Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  I decided to try to separate Karzai from his advisors, to make it a one-on-one Hail Mary conversation. In my experience over the years, I’ve learned that sometimes it’s essential to isolate the decision-maker from any external influence so that, in effect, you can have the last word. As the day wound down, I still couldn’t get Karzai over the hump. Finally, when we were two or three hours away from my wheels-up time, I decided we needed a little fresh air. Atmospherics matter. I wanted to shift his focus. The grounds around the palace ensured that I could be alone with him. We walked down a long path. I put my arm around him and said, “Mr. President, we’re going to find a way to make this work for both of our countries.”

  As we walked, we went back over the ground we’d covered the past four days. Most leaders like to think of themselves in a historical context. I talked to President Karzai about the historical context of this moment. He could go down in history as the founding father of the new Afghanistan, or he could be a failed petty politician. I painted a picture for him of two different paths—one in which he was respected as a statesman and the first democratic leader of Afghanistan, and another where he undermined the democratic process and helped lead his country down a dark path toward war and dictatorship. I told him that I hoped he would pick the right path, but that I needed to know his answer. Karzai said simply, “Okay, I’ll do it, but I cannot accept the invalidation of 250,000 Pashtun voters.” I told him that as long as he was on board with the runoff, we were heading in the right direction.

  As Karzai and I took the stage to announce that he had agreed to a runoff, one of his aides passed my team a note: Karzai’s final vote tally. I opened it and read: “The final number—49.7 percent.” I flashed my palms very subtly toward the sky and shot my team a look. Sometimes diplomacy isn’t pretty, but in the end, we achieved the right outcome.

  Secretary Clinton was a person of her word. She did call Reid and thanked him for allowing me to screw up the best-laid Senate plans for votes. Harry—whom I really liked as a colleague for many reasons but most of all because he was a straight shooter, although you never wanted him mad at you—made one of the most gracious and entirely unnecessary gestures I’d seen in twenty-five years as a senator. In a speech on the floor of the Senate, he described our uncomfortable phone conversation and acknowledged he had been angry, but he said that he was proud to see that a member of the Senate—a chairman of one of his committees—had made a difference in solving an international crisis. It was vintage Harry Reid, totally unexpected, and the moment smacked of the old Senate, the Senate of 1985 that I’d known and revered and, sadly, seen fade away—sure, a place where tempers might flare, but where, in the end, a strong sense of shared purpose prevailed.

  For me, it was back to the work of democracy at home—and a sense of satisfaction knowing that at least in Kabul, a democracy that the sacrifice of American troops and our diplomats had helped create had dodged yet another bullet. President Karzai and Dr. Abdullah’s decision to agree to a runoff election showed that both men were willing to put their country ahead of politics. It wasn’t our mission to determine the political realities of Afghanistan, and it shouldn’t be. That job belongs to the Afghans themselves. Now at least we knew that they still had a democracy to hold on to and that they’d live to fight another day.

  • • •

  NONE OF THE work we were doing in Afghanistan during the Obama years had much of a shot at long-term success if we couldn’t improve cooperation with Pakistan. The odds against us were long and complicated. In 2008, Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel and I had sat in Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf’s office the morning after the vote tally showed he had lost an election. We’d visited some polling stations with election monitors the day before, which is an interesting proposition in Pakistan. I think the number of armed Pakistani escorts along with the three of us outnumbered actual voters by about a hundred to one. The security situation was challenging, but the elections turned out to be free and fair. As we were sitting in Musharraf’s office the next morning, the only question was whether he’d accept the results. He had been a military man in a country that had a long history of military coups, which was famously how he had arrived on the scene. We were concerned that he’d find a pretext to invalidate the election and continue as a military ruler.

  None of us knew what would happen. There was a palpable sense of uncertainty in the air. The second Musharraf walked into the room, I tried to read his facial expression. He lingered for a moment, then sat down and barely said any of the customary diplomatic pleasantries, but cut straight to the chase: “I know why you all are here. I’m going to respect the results of the election because it’s the right thing to do for my country, but I’m not going to do the other things you want.” He had incarcerated a supreme court justice and we’d made clear our interest in seeing him released from prison. Musharraf turned toward us again. “Let me say to you very clearly, be careful what you wish for. Pakistan is an incredibly difficult country to govern. If we’re not careful, it could be overrun by extremists.” It was a chilling reminder that while we had made it over one hurdle in Pakistan, there were always more to follow—and Pakistan’s direction would matter enormously to Afghanistan.

