by Ronan Farrow
After Agha left, the negotiators were elated. Holbrooke, who had been obsessively monitoring the talks from afar, met Ruggiero’s flight back the next day at Dulles. At Harry’s Tap Room on Concourse B, Holbrooke ordered a cheeseburger and Ruggiero briefed him on every detail. This was not an intensive negotiation—not yet. But Agha hadn’t balked at the American conditions. It was the most important break to date in Western efforts to drive a wedge between al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
“REMEMBER THIS MOMENT,” Holbrooke had told Ruggiero when he tapped him to make the trip a month earlier. “We may be on the verge of making history.” It was a Sunday afternoon in October 2010, and Ruggiero was driving over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia with his seven-year-old daughter when he got the call. As instructed, he never forgot. For a variety of reasons—to avoid public scrutiny; to avoid the fallout should the contact prove to be a fake; to skirt the perils of his fraught relationship with the White House—Holbrooke had decided against attending the first meeting himself. But the expectation was that he would take charge of any further negotiations.
Holbrooke had first heard about Agha during one of his whirlwind international rallying efforts in Cairo in the fall of 2009. The Egyptians told him that Taliban leaders, including an aide to Mullah Omar, had visited them. Steiner and the German diplomats, who had also made contact, felt Agha was authentic. And, tantalizingly, he was willing to talk to the Americans. Clinton, who had initially been skeptical of high-level talks, told Holbrooke to begin exploring the prospect under a strict veil of secrecy. Holbrooke’s love of the Yankees had solidified at age fifteen, when his father refused to let him cut class to see Game 5 of the World Series and what turned out to be Don Larsen’s historic perfect game. He took to referring to Agha as “A-Rod,” to keep a lid on leaks.
A negotiated settlement with the Taliban had, to that point, been the white whale to Holbrooke’s Ahab. Barney Rubin, whose desk sat not far from mine in our State Department suite, had been hired expressly because he was the foremost expert on the Taliban in the Western world. Just before Holbrooke scooped him up in early 2009, Rubin had met with Taliban intermediaries in Kabul and Saudi Arabia. During these exploratory trips, he had probed what conditions had to be met for talks to proceed and hit upon the same priorities A-Rod later raised. Rubin believed talks were a real possibility. The day Holbrooke was sworn into his job, he met with Rubin about his trip and the prospects for negotiation. “If this thing works,” Holbrooke said, “it may be the only way we will get out.” Holbrooke didn’t consider the decision to deploy more troops to be at odds with the possibility of a political settlement. Quite the opposite: he often talked about using the period of greatest military pressure as leverage to bring parties to the table. It was a tactic he had used, to great effect, in the Balkans.
There were two schools of thought on talking to the Taliban. The modest approach was to peel off and reintegrate low-level fighters—the kind in it for a living wage rather than an ideological fight to the death—from the bottom up. The more ambitious approach—the one Holbrooke and Rubin were discussing—was to bring Taliban leadership to the table to attempt reconciliation. The exhaustive policy review led by Bruce Riedel had endorsed reintegrating low-level fighters, but flatly rejected a peace process. Taliban leaders “are not reconcilable and we cannot make a deal that includes them,” that report concluded. The very idea of such talks ran counter to a basic ethos that had calcified during the Bush years: you don’t talk to terrorists. For much of the first two years of the Obama administration, we were forbidden from so much as referencing the idea in unclassified communications. Reconciliation, Vali Nasr later said, was “a taboo word . . . the military would say, well, you’re talking to the Taliban, you’re already throwing in the towel.”
Holbrooke longed to make his case to the president and lobbied for a meeting, but he never got one. Instead, he argued for a diplomatic approach with any one else in the administration he could get to. The toughest nut to crack was the military. Much of the leadership, including Petraeus in his seat at CENTCOM, felt talking to the Taliban would interfere with their case for military escalation. But Petraeus’s commander in Kabul, McChrystal, began to come around to the idea. He and Holbrooke didn’t have an easy relationship, but I saw him listen closely when Holbrooke worked up a lather—unlike Petraeus, who could be more visibly dismissive. An Army colonel under McChrystal named Christopher Kolenda, who had been working on reintegration efforts for insurgents at a local level, came to believe the Taliban was growing more moderate in some ways, and to share Holbrooke’s view that negotiation held promise. McChrystal was intrigued and contacted Holbrooke, and the two began discussing the pros and cons of reconciliation, and how it might fit with the United States’ military campaign. In early June, McChrystal notified his staff that he was “on board” with Taliban negotiations, and even began preparing a briefing for Karzai on the subject.
