by Ronan Farrow
CLINTON HAD TOLD HOLBROOKE he would be the direct civilian counterpart to General David Petraeus, who was then the commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM), the powerful Pentagon division responsible for Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan. “He has more airplanes than I have telephones,” Holbrooke later grumbled. Petraeus was a small man with a wiry physique honed through a daily, predawn workout regimen that had become catnip for profile writers: five miles of running, followed by twenty chin-ups—a torturous modification involving a full leg-raise until his shoelaces toucehed the bar—and then a hundred push-ups. At a 2016 meeting of the shadowy Bilderberg Group in Dresden, Petraeus, by then in his sixties, was accosted by twenty-something-year-old reporters shouting questions. He sprinted away. They tried, and failed, to catch him. He had once taken an M-16 shot to the chest during a live fire training exercise and lived to tell the tale. Legend had it that he ate one meal a day and never slept more than four hours. I once had the misfortune to stand in line at a buffet next to him. His eyes flicked down to my plate of mac and cheese. “I’m . . . going for a run later,” I offered defensively. He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Really? Think you can keep up?” (I have never gone for a run in my life.)
Petraeus, like Holbrooke, was a larger-than-life operator who knew how to build a public narrative and use it to his advantage. He too, had the ear of every reporter in Washington, a direct line to the op-ed pages, and a tendency to surround himself with experts who could help propagate his message outside of the government. He was, enraptured profiles noted, a scholar-general, and this was true—he had been an ace student at West Point before receiving a doctorate from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His doctoral dissertation was titled “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era.”
Holbrooke and Petraeus both interrogated America’s misadventures in Vietnam, but they came up with diametrically opposed answers. Holbrooke believed counterinsurgency doctrine—or COIN, as it came to be known—was a recipe for quagmire, breeding dependency in local populations. Petraeus believed in the doctrine and built a career championing its revival. In Iraq he relied on a sweeping COIN strategy. Broadly speaking, that meant a large deployment of troops, integrated within Iraqi society over a long period of time, securing communities while getting the bad guys. Petraeus had emerged from that conflict a hero. Critics argued that he benefitted from events outside his control—like al-Qaeda leader Muqtada al-Sadr declaring a unilateral ceasefire. Others contended that his accomplishments fell apart after his departure, or that they were exaggerated to begin with. (That included then-senator Hillary Clinton, who, in a 2007 congressional hearing, accused Petraeus of presenting an overly optimistic assessment of the Iraq troop surge at a time when she was seeking to create distance from her Iraq vote. “I think the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief,” she said.) But in Petraeus’s view, COIN had worked in Iraq, and for his many ardent supporters in the Pentagon, it became gospel. In Afghanistan, he intended to put COIN to the test a second time.
Shortly after Hillary Clinton accepted Obama’s job offer, she, Petraeus, and Holbrooke sat around the fireplace at her Georgian-style mansion near DC’s Embassy Row and shared a bottle of wine. “I worked really hard to make sure Richard had relationships with the generals,” Clinton said. “I invited him and Dave Petraeus, who hadn’t met each other, to come to my house and to talk about what each of them thought needed to be done.” She knew Petraeus—who had just become commander of CENTCOM—would play a defining role in some of her greatest international challenges.
That night at Clinton’s home marked the first of a series of dinners and drinks between the two men, and the partnership was often characterized as a strong one in the press. “Richard did share Petraeus’s interest in an aggressive counterinsurgency strategy,” Clinton recalled, “but focused on increasing the credibility of the government in Kabul and trying to weaken the appeal of the Taliban. Richard wasn’t sure that adding more troops would assist that, he thought it would maybe undermine goodwill.”
The truth was, Petraeus and Holbrooke were wary of each other. Organized, tightly controlled Petraeus (though, subsequent years of scandal would suggest, not so tightly controlled in some areas) was often uncomfortable with Holbrooke’s freewheeling improvisation. New York Times reporter Mark Landler later recalled Petraeus arriving for a meeting as he interviewed Holbrooke, and Petraeus’s dismay both at Holbrooke’s impromptu suggestion that Landler stay on with the two of them, and at Holbrooke’s shoeless feet propped on a coffee table. “Richard, why aren’t you wearing shoes?” Petraeus asked, horrified. Holbrooke said he was more comfortable that way.
I first met Petraeus at the Kabul headquarters of ISAF—the NATO mission in Afghanistan. I’d presented a PowerPoint (the military loves PowerPoints) on civil society in Afghanistan, and afterwards Holbrooke, in his typical manner of elevating subordinates, introduced me to the general. “So, you’re working for my diplomatic wingman,” Petraeus said, rising from his seat to shake my hand. Petraeus called Holbrooke his “wingman” a lot, in private and in the press. Holbrooke hated it. He didn’t particularly relish being anyone’s wingman. And the power imbalance, and what Holbrooke took to be Petraeus’s ribbing about it, struck a deeper nerve, running against the grain of Holbrooke’s belief that military power should be used to support diplomatic goals. “His job should be to drop the bombs when I tell him to,” Holbrooke told our team testily. Petraeus later told me he intended “wingman” to be a show of respect. But he admitted that the relationship was fraught. “He was a difficult partner at various times. I think he had ADD and some other things. Very difficult for him to stay focused,” he recalled. “Richard came in thinking, ‘I am Richard Holbrooke’ and the administration came in thinking, ‘I am Barack Obama.’ Seriously bright people. But they were supposedly going to be able to do something that nobody else could do.”