  Now, more than a year after that trip, I was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and the new administration was trying to think of its Afghanistan strategy in a broader context that included Pakistan. We wanted to make a big move to secure greater coordination and cooperation from Pakistan. Everyone, administration and Congress, understood that our relationship with Pakistan was messy. There’s a long history in Pakistan and the region of these governments hedging their bets. We were concerned they were playing a double game with us, supporting the United States on the one hand and the Taliban and the Haqqani Network, an Afghan guerrilla group, on the other. I still remembered Daniel Patrick Moynihan describing to me what he saw as the difference between Pakistan and Afghanistan: “Pakistan is a government without a country, Afghanistan is a country without a government.” It was a sad statement but a wry insight: Pakistan’s security apparatus had endured and thrived in a very tough neighborhood for a very long time precisely through shifting allegiances. Its survival was our confusion. As a result, we were never certain how much we could trust the Pakistani government. One thing we were certain of was that we needed to change our relationship with the Pakistani people. If the people of Pakistan had a better sense of the United States as their partner, then regional cooperation and reconciliation could be made easier.

  For decades, the United States had sought the cooperation of Pakistani decision-makers through military aid, while paying scant attention to the aspirations of the broader population. This arrangement was rapidly disintegrating: we were paying too much and getting too little, although most Pakistanis believed exactly the opposite. As a result, an alarming percentage of the Pakistani population saw America as a greater threat than al-Qaeda. Until that changed, I knew there was little chance of ending tolerance for terrorist groups or persuading any Pakistani government to devote the political capital necessary to deny such groups sanctuary and covert material support.

  During our trip to monitor the elections, Chairman Biden, Senator Hagel and I joined in promoting a major aid program to Pakistan to try to change the relationship for the better. Now, as the new chairman, I continued to shape this concept. The theory was simple: a major commitment of civilian aid might change the nature of our relationship. We wanted to empower those Pakistanis who were trying to steer the world’s second-largest Muslim country onto a path of moderation, stability and regional cooperation. That was the goal of the bill I introduced with the critical partnership and support of Senator Dick Lugar.

  By then, Dick’s Nunn-Lugar efforts on nonproliferation had become shorthand for bipartisanship in foreign policy. We’d worked closely together in the 1980s to help bring about free and fair elections in the Philippines. He was the right partner for this effort to jam major foreign aid fun
ding through a Senate still reeling from the way issues such as foreign aid had been demagogued to death and turned into surefire negative applause lines. With our economy and a whole lot of people still hurting from the Great Recession, it was not the ideal time to ask Americans to send money to a country where we weren’t popular.

  I believed in this new approach to Pakistan because I’d seen it work firsthand. Following the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, the United States had spent nearly $1 billion on relief efforts. Having visited places like Mansehra and Muzaffarabad in the earthquake’s aftermath, I knew the awesome power of the operation we launched. I’ll never forget flying by helicopter to the northwestern part of Pakistan, not far from the big Himalayas, and landing in a small spot by the river. I met kids in a tent city. It was the first time they had ever come out of the mountains and the first time they had ever gone to school. It was extraordinary to see American servicemen and -women saving the lives of Pakistani citizens. Frankly, it was invaluable in changing the perceptions of America in Pakistan.

  In the wake of natural disaster, we weren’t the only ones to recognize the need for public diplomacy based in deeds rather than words: the front group for the terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Good) had set up a string of professional relief camps throughout the region. Our effort, however, was far more effective, and the permanent gift of the U.S. Army’s last mobile Army surgical hospital helped seal the deal. For a brief period, America was going toe-to-toe with extremists in a true battle of hearts and minds and actually winning.

  I knew it was up to us to re-create this success on a broader scale, without waiting for a natural or even a man-made disaster. The question was: How could we most effectively demonstrate the true friendship of the American people for the Pakistani people?

  The aid bill was an important first step. It was a prime example of “smart power,” because it used both economic and military aid to achieve an overall effect greater than the sum of its parts. Nonmilitary aid was increased—both in actual dollars and for a longer time frame. These funds would build schools, roads and clinics. In other words, they aimed to do on a regular basis what we briefly achieved with our earthquake relief, but this money would do a great deal more than good deeds. It would empower the fledgling civilian government to show that it could deliver the citizens of Pakistan a better life. It might embolden the moderates, giving them something concrete to put forward as evidence that friendship with America brings rewards as well as perils. It could also encourage the vast majority of Pakistanis who rejected the terrifying vision of al-Qaeda and the Taliban but were angered and frustrated by the perception that their own leaders and America’s leaders didn’t care about their daily struggle.

  To do this right, I knew that we needed to make a long-term commitment. Most Pakistanis felt that America had used and abandoned their country in the past—most notably, after the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. They feared we would desert them again the moment that the threat from al-Qaeda subsided. It was this history and this fear that caused Pakistan to hedge its bets. If we ever expected the country to break decisively with the Taliban and other extremist groups, I knew we would have to provide firm assurance that we were not merely foul-weather friends. This bill offered just such an assurance.

