The Secretary

by Kim Ghattas

  The Israelis were livid. Bibi didn’t like to be told what to do, especially not in public. He wasn’t going to let an American administration push him around again. He was convinced that Hillary and Rahm wanted to throw him under the bus and had turned Obama against him.10 But a few days later, Obama called for settlements to stop, and this time he used Clinton’s more elaborate wording.

  “I’ve said very clearly to the Israelis both privately and publicly that a freeze on settlements, including natural growth, is part of those obligations [that Israel will have to meet],” he told NPR in Washington.

  But, as in 1998, Hillary had been ever so slightly ahead of the White House—and this time of herself. She had spoken more forcefully than the president, and it had taken the White House by surprise. A nascent policy on settlements was crystallized with a statement: “No natural growth.”

  A few days after his NPR interview, Obama flew to Riyadh and then on to Cairo, where his prose enchanted the crowds. He promised again to work hard for peace, telling the crowds that “all of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear.” And he promised a new beginning with the Muslim world, which had grown weary of being lumped together in the same group as Osama bin Laden. With every lofty line, expectations rose higher and higher, in the halls of the American University of Cairo and across the region. There was only one way to go from there: down. But it was a question of how hard and fast the fall would be and how damaging to American interests.

  5

  THE SHRINK WILL SEE YOU NOW

  Nine months into her job and Hillary had already flown 140,000 miles crisscrossing the world. She had honed her voice and style as secretary of state with friendly audiences in Asia, Africa, and Europe. She had made a few more missteps along the way, tripping over names of officials and mistakenly saying the United States had no diplomatic ties with Burma. She had reconnected with allies, reset relations with rivals like Russia, and started spinning her web of diplomatic connections and initiatives. It was time for the frying pan.

  On the morning of Tuesday, October 27, when the State Department sent another one of its cryptic e-mails announcing that the secretary had no public appointments, we were already on a plane. It was a seventeen-hour journey to another country that warranted surprise visits: prickly Pakistan. A nuclear power as well as India’s neighbor and archenemy, Pakistan had helped prop up the Taliban government in Afghanistan on its western border during the 1990s, and the Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda.

  The Obama administration’s policy toward Pakistan was still in flux, and Clinton’s team was still shaping the contours of the trip as we boarded the plane. The trip Book was an untamed mess. Schedules were never final with Hillary, and there didn’t ever seem to be enough reading material in the Book to satisfy her voracious appetite. In Pakistan, the advance teams from the Line were still negotiating the content of the agenda of her talks, the exact look and location of her town halls, which shrines she would visit, and what security arrangements would be needed. Just like Lebanon and Iraq, Pakistan was one of those countries where security concerns kept American officials from fully engaging with the local population, but the State Department was still planning a Hillary template trip.

  The relationship with Islamabad was broken, and attempting to fix it required a bold approach, such as having the secretary connect with average people as she had done so well in other countries. None of her predecessors had bothered with public diplomacy in Pakistan; they instead focused on meetings with the country’s generals. Rice only once spent the night in the country. Pakistani officials were a slippery bunch and the people often openly hostile to the United States. Over three days, in two cities, Clinton would face a battery of town halls with students; meetings with tribal leaders, women’s groups, and businessmen; and interviews with feisty journalists. She had essentially agreed to be a punching bag. The idea was to help Pakistan release some of its anger toward the United States by allowing people to vent their frustrations and disappointments at the secretary. Jake, Huma, and Philippe were nervous about putting their boss in this position: it was a gamble with no guarantee of success. But even the tiniest bump in the dismal 19 percent approval ratings of the United States in Pakistan would be welcome.

  President Obama and his National Security team were exploring a new strategy for the war; American soldiers were still fighting against al-Qaeda and the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan. Obama had already increased troop numbers and was considering sending in even more soldiers, but if he wanted to make progress in Afghanistan, Islamabad’s help was crucial. Even after agreeing to help fight al-Qaeda in 2001, Pakistan was still a base for radical militants. The administration was still determining how to handle Pakistan: Clinton’s trip was in large part a live test of nascent policy.

  Pakistan was not exactly an American ally nor was it an enemy. Pakistan wanted strong ties with America, but the relationship between the two countries was long and fraught. Each distrusted the other equally. The United States was one of the first countries to recognize an independent Pakistan in 1947. The new country was born from the partition of British India, which gave birth to Muslim Pakistan and secular India. Washington provided Pakistan with generous aid. But when the young nation sent 30,000 soldiers into the contested border territory of Kashmir in 1965 and provoked a war with India, the United States cut off military and economic aid to both countries. By 1975, American military aid flowed into Pakistan again but then stopped in 1979 because of concerns that Pakistan was trying to build a nuclear weapon. When the Soviet Union invaded neighboring Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, America’s priorities in the area shifted. Now concerned with fighting the advance of Communism, Washington turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear program, cozied up with its leaders, and in the 1980s the aid started up again. The two countries and their intelligence agencies started working together to fund and arm the anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas. Many of them had strong Islamic militant views and wanted the Communist unbelievers out of their land—their war was a jihad. Millions of Afghan refugees fled into Pakistan, and America sent $5.6 billion of military, economic, and food aid to support Pakistan. In 1989, the jihadi guerrillas defeated the Soviets and forced them to withdraw from Afghanistan.

