Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  The Bonn conference in December 2011 turned into a disaster for our peace efforts. Karzai, ever unpredictable, turned against the idea of a Taliban office, berating Grossman and Crocker. “Why have you not kept me informed of these talks?” he demanded, despite the fact that just a few months earlier he had urged us to accelerate them. Karzai was once again afraid of being left behind and undercut. Our plan had always been for these U.S.-Taliban talks to lead to parallel negotiations between the Afghan government and the insurgents. That was the sequence we had agreed to with A-Rod and discussed with Karzai. But now Karzai insisted he wanted his own people in the room for any future meetings between the Taliban and us. A-Rod balked when Grossman and Ruggiero broached this proposal. From his perspective, we were changing the rules of the game. In January 2012 the Taliban once again pulled out of our talks.

  This time it was not so easy to coax them back. The peace process went into a deep freeze. Still, based on various public statements throughout 2012, there appeared to be a renewed debate under way within the ranks of the Taliban over the benefits of talking versus fighting. Some key figures publicly accepted that a negotiated solution was inevitable, reversing nearly a decade of rejection. Others, however, were committed to violent opposition. At the end of 2012 the door to reconciliation remained open, but only part way.

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  In January 2013, just before I left office, I invited President Karzai to have dinner with me, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and a few other senior officials at the State Department in Washington. Karzai brought along the chair of his High Peace Council and other key advisors. We gathered in the James Monroe Room on the eighth floor, surrounded by antiques from the early days of the American republic, and talked about the future of Afghanistan’s democracy.

  It had been more than three years since Karzai and I had dined on the eve of his inauguration. Now I was about to hand the reins of the State Department over to Senator Kerry, and another Afghan election would soon select Karzai’s successor, or at least that was the plan. Karzai had publicly pledged to abide by the Constitution and leave office in 2014, but many Afghans wondered if he would actually follow through on that promise. The peaceful transfer of power from one ruler to the next is a crucial test of any democracy, and it is not unusual in that part of the world (and many others) for leaders to find ways to extend their tenure.

  In a long one-on-one meeting before dinner, I urged Karzai to keep his word. If the government in Kabul could build more credibility with its citizens, deliver services, and administer justice fairly and effectively, it would help undercut the appeal of insurgency and improve the prospects for national reconciliation. That depended on all government officials, but especially Karzai, to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. Presiding over a constitutional transition would be an opportunity for Karzai to cement his legacy as the father of a more peaceful, secure, and democratic Afghanistan.

  I recognized how difficult this might be for him. The Rotunda of the Capitol Building in Washington is home to a series of soaring patriotic paintings that depict proud moments from our own democracy’s early days, from the voyage of the Pilgrims to the victory at Yorktown. There is one painting in particular that I have always thought spoke to the democratic spirit of our country. It shows General Washington turning his back on the offered throne and giving up his commission as commander in chief of the Army. He went on to serve two terms as a civilian President and then voluntarily stepped down. More than any election victory or inaugural parade, that selfless act was the hallmark of our democracy. If Karzai wanted to be remembered as Afghanistan’s George Washington, he had to follow this example and give up the throne.

  The other topic I raised with Karzai was the stalled peace process with the Taliban. Karzai had effectively pulled the plug in late 2011; I wanted him to reconsider. If we waited until after U.S. troops started coming home, we and he would have less leverage with the Taliban. Better to negotiate from a position of strength.

  Over dinner Karzai ran through a litany of familiar concerns: How would we verify if Taliban negotiators actually spoke for the leadership? Would Pakistan be pulling the strings from Islamabad? Would Americans or Afghans lead the talks? One by one I answered his questions. I tried to impart the sense of urgency I felt to get the process moving again and suggested a plan that did not require him to directly reach an agreement with the Taliban on opening the office. All he had to do, I said, was make a public statement supporting the idea. I would then arrange for the Emir of Qatar to invite the Taliban to move forward. The goal would be to open the office and organize a meeting between the Afghan High Peace Council and representatives of the Taliban within thirty days. If that failed to happen, the office would be closed. After much discussion, Karzai agreed.

  In June 2013, a few months after I left the State Department, the Taliban negotiating office finally opened. But the new understanding, which had taken years to reach, collapsed in little more than a month. The Taliban staged a flag-raising ceremony at the office and proclaimed that it represented the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” the official name of the country in the 1990s when the Taliban were in power. We had been clear from the beginning that using the office in this way would be unacceptable. Our objective had always been to strengthen the constitutional order in Afghanistan and, as I had assured Karzai, we were vested in the sovereignty and unity of the country. Understandably, Karzai was apoplectic. To him it looked more like the headquarters of a government-in-exile than a negotiating venue. It was everything he had always feared. The Taliban refused to back down, relations ruptured, and the office was forced to close.