  On the security side, the bill placed conditions on military aid that would ensure that the money was used for the intended purposes. For Pakistan to receive any military assistance, it had to meet an annual certification that its army and spy services were genuine partners. Just as important as the economic and military components of the bill were how those elements fit and worked together. Making this unequivocal commitment to the Pakistani people enabled us to calibrate our military assistance more effectively. In any given year, we could choose to increase or decrease it, or leave it unchanged. For too long, the Pakistani military had felt we were bluffing when we threatened to cut funding for a particular weapons system or expensive piece of hardware. If our economic aid was tripled to $1.5 billion, we could afford to end this game. We’d finally be able to make this choice on the basis of our national interests, rather than the institutional interests of the Pakistani security forces.

  When the bill passed on October 16, 2009, we were confident that the Pakistanis would be appreciative. Instead, I got a real-life reminder of the danger of what can happen inadvertently when certain compromises are necessitated in order to get a bill passed. Dick Lugar and I had passed a straightforward bill through the Senate. The House, on the other hand, had larded up their near-identical bill with a lot of language that the activist community had recommended, most of it boilerplate about civilian control of the military, conditioning the money on reform inside Pakistan, and insisting on a rather cumbersome process of showing how the money was being spent. Most of it was perfectly reasonable thinking from the American policy perspective, but I worried how it would play in Pakistan. Still, because my priority was getting a bill passed into law, and this bill didn’t actually change anything in practice, we swallowed the House’s language. The bills were combined and the final act was titled the Enhanced Partnership of Pakistan Act, but became known as the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Act.

  Unfortunately, in Pakistan, the bill was initially reported not as a new day in the relationship between our people, but as an infringement on their sovereignty, an act of neocolonialism. It was obvious it was necessary for me to return to Pakistan. I had envisioned my trip as a rollout in-country of our bill, an opportunity to talk about its benefits and make clear that the United States cared about the Pakistani people. Instead, I wound up spending most of my time just trying to keep Pakistani stakeholders on board and explaining to them that we respected their sovereignty. The whole trip had a no-good-deed-goes-unpunished quality about it. Any politician who thinks a town hall meeting in the United States is confrontational ought to try one in Pakistan. We’d worked hard to get support for the Pakistani people, despite real misgivings in the Congress and among the American public. Now here I was in Pakistan, trying to convince the leaders and the public that the United States was not violating their sovereignty. Why didn’t I just pack up and say, “To hell with all of you”? Because like it or not, it was in the United States’ interests to help enable success in Afghanistan and stronger regional security, and you couldn’t do that if you weren’t willing to endure a frustrating exercise in public diplomacy in Pakistan.

  The trip and this entire period was a big reminder that so much of what we try to do here at home depends on how things are messaged and framed overseas. No matter what we do, we have a responsibility to explain it properly, taking into full account how the effort will be seen by a public that can’t possibly be expected to understand and isn’t much interested in our domestic politics. At the same time, we have a right to hold a country accountable for its politicians playing politics with the generous intentions of American taxpayers. I made a mental note to myself of a lesson learned, that when we decide that doing something is in our country’s interests, we have to overcome the instinct in Congress to act in a way that scores points and makes people feel good but might contribute to undermining our goals along the way. All the extra language in that bill did nothing to advance our actual goals, but it sure got in the way of communicating our intentions to the people we aimed to help.

  Then the floods came. Weeks after the legislation was signed into law and the initial media firestorm had dissipated, in the summer of 2010 raging floodwaters killed more than 1,600 people and left great swaths of Pakistan devastated. I detoured from another trip to return there to observe the American aid effort. I had to helicopter out to the hardest-hit areas. It was important to show how the dollars from the act just passed by our Congress would be used to address immediate humanitarian needs. As we were choosing our landing sites, it dawned on me that it was all well and good for me to go there to make the case that the United States was on the side of the Pakistani people, but what about the president of Pakistan? I called Pres
ident Asif Zardari and asked him to tour with me. He was out of the country at the time, so I suggested he get back to Pakistan right away and join me. He agreed, but once he was added to the mix, the number of places we could visit diminished by orders of magnitude. There were few areas in the country where President Zardari was welcome. When we cross-referenced those places with the areas where our security detail could land, we were down to two or three.

  When we finally landed at our first site, we were shepherded over to a corner of a soccer field, where we were briefed on relief efforts by President Zardari’s military people. Thousands of Pakistanis had gathered around the soccer field, but none of them could see what we were doing. The entire purpose of the visit was defeated. We had wanted to share the visual of a president actively working to help his people in distress, accompanied by my speaking directly to Pakistanis about America’s efforts to address their humanitarian needs. Instead, the event turned into a briefing on a soccer field with a security perimeter of a hundred yards in every direction. The Pakistani people were blocked from seeing what we were doing. It was a microcosm of the frustrations I experienced when we passed the bill in the first place, only to be forced to convince the Pakistanis that we weren’t violating their sovereignty. I was concerned that this recent episode would only increase the sense of alienation that the Pakistani people felt for the United States. Watching from hundreds of yards away as military helicopters landed in a soccer field seemed to exacerbate rather than alleviate the problems. I wondered whether there would ever be a way to truly communicate the good we were doing in a country where mistrust and paranoia had clouded our relationship for a long, long time.