AS THE NEW ADMINISTRATION ASSEMBLED, Obama ordered a sweeping review of America’s role in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The process was so torturous that the journalist Bob Woodward managed to spin an entire book out of disgruntled accounts of it. For ten meetings spanning more than twenty-five hours, the president heard arguments and proposals. Countless more meetings were conducted by lower-ranking officials. The fundamental question: how many troops to deploy and when. The military had already requested a surge of 30,000 troops when Obama began his term, and during the review, military leaders fought tooth and nail for a fully resourced counterinsurgency, with as many troops as possible, as fast as possible, to remain as long as possible. “We cannot achieve our objectives without more troops,” Petraeus argued. After the very first National Security Council meeting on the subject, he said he was going to move forward on the pending troop surge. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had to rein him in: “Hold on,” he said, according to leaked accounts. “General, I appreciate you’re doing your job, but I didn’t hear the president of the United States give that order.”
Holbrooke was nominally the co-chair of the review process, along with retired CIA veteran Bruce Riedel and, according to Riedel, Petraeus as an “unacknowledged third co-chair.” But Holbrooke was sidelined—by Riedel, who had greater access to the president, by a series of generals, and by the White House itself. The review threw into sharp relief the generational and cultural chasm between Holbrooke and Obama. In a February 2009 National Security Council meeting, Holbrooke compared the deliberations to those Lyndon Johnson conducted with his advisers during Vietnam. “History should not be forgotten,” he said. The room fell silent. Obama muttered: “ghosts.” When Holbrooke brought up Vietnam again several months later, the president was less demure. “Richard,” he snapped, cutting him off. “Do people really talk like that?” Holbrooke had begun taping audio diaries of his experiences, with an eye toward history (and a memoir). “In some of the early NS
C meetings with the president, I referred to Vietnam and was told by Hillary that the president did not want any references to Vietnam,” he said in one, his voice sounding tired on the scratchy tape. “I was very struck by this, since I thought there were obviously relevant issues.” “He was incredibly unhappy with the way he was personally treated,” Hillary Clinton reflected. “I was too. Because I thought a lot of what he was offering had real merit and it didn’t somehow fit into the worldview that the White House had.” Holbrooke had allowed himself to be categorized not as someone to be heard but as someone to be tolerated.
But the more meaningful divide was with the military. Holbrooke was no dove. He had supported the invasion in Iraq, and at the outset of the review, he endorsed an initial deployment of troops in advance of the Afghan elections as a stopgap. But he felt military engagement should be organized around the goal of achieving a political settlement. He was alarmed by the force of persuasion the military voices at the NSC table commanded, sometimes crowding out nonmilitary solutions. “I told David Axelrod that we had been dominated much too long by pure mil-think,” he said in another tape. “Military thinking and military domination. And while I had great respect for the military, uh, and Petraeus was brilliant, I liked them as individuals and they were great Americans, they should not dictate political strategy, which is what’s happening now.”
After one meeting, he emerged, exhausted, and told Vali Nasr something absurd: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had bigger folders. His maps and charts were more colorful. The SRAP team had cranked out voluminous policy papers, but they were going unread by many of the president’s advisers. “Who can make graphics?” he asked in one meeting. Everyone looked at me. “Ageism,” I muttered, and went to work making technicolor PowerPoints out of his policy proposals, which he dictated in minute detail. Often, they focused on political and diplomatic solutions he felt were being given short shrift by the White House. A series of concentric circles showed the complex landscape of global players he felt the United States needed to do more to engage—from international donors, to NATO states, to rising powers like India and China. Triangles linked by arrows illustrated trilateral relations between Pakistan, India and the US. A flow chart, titled “Changing Pakistan’s Behavior Toward the Taliban,” offered a storybook simplification of his plan for the most difficult bilateral relationship in the world:
1. Focus on entire country with new US-led international assistance and new commitments campaign . . .
2. . . . Which builds pro-US-sentiment . . .
3. . . . Which helps turn the Pakistani government and Pakistani military toward our position . . .
4. . . . Which gets Pakistan’s military to take more action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The graphics did little to move the needle. Advocates for a full troop surge were more numerous and had better access than voices of caution. Riedel rode on Air Force One with the president, and briefed him without others present. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates supported his generals and their lobbying for a robust troop surge. Retired General Jim Jones, the national security advisor, did as well. So did his deputy in charge of Afghanistan, Retired Lieutenant General Doug Lute. Hillary Clinton, despite her advocacy for Holbrooke, was fundamentally a hawk. “There’s plenty of blame,” Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security advisor, later recalled. Holbrooke’s “biggest defender was Hillary, and yet she constantly sided with the generals in the policy discussions.”
