by Kim Ghattas
I had a hard time accepting my friend’s change of heart. I prodded deeper with others, journalists and diplomats, architects and hotel owners, in Italy, in the United Kingdom, in the Netherlands. They all expressed concern about the possibility of American decline. If America is in decline, what about us? The rivalry was gone, the scorn had vanished. Europe now looked to America and saw that the country it had mocked for its lack of sophistication, history, or refined culture was the first line of defense against its own decline into total irrelevance. Together, they could face the new powers on the global stage, new powers that didn’t have the same values or interests as the West.
* * *
On August 21, Tripoli fell to rebels. Although the fighting around the capital had intensified and the assault had been carefully and secretly planned, it was still very sudden. Months later, an American official would tell me that luck had also played a role, so the Obama administration did not see the military operation as a guarantee of success anywhere else. Gaddafi was still on the run, but Sarkozy, Cameron, and Erdoğan made a very public triumphant appearance in the city, with chants of “Thank you, France, thank you, Turkey” ringing around them. On October 17, 2011, we were on our way to Libya.
Clinton was greeted on the tarmac of Tripoli airport by a chant no American official has ever associated with gratitude to America.
“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.” God is great, in Arabic. A phalanx of uniformed, bearded fighters, who were part of a militia that now controlled the airport, stood on the tarmac as she emerged from the plane. SAM had remained in Malta, and we had flown over in a military C-17, better equipped to fly into what was, in effect, still a war zone. In the West, “Allahu Akbar” is now so closely associated with the cry of radical militants before their worst acts of violence that few are able to accept that in Arabic it is often simply a cry of joy or exasperation or a reaction to fear, as common as “Oh my God” or “Dear Jesus.”
The fighters raised their hands in signs of victory and asked to pose for pictures with Hillary. She also raised her fingers in a V. The militiamen then escorted Hillary’s heavily armored motorcade into Tripoli, zigzagging on the road ahead of us in their own SUVs, driving alongside us, grinning widely, some of them leaning out of their windows with their guns.
“I am proud to stand here on the soil of a free Libya,” Clinton said after one of her meetings with the country’s new interim leaders, including Mahmoud Jibril, who had played a key role in convincing the West that the Libya opposition was worth betting on.
After Tripoli, we went on to Kabul and Islamabad. The policy on Pakistan had been drifting for a while. After Richard Holbrooke died, his team had disbanded. Vali Nasr was gone too. The United States and Pakistan still didn’t trust each other; even worse, they confused the hell out of each other. The relationship between them seemed to be only getting worse, partly because of American actions and partly because Pakistani honor—ghairat—was applied selectively. When Pakistani soldiers died in friendly fire by the Americans, the news was plastered all over television and Pakistan demanded an apology and more aid. When Pakistani soldiers died at the hands of the Taliban or in a snow avalanche, the deaths, divergent from Pakistan’s narrative that it was being bullied by America, barely received a mention in the news.
A lot of bruised egos followed the Navy SEAL special operation that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011. The Pakistanis didn’t just feel betrayed by the United States. They were worried about having been caught unaware and what that said to the world about their intelligence and army. If we didn’t know the United States was flying into our country, they thought, who knows what else, who else, might be flying in. In Islamabad, Clinton soldiered on with her efforts to engage the people, the members of parliament, though the types of questions and the reception she received had barely changed in the two years since she first visited.
From Lahore, Shehrbano Taseer, the daughter of Aamna and the assassinated Punjab governor Salman Taseer, was watching the coverage of the visit to Islamabad. She had missed Clinton’s last visit while studying in the United States, but now she was back in Pakistan, fatherless and helping her mother with the family business. Shehrbano’s brother Shahbaz, the eagle, whose name had so pleased Hillary, had been kidnapped that summer. There had been no claim, no ransom demanded. His family believed he was being held somewhere along the border with Afghanistan. Shehrbano had come to Washington in the fall to ask if there was any intelligence about his whereabouts, as the whole area was under heavy surveillance by the Americans, who hunted down militants and then struck them down in drone attacks. The family kept any information they gleaned to themselves for fear it would compromise Shahbaz’s safety. The harsh winter would set in soon, and Shehrbano worried about her brother, in the cold. Drone strikes were ridding her country of militants, but her brother was now in their hands. As she lay awake at night, she wondered, “What if my brother dies in a drone strike meant to kill his captors?”
Our stop in Kabul, as always, was about getting out of the country as fast as possible. Fred was now based there, in charge of the embassy security. Another tall but blond and heavily built Diplomatic Security agent, Kurt Olson, looked after Clinton. Antoinette Hurtado had also joined the embassy for a yearlong stint and thought back fondly of the Paris escapade. On October 20, news reached us that Gaddafi had been caught alive and then shot dead in Sirte.
“We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton said in an unguarded moment caught on camera.
