by Ronan Farrow
“That New Yorker profile doomed him for this administration,” Marton said. “They didn’t want anybody in those early years to steal the president’s thunder.” She told her husband not to worry, that he was part of the team and Obama’s inner circle would surely see any positive press as a boon. “You don’t understand how they are,” he told her. She didn’t.
13
PROMISE ME YOU’LL END THE WAR
WE ARRIVED AT FORT MCNAIR at 7 a.m. sharp. It was September 2010, and Holbrooke was set to co-chair a civilian-military review of Pakistan policy with Petraeus’s successor at CENTCOM—one General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, future secretary of defense. More than 225 participants were due, including Holbrooke’s British, German, and French counterparts, and the British ambassador to Pakistan. The guests filed into the National Defense University’s George C. Marshall Hall, a hulking brick and concrete structure built in the style of a megachurch, with taupe stonework and a yawning, multistory atrium. Like the rest of the NDU campus, it was set on a narrow peninsula extending south of Washington, DC, at the meeting of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. Mattis seemed receptive to Holbrooke’s agenda, listening intently as I ran through my NGO-tracking technology, and suggesting that I brief his team at CENTCOM in Tampa. Holbrooke was distracted. His conflict with the White House had reached its very public nadir, with a steady drumbeat of leaks suggesting his days were numbered. But against all odds, he felt he had momentum. The month before, Marton had caught him with what she described as a “faraway look” and asked what he was thinking about. “I think I’ve got it,” he told her. “I think I can see how all the pieces can fit together.” Marton and Holbrooke shared a flair for crafting a narrative, in this case the notion that what was missing was an answer, a way to put together this puzzle, as opposed to a bunch of incredibly hard and complicated problems that would never cleave neatly, that required less a grand solution than grinding work. Nevertheless, in the following weeks, he began putting together a memo for Hillary Clinton forcefully articulating what had gone wrong with America’s relationships in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and how to set them right. It was, he told me, to be a document of record; the fullest statement of his views that had often been muzzled over the course of the administration.
Sending documents through the government bureaucracy is a special kind of hell. Memos for the secretary of state go through “The Line,” a corps of gatekeepers who ensure documents are “cleared” by any offices with equities before reaching the boss’s desk. In this case that meant embassies and the White House—the bureaucratic rivals engineering Holbrooke’s removal. He wanted to get his message directly to Clinton, and he didn’t want a digital record of it. His original, trusted staff assistants had been replaced by new officers he feared were more loyal to the system than to him. In a sign of how profound his bureaucratic isolation had become, he asked if I would help him put together the memo and pass it to Hillary Clinton. Despite Holbrooke’s around-the-clock love affair with the BlackBerry, I never saw him use a word processor. He didn’t even have a computer on his office desk. So the day before our trip to Fort McNair, he had dictated a first draft to me. The next morning, he stepped out of his sessions with Mattis to scrawl notes and corrections in the margins. It was, he said, “eyes only,” a handling instruction intended to ensure only Clinton saw it—but, by dint of Holbrooke’s own effort to skirt the system, it was never formally classified. Still, I texted a friend at the time that I felt antsy walking around with it.
“TO: HRC, FROM: RCH,” the memo began. “SUBJECT: AT THE CROSSROADS.” Over nine, single-spaced Times New Roman pages, Holbrooke made his case in stark terms. “I still believe that the importance to our national security of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the region remains as high as ever,” he wrote. “But our current strategy will not succeed.” The Afghan government, populated with warlords we had used as Cold War–style proxy forces in the wake of 9/11, was buckling under the weight of corruption and exhibiting few signs of strategic alignment with the United States. “Whatever happens in counter-insurgency, our policies are in peril for a basic reason: the lack of a credible and reliable partner who shares our goals . . . ,” he went on, listing a litany of instances of Karzai’s government engaging in double-dealing and corruption. “I know of no strategic partner in the history of American foreign relations who has behaved in such an extraordinary manner. Yet we have tolerated it, made allowances and excuses for it, and generally given him the sense that he can get away with almost anything.”