  The job was done, Communism had been dealt a blow, the United States forgot about Afghanistan, and Pakistan was left to deal with the collapsing country next door, where civil war raged. Afghan refugees continued to cross the border, fleeing the fighting in their villages and towns. Pakistan was still hard at work on its nuclear program, despite warnings from Washington. In 1990, the United States became concerned enough that it once more stopped all military aid and drastically cut back economic assistance to Pakistan. A decade later, the September 11 attacks put this fraught relationship under unprecedented strain. When Washington asked President Pervez Musharraf to show whether his country was with the United States or against it, Pakistan chose the cash cow. Military aid flowed again. The Pakistanis were getting seasick from the on-again, off-again relationship.

  But it was a lucrative one. Plagued by years of unchecked military power, corruption, rampant tax evasion, ballooning debt, extremism, and an all-consuming rivalry with India, Pakistan’s economy had become addicted to outside aid, its generals avid recipients of military assistance. The Pakistanis wanted the money with no strings attached. Just a few weeks before Clinton’s trip, Congress had approved the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill, a new package of aid for Pakistan—$7.5 billion over five years in nonmilitary assistance. The idea was to help shore up the civilian government and state institutions, after years of military dictatorship—if the Pakistanis could show that they were really building a civilian state. Though Pakistan complained that this was interference in its internal affairs, the government still took the money. The contradictions were giving America a headache, and though the relationship was a drain and a nuisance, no one dared contempl
ate the risk of letting go of Pakistan again.

  * * *

  Flying across the Atlantic, Hillary was in her cabin being briefed by the top man in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy, Richard Holbrooke, a longtime diplomat, and by his deputy Vali Nasr, the expert outsider. An acclaimed academic and author, Vali had never been in government before and had not yet traveled on Hillary’s plane. An authority on the Islamic world and a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, Vali was born in Tehran. Although he left Iran after the 1979 revolution to settle in the United States with his family, Vali’s background enriched his perspective, allowing him to see the world from a non-Western point of view. He had spent a year living in Pakistan in 1989 while researching his PhD thesis about Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan, and he knew the country intimately. Back then, American embassy staffers traveled around the country, went on trips to the idyllic Swat valley, and held glamorous cocktail parties where they mingled freely with Pakistanis. How things had changed.

  Almost exactly thirty years ago, as the United States was emerging from the trauma of the Vietnam War and the Soviets were plotting their invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution that deposed the U.S.-backed shah was still in full swing. On November 4, 1979, Americans started watching television every evening for news about the hostages held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. On November 20, in Saudi Arabia, gunmen stunned the world when they seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam. The following day in Iran and in Pakistan, conspiracy-driven news reports claimed America was behind the desecration of Mecca in a plot to take over the Gulf region. American diplomatic missions and schools in Pakistan were mobbed by angry anti-American crowds across the country. The U.S. embassy in Islamabad was torched and besieged for a whole day; three people were killed, and four hundred Americans were evacuated out of Pakistan. It had taken four hours for Pakistani forces to react to the pleas for help from the embassy and control the mob. Pakistani officials then complained that the American evacuation was an overreaction. Washington was preoccupied with Communism and fighting the Cold War and saw the violence in Pakistan as an aberration. Few connected the dots of the events from Iran to Saudi Arabia, Islamabad, and later to Beirut, dots that signaled the swell of militant, political Islam that would eventually lead to the attacks of September 11. Soon, life at the embassy returned to normal, and American diplomats resumed drinking cocktails with Pakistanis at fancy parties in Islamabad or Lahore.

  In 2009 the American diplomatic mission in Pakistan still occupied the same thirty-two acres of rolling hills but was now shielded from the dangers of the outside world by several layers of security, a walled-off compound within a larger diplomatic enclave with checkpoints at every turn. Almost all the embassy staff lived within the compound. As in so many other countries where Americans were targets, life in a fortress deprived diplomats of real encounters with average Pakistanis. American diplomats saw Pakistan mostly through the prism of the liberal elite, the English speakers who seemed open to the West and were very much Western in lifestyle. But they were often also nationalists who held grudges against America. The lack of contact fed the mistrust that the general population felt toward the United States, so Vali was enthused by the decision that Hillary and her team had taken to leave the fortress and reach out more widely to the people.

  Fred Ketchem was less happy. He had been to Pakistan once before, in 1992. He always found it helpful to have a mental image of the country where he was about to deploy his agents and protect the secretary, but Pakistan had only become more dangerous since his last visit. American diplomatic missions continued to be attacked; an American journalist, Daniel Pearl, had been kidnapped and beheaded in 2002, and others had been gunned down in the street. Since that first trip to Asia, Fred had started to adapt to the secretary’s elastic concept of the Bubble, but his can-do attitude didn’t stop him from pushing back as much as he could against what he saw as risky exposure. In a way, it was easier for him to feel in control of security in a country like Iraq or Afghanistan with thousands of American troops. In Pakistan, there was not enough trust and too many unknowns. But Hillary’s team was determined that she would go beyond government buildings and embassy compounds and into everyday Pakistan.

