up to 9/11 pumping money, arms, and advisers into Afghanistan to prop up the Taliban and vanquish its enemies—including the coalition of warlords known as the Northern Alliance, which received support from India. When the United States’ demands for cooperation rolled in after 9/11, Musharraf assembled his war room—stacked with generals notorious for championing the Taliban and other Islamist militant groups—and decided to “unequivocally accept all US demands, but then later . . . not necessarily agree with all the details,” as one attendee recalled. Pakistan was playing a double game, as it had in the past. As had been the case in the midst of cooperation against the Soviets, the United States looked the other way.

  The other half of the American response involved arming the Northern Alliance, and the consequences of backing the two opposing factions became apparent almost immediately. As US-backed Northern Alliance fighters toppled the Taliban stronghold of Kunduz, Musharraf made a frantic call to President Bush and asked for
a favor: a break in the bombing, and permission to land in Kunduz and airlift out Pakistanis. A series of flights collected men and ferried them into Pakistan, where they promptly disappeared. The operation was kept secret, and American officials lied to conceal it. “Neither Pakistan nor any other country flew planes into Afghanistan to evacuate anybody,” then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted. Those evacuated were, by most accounts, not innocent bystanders: among them were numerous al-Qaeda loyalists. A CIA agent who worked with the Northern Alliance at the time told me flatly of the incident: “it was a mistake.”

  The extremists who escaped set up shop in Pakistan, where organized terrorist structures flourished in two safe havens. In Quetta, Mullah Omar built a new Taliban council or shura and appointed commanders to lead an insurgency in Afghanistan’s southern provinces. In the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA) in Northwest Pakistan, Jalaluddin Haqqani (no relation to Husain, the ambassador) and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—both former operatives used by the ISI and CIA against the Soviets—ran their own Taliban-allied movements. The ISI also continued to directly fund and arm the Taliban inside Afghanistan. Pakistan’s military and intelligence leadership allowed the extremists to function openly, while brazenly lying to the Americans and denying anything was amiss. This was one of the great ironies of the war on terror—as the United States drew closer to Pakistan to fight the Taliban, it was in effect also ensuring the survival of the Taliban.

  Husain Haqqani, who had become ambassador in the final year of the Bush administration, said Pakistani military and intelligence brass repeatedly asked him to lie about the support for terrorists. When Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a group based out of Pakistan and heavily sponsored by the ISI, executed a series of bombings and shootings in Mumbai, India that killed 164 people, ISI director Ahmed Shuja Pasha told Haqqani to inform the Americans that “nobody in Pakistan had any knowledge” of the attack and that none of the perpetrators were Pakistani. “I said, ‘But you know, that’s an outright lie.’ The reason why America and Pakistan have this huge trust deficit is because we tell them bold-faced lies,” Haqqani said. “Diplomacy is never 100 percent truth, but it’s never 100 percent lies either. I wanted it to be . . . ” he paused, a half-smile turning the edges of his lips. “Truth well told.”

  The Bush administration knew Pakistan was playing a double game but, as a general rule, publicly denied it. CIA director Michael Hayden even said at the time that the United States had “not had a better partner in the war on terrorism than the Pakistanis.” Hayden, a retired four-star general, was a compact, energetic man with an affable manner. He spoke quickly, his eyebrows darting up and down over the ovals of his small rimless glasses. When I pressed him on the Bush administration’s rosy characterizations of the relationship with Pakistan, he was frank. “If I said that about the Pakistanis,” he told me, “it was to balance that which then followed. Which was, this is the ally from hell because, actually, they have made a deal with the devil.” He had seen strong cooperation from some divisions of the ISI. But there were others, like the infamously pro–al-Qaeda Directorate S, “whose sole purpose in life was to actually sustain groups who we would identify as terrorist groups,” Hayden said. General Pasha, likewise, had been “duplicitous.” Pasha declined to respond. “I can not tell half truth,” he wrote in an email, “and I do not think I should tell the whole truth!!” (General Pasha corresponded with courtly politeness and a lot of exclamation points, like a Victorian gentleman dictating to a millennial teen.)

  Multiple senior Bush administration officials said they seldom, if ever, confronted Pakistan about the support for terrorists, for fear of jeopardizing the counterterrorism alliance. Hayden recalled only one such direct conversation, late in the administration, in which Musharraf “fobbed it off on retired ISI officers. You know, the ones who supported the ‘mooj’ during the Soviet War.” The US had helped create Pakistan’s state sponsorship of militant Islam in that era, and now it couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. If it wanted to, Hayden argued, that would take more than the narrow confines of intelligence and military cooperation. “Look, I mean, the director of the CIA is not going to cause the government of Pakistan to change course based upon a conversation he has in either Washington or Islamabad,” he said. “That requires a whole government effort of long-term . . . and really powerful sanctions that I saw no evidence that we were prepared to make.” He was describing the urgent need for a larger diplomatic effort that would never take place.