Though accounts of the Afghanistan review process from Bob Woodward and others have broadly characterized Holbrooke’s perspectives on troop deployments, he was always meticulous about withholding his views publicly and in documents disseminated through normal channels in the administration. “During the debate last year,” he wrote, “I shared my recommendations only with you and Tom Donilon, who says he shared them with the president. They never became public.” The memo contains perhaps the only frank summary of those recommendations in his own words. “I recommended at that time a strategy that would have given McChrystal a somewhat lower troop level with a significantly different configuration—about 20–25,000, ‘composed of only one combat brigade and its enablers (about 10,000 troops), and about 10,000–15,000 trainers, advisors and their support.’ My view was that this would cause less American and civilian casualties, be less provocative to the Pakistanis (who had opposed the larger number), and perhaps buy more time from the American public. It would also have been about $15–20 billion cheaper per year.” He also took issue with Obama’s addition of a July 2011 deadline for beginning troop withdrawals, which “was introduced at the last moment, almost as an afterthought, and far too late for us to consider its full implications.” Among those implications was, he told me, a squandering of American leverage in any negotiations with the Taliban, which now knew it could wait the Americans out.
Using the Pakistanis as a proxy for American counterterrorism objectives was also failing. He urged broader diplomacy, including yet another stab at bringing India to the table. Obama was scheduled to travel to India the following month, and Holbrooke made the case for a Pakistan stop. Integrating Pakistan in Presidential trips had always been a thorny matter, since it risked annoying the Indians—and potentially the Pakistanis, too, as they invariably received a briefer and less celebratory visit. But Holbrooke suggested now was the moment to take that leap.
[T]his would be an obvious time for such a trip, since overflying the stricken area without a stop could provoke criticism. In these unique circumstances, I think the perennial issue of balancing relations and visits to the two countries, which President Clinton managed successfully in 2000, can be finessed.
In the end, the president visited only India, as planned. Holbrooke suggested that the failure to transition Pakistan from a transactional, military-to-military relationship to a broader partnership left the United States with little prospect of permanently addressing the terrorist safe havens in the border region. In the end, he could see only one way forward. Holbrooke bolded the following passage, drawing on lessons from Vietnam that the administration seemed to have little desire to hear about:
In the end, however, the insurgents win in a guerilla war if they don’t lose. Moreover, there is one constant about counter-insurgency: it does not succeed against an enemy with a safe sanctuary. Yet we cannot convince Pakistan to make its strategic interests symmetrical with ours because of its obsession with India and the military domination of its strategic policies. For these reasons, we should explore whether there is a basis for a political settlement with the Taliban that falls within our red lines. Nothing is less appealing than the idea of dealing with the Taliban, but it would be irresponsible to continue to ignore this area.
In addition to the upcoming effort with A-Rod, which he told Clinton he’d brief her on, he suggested the United States publicly announce support for low-level talks between the Karzai government and any forces who renounce
d al-Qaeda. He urged a continuation of the kind of thinking behind the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Act, with “a major new effort to help the people of Pakistan,” undertaken “with due attention to India.” And he threw his weight behind a slower drawdown of troops, with a three- to five-year timeline for transferring authority to Afghan forces (of whose capacity he painted a bleak picture) and a pledge to maintain at least some American military presence “as long as needed to go after those terrorist groups which directly threaten the United States.”
In the memo, Holbrooke argued that the United States had missed critical openings for diplomacy, and pointed the finger squarely at the systematic military domination of the policy process. It topped his list of challenges:
1. Military domination of the review process must be ended. Even though everyone paid lip service to the proposition that “counter-insurgency” required a mixed civilian-military strategy, last year the military dominated and defined the choices. And even though everyone agreed the war would not end in a purely military outcome, State was never able to make a detailed presentation to the full NSC on the civilian-political process or the need to look for a political solution to a war. Unlike the military, we never had a meeting alone with the President, with the important exception of your weekly private session on all issues with the President, which I attended once. In the coming debate, we should seek to redress this imbalance.
