by Ronan Farrow
Even for the projects underwritten through the new USAID and State Department funding, Holbrooke had trouble disentangling development and military objectives. Counterinsurgency strategy was typically described in three steps: “clear, hold, build”—as in, clear the area of the enemy, hold it with our forces, and begin to build capacity. As the first year of the Obama administration wore on, that COIN language, ripped from Petraeus’s counterinsurgency manual, began appearing in USAID development contracts. One request for applications for a community-based development initiative called for USAID’s partner charities to “enable COIN-focused, unstable communities to directly implement small-scale community level projects” and “support military . . . efforts in communities by helping to ‘hold’ areas after they are cleared.”
Security and development objectives in an active theater of war are never completely separable, but there had, historically, been an acknowledgment that development should be driven by technical expertise and long term goals, not shackled to tactics. Explicitly militarizing the contract language was new—and, it turned out, tone-deaf. The nongovernmental organizations applying for the contracts revolted. The head of one charity told me its staffers had been targeted for attacks based on their visible identification with the military. Others said it was destroying trust with communities of Afghans who were comfortable with American reconstruction, but not American military might.
Holbrooke correctly judged that the years of narrow, military-driven engagement under the Bush administration had also atrophied relationships with civil society, especially at a local level. Large American companies took equally large commissions, then subcontracted to other groups, which in turn sometimes subcontracted yet again. The result was obvious: massive inefficiency and a lack of accountability.
One of the first problems: The United States simply wasn’t aware what groups were on the ground, and where. Holbrooke’s response was typically ambitious: he asked me to track every NGO in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I enlisted the one computer science geek I knew—a programmer named Jillian Kozyra, who was snapped up by Google soon after—and we pulled all-nighters in my tiny basement studio on U Street as I designed and she coded. Using the programming language Ruby, she built a scraping application—an automated tool that extracts data from internet sources—married to Google Maps and basic analysis tools that could, for instance, break out a pie chart of different types of civil society activity in a given area. At the end of the process, we had a map of Afghanistan and Pakistan populated with more than a hundred thousand local groups. We put it up on an open, nongovernment URL that I purchased. Holbrooke was delighted by the technology and asked me to present it at the White House, the Pentagon, and our embassies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But the project also illustrated, in miniature, the pitfalls of his bull-in-a-china-shop approach. The American contractors were incensed by Holbrooke’s push away from them. They began lobbying for his firing and complaining about the focus on local NGOs in the press. And, as in all of Holbrooke’s endeavors, the military was an overpowering and not always friendly counterpart. Within two years of the first demonstrations of the NGO tracking technology, both Pentagon and CIA lawyers descended on my office. Where had this mysterious technology come from, they wanted to know? Where was I getting my data? Who was funding it? The answer was, of course, that this was a jury-rigged solution using open-source data and tools, at the cost of a single domain name. Both agencies asserted ownership of the work product, but did nothing with it. When I left government after nearly four years, the United States still lacked the basic database of civil society entities Holbrooke had sought.
Later, I received a large manila envelope from an anonymous P.O. box in Virginia. Inside was an application form for a job interview process to be conducted under a strict veil of secrecy. A timed online test and a series of meetings at hotel bars with unnamed officials followed. They had little interest in my work at State. Would I be willing to depart to work as a lawyer or journalist under nonofficial cover, they asked? “Come on,” said one interviewer. “What you’re all doing over there is a side show. This is the real work.”
Like most things Holbrooke, SRAP was ambitious and exciting and, for many, alienating. Prioritizing outsiders over career Foreign Service officers made the office hated inside the State Department bureaucracy. The interagency convening role he had taken upon himself was the traditional domain of the White House—and this was a particularly controlling White House. These were original sins for which Holbrooke would never fully atone. From the moment we started, the system went to work expelling this peculiar creation, like a body rejecting a transplanted organ. It would cost Holbrooke, and, some would later argue, the country, dearly.
11
A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION
A WEEK AFTER the ceremony in the Ben Franklin Room announcing Richard Holbrooke’s role in January 2009, Holbrooke and Husain Haqqani sat in the Hay-Adams hotel’s Lafayette dining room—an airy, light-filled hall with cream-colored walls and wide views of the White House. The property was once home to career diplomat and Secretary of State John Hay, and the legendary salons he and neighbor and political scion Henry Adams hosted for DC’s intellectual elites. In the 1920s, their homes had been razed to make way for the elegant, Italian Renaissance complex where Haqqani and Holbrooke now lunched. Holbrooke had passing encounters with Haqqani over the course of their overlapping diplomatic careers. The two had struck up a rapport in 2008, when Haqqani became ambassador to the US and Holbrooke, who was at the time chairman of the Asia Society, began making trips to build up his bona fides in the region. The day his new role was formally announced, he had called Haqqani and suggested they have lunch. Someplace where they’d be seen, he’d said wryly but pointedly. The Hay-Adams was hard to top for visibility. Yet such a consideration also captured Holbrooke as a creature of another era, when being seen at a prominent locale sent a signal, and when there was a clique of interested power brokers and observers ready to receive such a transmission. The truth is, nobody was paying attention.
