In the end the inauguration went off without incident, and the Somali threat proved to be a false alarm. But the episode served as yet another reminder that even while we were trying to turn the page on many aspects of the Bush era, the specter of terrorism that defined those years required constant vigilance.
Intelligence reports painted a troubling picture. The U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had overthrown the Taliban regime in Kabul and dealt a blow to its al Qaeda allies. But the Taliban had regrouped, staging insurgent attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces from safe havens across the border in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas. Al Qaeda’s leaders were likely hiding there as well. The border region had become the epicenter of a global terrorist syndicate. As long as those safe havens remained open, our troops in Afghanistan would be fighting an uphill battle and al Qaeda would have the chance to plan new international attacks. This was my logic for appointing Richard Holbrooke as Special Representative for both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those safe havens were also fueling increasing instability within Pakistan itself. A Pakistani branch of the Taliban was waging its own bloody insurgency against the fragile democratic government in Islamabad. An extremist takeover there would be a nightmare scenario for the region and the world.
In September 2009 the FBI arrested a twenty-four-year-old Afghan immigrant named Najibullah Zazi, who they believed had trained with al Qaeda in Pakistan and was planning a terrorist attack in New York City. He later pled guilty to conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country, and providing material support to a terrorist organization. It was yet another reason to be concerned about what was happening in Pakistan.
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I looked into the sorrowful eyes of Asif Ali Zardari, the President of Pakistan, and then down at the aging photograph he held out to me. It was fourteen years old, but the memories it evoked were as vivid as the day it was taken in 1995. There was his late wife, Benazir Bhutto, the astute and elegant former Prime Minister of Pakistan, resplendent in a bright red suit and white headscarf, holding the hands of their two young children. Standing next to her was my own teenage daughter, Chelsea, her face full of wonder and excitement about meeting this fascinating woman and exploring her country. And there I was, on my first extended trip overseas as First Lady without Bill. How young I was then, with a different haircut and a different role, but just as proud to be representing my country in a difficult place halfway around the world.
A lot had happened in the years since 1995. Pakistan had endured coups, a military dictatorship, a brutal extremist insurgency, and escalating economic hardship. Most painful of all, Benazir was assassinated while campaigning to restore democracy to Pakistan in 2007. Now, in the fall of 2009, Zardari was the first civilian President in a decade, and he wanted to renew the friendship between us and between our nations. So did I. That’s why I had come to Pakistan as Secretary of State at a time when anti-American sentiments were surging across the country.
Zardari and I were about to go into a formal dinner with many of Pakistan’s elite. But first we reminisced. Back in 1995 the State Department had asked me to go to India and Pakistan to demonstrate that this strategic and volatile part of the world was important to the United States and to support efforts to strengthen democracy, expand free markets, and promote tolerance and human rights, including the rights of women. Pakistan, which split from India in a tumultuous partition in 1947, the year I was born, was a longtime Cold War ally of the United States, but our relationship was rarely warm. Three weeks before I arrived on that 1995 trip, extremists killed two U.S. Consulate workers in Karachi. One of the main plotters in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Yousef, was later arrested in Islamabad and extradited to the United States. So the Secret Service was understandably nervous about my intention to leave the safety of official government compounds and visit schools, mosques, and health clinics. But the State Department agreed with me that there was real value in that kind of direct engagement with the Pakistani people.
I was looking forward to meeting Benazir Bhutto, who had been elected Prime Minister in 1988. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had served as Prime Minister during the 1970s before being deposed and hanged in a military coup. After years of house arrest, Benazir emerged in the 1980s as the head of his political party. Her autobiography is aptly titled Daughter of Destiny. It tells a riveting story of how determination, hard work, and political smarts enabled her to rise to power in a society where many women still lived in strict isolation, called purdah. They were never seen by men outside their immediate family and left their homes only when fully veiled, if at all. I experienced that firsthand when I paid a call on Begum Nasreen Leghari, the traditionalist wife of President Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari.
Benazir was the only celebrity I ever stood behind a rope line to see. During a family vacation to London in the summer of 1987, Chelsea and I noticed a large crowd gathered outside the Ritz Hotel. We were told that Benazir Bhutto was expected to arrive there shortly. Intrigued, we waited in the crowd for her motorcade to arrive. She emerged from the limousine, elegantly swathed from head to toe in yellow chiffon, and glided into the lobby, looking graceful, composed, and intent.
Just eight years later, in 1995, I was First Lady of the United States and she was Prime Minister of Pakistan. It turned out Benazir and I had mutual friends from her time at Oxford and Harvard. They had told me she had a sparkle about her: bright eyes, a ready smile, and good sense of humor, along with a sharp intellect. All that was true. She talked candidly with me about the political and gender challenges she faced and how committed she was to education for girls, an opportunity then and now limited largely to the wealthy upper class. Benazir wore a shalwar kameez, the national dress of Pakistan, a long, flowing tunic over loose pants that was both practical and attractive, and she covered her hair with lovely scarves. Chelsea and I were so taken with this style that we wore it for a formal dinner in Lahore held in our honor. I wore red silk, and Chelsea chose turquoise green. At the dinner I was seated between Benazir and Zardari. Much has been written and gossiped about their marriage, but I witnessed their affection and banter and watched how happy he made her that night.
