Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  I picked up the phone to tell Anne’s parents the terrible, almost unfathomable news that no parent should ever have to hear. There aren’t words that could ever meet the test of such a horrific moment. I thought of Anne and the meaning of her loss every time I heard an Afghan politician dismiss the contributions and sacrifices the United States had made for his country, and I thought of her every time an American—congressmen or pundits mostly—hastily announced we should just leave Afghanistan and let the country fall apart. It mattered to me how we transitioned, and it mattered to the United States whether we left Afghanistan as a country—or in chaos. I believed we could choose an outcome worth the sacrifice.

  But it wouldn’t be easy. Karzai was shrewd and calculating. He was going to make the next Afghan government own the status of forces agreement for NATO and American troops, even as he engaged with me on negotiating the framework that would give us what we needed to stay in Afghanistan at all as a security partner. But Karzai’s punt to the next government made the outcome of the 2014 elections all the more important.

  The stakes couldn’t have been bigger. There was a very real concern that the Afghan state was at risk of fracturing from internal divisions if the elections didn’t lead to a government capable of providing cohesion. It didn’t take a great leap of imagination to think that civil war was just around the corner.

  The first round of voting in June went pretty smoothly. The process of getting a wide spectrum of candidates to run was successful, and international engagement was coordinated and constant. Dr. Ashraf Ghani and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah emerged as the two front-runners. They were a study in contrasts.

  Ghani was a pro-Western Pashtun nationalist with a flair for technocratic jargon. Having spent much of his career at the World Bank in the United States, Ghani had a difficult time connecting with some of the local politicians. He had a brilliant mind but was an inexperienced politician. Sometimes he was prone to overreacton. He was also an intensely private man who had a tendency toward micromanagement that hadn’t always served him well.

  Abdullah, by contrast, was cool, calm, studious and soft-spoken. He didn’t have Ghani’s vision or technocratic expertise, but he always had a sense of the moment. He was an effective coalition builder and knew how to work behind the scenes. He was a good pol.

  The view from those who had been working the Afghanistan desk was that either Ghani or Abdullah could be a big improvement over Karzai, if they could get their foothold. Both looked to the West for a partner and wanted a relationship with the United States. Both were well known to us and good leaders in different ways: Abdullah was the natural politician; Ghani was the cerebral policy wonk with a PowerPoint for every occasion.

  The problem was that the second round of Afghanistan’s presidential election in June was a debacle. We thought that, regardless of how you examined the results, the outcome would be a Ghani win. But charges of fraud and other irregularities cast a pall over what should have been a triumphant moment for the Afghan people.

  It was not up to the United States to determine who would lead Afghanistan—nor should it have been. And we supported no individual candidates throughout the process. But it soon became clear that breaking this impasse and restoring the legitimacy and credibility of the electoral process required Afghan electoral institutions to address serious and extensive allegations, including voting irregularities in provinces like Paktika and Khost.

  Coming out of a hotly contested presidential election, each candidate honestly thought and continued to believe he had won. For Abdullah, it was déjà vu—he believed he had won in 2009 and he believed that he had put country over ambition back then. He wasn’t about to do so again without a fight. Abdullah tried to manage his constituency, but it was clear that his people were growing restless. In July, one of Abdullah’s key supporters threatened to form a parallel government of twelve to fourteen breakaway provinces. One of my deputies warned me that he thought secession and even civil war were real possibilities; our ambassador in Kabul argued that the risk of a coup was real. I asked my team what the implications would be if we cut off all assistance. The answer I got was pretty sobering: the Afghan army would disband; the police would stop being paid and attrition would grind away most of the gains we’d made; clinics and schools would close, leaving millions of boys and girls without a future. In short, the country would go back to the turmoil of the 1990s, when the civil war flared.

  We had to take control of the situation before it imploded, because we were in real jeopardy of losing everything and because the costs of ignoring this problem were growing by the day. I also knew that Congress was at a breaking point. Karzai had poisoned the bilateral relationship and American casualties were mounting. If we couldn’t get two qualified, pro-Western candidates to form a government and prevent another civil war after all that investment in blood and treasure, what were we fighting for? Many members of Congress were ready to wash their hands of Afghanistan.

  The situation was so dire that some people were urging me not to get caught in the middle of it. “Don’t diminish your currency,” they warned. “Don’t own Afghanistan—you saved it before, everyone knows it’s a mess, don’t touch it.”

  I thought the concern was pointless: the United States wasn’t going to sit on the sidelines while Afghanistan burned. In diplomacy, showing up is half the battle. We still had a chance to avoid a terrible outcome. And I thought that if I made a visit, that could create breathing room for diplomacy—which, at this point, meant at least giving Abdullah a lifeline so he could calm his followers.

  I told Ghani and Abdullah that I was headed to Kabul and appealed to them to give my trip a shot. Abdullah could dissuade his constituents against any rash actions on the pretext that he needed to see what we’d accomplish during my seventy-two-hour visit.