Holbrooke laid out his goals: he wanted an end to the war in Afghanistan, and a stable Pakistan. He wanted a settlement. As always, he asked incisive questions, many of them about bringing regional parties to the table. “Could the United States be friends with both India and Pakistan at the same time?” he asked. He wanted a more candid discussion of Pakistan’s national interests. If there’s one thing Haqqani knew from experience, it was that candor would be hard to come by.
“Remember one thing,” Haqqani warned Holbrooke. “This is not Yugoslavia.” He quoted a passage from Holbrooke’s book about Bosnia, To End a War: “The leaders of all three sides were willing to let their people die while they argued.”
“In the subcontinent,” Haqqani went on, “it’s not just that. People are unwilling and do not know what compromise means. This is not going to be as easy as you think.”
The two men—both, for different reasons, outsiders in their political establishments, and both staring down the hardest foreign policy problem in the world—looked at each other.
Holbrooke observed that the new American president’s pivot to the region might make life hard for Haqqani, too. “Increased focus and scrutiny raise questions to which there are no easy answers.” He said he didn’t envy Haqqani’s job. The feeling was mutual. Over the course of the ensuing two years, the two men became close. Holbrooke would jolt Haqqani out of bed at 7 a.m. with calls about his latest diplomatic schemes. They’d take walks together near Holbrooke’s Georgetown townhouse. On weekends, when Holbrooke’s wife was out of town, they’d go to the movies. In March 2010, they walked to the E Street Cinema to see The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski’s thriller about a British prime minister accused of war crimes while working too closely with the Americans, and his wife, who turns out to be a CIA agent. Afterwards, Holbrooke and Haqqani got frozen yogurt.
Pieces of Holbrooke’s desired region-wide role had been carted off before
he could grab them. The Iran job had been commandeered by the White House, who appointed Dennis Ross to head up dialogue with that state. In an even bigger blow, the Indians, whose meteoric economic rise made them a far greater diplomatic center of gravity than the Pakistanis, pitched a fit at the idea of being included in Holbrooke’s war portfolio alongside a rogue state like Pakistan. They successfully lobbied the Obama transition team to nix any India envoy role, and particularly one involving Holbrooke.
Holbrooke told me he intended to address the Indian elephant in the room anyway, and proceeded to regularly include said elephant in his regional diplomacy. And the Indians weren’t his only targets. In February 2010, he had his staffers, including myself, assemble a list of his international travel in the job. It was exhausting to behold. In the first two months of 2010 alone, his shuttle diplomacy included trips to twenty cities in nearly as many countries. London, Abu Dhabi, Islamabad, Kabul, New Delhi, Paris, Munich, Doha, Riyadh, Tashkent, Tbilisi, Berlin; the list went on and on. Alongside the list of cities, we noted commitments he had secured from foreign partners, for either Afghanistan or Pakistan. New Delhi pledged continued civilian assistance to and increased trade with Afghanistan, along with a promise to avoid “provocative assistance in the security sector.” The Russians, at one point, offered “technical military training” and helicopter maintenance for the Pakistanis. This was a global threat, and Holbrooke intended to build a global solution.
The dream was to bring the Pakistanis and Indians together to defuse the root causes of Pakistan’s support for terrorists. He even set up a secret meeting between himself, Haqqani, and former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan, S. K. Lamba. “We met together once,” Haqqani admitted. “Holbrooke encouraged me and the Indians to talk.” But Haqqani considered his own country inhospitable to any meaningful negotiations. “What will satisfy the Pakistanis,” he mused, “short of India stopping to exist?” The India-Pakistan problem required a fundamental shift in the posture of the negotiating parties—the kind that Holbrooke achieved in Dayton only with the robust backing of the White House and the threat of military strikes he could meaningfully direct. In this case, he barely had a mandate to talk to the Indians, and frequently had to do so in secret to avoid irritating not only the Pakistanis but also the White House. Here, the military was driving engagement. Here, he would have to work around the limitations of his job description.
ANOTHER GREAT CHALLENGE was simply talking to the Pakistanis. Years of conversation conducted between intelligence agencies, with blinders on to any broader dialogue, had worked during the war with the Soviets. But during that conflict, the Pakistanis and the Americans had been on the same side. Both needed the invading forces out of the region, each for their own reasons. The relationship was already fraught with deception in other areas, like Pakistan’s nuclear development. But there was at least a strategic alignment. There wasn’t broader dialogue, but there didn’t need to be.
In the Global War on Terrorism, the Americans attempted to rebuild the same relationship, but there was an essential difference that was almost impossible to overcome: this time, Pakistan was on the other side. Now we wanted al-Qaeda–aligned militants out of the region. But Pakistan had kept right on using them as a proxy force, just like we taught them to do. However often the Pakistanis appeared to accede to American demands for cooperation, they always had goals opposed to those of the United States. If Pakistan was going to reconsider its basic priorities, there needed to be a broader and more honest conversation. To succeed, Holbrooke would have to turn the uneasy transactions of proxy war into a true diplomatic alliance—or something closer to it.