  Watching all this now as a private citizen, I am disappointed but not surprised. If making peace were easy, it would have been done long ago. We knew the secret channel with the Taliban was a long shot, with failure more likely than success. But it was worth testing. I believe that we laid a positive foundation that might help future peace efforts. There are now a range of contacts between Afghans and the Taliban, and we exposed debates inside the Taliban that I suspect will only intensify over time. The need for reconciliation and a political settlement isn’t going away. If anything, it is more pressing than ever. The benchmarks we put down could still guide the way.

  I wondered what Richard would have thought. Up until the end, he never lost his confidence in the power of diplomacy to untangle even the toughest knots. I wish he were still with us, twisting arms and slapping backs and reminding everyone that the way to start ending a war is to begin talking.

  9

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  Pakistan: National Honor

  The secure videoconference room in the basement of the West Wing fell silent. Next to me, Secretary Bob Gates sat in his shirtsleeves with his arms folded and his eyes fixed intently on the screen. The image was fuzzy, but unmistakable. One of two Black Hawk helicopters had clipped the top of the stone wall surrounding the compound and crashed to the ground. Our worst fears were coming true.

  Although President Obama sat stoically watching the screen, we were all thinking the same thing: Iran 1980, when a hostage-rescue mission ended in a fiery helicopter crash in the desert, leaving eight Americans dead and badly scarring our nation and our military. Would this end the same way? Bob had been a senior official at the CIA then. The memory surely was weighing on him, and on the man across the table, President Obama. He had given the final order, directly staking the lives of a team of Navy SEALs and Special Operations helicopter pilots and perhaps the fate of his presidency on the success of this operation. Now all he could do was watch the grainy images beamed back to us.

  It was May 1, 2011. Outside the White House, Washington was enjoying a spring Sunday afternoon. Inside, the tension had been building since the helicopters took off from a base in eastern Afghanistan about an hour earlier. Their target was a fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which the CIA believed might be sheltering the world’s most wanted
man, Osama bin Laden. Years of painstaking work by the intelligence community, followed by months of soul-searching debate at the highest levels of the Obama Administration, had brought us to this day. Now it all rested on the pilots of those state-of-the-art helicopters and the Navy SEALs they carried.

  The first test had been crossing the Pakistani border. These Black Hawks were equipped with advanced technology designed to allow them to operate undetected by radar, but would it work? Our relationship with Pakistan, America’s nominal ally in the fight against terrorism, was already very troubled. If the Pakistani military, always on a hair trigger out of fear of a surprise attack from India, discovered a secret incursion into their airspace, it was possible they’d respond with force.

  We had debated whether to inform Pakistan about the raid ahead of time in order to avoid this scenario and the complete breakdown in relations that could follow. After all, as Bob Gates often reminded us, Pakistani cooperation would continue to be needed to resupply our troops in Afghanistan and pursue other terrorists in the border region. I had invested considerable time and energy in the Pakistan relationship over the years, and I knew how offended they would be if we did not share this information with them. But I also knew that elements in the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, maintained ties to the Taliban, al Qaeda, and other extremists. We had been burned by leaks before. The risks of blowing the whole operation were just too great.

  At one point another senior administration official asked if we needed to worry about irreparably wounding Pakistani national honor. Maybe it was the pent-up frustration from dealing with too much double-talk and deception from certain quarters in Pakistan, or the still-searing memories of the smoking pile in Lower Manhattan, but there was no way I was going to let the United States miss our best chance at bin Laden since we lost him at Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in 2001. “What about our national honor?” I said, in exasperation. “What about our losses? What about going after a man who killed three thousand innocent people?”

  The road to Abbottabad ran from the mountain passes of Afghanistan through the smoking ruins of our embassies in East Africa and the shattered hull of the USS Cole, through the devastation of 9/11 and the dogged determination of a handful of U.S. intelligence officers who never gave up the hunt. The bin Laden operation did not end the threat of terrorism or defeat the hateful ideology that fuels it. That struggle goes on. But it was a signal moment in America’s long battle against al Qaeda.

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  September 11, 2001, is indelibly etched in my mind, just as it is for every American. I was horrified by what I saw that day, and as New York’s Senator, I felt an intense responsibility to stand with the people of our wounded city. After a long, sleepless night in Washington, I flew to New York with Chuck Schumer, my partner in the Senate, on a special plane operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The city was in lockdown, and we were the only ones in the sky that day, except for the Air Force fighters patrolling overhead. At La Guardia Airport we boarded a helicopter and flew toward Lower Manhattan.

  Smoke was still rising from the smoldering wreckage where the World Trade Center once stood. As we circled above Ground Zero, I could see twisted girders and shattered beams looming above the first responders and construction workers searching desperately through the rubble for survivors. The TV images I’d seen the night before didn’t capture the full horror. It was like a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.