  My approach was to listen and learn. I had my team put together a list of the key power brokers and proposals. Our goal was to work through the election irregularities and find a way forward on the political track. In any negotiation, you need to know what you want and you need to understand both the substance of the disagreement and the politics. Abdullah wanted an audit of the voting in four or five key provinces, which were mostly Pashtun areas that he claimed had voted in some cases five times higher than in previous elections and a hundred to one in favor of Ghani. His team wanted to throw out the votes from those provinces altogether. I was very clear that that approach wouldn’t fly. Ghani’s people were adamant they had had a brilliant mobilization plan for getting out Pashtun voters who would otherwise be attracted to the Taliban. To challenge the fact of their participation, they argued, was to threaten the stability of the country. In their view, any questioning of the results should be on an equal basis. So we spent a lot of time deliberating and debating what role the UN would play and how to guarantee the integrity of the process.

  On July 2, the situation looked bleak. The way I saw it, we had two options: make the process work and try to conciliate Abdullah, or promote some sort of power-sharing arrangement.

  We were nearing a critical moment in the negotiations when, in a surprise move, Ghani picked up on the idea of forming a unity government. I always suspected he knew this idea was popular among some factions of the Northern Alliance. Maybe he was just saying what Abdullah wanted to hear. Maybe he was searching for a reasonable compromise between two extremes. Either way, the proposal for power sharing bought us some breathing space. I worked closely with our special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Dan Feldman, whom I’d known and liked since he was on my foreign policy team in the 2004 campaign, and we built an engagement strategy. Dan had worked as a deputy to Richard Holbrooke. He proved himself to be an extremely hard worker, dogged like his mentor. Dan and I stayed in constant touch with both sides and met with them virtually nonstop over those seventy-two hours.

  That’s when we had a breakthrough.

  We were debating the finer points of the recount in four or five contested provinc
es when Ghani looked me dead in the eye and said, “Let’s just audit everything.” I immediately embraced the idea. Ghani knew this was a smart move. It would increase his moral authority without conceding any foul play during the elections. He didn’t believe that his campaign had done anything to encourage fraud, but his campaign had benefited from fraudulent votes.

  The audit wasn’t a silver bullet. But I knew we needed a clear and verifiable process that would make certain that the numbers added up.

  Convincing both sides to move forward required some doing. After one particularly long discussion, I invited both candidates and their teams into the ambassador’s residence at our embassy. I met with them separately, but I delivered the same message.

  I told them that the United States of America and dozens of other countries had invested for more than a decade in Afghanistan—thousands of our soldiers had died and spilled blood on their behalf, and for the rest of my life, I had to be able to look Anne Smedinghoff’s parents in the eyes and tell them that the men running Afghanistan were worthy of Anne’s sacrifice. Countries had made long-term commitments to Afghanistan’s future—but if that future was stolen because two men who wanted to be president of Afghanistan couldn’t work out their differences, the responsibility of what happened would be theirs. Leaders have to lead and put personal feelings aside. I told them that they were running the risk of civil war, of complete and total implosion.

  I then turned to Ghani, put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Ashraf, you’re going to be president. Abdullah will help you implement a common agenda. But you have to be willing to transfer real power to him and give him the opportunity to share in governance, because it is in the interest of the country.”

  After about forty-five minutes, the candidates and their teams went on the patio for iftar prayers against an amber sky, just as the sun was setting. When they came back, they agreed to the audit and the need to form a national unity government. Abdullah said to me later that this was a turning point. Ashraf told me that both sides were on track to replay the events that had led to the civil war and that their agreement saved “between one hundred and one million lives.”

  In my press conference at the UN mission in Kabul, I laid out the concrete steps and commitments that, if implemented, would move Afghanistan closer to the vision of a sovereign, stable and unified democracy.

  After the press conference, Ghani said he needed time to engage his constituents before he could sign the agreement. Back in Washington, the reports I was getting weren’t good. The monitoring and auditing process wasn’t going well. The teams of both candidates were at odds over how the new CEO position for Abdullah would operate, whether he would chair the Council of Ministers, and who would have power over appointments.

  We knew that Ghani was always going to have a hard time navigating the transition from a winner-take-all election to a power-sharing accord. The ink on the agreement wasn’t even dry and yet the agreement was on life support. Even as we were working to get the political negotiations back on track, we had to wrestle with problem after problem on the audit. I made another trip to Kabul in August. We identified several outstanding issues and tried to get Ghani and Abdullah to resolve them. On September 3, I spoke with both men by phone. I talked about the importance of an agreed description of the outcome that would bring legitimacy to the result and confer it on the elected president and how the statement should also acknowledge real problems in the electoral process. Ghani focused much more on the need to vindicate the outcome and the presidency, but he did acknowledge that the audit had turned up fraud, which I said would need to be part of a common narrative describing the election. I encouraged Ghani to attend the NATO summit in Cardiff with Abdullah in order to iron out their political agreement.

