The Back Channel

by William J Burns

  Obama’s suspicions about the foreign policy establishment in Washington ran deeper than his predecessor’s mistakes. He was skeptical, and eventually publicly dismissive, of its tendency to homogenize analyses and reduce complicated problems to simple tests of American credibility. For Obama, the “blob” was not a term of endearment, but a self-absorbed bipartisan elite whose insular judgments had led the United States into troubles, from Vietnam to Iraq.

  Obama took office determined to break the chains of U.S. foreign policy pathologies and shift the terms of America’s engagement in the Middle East. He sought to position the United States for long-term success by pivoting more attention and resources to Asia, where China’s rise was rapidly unfolding; making bets on emerging geostrategic players like India; and resetting relations with critical if declining rivals like Russia.

  Obama saw the Bush 41 model—the instinctive modesty of George H. W. Bush and the dexterity and restraint of Baker and Scowcroft—as one to emulate. The world he inherited, however, was far less propitious than theirs. Nor did he enter office with their experience and a Rolodex full of world leaders. For all the impossibly inflated expectations that greeted his inauguration, Obama would discover that the world was full of events that would make pushing the reset button on America’s role infinitely difficult. After the recklessness of his predecessor, Obama’s mantra of “not doing stupid shit” was a sensible guideline. But there were other scatological realities in foreign policy: Shit happened too, and reacting to events outside neat policy boxes would be a persistent challenge.

  If Obama was innately suspicious of the Washington establishment, Clinton and Kerry had come to embody it. Both had been on the national stage for decades. Both had voted for the 2003 Iraq War in the Senate. Both reveled in the personal relationships with world leaders that were the daily stuff of diplomacy, and prized their long connections with friends in high places. Their convictions about American leadership were traditional and assertive.

  Clinton was most self-confidently an American exceptionalist, and least self-flagellating in her assessment of U.S. foreign policy and its blind spots. She was comfortable with the muscularity of America’s role, and attuned to the benefit of being the hawk in the room. She was unfailingly sober and well prepared in her approach, unflappable when hard decisions had to be made but generally risk-conscious, and sometimes risk-averse, about big diplomatic bets.

  I first met Hillary Clinton when she accompanied President Clinton to King Hussein’s funeral in February 1999. In November of that year, she returned to Jordan to visit King Abdullah and Queen Rania. The backdrop was complicated. The day before in Ramallah, she had had to sit through a particularly nasty rant by Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha. In the midst of a public ceremony, and with the First Lady by her side, Suha accused the Israeli government of using poison gas against Palestinians. The simultaneous interpretation had apparently broken down or was garbled and Clinton—already bone-tired—missed much of what Mrs. Arafat was saying. When she embraced Suha at the end of the event, a mini-scandal erupted. Criticism in Israel and the United States quickly mounted, an unhelpful storm on the eve of her campaign for a Senate seat in New York.

  Arriving in Petra in southern Jordan to tour the fabled Nabatean city before heading to Amman, Clinton seemed unfazed. There was very little angst or finger-pointing. Clinton decided to make a short statement to the press before leaving Petra, explaining what had happened and rejecting Mrs. Arafat’s vile rhetoric. When that was done, we flew on to Amman, and Clinton was focused and even-keeled over the rest of a busy schedule. The following night, she invited Lisa and me to join her and her immediate staff for an after-dinner drink in her hotel suite. The First Lady was funny and relaxed, full of good questions about how the king and queen were coping with their first year on the throne, and how Jordan was faring. As we talked on the way home, Lisa and I were both struck not only by how smart and genuinely devoted to her staff Clinton was, but also by how quickly she picked herself up after setbacks and moved on.

  John Kerry shared Clinton’s tireless energy and perseverance. Kerry never met a diplomatic problem that he didn’t want to take on, or that he thought would prove immune to his powers of persuasion. He was far more prone to improvising, always willing to be caught trying, and unintimidated by long odds or historical patterns. His was in some respects a more classical approach to diplomacy, focused on ending big conflicts and negotiating big international agreements, with a readiness to take big risks and even bigger falls.

  I had met Senator Kerry off and on over the years, in Senate hearings and briefings. It was not until May 2012, when we wound up as roommates at a small retreat of Arab and international political leaders hosted by King Abdullah in Aqaba, that I got the chance to get to know him better. Abdullah kept these weekend gatherings informal and exclusive, with no staff or media allowed.

  The king ensured that there was plenty of time for Hashemite hospitality and bonding. He organized a cookout in Wadi Rum, the spectacular desert setting not far from Aqaba where T. E. Lawrence had orchestrated the Arab Revolt against the Turks a century before. There was a shooting range, and dune buggies to race. Kerry and Senator John McCain, political opposites but longtime friends, roared off into the desert sunset, huge grins on their faces. That was John Kerry. He loved a challenge, loved competition, and loved being in constant motion.