The following years were marked by pain and conflict. General Pervez Musharraf seized power in a military coup in 1999, forcing Benazir into exile and Zardari into prison. She and I stayed in touch, and she sought my help to obtain her husband’s release. He was never tried on the assortment of charges against him and finally was released in 2004. After 9/11, under heavy pressure from the Bush Administration, Musharraf allied with the United States in the war in Afghanistan. Yet he had to know that elements of Pakistan’s intelligence and security services maintained ties to the Taliban and other extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan that dated back to the struggle against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. As I often told my Pakistani counterparts, this was asking for trouble, like keeping poisonous snakes in your backyard and expecting them to bite only your neighbors. Sure enough, instability, violence, and extremism swelled, and the economy crumbled. Pakistani friends I’d met in the 1990s told me, “You can’t imagine what it’s like now. It’s so different. We’re scared to go to some of the most beautiful parts of our country.”
In December 2007, after returning from eight years of exile, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated at a campaign rally in Rawalpindi, not far from the headquarters of the Pakistani military. After her murder, Musharraf was forced out by public protests and Zardari swept into office as President on a wave of national grief. But his civilian government struggled to manage Pakistan’s escalating security and economic challenges, and the Pakistani Taliban began expanding their reach from the remote border region into the more heavily populated Swat Valley, just a hundred miles from Islamabad. Hundreds of thousands of people fled their homes as the Pakistani military moved in to beat back the extremists. A cease-fire agreement between President Zardari’s government and the Taliban in Febru
ary 2009 fell apart after only a few months.
As their country’s problems worsened, many Pakistanis directed their anger at the United States, fueled by a rambunctious media that trafficked in wild conspiracy theories. They blamed us for stirring up trouble with the Taliban, exploiting Pakistan for our own strategic ends, and showing favoritism toward their traditional rival, India. And those were the most rational claims. In some polls, approval of America fell below 10 percent, despite the billions of dollars in aid that we had contributed over the years. In fact, a massive new assistance package passed by Congress became a lightning rod for criticism in Pakistan because it was seen as having too many strings attached. It was maddening. All the public anger made it harder for the Pakistani government to cooperate with us in counterterrorism operations and easier for the extremists to find shelter and recruits. But Zardari proved more politically adept than expected. He worked out a modus vivendi with the military, and his was the first democratically elected government to complete its full term in the history of Pakistan.
In the fall of 2009 I decided to go to Pakistan and take on the anti-American sentiments. I told my staff to plan a trip heavy on town halls, media roundtables, and other forms of public engagement. They warned, “You’ll be a punching bag.” I smiled and replied, “Punch away.”
I have faced my share of hostile public opinion over the years and have learned it can’t be wished away or papered over with happy talk. There will always be substantive disagreements between peoples and nations, and we shouldn’t be surprised about that. It makes sense to engage directly with people, hear them out, and offer a respectful exchange of views. That might not change many minds, but it’s the only way to move toward constructive dialogue. In today’s hyperconnected world our ability to communicate with publics as well as governments has to be part of our national security strategy.
My years in politics prepared me for this phase of my life. I’m often asked how I take the criticism directed my way. I have three answers: First, if you choose to be in public life, remember Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice and grow skin as thick as a rhinoceros. Second, learn to take criticism seriously but not personally. Your critics can actually teach you lessons your friends can’t or won’t. I try to sort out the motivation for criticism, whether partisan, ideological, commercial, or sexist, analyze it to see what I might learn from it, and discard the rest. Third, there is a persistent double standard applied to women in politics—regarding clothes, body types, and of course hairstyles—that you can’t let derail you. Smile and keep going. Granted, these words of advice result from years of trial and error and mistakes galore, but they helped me around the world as much as they did at home.
To help us better tell America’s story and take on the critics, I turned to one of the country’s smartest media executives, Judith McHale, to come on board as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. She had helped found and lead MTV and the Discovery Channel, and is the daughter of a career Foreign Service officer. In that capacity she helped us explain our policies to a skeptical world, push back against extremist propaganda and recruiting, and integrate our global communications strategy with the rest of our smart power agenda. She also was my representative to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the Voice of America and other U.S.-funded media around the world. During the Cold War, this was an important part of our outreach, giving people locked behind the Iron Curtain access to uncensored news and information. But we had not kept up with the changing technological and market landscape. Judith and I agreed we needed to overhaul and update our capabilities, but it proved to be an uphill struggle to convince either Congress or the White House to make this a priority.
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I saw my job as pushing Pakistan to be more committed and cooperative in the fight against terrorists and helping its government strengthen democracy and deliver economic and social reforms that offered citizens a viable alternative to radicalism. I had to pressure and criticize without losing Pakistan’s help in the struggle that was critical to both our futures.