The military, he said, had been “grading themselves,” crowding out room for a “frank assessment” of progress on the ground. It was a direct echo of his earliest memos from Vietnam. Contrary to the military’s assessment that they just needed more time, more troops, Holbrooke felt COIN was fundamentally untenable in Afghanistan, for many of the same reasons it had been untenable in Vietnam. “ ‘[C]lassic COIN,’ a phrase used repeatedly by Petraeus and McChrystal in last year’s review, is just that—something out of the past which, where it succeeded, was primarily a colonial concept that involved a great deal of coercive force,” Holbrooke wrote. “And COIN cannot succeed when insurgents have a safe sanctuary.” In this case, withdrawing US and NATO troops on the timetable dictated by domestic political concerns would require a self-sufficient government in Afghanistan, with an autonomous security force. It was, Holbrooke said simply, “unrealistic.”
The lack of space for civilian voices, including his own painful freeze-out, had led to an unwillingness to step outside of that military thinking. That, in turn, had led to a failure to pursue broad-based strategic relationships at the moment the United States had exercised maximum leverage. The result was a bleak prognosis. “The best we can achieve in an acceptable period of time is a murky outcome, in which local violence continues but at a much reduced level.” But he still felt he could secure Pakistani buy-in to a regional agreement, and he still felt a deal with the Taliban was realistic—even “one that still protects women from a return to the worst parts of ‘the black years.’ ” He was sober. The administration had lost important opportunities. But he wasn’t giving up.
THAT FALL HAD an ominous feeling. As animosity with the White House reached a fever pitch, every day seemed to herald Holbrooke’s departure. When Holbrooke called for an “all-hands-on-deck” staff meeting at the end of November, several staffers confided that they thought it was the end. And then there was Holbrooke himself, who looked increasingly drawn and tired. He stopped and stood still more often than usual. He fell silent on occasion, as if out of breath. In the memo to Clinton, he had outlined a relentless schedule of shuttle diplomacy, and the constant travel seemed to be taking its toll. At a previous all-hands-on-deck meeting, earlier in the year, Holbrooke had risen, his voice wavering with emotion, to announce that he would have to cancel a major trip to Afghanistan due to test results that had revealed a heart ailment in need of urgent treatment. Then, strangely, the trip was back on. Further tests had cleared him, he said.
But many of us around him remained concerned. Frank Wisner, another veteran diplomat with whom Holbrooke had forged a friendship in Vietnam, later told a reporter how, over lunch that fall, Holbrooke had nicked his nose with a cherrystone clam (he was not a delicate eater) and begun to bleed profusely. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Wisner asked. Holbrooke said he was taking large doses of the blood thinner Coumadin for ongoing heart problems. “Today was a difficult day, because I woke up in the morning feeling quite uncomfortable and realized I was back in atrial fibrillation,” Holbrooke said in one of his nightly recordings for his memoirs. He over-enunciated “uncomfortable” in his distinctive almost-an-accent drawl, hitting each syllable crisply. “Did not do the kind of work I should have done over the weekend, but that’s par for the course. One can just feel the growing tension and pressure in every direction. I certainly can feel it.” Wisner was one of several friends who began to counsel Holbrooke to quit. “There wasn’t a week that went by that I didn’t tell him to leave,” said Les Gelb.
Holbrooke was in the professional fight of his life. He was watching another mission go awry, as it had in Vietnam, and now, as then, he felt he was the only one capable of giving an honest assessment of the harsh realities. But beneath the sweep of history was a small human struggle, of ego and age and fear. Departure would be an admission of just how far his star had fallen. Clinton had protected Holbrooke from being fired, but not from being sidelined. He too was an insurgent with a sanctuary. Perhaps he too could win by not losing.