“I was convinced that Richard was right about the need for both a major diplomatic campaign and a civilian surge,” Clinton said. “I did disagree with him that additional troops weren’t needed to make that work, because I thought, given how the Bush administration had kind of lost interest in Afghanistan because of their hyper-concern about Iraq, that the Taliban was really on the upsurge and that there had to be some demonstration that we’d be willing to push back on them.”
Holbrooke had to hold his tongue, but he knew force alone couldn’t solve the crisis in Afghanistan. “My position was very precise,” he said over a meal with Bob Woodward, who recorded the conversation. “I will support you in any position you take cause you’re my boss but you need to know my actual views. I have serious concerns about the fact that our troops are going to be spread too thin and I’m most concerned we’re going to get into a mission/resource mismatch. A lot of people thought I was overly influenced by Vietnam. It didn’t matter to me. At least I had some experience there.”
“I always had such regret about the Holbrooke thing,” Rhodes said. “It went wrong and it feels very unnecessary when I look back.” It was, he reflected, like “Holbrooke was in a game of musical chairs, and he was the guy without a chair to sit in.”
One of the Kafkaesque qualities of the period was the profusion of seemingly duplicative reviews—not just the White House’s process led by Riedel, but prior assessments by Petraeus, and one by Stanley McChrystal, the new general in charge of Afghanistan. Just before McChrystal released his recommendations, Holbrooke told our team exactly how the process would play out. There would be three choices. “A ‘high-risk’ option,” he said, gesturing above eyeline, “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,” he said, moving his hand down, “which will ask for double the number they are actually looking for. In the middle will be what they want.” Holbrooke had seen this movie before. The first recommendation of the final Riedel report was for a “fully resourced” counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. After months of dithering, the President chose COIN, and a deployment of 30,000 additional troops.
Obama announced the surge with an expiration date: two years later, in mid-2011, withdrawals would begin. Conspicuously absent from either the Riedel report or the president’s announcement was any commitment to negotiation, either with Pakistan over the terrorist safe havens, or with the Taliban in Afghanistan. There was “no discussion at all of diplomacy and a political settlement,” Vali Nasr recalled. “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.”
9
WALKING ON GLASS
IT WAS RAMADAN in 2010, and Umar Cheema, a Pakistani journalist, woke up in the middle of the night to spend time with friends while they waited for suhoor, the predawn meal with which observant Muslims break fast. They hung out at Daman-e-Koh park, which in the day overlooks spectacular views of Islamabad and at night turns into a warren of romantic courtyards and gardens, bathed in golden light. The group left at around 2:30 a.m., crowding into Cheema’s car for a ride to their respective homes. He had dropped off the last of his friends and was on his way home when he noticed two cars had been following him. One, a white Toyota Corolla, fell in line behind him. Another, a black Jeep, pulled in front of him.
As he stopped, three men in police uniform jumped out of the Jeep. They said, strangely, that he’d run over a man and fled the scene. Cheema, who wrote for Pakistan’s The News and had won the Daniel Pearl Fellowship for foreign journalists and worked for the New York Times, had never been involved in a crime in his life. He had, however, written a series of hard-hitting articles about the powers that be. He exposed army controversies, including allegations that court martialed officers were being denied fair trials. He dug into evidence that Pakistani intelligence was behind a series of disappearances of civilians. He reported that intelligence agents were letting suspects in a major terrorist attack go. He told the officers there’d been a mix-up, but let them lead him into their car. That’s when they blindfolded him and took away his phone.
When they pulled off his blindfold, Cheema was seated in a bare room with peeling green cement walls. It was lit by a single, exposed light bulb. A fan turned slowly in a corner. When he asked where he was, his captors told him to shut up. In the dim light, he could see three of them, their faces covered with c
hildren’s party masks. They tore off Cheema’s clothes, threw him on the floor, and beat him with wooden rods. They shaved his head and eyebrows, and took pictures of him cowering. They didn’t mince words about their motivations. “You’re here because of the stories,” said one. “This will teach you to be obedient.”
“I had been reporting about the missing persons, so that gave me the idea of the horrifying stories the families had been through,” he told me. “I thought of my son, he was two years old. I realized if I didn’t make it back, my son would grow up alone.” Cheema steeled himself against the pain. “I told myself, ‘I am being punished for doing something good, for being truthful.’ ” Cheema’s captors beat him on and off for nearly seven hours, then dumped him, naked and bleeding, by the side of the road outside Islamabad. His car had been left there. They gave him 100 rupees to cover tolls back into the city. The operation was a well-oiled machine of intimidation; Cheema had the distinct sense that they’d done it before. His case was unusual solely in that the intimidation didn’t work: he immediately went public.