  My conversations with Abdullah were focused more on the impasses in the draft political agreement, especially but not exclusively the issue of the CEO chairing weekly cabinet meetings. I noted on several occasions the extensiveness of Ghani’s proposal of delegated powers to the CEO in the draft text. I argued that the agreement needed to close and that Abdullah couldn’t afford to walk away, forcing us and the UN into a position of defending the audit without a political agreement or an agreed narrative about the election.

  On September 17, Abdullah convened a tribal shura to build support for the unity government. Special Representative Dan Feldman, Ambassador Jim Cunningham, UN Special Representative Jan Kubis and some seventy of Abdullah’s worthies were in the crowd. In total, they talked for six hours, until about 2:00 a.m. Kabul time. The shura got off to an inauspicious start. Many doubted that Abdullah had achieved a good deal for them. His team reached out to me and asked if I’d talk to them on speakerphone. So here I was, half a world away, attempting to persuade a tentful of tribal elders that their interests lay with the unity government, not against it. I talked to them about the definition of “country”—not as a sectarian institution or a spoils system—but as a nation with a common purpose. I told them that Abdullah represented them well and how persuasively he argued for the sharing of power. In an election, I argued, often there are discrepancies and challenges, but you have to move forward. I said that “compromise” was the watchword, and that the United States was supportive, but that both sides were running the risk of losing that support.

  I concluded by saying, “If you fail to reach agreement, many people will ask themselves why Afghanistan still deserves so much international funding and other support. We outsiders can’t want political stability in Afghanistan more than you do—we can’t want to create a chance for a better future more than you do. The draft agreement may not have everything you wanted; no agreement in circumstances like this could. But it is a good agreement. It is a fair agreement, and it will give your team real power and influence in the next government.”

  The tide shifted. A majority backed Abdullah and we were back on track. I talked to Abdullah again later that week by phone. He thanked me for my intervention and said that without the U.S. commitment, the negotiation would have never reached this moment. He said that it had been an exhausting process. He told me that he saw no alternative to the unity government. Both sides had to live up to their responsibilities. Before we got off the phone, he said simply, “Time spent on negotiations with Ghani is time spent on investing in the unity government.” I believed we were on the right path.

  On September 18, my team hosted hours of proximity talks because the candidates didn’t want to be in the same room until there was final agreement on language. It was tough work, but we made progress. In the course of the discussions we actually had to invent a new Dari word that meant “equitable” because no such word existed in that language. The secret to diplomacy in a dangerous world? Speak softly and carry a Dari dictionary.

  On September 21, Ghani and Abdullah officially signed the agreement for the unity government. It was a joyful moment. It is easy today to underestimate the measure of courage and leadership that that agreement demanded and that these men continue to show. Yes, there were many high-wire moments when it seemed just as likely that Afghanistan’s political future could lurch in dangerous directions. But in the end, statesmanship and compromise triumphed.

  Tough decisions still lie ahead. Afghanistan today faces huge economic and security challenges, but it has a chance of being known as a country, not just a war. It was worth the diplomacy it took to get to this point. I have hope for Afghanistan because I know there’s a generation to come that doesn’t want to fall backward into the terror and travails their parents and grandparents knew. Once, my staff handed me a letter from a young Afghan girl who had earned a scholarship from the State Department to study at the American University of Afghanistan. One line stood out to me. She wrote about the importance of education and women role models and how her goal is not just to help herself, but to lift her community, her society and her country. She said very simply, “I want to be one of them.” Think about that. She feels ownership over the future that she is
creating in Afghanistan, and that’s not something that her sisters or her mother could say even a decade ago. But girls all over Afghanistan are saying it today, girls who can grow up to be Afghanistan’s own Anne Smedinghoffs. That’s a reason to be hopeful that Afghanistan can break the cycle of chaos and tragedy that defined the country for decades. That’s reason enough to be glad we stayed at it—to give Afghans not a guarantee, but a chance to succeed on their own.

  • • •

  SCOTT GILBERT DIDN’T pull any punches: it was June 2014, and as Alan Gross headed into his fifth year stuck in a dank Havana prison cell, his ninety-two-year-old mother, Evelyn, lay dying of cancer 1,100 miles away in Plano, Texas. Scott didn’t think Alan could hold on any longer.

  Alan Gross had been jailed on trumped-up charges, held as a bargaining chip for the Cuban regime, which was determined to secure the release of the so-called Miami Five, Cuban spies imprisoned in the United States. Alan had wasted away in prison, separated from the love of his life, Judy.

  But now Scott worried: If Alan wasn’t able to say goodbye to his mother, would he be able to hold on with no end in sight?

  Scott was not your typical Washington lawyer. He had quit a big white-shoe law firm to start his own practice. He didn’t wear suits but he did wear a single diamond stud earring. He rode a Harley-Davidson, loved good wine. He cared about his clients—as people. He wasn’t in it for fame or money. He was, above all, a no-bullshit, no-holds-barred advocate for the release of Alan Gross. And now he was worried that his client was giving up.