  In Washington, at every planning meeting, Fred would bring with him a list of all the new threats that had emerged. Every time someone put forward a proposal for a visit to a shrine or a mosque, the Diplomatic Security’s first reaction was: “No.” Huma understood the concerns, but she was exasperated.

  “Maybe your answer should be ‘maybe’ until you’ve checked on the ground,” she snapped.

  The planning had been shrouded in secrecy, and our printed schedules were stamped all over with “CLOSE HOLD—CONFIDENTIAL.” We were going to spend two nights in Islamabad, maybe three, then would end up in Marrakesh in Morocco, by the weekend, but there was a gap in the middle. Where were we going? On the plane ride out of the United States, the traveling press corps speculated endlessly. Next door to Afghanistan? Perhaps back to Iraq? Someone heard Addis Ababa. Or was that Abu Dhabi? The Palestinian president was apparently touring the Gulf. Maybe Clinton was about to announce major progress between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

  Oblivious to the building anticipation, Jake couldn’t think beyond Islamabad. He was exhausted from the preparations for the high-stakes trip and from finally moving his life in boxes from Minnesota into his new apartment in Washington, D.C., just a couple of weeks before our departure.

  From my seat, I could see incessant activity behind the Line of Death. Thanks to communication equipment on SAM, officials were calling both “post”—the embassy in Islamabad—and the Building in Washington to tee up last-minute details. The printer was overheating, pieces of paper were going around, and Paul Narain, the solo line officer on the plane for this trip, was typing away furiously on his laptop. Vali, Paul, Jake, Holbrooke—they were all defining and refining policy on the fly. Literally. Sitting in Beirut or Islamabad, it was easy to forget that the foreign policy of the world’s superpower was being devised not by superhumans but by real people, tired, fallible human beings working in imperfect conditions, faced with imperfect choices, who didn’t have all the answers. They didn’t even have a finished Book.

  Jake was excited about the possibilities and nervous about the diplomatic dangers on this trip. His job was to focus on the substance: what the secretary had to say, what she needed to know, how her message was being received, how it had to be fine-tuned for the next appearance. Engrossed in his thoughts, his papers, his e-mails, he generally paid scant attention to his surroundings and followed people in front of him off the plane, into the motorcade, into buildings, and out of rooms. His awareness of his surroundings had never been as low as on this trip: he didn’t notice Fred and his agents putting on bulletproof vests before getting off the plane, didn’t feel the searing heat that greeted us on the tarmac of Chaklala military air base outside Islamabad on Wednesday morning, didn’t lift his head from his BlackBerry in the staff van to see the security officers posted along the wide streets as Clinton’s motorcade made its way into Islamabad.

  Now that we had arrived and the veil of secrecy had been lifted, I called my mother in Beirut to tell her I was in Pakistan. She was not pleased.

  “Why do you have to go to all these dangerous places? What if someone tries to kill her or bring down her plane? She’s a target, and you’ll be in the middle of it. I’m not sure this is such a good idea.”

  The thought had crossed my mind before. Back in Beirut when American embassy convoys drove through the streets, we didn’t simply roll our eyes. We also stayed far behind: you didn’t want to be too close in case someone tried to blow them up. But my mother even worried about me living in Washington, D.C. Years ago, she had heard it was the crime capital of the United States, and when I first moved there, she asked whether I would be safe. I’m not sure she realized the irony
of her question. After living through the war in Lebanon, surely I could fend for myself in a country where tanks weren’t part of the urban landscape. When I once told her I was going on a beach holiday to Mexico, she called me every morning until my departure to tell me I was crazy and that I should come on holiday to Lebanon where we had the best sun and sea and no violent drug cartels. No, we didn’t have drug cartels, just wars.

  But that was a danger we had grown to understand instinctively in Lebanon: we knew where the sniper bullets might be coming from, where to take shelter if bombs were coming toward us from the east or the west. More recently, we knew where to be safe if there was an Israeli air raid, and we knew to stay away from motorcades of Lebanese politicians who were also being targeted for assassination. In Washington, Pakistan, or Mexico, my mother worried I would lose my bearings and lack the adequate survival reflexes. My senses were certainly dulled by the hours on the plane, the heavy air force food, the jetlag, and the baking heat. I was starting to learn to trust Diplomatic Security and Fred. His task wasn’t to protect us journalists but to protect the whole package in which the secretary traveled, and that included me. There had never been an assassination attempt on foreign soil against an American secretary of state or even the president as far as I could tell, so I was probably safer inside the Bubble than outside. There was still plenty of violence to greet us.

  A few hours before we landed in Pakistan that Wednesday morning, a bomb had exploded in Peshawar, a two-hour drive from the capital. The bomb tore through a women’s market, killing more than a hundred people. It was the kind of attack that often stupefied American diplomats—there were no demands, no clear agenda. The violence barely cast a shadow over the country, which seemed to simply pause for a second and move on. The logic of it all escaped Hillary’s team: What good did it do to anyone? What goals did it advance? But the perpetrators had their own logic defined by spite and obstructionism.