A few weeks later, Holbrooke woke up to the sound of his BlackBerry ringing. It was 2:30 a.m. and we were all staying at the US embassy in Kabul—he in one of the proper visitor’s suites, I in my “hooch”—a white Conex shipping container outfitted with a bunk bed, a mini-fridge, and a tiny sink. “Remember to wash your hands! :)” read a peeling laminated sign to the left of the sink. “ROCKET ATTACK INSTRUCTIONS,” read a notice to the right. One of said instructions was to hide under the bed, which didn’t inspire much confidence. The day before, Holbrooke had been in Marja, a tactically important town that had been reclaimed from the Taliban a few months prior. As he made his approach, Taliban fighters opened fire on his V-22 Osprey—a futuristic but troubled combat aircraft with swiveling “tiltrotors” that allow it to act as either a helicopter or a plane. He’d descended safely and laughed off the incident to assembled reporters. (“I’ve been shot at in other countries,” he said with his usual bravado. “A lot of other countries, actually.”) But the gunfire continued during his brief visit, and moments after he took off again, three suicide bombers detonated themselves nearby. It was a violent reminder of how ephemeral military victories in Afghanistan were proving to be. I’d stayed behind at the embassy, eating greasy food at the commissary and taking meetings. Holbrooke returned looking spent. By 2:30 a.m. he was fast asleep.
The wake-up call was from Stan McChrystal, across town at ISAF headquarters. Holbrooke was annoyed. What was possibly urgent enough for this? “There’s a Rolling Stone story coming out,” McChrystal said. “And I said some embarrassing things in it.” “Stan, don’t worry about it,” said Holbrooke. McChrystal, of course, was right to worry. Michael Hastings’s story, “The Runaway General,” had captured McChrystal and his staffers taking a blowtorch to just about everyone in the administration. “The Boss says he’s like a wounded animal,” one member of his team had said of Holbrooke. “Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he’s going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous. He’s a brilliant guy, but he just comes in, pulls on a lever, whatever he can grasp onto. But this is COIN, and you can’t just have someone yanking on shit.” Another memorable moment saw McChrystal looking at his BlackBerry and groaning. “Oh, not another email from Holbrooke. I don’t even want to open it.” Two days later, President Obama accepted McChrystal’s resignation. Military support for reconciliation departed with him.
In McChrystal’s stead, Obama installed Petraeus in Afghanistan. This was technically a demotion for Petraeus, since McChrystal had reported to him. But it elevated Petraeus to a far more direct role in shaping policy for the war. And he did not share McChrystal’s openness to negotiation. “I just don’t think it was negotiable,” Petraeus told me. “We certainly tried and our forces supported the movement and security of potential interlocutors. But I doubted that we could get the right Taliban to come to the table and truly deal. Their nonnegotiable redlines were totally unacceptable to the Afghans and to us. And if you couldn’t get the true Taliban leaders, you certainly couldn’t get the ‘Haqqani Taliban’ leaders, or those of the Is
lamic Movement of Uzbekistan or al-Qaeda,” he said, referring to the more extreme elements across Afghanistan’s borders. “The leaders of all the groups were sitting in sanctuaries and it was clear that the Pakistanis, at that time, were not willing or capable of going after them.” He found the incessant calls for negotiations, from Holbrooke and the State Department, to be an unhelpful distraction. “There was a belief that if we just tried a little harder, we could get a negotiated settlement,” he said. The message given to the military was that “we’re just not trying hard enough. Just put our shoulder to the wheel. You guys are obstacles. You don’t want it enough.” Years later, Petraeus was still defensive on this point: he argued that he did “all humanly possible,” including “reintegrating” tens of thousands of low-level Taliban within Afghanistan. “But we could never bring pressure on the leaders of the groups outside Afghanistan and they had little incentive to negotiate when they knew they just needed to wait us out given the announced drawdown date.” In October 2010, as Holbrooke closed in on the A-Rod talks, he tried to approach Petraeus. “Dave, we need to talk about reconciliation,” he said.