Holbrooke knew that coaxing the Pakistanis into broader dialogue would require a show of commitment from the United States in areas other than military assistance. He needed action—or at least money. In April 2009, he gathered many of the countries on his international engagement list for a donor’s conference in Tokyo, where he wooed them into $5 billion of pledges to Pakistan. “That is a respectable IPO,” he joked. Was it enough, a reporter asked? “Pakistan needs $50 billion,” Holbrooke said, “not $5 billion.”
Back home, he and David Petraeus followed up with a frenzy of lobbying. “Richard and I worked that very hard on the Hill,” Petraeus told me. “I remember the two of us worked that together.” It was the zenith of Holbrooke’s BlackBerry jujitsu, as he worked every connection he had in every legislator’s office. In September 2009, the Senate unanimously authorized $7.5 billion in new assistance to Pakistan over five years. The legislation was named Kerry-Lugar-Berman for its sponsors. It was the first long-term civilian aid package to Pakistan born of a deliberate effort to roll back the almost exclusively military-to-military nature of the relationship. “That was a grand strategic attempt to address the perception that the US was only engaging with the Pakistani military and didn’t care about democracy or the Pakistani people,” recalled Alan Kronstadt, the Congressional Research Service’s analyst on Pakistan assistance. But changing those perceptions proved more difficult than any of the Americans had bargained for.
The day the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Act passed, Mark Siegel, Benazir Bhutto’s lobbyist, held a party at his house. He had brought his Pakistan account to his firm at the time, Locke Lord, and a large crowd of employees, Pakistani diplomats, and politicians toasted the achievement. Less than twenty-four hours later, the fallout began. Mohsin Kamal, a young Pakistani lobbyist, had joined Siegel’s firm the day of the party. He expected to capitalize on an apparent thaw in the relationship. Instead, his first job was frantic damage control. Items began appearing in Pakistani outlets excoriating the bill. It was “degrading,” with “vicious designs on Pakistan’s sovereignty,” raged The Nation. “An affront to the country in the eyes of its people,” opined diplomat Maleeha Lodhi in The News. Even the Pakistani army chief, General Kayani, expressed outrage and privately harangued US officials.
At issue was a requirement that the US secretary of state annually certify that Pakistan was meeting basic thresholds for good behavior to keep security assistance flowing. That included cooperation on ensuring nuclear weapons stayed out of terrorists’ hands, ceasing support for extremist and terrorist groups, and helping to confront the safe havens in FATA and Quetta. It was, in fact, a pretty modest nod to accountability. The certification requirements only applied to security-related assistance, and even then, could be waived freely for any national security reason. In practice, this was a no-strings-attached gift. Few legislators in America had considered the possibility that it would actually threaten to burn down the entire relationship. But in Pakistan, paranoia is a national pastime. This episode, like just about everything else, prompted two reactions. Some were convinced it was evidence of Indian meddling. And some were convinced it was Husain Haqqani’s fault. “Husain Haqqani did something very stupid,” was Mohsin Kamal’s straightforward reading of events. “He put those provisions in.”
As the furor grew, Holbrooke gathered staffers in his office for a crisis session. He paced back and forth in his socks. Holbrooke’s chosen response, seeded to any reporter who would listen, was to insist that the assistance came with “no conditions”—which he jokingly referred to as “the c word.” John Kerry, whose name the legislation bore, was dispatched to Islamabad to try to pacify the Pakistanis. “We did a whole apology tour with Kerry-Lugar-Berman where we met with Nawaz and the whole gang over there,” remembered one senior official. On one occasion, Kerry sat for five hours with General Kayani over dinner. “We want to give you this money, we want to change the nature of our relationship,” Kerry told him. “But to be able to do that, you guys have to be sensitive to how you’re going to be perceived if you continue to do some of the bad things that you’ve been doing.” “Look, I’m a politician too,” replied Kayani. “I understand your politics. I know how difficult this is.” As was so often the case, the Pakistanis had one message for their people and another for the Americans.
I wondered, for a moment, what an
outside observer might make of this madness: a supposed ally convulsed with rage over a $7.5-billion handout, and a world power bending over backward to deny that said handout contained any accountability. The situation held a mirror to the deep problems in the relationship. Holbrooke had tried to buy a broader conversation. But Pakistan had been a proxy for America’s military interests for too many years. While the conversations between spy chiefs and generals flourished, the untended broader relationship had become a petri dish for paranoia and suspicion. $7.5 billion couldn’t buy it back.
ROBIN RAPHEL SAID YES to the job offer from Anne Patterson, the US ambassador to Pakistan at the time. The month before the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Act passed the House and Senate in September 2009, she packed up her things and moved to Islamabad one more time. She settled into life in a two-story, stucco house in Islamabad’s comfortable, leafy F-6 sector, right next to the Margalla Hills. She got a refurbished Toyota and drove herself to parties and functions. During my trips to Islamabad, I saw her working her way through house parties thrown by Russian diplomats and British charity heads, always thronged by Pakistanis. Robin Raphel was back among the Islamabad elites she’d known since her twenties. The task of spending the new flood of money that Holbrooke and Petraeus had fought for on the Hill fell to her.