Dictators were being brought down, walls of fear falling, but some things never changed. The minute Obama had announced a surge of troops to stabilize Afghanistan and defeat al-Qaeda in November 2009, he had been looking for the exit out of the war. The motto had been “Clear, hold, build, transfer,” which had proved too ambitious. In Kabul, Clinton announced a new, more modest strategy. Any hint of nation building was gone. As so often before, grand plans had been shelved, more millions of dollars had been wasted by short-sighted ambitions and petty turf wars within the U.S. government and military. Naive good intentions dried up on the arid plains of a country known as the “graveyard of empires.”
16
HELP US HELP YOU
The e-mail arrived in our in-boxes in late November. We would soon be flying twenty-two hours across the Pacific until we reached our destination, a country almost untouched by the outside world, a land of white elephants and bejeweled temples. There were detailed clothing instructions. Don’t bring white, pink, or black clothes; these are considered mourning colors. Tone down your rusts and saffrons; these are the colors of protest. For the men among us, whose closets were full of black suits and white shirts, these strange instructions presented an unwelcome hassle the day before the Thanksgiving weekend. We women had more options; there were enough colors left for us to assemble our attire.
The second memo, titled “Facts before you come,” was more problematic: no BlackBerry service, no high-speed Internet, no credit cards, no cash machines. Foreign journalists were a rarity, and sensitive areas were off limits to foreigners. Though this would make our work as journalists a particular challenge, the reward of reporting from inside this isolated nation would only be that much greater. On the Monday after Thanksgiving, we settled into our seats in the back of good old SAM.
* * *
The package pulled up on the tarmac just after two in the afternoon. Hillary had already been to four events that day, including a summit at the White House with European leaders. The Euro-zone crisis was still in full swing and threatened to land on America’s shores every day. Clinton stepped out of her limousine in a chic black pantsuit, her sunglasses on as usual, her blond windswept hair now past her shoulders. Hillary had many reasons to be excited about this trip, both professionally and personally. The trip added a new country to her list of places she had visited and represented the result of three years of work. Clinton would be the first American secretary of state to set foot in the country since the 1950s. She was also going
to meet a personal heroine.
Burma beckoned. The Land of the Golden Pagodas, once known as the Jewel of Asia, a fertile country traversed by the Irrawaddy River.
“This is Burma, and it will be quite unlike any land you know about,” Rudyard Kipling had written in 1898, in his Letters from the East.
Today’s Burma was a pariah state called Myanmar by the military junta that had ruled the country since a coup in 1962. The ruling junta stood accused of the worst abuses—forced labor, including of children, forcible relocations of ethnic populations, and using rape as a war weapon. The country was mired in poverty, civil war, and corruption. Uprisings by monks demanding more freedom for the country were violently put down, whole monasteries emptied of their populations as the monks were sent to prison. Tough sanctions imposed by the West were meant to choke the regime, but the strategy wasn’t working and the people were only getting poorer.
In his inaugural address, Obama had called on America’s foes to unclench their fists. Iran and North Korea weren’t sure they wanted to unclench anything and didn’t seem to know how. But that year, surprising everyone, Burma’s junta made contact. During her travels to Asia, Clinton had heard from her Indonesian counterpart that the sanctions alone weren’t working and that the Burmese were trying to figure out how to move forward. Indonesia could help bring Burma back into the fold of the international community. She listened closely, registering the importance of what she was hearing. A regional approach to solving a vexing problem appealed to the Obama administration. And unlike Brazil and Turkey with Iran, Asian countries didn’t want to make friends with Burma just for the sake of making friends, just for the sake of a deal. They were willing to listen to Washington’s advice about how to navigate the process and Washington was open to their approach. This could work.
Burma and the United States waltzed with each other all year, but the dance didn’t really go anywhere. There were no diplomatic breakthroughs beyond one high-level meeting at the UN between Burmese and U.S. officials. The country had its own groundwork to do first, including parliamentary elections and the election of its first civilian president in decades, a former general, Thein Sein. The strongest signal for change came when the generals released from house arrest a woman as famous as Hillary—Aung San Suu Kyi. In 1990, her party had won the elections, but the military ignored the results and instead imprisoned her, sometimes in her own home, sometimes in a jail. The way Burma’s generals treated Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate, would become the barometer of how close or fast the West was ready to engage with Burma. Obama had consulted with Aung San Suu Kyi before sending Clinton to the country, and soon the two iconic women would be face-to-face. First, however, Hillary would deploy her people-reading skills to gauge whether Thein Sein and his colleagues were serious about change or simply trying to con the world into lifting sanctions. Obama said he saw “flickers of progress,” and Clinton was going to find out if they could be fanned into a real flame.
Soon after takeoff, Clinton came to the back of the plane for a chat. It was such a shame there wasn’t more time to travel around Burma, Clinton told us. She would have wanted to visit Mandalay, the country’s former capital. Clinton had repeatedly insisted she was stepping off the high-wire of politics at the end of her tenure at the State Department. She said she felt cheated traveling the world for work with no real time to experience the places she was visiting. She was still energized by her trips, but this one was especially momentous. Copious briefing material produced by the State Department had not been enough for her. She had asked for books and films, poring over the history and politics of the country for a week before the trip.