  Kerry and I shared a bungalow on the Aqaba compound, modest by most royal standards. Late at night, we had a couple beers and talked at length about American foreign policy. I found him incisive and well informed, with a conviction that it was far riskier to miss diplomatic opportunities than to throw yourself into them. He bore little resemblance to the stiff and self-important portrayal favored by critics. He was, as he so often liked to say about others, “the real deal.”

  For all their differences, however, Obama and his secretaries of state shared a broad view of the world they faced and the challenge for American diplomacy. While neither could be as close in personal and policy terms as Baker was with Bush 41, Clinton and Kerry were just as loyal to Obama and both became effective partners. Like the Bush 41 administration, they would confront a world undergoing seismic change with all its turbulence, uncertainty, and impossible balancing acts.

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  WHEN OBAMA WAS elected in 2008, and soon thereafter chose Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state, I doubted that I would be asked to continue as undersecretary for political affairs. New administrations and new secretaries almost invariably made new appointments to the most senior jobs at State. So I was delighted when Clinton asked me to stay on soon after her nomination was announced, and even more enthused after we met on her first day in the transition office on the department’s first floor. I realized that we had already inundated Clinton with massive briefing books, in the best State Department tradition that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Figuring that a canned presentation was the last thing the incoming secretary needed or wanted, I put down a few notes on a single index card, focused on the main trend lines, the most significant troubles and opportunities ahead. I’d be the first senior career officer she’d be meeting as she got ready for her new role, and I didn’t want to screw it up.

  Our scheduled forty-five-minute session ran nearly two hours. We covered the waterfront of policy issues. Clinton had lots of questions—about substance, foreign personalities, and how best to work with the Pentagon and the NSC staff. I was impressed both by the depth of her knowledge and her easygoing style.

  I introduced Secretary Clinton on her first day in office to an uncharacteristically raucous crowd of employees at the main C Street entrance. The next day, President Obama made a visit, a visible early sign of his support for her, the department, and, as he said, “the importance of diplomacy and renewing American leadership.” He backed those words with actions. He and Clinton moved quickly to win an increase in th
e international affairs budget, and issued a presidential directive emphasizing development as a core element of American foreign policy.

  There was no question about the importance of strengthening diplomacy and development alongside defense. But there were significant questions about what kind of investments we should make now and to what ends. The military was struggling with how to adapt itself to an uncertain era defined by both potential great power collisions and small wars in far-off places. The State Department similarly struggled to settle on a theory of the case for what loomed over the horizon and the most realistic way to adapt given growing risks and scarce resources. There were plenty of slogans bandied about but less hard-nosed priority setting, and even less success in translating Obama’s electoral mandate into a domestic political coalition to support serious reforms and his long-term foreign policy ambitions.

  Organizing the national security bureaucracy for this new era was an ongoing challenge. Having lived through the bureaucratic blood feuds of the Reagan and Bush 43 eras, I found the interagency atmosphere of the Obama administration to be congenial and disciplined. The president set the tone. He brooked no backbiting or game-playing, and expected that issues would be considered thoroughly and deliberately. He had limited patience for verbosity, and even less for melodrama. Obama’s focus was on a “tight” process—rigorous review of the facts and problem at hand; patient examination of the various options; careful attention to second- and third-order consequences; and “buttoned down” execution of decisions. He understood right from the outset that a disciplined decision-making process would help ensure disciplined implementation. His national security advisors were sticklers for “regular order” and avoiding analytical or procedural shortcuts.

  Obama’s national security advisors, Jim Jones, Tom Donilon, and Susan Rice, chaired the Principals Committee (PC). This was the group of cabinet agency heads—with State, Defense, the Joint Chiefs, CIA, the director of national intelligence, and Treasury at its core, and other agency counterparts sometimes joining, depending on the subject. Vice President Biden always came to NSC meetings chaired by the president, and frequently to PC meetings. His experience in national security went back to the Vietnam era, and his was a significant and thoughtful voice at the table. Clinton and Bob Gates were almost always of like mind on key issues, a formidable pairing that carried on the informal alliance that Condi Rice and Gates had built late in the previous administration. That was a huge asset for State, and for the quality of decision-making, and a sharp contrast to the pitched battles we endured during Powell’s tenure. It also filtered down to the next level, the Deputies Committee.

  As undersecretary, and then later as deputy secretary, I probably spent more time with my colleagues in the claustrophobic, windowless confines of the White House Situation Room than I did with anyone else, including my own family. The meetings of the Deputies Committee, which comprised sub-cabinet officials led by the deputy national security advisor, were serious affairs. Our job was to propose, test, argue, and, when possible, settle policy debates and options, or tee them up for the decision of cabinet officials and the president. None of the president’s deputy national security advisors, however, lost sight of the human element of the process. Denis McDonough, who later became the president’s chief of staff for the entire second term, was adept at poking holes in policy arguments and keeping people honest. His good humor and humanity also helped keep us sane and focused—his scribbled thank-you notes or expressions of sympathy for family emergencies were legendary.