“Richard, that’s a fifteen-second conversation,” Petraeus shot back. “Yes, eventually. But no. Not now.”
THAT THOSE FIRST, SECRET TALKS in Munich even happened was a monument to Holbrooke’s relentlessness. Time and time again, he had pushed on the subject and been rebuffed. The White House was even more strenuous in its opposition than the military—to the idea of talks, and, even more so, to the idea of Holbrooke leading them. In July 2009, the Saudis notified President Obama that their intelligence service was in contact with Taliban officials and they sensed an opening for talks. They asked the Americans to send a representative to meet with them. Holbrooke pushed the request with the White House, but they wouldn’t act on it. Later, he fought to have some Taliban names removed from the UN blacklist—as it turned out, one of A-Rod’s first requests in Munich. This, too, was flatly rejected by the White House, the military, and the CIA. Even raising negotiations in conversations with the Afghans was verboten—Holbrooke’s lobbying to put Taliban talks on the president’s agenda during one of Karzai’s trips to the United States dead-ended.
But Holbrooke kept pressing, sending SRAP members to explain the merits of reconciliation to Clinton and gradually wearing down her skepticism. The White House even began to come around. In early 2010, Lieutenant General Lute, the president’s Afghanistan adviser, began pushing a plan for reconciliation, led not by Holbrooke but by Algerian United Nations diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi. It was a deliberate slight aimed squarely at Holbrooke. Clinton hit the roof. “We don’t outsource our foreign policy,” she told our team. Holbrooke “would say often, ‘You don’t make peace with your friends,’ and we had to be open with talking to and exploring the Taliban,” Clinton remembered. “But it was a constant uphill struggle.”
The struggle wasn’t just a product of ideological division on negotiating with the enemy—it was also born of petty personal politics. What began as whispers of malcontent from Obama’s inner circle about Holbrooke’s antics eventually turned into a three-ring circus of humiliation. General Jim Jones, the national security advisor, along with Lute, were both used to the military calling the shots in theaters of war, and were working in a White House that had aggressively marshalled other national-security-sensitive policies under its own roof. Jones and Lute were furious that Holbrooke had maintained control of the Afghanistan and Pakistan operation.
Every Monday afternoon, in a moodily lit, wood-paneled conference room on the State Department’s seventh floor, Holbrooke held an interagency meeting on the region—called, in a nod to the local term for consultations, “the shura.” The meeting was a Holbrooke invention, but in a concession to the ongoing tensions with the White House, it was nominally led by Lute as well. Each week, we’d watch the two men take their seats at the head of the table, backed by a world map and digital clocks displaying the time in major capitals and in the secretary of state’s current location. You could have refrigerated a steak in the chill between them. “I’m pleased to have General Lute here co-hosting with me,” Holbrooke told the group, kicking off one early meeting. Lute leapt in quickly. “I’m so pleased Ambassador Holbrooke could join. To co-host with me.”
Jones and Lute compiled a dossier of Holbrooke’s supposed misdeeds. They kept him off the plane for the president’s first trip to Afghanistan—a trip he didn’t even learn about until Obama was en route. Rather than supporting Holbrooke during tense discussions with President Karzai in Afghanistan, White House officials sought to drive a wedge between the diplomat and the Afghan president as part of their lobbying to fire Holbrooke. During one of Karzai’s visits to the United States, they cut Holbrooke from the list of attendees at the Afghan president’s Oval Office meeting, and drafted talking points for President Obama specifically designed to undermine Holbrooke—noting that only those in the room had the president’s trust. Clinton intervened and insisted Holbrooke attend.
