Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  The top-down approach was more challenging but potentially more decisive. The leaders of the Taliban were religious fanatics who had been at war practically all their lives. They had close ties with al Qaeda, relations with Pakistani intelligence officers, and deep-seated opposition to the regime in Kabul. It was unlikely they could be persuaded to stop fighting. But with enough pressure, they might realize that armed opposition was futile and the only road back to any role in Afghan public life was through negotiations. Despite the degree of difficulty, Richard thought we should pursue both approaches simultaneously, and I agreed.

  In March 2009 the Riedel strategy review endorsed a bottom-up reintegration effort, but it rejected the prospect of a top-down peace process. The Taliban leaders were “not reconcilable and we cannot make a deal that includes them,” it stated. Still, the review set out some core principles that would be important guides for either approach. To be reconciled, insurgents would have to lay down their arms, reject al Qaeda, and accept the Afghan Constitution. And reconciliation should not come at the expense of Afghanistan’s progress on gender equality and human rights or lead to a return of reactionary social policies.

  That was a concern I felt passionately about, going all the way back to my time as First Lady and continuing through my Senate service. After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, I worked with other women Senators to support First Lady Laura Bush’s U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council and other programs for Afghan women as they sought new rights and opportunities. When I became Secretary of State, I requested that all our development and political projects in Afghanistan take into account the needs and concerns of Afghan women. Creating opportunity for women was not just a moral issue; it was vital to Afghanistan’s economy and security. While life remained difficult for most Afghan women, we did see some encouraging results. In 2001 life expectancy for women in Afghanistan was just forty-four years. By 2012 it had jumped to sixty-two. Mortality rates for mothers, infants, and children younger than five all declined significantly. Nearly 120,000 Afghan girls graduated from high school in those years, fifteen thousand enrolled in universities, and nearly five hundred women joined university faculties. Those figures are astonishing when you consider that at the beginning of the 21st century, they were close to zero across the board.

  Despite this progress, Afghan women faced constant threats to their security and status, and not just from the resurgent Taliban. In the spring of 2009, for example, President Karzai signed a terrible new law that dramatically restricted the rights of women belonging to the minority Shiite population, targeting an ethnic group called the Hazara, which had conservative cultural traditions. The law, which included provisions effectively legalizing marital rape and requiring Shiite women to seek permission from their husbands before leaving the house, blatantly violated the Afghan Constitution. Karzai had backed the measure as a way of shoring up support from hard-line Hazara leaders, which was, of course, no excuse. I was appalled, and I let Karzai know it.

  I called Karzai three times over the course of two days to urge him to revoke the law. If the Constitution could be ignored and the rights of this minority rolled back, then nobody’s rights were secure, men’s or women’s. It would undermine his regime’s moral case against the Taliban. I knew how much personal relationships and respect mattered to Karzai, so I also made clear that this was important to me personally. I explained that if he allowed this outrageous law to stand, it would make it very hard for me to explain why American women, including my former colleagues in Congress, should continue supporting him. Now I was speaking the language he understood. Karzai agreed to put the law on hold and send it back to the Justice Ministry for review. Changes were eventually made. Though not enough, it was a step in the right direction. To keep faith with Karzai, I generally kept this kind of personal diplomacy quiet. I wanted him to know that we could talk—and argue—without it ending up in the newspapers.

  Whenever I met with Afghan women, whether in Kabul or at international conferences around the world, they movingly told me how much they wanted to help build and lead their country, as well as their fears that their hard-earned gains would be sacrificed as U.S. troops departed or Karzai cut a deal with the Taliban. That would be a tragedy, not just for Afghan women but for the entire country. So in every conversation about reintegrating insurgents and reconciling with the Taliban, I was very clear that it would not be acceptable to trade away the rights of Afghan women to buy peace. That would be no peace at all.

  I made the Riedel review’s criteria for reintegration—abandon violence, break with al Qaeda, support the Constitution—a mantra of my diplomacy. At our first major international conference on Afghanistan, in The Hague in March 2009, I spoke to the assembled delegates about splitting “the extremists of al Qaeda and the Taliban from those who joined their ranks not out of conviction, but out of desperation.” At an international conference in London in January 2010, Japan agreed to commit $50 million to provide financial incentives to draw low-level fighters off the battlefield. I pledged that the United States would also provide substantial funding, and we convinced other countries to follow suit.

  In an interview in London, I was asked if “it would be a surprise and maybe even disturbing” for Americans to hear that we were trying to reconcile with some insurgents even as the President was sending more U.S. troops to fight the very same Taliban. “You can’t have one without the other,” I responded. “A surge of military forces alone without any effort on the political side is not likely to succeed. . . . An effort to try to make peace with your enemies without the strength to back it up is not going to succeed. So, in fact, this is a combined strategy that makes a great deal of sense.” That had been my argument during the many debates in the White House Situation Room about the troop surge, and it was in keeping with my beliefs about smart power. But I recognized that even if this was a wise strategy, it might be hard to accept. So I added, “I think underlying your question is the concern of people who say, well, wait a minute, those are the bad guys. Why are we talking to them?” That was a fair question. But at this point we weren’t talking about reconciling with terrorist masterminds or the Taliban leaders who protected Osama bin Laden. I explained that all we were doing was trying to peel off nonideological insurgents who sided with the Taliban for the much-needed paycheck.