  We were, after all, a collection of human beings, not an abstraction—always coping with intense time pressures, in the era of instantaneous news cycles; always operating with incomplete information, despite the unceasing waves of open-source and classified intelligence washing over us; often trying to choose between bad and worse options. After a quarter century of sitting in the back benches in that room, it finally dawned on me that I had crept up distressingly close to the top of the policy food chain. In a lull between meetings one day during Obama’s first term, I leaned over and said to Denis, “You know, I’ve finally realized that we’re the adults now. We’re it.”

  “Yup,” he replied with a smile. “Scares the crap out of me sometimes. But we better make the most of it.”

  For all the quality and camaraderie of the interagency process in the Obama administration, it had its imperfections. The increasing complexity of issues, the increasing number of agencies engaged, and the need for White House oversight of the use of force in an age of frequent drone strikes and limited military operations bred overcentralization. Too many problems got pushed up too high in the interagency process, with the most senior officials sometimes consumed by tactical questions and the details of implementation.

  That was compounded by the steady mushrooming of the NSC staff with each administration. At its Obama-era peak, it grew to a policy staff of three hundred, compared to just sixty in the Colin Powell NSC staff I had served on more than twenty years before. The deliberative, patient style of decision-making that was usually one of the strengths of the Obama administration could also sometimes become a weakness—a substitute for action, or a dodge. On challenges where there were no good choices, like Syria, tasking the ninety-seventh paper from the intelligence community on what Assad might do next was sometimes a convenient way to kick the can to the next meeting.

  Despite the emphasis on diplomacy, the arm of American military might was extending, not diminishing. During the course of the Obama administration, reliance on drones and special operations grew exponentially. No one in the administration had to be lectured about the blowback risks, but no one managed to slow the addiction, either. It was too inconvenient to challenge the conventional wisdom about the seemingly low-risk, high-reward nature of drone strikes. Yet the conventional wisdom had some painful limits, not just for the impact of occasional botched strikes and the extrajudicial nature of our operations on our standing with Muslim societies around the world, but the ways it would warp our diplomatic relations and skew—and sometimes upend—our diplomatic agenda.

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  ONE OF THE best examples of both the quality of Obama’s decision-making process and his capacity to navigate the often treacherous short-game choices posed by terrorist threats was the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. In early March 2011, CIA director Leon Panetta briefed Secretary Clinton privately about intelligence that had recently emerged on bin Laden, the best lead on his whereabouts since soon after 9/11. It indicated that he might be holed up in a walled compound near Abbottabad, Pakistan, north of Islamabad and not far from the Pakistani military academy. For obvious reasons, the information was being tightly held. Secretary Clinton was authorized to bring one other person at State into the circle, and she asked me to help her think through the options and the consequences of action. I joined her in a series of close-hold discussions in the Situation Room throughout the rest of the spring.

  The intelligence on the compound continued to suggest that bin Laden might well be there, along with a number of family members. But it was never a sure thing. Obama and his cabinet principals carefully weighed the options. The first was a joint raid with the Pakistanis, which was quickly dismissed. There was simply too high a chance that the Pakistanis were already complicit or would tip off bin Laden. Other alternatives included aerial bombing of the compound or a targeted drone strike. The former carried a substantial risk of collateral civilian casualties; neither would allow for confirmation that bin Laden had been killed, or for collection of other intelligence at the site.

  The final option was the riskiest—a special operations raid. This would mean a nighttime helicopter movement from a U.S. base in Afghanistan, a dangerous operation on the ground by a team of Navy SEALs, and then their extraction by helicopter back across Pakistan to Afghanistan. A lot could go wrong, as it had in the Desert One debacle in 1980 when the United States lost e
ight servicemen in an aborted attempt to rescue the embassy hostages in Tehran. But by 2011, American special forces had carried out hundreds of similar raids in Iraq and Afghanistan; when Admiral Bill McRaven, head of Joint Special Operations Command, laid out this option for the president in the Situation Room, it was impossible not to feel his confidence.

  The president convened his senior advisors for a final discussion on Thursday afternoon, April 28. I rode over with Secretary Clinton, and we agreed on the way that this was too important an opportunity to miss, even if the odds were no better than fifty-fifty that bin Laden was there, and that the special operations raid was the best of the options. It was hard to know how the Pakistanis would react, and a failed raid could be a disaster for the president. But not attempting it carried substantial risks too.

  The intelligence update presented to the president that afternoon was still inconclusive. When the president went around the room asking for views, Vice President Biden recommended waiting for more definitive intelligence. Bob Gates, who had lived through the Desert One ordeal as an aide to the CIA director, agreed. Clinton, in a rare break with Gates, laid out a calm, well-reasoned case for action, which Panetta reinforced. Most of the rest of the participants also favored action, and I joined them when the president polled the deputies in the room too. Obama concluded the meeting by saying that he would think about things overnight. The next morning, he told Donilon that he’d decided to launch, and McRaven began to set the operation in motion for Sunday.