On another occasion, in a moment of government slapstick that became the stuff of State Department legend, Jones sent a note to the US ambassador in Kabul, Retired Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, promising Holbrooke would soon be fired. Eikenberry had a similarly dim view of Holbrooke, and Jones knew he was a safe confidante for the message. Unfortunately, he accidentally sent the note as an official White House correspondence, automatically copying every agency involved in Afghanistan policy. Jones moved fast, calling Holbrooke in for a meeting at the White House in which he dressed the diplomat down and told him he should plan his exit strategy from government. Hillary Clinton once again interceded, compiling her own dossier on Holbrooke’s accomplishments and going directly to President Obama to stop the plot to fire him. “White House aides told me point blank to get rid of Richard,” she recalled. “They said, ‘You need to fire him,’ and I said, ‘I’m not going to do it. . . . If the White House wants to fire him they need to tell him themselves.’ ” Holbrooke wasn’t fired, which left him in a state of purgatory: inside, with everyone wanting him out.
Lute “hated Holbrooke, actually hated him,” one of his staffers told me. When the firing campaign later leaked into the press, Lute sounded sheepish, saying, “I’m not driven by hatred of anyone or anything,” but admitting that “it was a very personal experience for me and I’m still to a large extent unpacking it. But I think the tensions became at some point a bit personalized.”
Holbrooke’s pariah status was partly or largely of his own making, depending on whom you asked. He had earned the nickname “the Bulldozer” during the Clinton administration for a reason, and here again he took a high-handed manner, including with Lute. “He’d, you know, make his own appointment, he’d come in, he’d close the door, typically put his feet up on the desk,” Lute later recalled, bristling at the memory. “You know, he was confident edging on arrogance, he knew where he was going and no one should get in his way.” Always, there was a sense that Holbrooke was out of step with the era. “You know very candidly,” Lute went on, “I’ll tell you that he had more of a free rein in the Clinton administration and perhaps expected that same free rein under Obama.”
Nothing illustrated that tension better than Holbrooke’s relationship with the press, which he had used to great effect to amplify his negotiating tactics in Bosnia. A frequent fixture in Jones’s and Lute’s case against Holbrooke was the allegation that he was the source of a series of leaks of cables early in the administration. This was untrue. Reporters on the Holbrooke beat, including the Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran and the New York Times’s Mark Landler, later wrote that Holbrooke was not a leaker. But he did like talking to reporters he respected, and I heard his end of countless background conversations, in which he never leaked secrets, but provided garrulous commentary. Heartbreakingly, those background calls tended to be studiously politic about the administration; indeed, as his position in it became more tenuous, he appeared to overcorrect, sounding at tim
es like the world’s most cheerful team player.
But the conversations widened the yawning chasm between Holbrooke and the Obama team. For Holbrooke, the media was a stage, a space to theatrically curry favor with or squeeze the weak points of opponents. Those tactics were galling for the “no drama Obama” White House, which prided itself on keeping internal arguments out of the press and wanted the focus on the boss. (Or at least, on the chosen allies of the president—as the administration wore on, virtually all of Obama’s core staffers pursued showboating profiles.) A September 2009 story by George Packer in The New Yorker threw a hand grenade into the already tense relationship with the White House just as Holbrooke was getting started. Packer, an incisive journalist with a narrative flair, had turned what Holbrooke had hoped would be a celebration of his Afghanistan and Pakistan policy and his fight for Taliban negotiations into a sweeping biographical piece, replete with pictures of Holbrooke in Vietnam. As the scope of the story became apparent, Holbrooke tried to slam the brakes. He refused to sit for a photo shoot. (The New Yorker used an existing photo, a moody portrait by celebrity photographer Brigitte Lacombe.) His wife, Kati Marton, called New Yorker editor David Remnick and pleaded with him to rein in the piece. “Kati,” he said, “you shouldn’t be making this call.”
When the magazine contacted the State Department to fact-check the story, alarm spread through the administration. “Importance: High,” read the email from P. J. Crowley to Clinton aides Jake Sullivan, Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and Philippe Reines. “Obviously Richard strayed shall we say from discussion of our strategy. It ends up being a semi-profile on Richard. I’ll alert the WH.” Holbrooke had already warned Clinton. “I know more about this if you wish to discuss,” she responded to Mills. The episode confirmed what advisers inside the Obama White House believed about Holbrooke: that the rest of us were just characters in his story.