  The result of Pakistan’s double-dealing, and the United States’ relative tolerance of it, was a slide into violent turmoil on the Afghan side of the border, with the Taliban steadily resurging over the course of the Bush administration. American and NATO operations offered periodic pushback, but the supply of fighters always replenished from the safe havens in Pakistan. Over the course of Bush’s second term, the insurgency gained strength, staging devastating attacks, sometimes with the Pakistani military providing cover from across the border, firing on American and Afghan soldiers. The Taliban’s gains allowed them to establish a parallel government in the country’s south and then east—complete with governors and judges. By the beginning of the Obama administration, America was losing.

  7

  THE FRAT HOUSE

  AS AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN unraveled, Richard Holbrooke was still chasing the role he felt he was born to play: secretary of state. I first met him as he came close yet again in 2004, throwing his weight behind John Kerry’s failed bid for the presidency. Holbrooke was a private citizen then, working as an investment banker again, but still a fixture at United Nations and charity functions. I was working with UNICEF, in New York and several conflict zones. In Sudan, I began cranking out Wall Street Journal and International Herald Tribune columns about a gathering ethnic cleansing campaign there. For years, Holbrooke was religious about sending appraisals of my stories: “Ronan, this is a splendid, vivid piece. . . . You should try to get lift-off on this issue with State and the UN. I’ll send it around.” Or, just as often: “Next time, put a bit more emphasis on solutions so that it comes across as more than an anti-UN rant.”

  He took correspondence seriously. In that 2010 State Department speech marking the release of the Vietnam documents, he lamented that “in all likelihood, the volumes being released now will never be matched again . . . with emails and video teleconferences, documentation just isn’t what it used to be.” He was, by the time I knew him, a practitioner of dying arts. That I was far too young for any of it—a teenager, when I interned for him during his time advising the Kerry campaign—never seemed to faze him. It made sense: he himself had perfected the art of being too young and outspoken for his station. He let me in, and I was green enough to think nothing of it.

  Holbrooke was on the outside then, a role that would become familiar in the following years. So it was on January 19, 2009, the night before President Barack Obama’s inauguration and the prime moment for the preinaugural parties that send DC elites into a frenzy of invitation chasing every four years. One such party, hosted by Republican socialite Buffy Cafritz and her husband Bill, had been a venue for bipartisan schmoozing since the 1980s. Most years, it drew 250 or 300 guests. This year, more than 500 packed the ballroom of The Fairfax at Embassy Row, humming with excitement. Movie star jostled politician jostled reporter. They huddled, cocktails in hand, necks craning for marquee names from the new administration. Change was in the air, and everyone wanted to be a part of it.

  You can feel the energy of a crowd of political operators change when someone worth currying favor with walks in. When Bill and Hillary Clinton arrived that night—she, defeated on the campaign trail but lifted by her nomination as Barack Obama’s new secretary of state—the dimly lit ballroom practically tilted. Hillary Clinton smiled a wide, frozen smile and nodded her way through the crush. Huma Abedin, Clinton’s longtime body woman, trailed behind, thumbs pounding on her BlackBerry.

  Richard Holbrooke had been studying the cr
owd with undisguised intensity, eyes darting across the sea of faces as he half paid attention to our conversation. He was standing at the outskirts of the ballroom in an ill-fitting charcoal suit and a purple and white tie. At sixty-seven, he was overweight and graying; a universe and a generation apart from the lanky Foreign Service officer smiling from behind horn-rimmed glasses in photos from the Mekong Delta. But the smirk and the piercing eyes were the same.

  We caught up briefly. But Holbrooke’s focus never left the crowd. He was “on.” This was work. When Clinton entered the scene, he departed with a clipped “We’ll talk later,” and strode over to her, fast enough to attract a few sideways glances. He and Clinton had been close since her husband’s presidency, when Holbrooke was at times a mentor during her early years on the international stage. During the coming administration, she would prove to be his staunchest defender. But he never seemed on sure footing in those years, even with her. Every moment of precious face time counted. “One could not be with him for even the briefest period without knowing how badly he wanted to succeed,” the war reporter David Halberstam wrote after becoming close with Holbrooke in Vietnam. That night at the Fairfax was Exhibit A.

  IN BACKING HILLARY CLINTON, Holbrooke had, once again, bet on the wrong horse. But he was scrappy as ever, and the moment Clinton lost the 2008 primary, he began a campaign to break into an Obama administration to which he was very much an outsider. He worked the phones, calling anyone he could think of until, finally, friends told him to rein it in. For a time, he held a record for having appeared more often than anyone else on the PBS interview show hosted by Charlie Rose. In an August 2008 appearance, he tried, frantically, to pivot toward Obama.

  “I supported Senator Clinton, based on an old and close personal relationship and long-standing commitments. But I—I’ve read Senator Obama’s positions extremely carefully . . . and there was no major position he took which I would disagree on . . . ”