Shortly after I arrived in Islamabad in late October 2009, a car bomb exploded in a busy marketplace in Peshawar, a city just ninety miles northwest of us. More than a hundred people were dead, many of them women and children. Local extremists had demanded that women be banned from shopping in the market, and the blast seemed designed to target those who had refused to be intimidated. Pictures of badly burned bodies and smoking ruins filled television screens across Pakistan. Was the timing coincidental, or were the extremists sending a message? Either way, the stakes had just been raised on an already delicate trip.
The first stop on my itinerary was a meeting with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, a short drive away from the U.S. Embassy through Islamabad’s well-manicured diplomatic quarter. Islamabad is a planned city of wide avenues rimmed by low green mountains, built in the 1960s to move the government away from the commercial hub in Karachi and closer to the military headquarters in Rawalpindi. Even when a civilian government is nominally in charge, the influence of the Army remains pervasive. One of our traveling journalists asked me on the plane ride over, Was I convinced that the Pakistani military and intelligence services had cut off all ties with terrorists? No, I said, I was not.
For years most Pakistanis had regarded the unrest on their northwest frontier as distant. The region had never been under the full control of the national government, and they had been much more concerned with the practical and immediate problems of electricity shortages and unemployment. But now that the violence was spreading, attitudes were starting to change.
At the press conference following our meeting, Qureshi was distressed by the bombing and directed his words to the extremists. “We will not buckle. We will fight you,” he said. “You think by attacking innocent people and lives, you will shake our determination? No, sir, you will not.” I joined him in condemning the bombing in strong terms and said, “I want you to know that this fight is not Pakistan’s alone.” I also announced a major new assistance project to help with the chronic energy shortages bedeviling the Pakistani economy.
Later that evening I sat down with a group of Pakistani television reporters to continue the discussion. From the first minute, their questions were suspicious and hostile. Like many other people I met that week, they pressed me on the conditions attached to the large new aid package approved by Congress. One might have thought, given the generosity of the package, especially at a time of economic hardship of our own, that there would have been statements of appreciation. Instead all I heard was anger and suspicion about why the money came with “strings attached.” The bill tripled our assistance, yet many Pakistanis took issue with its requirement that military aid be tied to the country’s efforts to fight the Taliban. That seemed a reasonable request, but the Pakistani military reacted negatively to being told what it could and could not do with our money. The condition was seen by many Pakistanis as an insult to their sovereignty and pride. I was surprised at the degree of vitriol and misunderstanding generated around this issue, and how many people seemed to be scrutinizing every word of the legislation for possible slights. Very few Americans ever read our own laws so carefully. “I think your PR and charm offensive is fine, explaining your position is fine,” one of the journalists said, but “we believe that the bill had a sort of hidden agenda.” I tried to stay patient and calm. This was aid meant to help people, nothing more. “I am very sorry you believe that, because that was not the intention,” I replied. “Let me be very clear: You do not have to take this money. You do not have to take any aid from us.”
Clearly our approach to development aid in Pakistan was not working. Either the toxic politics of our relationship had infected the aid, or the aid wasn’t being allocated and spent in a way that made a positive impression on the Pakistani people, or both.
When I became Secretary, the United States was funding over a hundred projects in Pakistan, mos
t of them relatively small and targeted. Some were run directly by USAID, but most were outsourced for implementation to for-profit contractors, as well as nonprofits, including private NGOs, faith-based charities, and research institutes. The contractors were paid whether or not their programs produced verifiable results or furthered our country’s interests and values. There were so many American-funded projects that our embassy couldn’t determine the total number. It was no wonder Pakistanis were telling me they could not see the impact of American efforts.
Both before and after my trip, I worked with Richard Holbrooke on a strategy to address these concerns. We agreed that the entire effort needed to be streamlined. USAID needed to consolidate programs into signature projects with support among Pakistanis and measurable impacts for both our countries. Since we were spending ten times more money in Pakistan than all other countries combined, it seemed an easily achievable objective.
Nothing moved quickly enough for my taste, but USAID announced in April 2012 that it had developed a more focused and strategic plan for Pakistan that centered on a reduction in the number of programs, from 140 in 2009 to thirty-five in September 2012, emphasizing energy, economic growth, stabilization, health, and education. That was at least a step in the right direction.
Throughout my October 2009 visit, Pakistanis emphasized the human and financial costs they were bearing in the fight against terrorism, which many viewed as America’s war that had been unfairly imposed on them. Was it worth the lives of their thirty thousand civilian and military victims? Couldn’t they just make a separate peace with the extremists and live in peace? “You had one 9/11, and we are having daily 9/11s in Pakistan,” one woman in Lahore said to me. I recognized their feelings, and everywhere I went I paid tribute to the sacrifices of the Pakistani people. I also tried to explain why this struggle was as important to Pakistan’s future as to our own, especially now that the extremists were expanding their reach beyond the border region. “I don’t know any country that can stand by and look at a force of terrorists intimidating people and taking over large parts of your territory,” I told the students. I asked them to imagine how the United States would react if terrorists crossed the border from Canada and took control of Montana. Would we accept it because Montana is remote and sparsely populated? Of course not. We would never allow such a scenario anywhere in our country, and neither should Pakistan.
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