  Our helicopter set down on the West Side near the Hudson River. Chuck and I met up with Governor George Pataki, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and other officials and started walking toward the site. The air was acrid, and the thick smoke made it hard to breathe or see. I was wearing a surgical mask, but the air burned my throat and lungs and made my eyes tear up. Occasionally a firefighter would emerge out of the dust and gloom and trudge toward us, exhausted, dragging an axe, covered in soot. Some of them had been on duty nonstop since the planes hit the Towers, and they had all lost friends and comrades. Hundreds of brave emergency responders lost their lives while trying to save others, and more would suffer painful health effects for years to come. I wanted to embrace them, thank them, and tell them everything was going to be all right. But I wasn’t sure yet that it was.

  In the makeshift command center at the Police Academy on Twentieth Street, Chuck and I were briefed on the damage. It was crushing. New Yorkers were going to need a lot of help to recover, and it was now our job to make sure they got it. That night I caught the last train south before they closed Penn Station. First thing in the morning in Washington I went to see Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the legendary chairman of the Appropriations Committee, to make the case for emergency relief funding. He heard me out and said, “Think of me as the third Senator from New York.” In the days ahead he was as good as his word.

  That afternoon Chuck and I headed to the White House, and in the Oval Office we told President Bush that our state would need $20 billion. He quickly agreed. He too stood by us through all the political maneuvering that was required to deliver that emergency aid.

  Back at my office the phones were ringing with callers asking for help to track down missing family members or to seek aid. My extraordinary Chief of Staff, Tamera Luzzatto, and my Senate teams in D.C. and New York were working around the clock, and other Senators began sending aides to help out.

  The next day Chuck and I accompanied President Bush on Air Force One back to New York, where we listened as he stood on a pile of rubble and told a crowd of firefighters, “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”

  In the days that followed, Bill, Chelsea, and I visited a makeshift missing persons center at the 69th Regiment Armory and a family assistance center on Pier 94. We met with families cradling photos of their missing loved ones, hoping and praying that they might still be found. I visited wounded survivors at St. Vincent’s Hospital and at a rehabilitation center in Westchester County where a number of the burn victims had been taken. I met a woman named Lauren Manning; although more than 82 percent of her body was terribly burned, giving her a less than 20 percent chance of survival, through fierce willpower and intense effort she fought her way back and reclaimed her life. Lauren and her husband, Greg, who are raising two sons, became vocal advocates on behalf of other 9/11 families. Another amazing survivor is Debbie Mardenfeld, who was brought to New York University Downtown Hospital as an unidentified Jane Doe after falling debris from the second plane crushed her legs and caused extensive injuries. I visited her several times and got to know her fiancé, Gregory St. John. Debbie told me that she wanted to be able to dance at her wedding, but the doctors doubted that she’d survive, let alone walk. After nearly thirty surgeries and fifteen months in the hospital, Debbie confounded all expectations. She lived, she walked, and, miraculously, she even danced at her wedding. Debbie had asked me to do a reading at the ceremony, and I will always remember the joy on her face as she walked down the aisle.

  With equal measures of outrage and determination, I spent my years in the Senate fighting to fund health care for first responders harmed by their time near Ground Zero. I helped create the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund and the 9/11 Commission, and supported the implementation of their recommendations. I did all I could to urge the pursuit of bin Laden and al Qaeda and improve our nation’s efforts against terrorism.

  During the 2008 campaign both Senator Obama and I criticized the Bush Administration for taking its eye off the ball in Afghanistan and losing focus on the hunt for bin Laden. After the election we agreed that aggressively going after al Qaeda was crucial to our national security and that there should be a renewed effort to find bin Laden and bring him to justice.

  I thought we needed a new strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan and a new approach to counterterrorism around the world, one that used the full range of American power to attack terrorist networks’ finances, recruitment, and safe havens,
as well as operatives and commanders. It would take daring military action, careful intelligence gathering, dogged law enforcement, and delicate diplomacy all working together—in short, smart power.

  All these memories were in my mind as the SEALs approached the compound in Abbottabad. I thought back to all the families I had known and worked with who had lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks nearly a decade before. They had been denied justice for a decade. Now it might finally be at hand.

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  Our national security team began grappling with the urgency of the threat posed by terrorists even before President Obama walked into the Oval Office for the first time.

  On January 19, 2009, the day before his inauguration, I joined senior national security officials of the outgoing Bush Administration and incoming Obama Administration in the White House Situation Room to think through the unthinkable: What if a bomb goes off on the National Mall during the President’s address? Is the Secret Service going to rush him off the podium with the whole world watching? I could see from the look on the faces of the Bush team that nobody had a good answer. For two hours we discussed how to respond to reports of a credible terrorist threat against the inauguration. The intelligence community believed that Somali extremists associated with Al Shabaab, an al Qaeda affiliate, were trying to sneak across the Canadian border with plans to assassinate the new President.

  Should we move the ceremony indoors? Cancel it altogether? There was no way we were going to do either. The inauguration had to go forward as planned; the peaceful transfer of power is too important a symbol of American democracy. But that meant everyone had to redouble efforts to prevent an attack and ensure the safety of the President.