After our taco salad lunch, Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, crossed the Line of Death to brief us about the visit and what to expect. Kurt also spent his life on planes crisscrossing the region, building on the work done by the secretary or preparing for her upcoming visits. America’s relationships with its allies, in Asia or elsewhere, required constant tending. On the plane, everyone was preoccupied with one central question—after years of maintaining a close, repressive grip over the nation, why were the generals now finally unclenching their fist? No one knew for sure.
Burma’s leaders were able to travel around Asia, unlike their North Korean friends, whose travel was confined to China because of extensive travel bans. The Burmese attended ASEAN summits, spoke with other leaders, and could see their country falling behind, choked by sanctions, while the rest of Asia prospered. Burma had a large expatriate population that fed news back into the country. Burma was cut off, but it was no North Korea. So, unlike Arab leaders who had utterly rejected reforms, the Burmese leaders appeared to have understood that if they could open up the country slowly, on their terms, perhaps they could stay in power and reap the rewards, as well as avoid international justice.
Despite all the hard work that had gone into diplomacy with Burma, no one on the plane was claiming credit for the stirrings of change. It was too soon to claim success anyway, but American officials were also aware of the many converging elements that had made this moment possible. The hard work of other Asian countries and Burma’s own will and intention had been key, but the real game changer for the Burmese had been China. The Burmese were feeling used by their bigger neighbor. Chinese companies were building hydroelectric projects in Burma and bringing in workers from China rather than creating jobs for the Burmese. The Chinese were planning a huge dam on the Irrawaddy River, a holy flow of water for the Burmese. The dam would greatly damage the river, and the Chinese were planning to send 90 percent of the power generated back to China. What kind of a friend was that? the Burmese wondered. The generals wanted the United States to be a buffer, a balancer.
After a quick stop in South Korea for a conference about international aid, we flew to Nay Pyi Taw, Burma’s new capital. The landing strip was narrow and unlit; we had to be wheels down before nightfall. SAM could not be kept secure in Burma, so the Ravens would spend the night guarding the plane in neighboring Thailand. Clinton walked down the steps wearing an intense fuchsia jacket and black trousers. Men in white shirts and dark longyi, the traditional Burmese wrapped skirt, greeted her on the tarmac. Clearly, Hillary and her Burmese hosts had not read the memo.
A red billboard stood at one end of the tarmac, barely thirty feet away from the nose of the plane. The country welcomed the prime minister of Belarus, who had just visited, in big white letters. There were no banners welcoming Clinton—the generals didn’t seem to want to get ahead of themselves or appear too eager in public—but this country was clearly aspiring to keep better company than other dictatorships.
We had been promised white elephants and stunning, pastoral landscapes, but we got water buffalos, startled farmers, and a road paved with concrete. For probably the only time in our travels with the secretary, we all actually watched the country go by our windows: no BlackBerries. We entered the town, which looked deserted, and pulled up to our hotel, the Thingaha, a small resort of teak villas where we were the only customers. Waitresses bearing trays of watermelon juice welcomed us, some overcome by emotion when Hillary greeted them like long-lost friends.
Dusk fell as the waitresses set a long table on the terrace for drinks and snacks with the secretary. Over the last three years, Hillary had grown to like and trust the traveling press corps. Every now and then on the road, she joined us for drinks or dinner and talked frankly about everything from the policy issues she was facing to what films she had watched the evening before in her hotel room or gossip about celebrities. The agreement was always that those conversations were private and their content not to be shared. It allowed her to be herself, or as close to that as was possible while still in the company of journalists. She often had a couple of drinks. This evening it would be tea for the secretary—she was coming down with a cold and needed to be fit for the next day. Her hair was up, her makeup removed for the evening, her contact lenses replaced by her glasses. She was
relaxed, comfortable, and funny, holding court for over an hour.
* * *
The next morning we readied for our visit to the presidential palace in Nay Pyi Taw, Abode of Kings, the country’s new capital, a brand-new city with twenty-lane-wide streets. There was a street for hotels, one for restaurants, a section for government buildings, another for housing of government employees. The modern ultra-planned city was unlike anything else in the country. In the past, royals had moved the capital around the country according to their whim; the British had set up in Mandalay, and the capital then moved to Rangoon in 1948 after independence.
The generals who took over in 1962 grew increasingly isolated over the years and became paranoid about an attack by the country they perceived as their enemy—the United States. Rangoon was also becoming congested, so the generals started clearing hundreds of square feet of tropical scrubland to make way for Asian-style buildings with a Soviet bulkiness. They chose an area so remote that no one was even aware a new city was being built, except for residents in a logging town two miles away, who were tipped off when Chinese engineers suddenly began frequenting local cafés. The outside world, watching on satellite imagery, wasn’t sure what the construction was all about.
With the help of an astrologer, the generals chose an auspicious date and time to move to Nay Pyi Taw, and on a Friday in November 2005, they announced that Myanmar had a new capital. Two days later, whole government ministries started moving up to Nay Pyi Taw, a ten-hour drive from Rangoon. Burma’s rulers and its bureaucracy were retreating inland. Six years later, they let the “enemy” into their bosom.