  So far, at least, that was true—for us. For his part, Karzai followed up on his statements about reconciliation in his 2009 inaugural address by exploring direct talks with Taliban leaders. In the summer of 2010 he convened a traditional conference of tribal elders from across Afghanistan to back his efforts. Then he appointed a High Peace Council led by former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani to lead potential negotiations. (Tragically Rabbani was assassinated in September 2011 by a suicide bomber with explosives hidden in his turban. His son agreed to take his place on the council.)

  One obstacle to these early Afghan efforts was opposition from elements within the Pakistani intelligence service, known as ISI. Elements in the ISI had a long-standing relationship with the Taliban, going back to the struggle against the Soviets in the 1980s. They continued to provide safe haven for insurgents inside Pakistan, and supported the insurgency in Afghanistan as a way to keep Kabul off balance and hedge against potential Indian influence there. The Pakistanis did not want to see Karzai reach a separate peace with the Taliban that did not take their interests into account. And that was just one of the complications Karzai faced. He also had to worry about opposition from his allies in the old Northern Alliance, many of whom were members of ethnic minorities such as Tajiks and Uzbeks and were suspicious that Karzai would sell them out to his fellow Pashtuns in the Taliban. It was becoming clear that lining up all these players and interests to forge a lasting peace was going to be like solving a Rubik’s Cube.

  By the fall of 2010, Kabul was buzzing with reports of a new channel between Karzai and the Taliban leadership. Karzai’s lieutenants held a number of meetings with a contact who crossed th
e border from Pakistan and was provided safe passage by Coalition troops. At one point he was flown on a NATO airplane to Kabul to meet with Karzai himself. The man claimed to be Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, a high-ranking Taliban commander, and he said he was ready to deal. Some captured Taliban fighters reportedly were shown a photograph and confirmed his identity. This was an exciting prospect.

  In October, at a NATO summit in Brussels, Belgium, Secretary Gates and I were asked about these reports. We both emphasized our support for exploring any credible reconciliation effort, but I cautioned, “There are a lot of different strains to it that may or may not be legitimate or borne out as producing any bona fide reconciliation.”

  Unfortunately my skepticism was warranted. In Afghanistan the story was starting to crumble. Some Afghans who had known Mansour for years claimed that this negotiator looked nothing like him. In November the New York Times reported that the Afghan government had determined the man was an impostor and not a member of the Taliban leadership after all. The Times called it “an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel.” For Karzai, it was a bitter disappointment.

  While the Afghans were going down one dead end after another, Holbrooke and his team, including the noted scholar Vali Nasr, were focused on Pakistan, which they believed was one of the keys to unlocking the whole puzzle. We needed to get the Pakistanis invested in the future of Afghanistan and convince them they had more to gain from peace than from continued conflict.

  Richard latched on to a stalled “transit trade agreement” between Afghanistan and Pakistan that had been languishing unfinished since the 1960s. If completed, it would lower trade barriers and allow consumer goods and commodities to flow across a border most often used in recent years for troop movements and arms shipments. He reasoned that if Afghans and Pakistanis could trade together, maybe they could learn to work together to combat the militants who threatened them both. Increased commerce would boost the economy on both sides of the border and offer people alternatives to extremism and insurgency, not to mention giving each side more of a stake in the other’s success. He successfully pushed both countries to restart negotiations and resolve their outstanding differences.

  In July 2010, I flew to Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, to witness the formal signing. The Afghan and Pakistani Commerce Ministers sat next to each other, staring down at the thick green folders before them that contained the final agreement. Richard and I stood behind them, next to Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani. We looked on as the men carefully signed the accord and then stood to shake hands. Everyone applauded this tangible step, hoping that it could end up representing a new mind-set as much as a new business deal.

  This was the first building block of a vision we would come to call “the new Silk Road,” a network of expanded commercial and communications links that would bind together Afghanistan with its neighbors, giving them all a stake in promoting shared peace and security. Over the next few years the United States committed $70 million to significantly upgrade key roads between Afghanistan and Pakistan, including through the famous Khyber Pass. We also encouraged Pakistan to extend “most-favored nation” status to India, and India to liberalize barriers to Pakistani investment and financial flows, both of which are still moving forward. Given the distrust that exists between them, getting anything done on the Pakistan-India front was no easy task. Electricity from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan began powering Afghan businesses. Trains started running on a new rail line from the Uzbek border to the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif. Plans progressed for a pipeline that one day could ship billions of dollars’ worth of natural gas from energy-rich Central Asia across Afghanistan to energy-hungry South Asia. All these improvements were long-term investments in a more peaceful and prosperous future for a region too long held back by conflict and rivalry. It was slow going, to be sure, but even in the short term this vision injected a sense of optimism and progress in places where they were sorely needed.