“He was always hoping that tomorrow there would be a miracle and Obama would like him,” Gelb went on, “and everything would be fine.”
IT WAS DURING THIS PERIOD that Holbrooke and I had our knock-down-drag-out session that left poor Donna Dejban in tears. Our communications had been perfunctory in the weeks since. This kind of chill was routine for those of us who worked for Richard Holbrooke year after year—I’d counseled his closest assistants through tearful low points in his equally volatile relationships with them. In the final days of November, as the first conversation with A-Rod came together, I ran into Holbrooke in the hallway near the cafeteria. “You’re not leaving us, are you?” he asked. I’d just been sworn into the New York bar, which I’d been studying for at night during my first year at State. “Don’t practice. That’s a whole lot of nothing.” He smiled at me, deep lines creasing around his blue eyes. “Anyway, you’re just getting warmed up.” On December 8, he called in a favor. His friend James Hoge, the longtime editor of Foreign Affairs, was being honored at an event that night. He planned to roast him. Could I find an article from “some time in the 1970s” making fun of him for being too handsome? His memory was, as usual, preternatural—after several hours of hassling staffers at the Library of Congress, I tracked down an Esquire profile of Hoge from September 1979 entitled “The Dangers of Being Too Good-Looking.” I passed a copy to Holbrooke just before he got on the shuttle to New York. “Terrific work, Ronan!” he emailed me. “I knew if anyone could do it, ’twas you. Thanks, it is just what I needed.” It was the last email I got from him.
On a cold morning two days later, Holbrooke and Husain Haqqani sat down for breakfast at the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown. Both men were frustrated. Holbrooke was preparing to make one more push to meet with the president and make the same case for a political settlement that he had made to Clinton. Haqqani was, increasingly, taking heat from the ISI. His close relationship with the Americans had been a source of controversy in each of his incarnations over the years. After the visa freeze subsided and he began letting in more Americans, that controversy had reached new heights, with some whispering that he was letting in spies to undermine Pakistani interests.
“I have all these problems with the ISI and you have all these problems with the NSC, how long are we going to do it?” Haqqani asked.
“Husain,” Holbrooke replied. “We are going to do this for as long as we can make a difference.”
Holbrooke’s very next meeting was at the White House, where he made a final impassioned push for an audience with the president to Obama’s cl
ose adviser David Axelrod. Clinton had delivered a memo to Obama on Taliban talks, and Holbrooke thought he could sell the president on his plan to use them as a way out of Afghanistan, given the chance. “Hillary has delivered the all-important memo to the president seeking negotiating routes out of this thing,” he said in one of his recordings. “Finally the president is focused on it. Maybe we’ll look back on it as one of the most important memos we wrote, but that remains to be seen.” Axelrod said he’d see about the meeting. Holbrooke looked flushed and seemed out of breath—Axelrod’s assistant offered him a glass of water.
He ran long at the White House, and arrived late to his next meeting with Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan and Frank Ruggiero—their first major strategy session on Taliban talks after the secret meeting with A-Rod. She was waiting in her outer office, a spacious room paneled in white and gilt wood, with tasseled blue and pink curtains and an array of colorfully upholstered chairs and couches. In my time reporting to her later, I only ever saw Clinton take the couch, with guests of honor in the large chair kitty-corner to her. She’d left it open for him that day. “He came rushing in. . . . ” Clinton later said. “And, you know, he was saying ‘oh I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ ” He sat down heavily and shrugged off his coat, rattling off a litany of his latest meetings, including his stop-in at the White House. “That was typical Richard. It was, like, ‘I’m doing a million things and I’m trying to keep all the balls in the air,’ ” she remembered. As he was talking, a “scarlet red” flush went up his face, according to Clinton. He pressed his hands over his eyes, his chest heaving.
“Richard, what’s the matter?” Clinton asked.