  In Islamabad, on that trip in July 2010 (and on every other visit there), I pushed hard to get Pakistan’s leaders to view the war in Afghanistan as a shared responsibility. We needed their help in closing the safe havens from which Taliban insurgents were staging deadly attacks across the border. As Richard kept emphasizing, there was never going to be a diplomatic solution to the conflict without Pakistani support. In a television interview with five Pakistani television journalists set up in our Ambassador’s home—part of my plan to be treated like a punching bag by the hostile Pakistani press to show how serious I was about engagement—I was asked whether it was possible to pursue such a settlement while still pounding away at the other side on the battlefield. “There is no contradiction between trying to defeat those who are determined to fight and opening the door to those who are willing to reintegrate and reconcile,” I replied.

  In fact Richard and I still harbored hope that top Taliban leaders might one day be willing to negotiate. And there were some intriguing developments. In the fall of 2009, Richard visited Cairo and was told by senior Egyptian officials that a number of Taliban representatives, including an aide to the top leader, Mullah Omar, had recently paid them a visit. In early 2010, a German diplomat reported that he had also met with the same aide, this time in the Persian Gulf, and that he seemed to have a direct line to the elusive Taliban chief. Most interesting of all, he reportedly wanted to find a way to talk to us directly.

  Richard thought this was an opening that needed to be tested, but some of our colleagues at the Pentagon, CIA, and White House were reluctant. Many agreed with the analysis in the Riedel review that the top leaders of the Taliban were extremists who could never be reconciled with the government in Kabul. Others thought the time was not yet ripe for negotiations. The surge had just begun, and it needed time to work. Some did not want to accept the political risk of engaging so directly with an adversary responsible for killing American soldiers. I understood this skepticism, but I told Richard to quietly explore what was possible.

  A die-hard baseball fan, Richard started calling the Taliban contact, who was later identified by media reports as Syed Tayyab Agha, by the code name “A-Rod,” and it stuck. The Germans and Egyptians both said he was the real deal, a representative empowered to speak for Mullah Omar and the Taliban high command. The Norwegians, who had contacts within the Taliban, agreed. We weren’t sure, especially after other potential channels had turned out to be duds, but felt it was worth proceeding cautiously.

  In the fall, even as the Afghan government was spinning its wheels with the Taliban impostor, we moved forward with a first exploratory meeting in Germany under the strictest secrecy. On a Sunday afternoon in October, Richard called his Deputy Frank Ruggiero, who had served as a civilian advisor with the military in Kandahar, and asked him to prepare to go to Munich to meet A-Rod. Ruggiero was in the car with his seven-year-old daughter, driving across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. Richard told him to remember the moment because we might be about to make history. (That was classic Holbrooke, with his irrepressible flair for the dramatic. He saw himself as wrestling with history and always believed he could win.)

  The day after Thanksgiving Richard gave Ruggiero his final instructions. “The most important objective of the first meeting is to have a second meeting,” he said. “Be diplomatic, clearly lay out the redlines authorized by the Secretary, and keep them negotiating. The Secretary is following this closely, so call me as soon as you walk out of the meeting.” The redlines were the same conditions I had been repeating for more than a year: If the Taliban wanted to come in from the cold, they would need to stop fighting, break with al Qaeda, and accept the Afghan Constitution, including its protections for women. Those terms were nonnegotiable. But beyond that, as I told Richard, I was open to creative diplomacy that could move us toward peace.

  Two days later Ruggiero and Jeff Hayes from the National Security Council staff at the White House arrived at a house arranged by the Germans in a village outs
ide of Munich. Michael Steiner, the German Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was the host. A-Rod was young, in his late thirties, but he had worked for Mullah Omar for more than a decade. He spoke English and, unlike many Taliban leaders, had some experience with international diplomacy. The participants all agreed on the need to maintain absolute secrecy. There could be no leaks; if the Pakistanis found out about this meeting, they might undermine the talks just as they had Karzai’s early efforts.

  The group talked for six intense hours, feeling one another out and stepping carefully around the massive issues on the table. Could sworn enemies actually come to some kind of understanding that would end a war and rebuild a shattered country? After so many years of fighting, it was hard enough to sit together and talk face-to-face, let alone trust one another. Ruggiero explained our conditions. The Taliban’s top concern seemed to be the fate of its fighters being held at Guantánamo Bay and other prisons. In every discussion about prisoners, we demanded the release of Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who had been captured in June 2009. There would not be any agreement about prisoners without the sergeant coming home.