The Secretary (15 page)

The Pakistani guard eventually backed down, and we got off the bus. Our phones and
recorders were taken away. In most countries traveling with the American secretary
of state meant you were waved through security but not in Pakistan. It wasn’t clear
whether they didn’t trust that her guards had done their job right or whether they
just didn’t trust us.

Clinton had insisted that her whole delegation, including the traveling press, be
invited to the dinner that the president was throwing in her honor. Ministers, journalists,
politicians, and members of parliament were also attending. Our invitations said eight
thirty, and we waited in a one-hundred-foot-long rectangular room with wooden floors
and crystal chandeliers in the company of some of the dinner guests. We were back
on Hillary time—or perhaps it was Pakistan time.

“Sit down; tea will be served shortly,” the servants kept telling us as we paced the
room and tried to walk around the palace. Just outside the door, in the marble-floored
foyer, the walls were lined with portraits of Pakistan’s presidents starting with
the founder of the country, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who was holding a cigarette in one
hand. An abstract sculpture by Pakistani artist Amin Gulgee,
The Message
, stood in the middle, engraved with the words “God taught man what he knew not.”

Around ten o’clock, Hillary finally emerged, looking remarkably fresh in her white
blazer, Huma by her side. We all walked into the dining room on the other side of
the foyer. In between four pistachio-green walls, twenty-one round tables were set
for dinner for two hundred people. The large main table stood in the middle, between
the entrance and a lectern below a white gazebo on the opposite wall.

We sat down for a fifteen-course curry meal starting with a strange-tasting “creamy
pasta sausage salad appetizer,” according to our menu. Sandwiched between the president
and the prime minister, Clinton looked around the table to where her aides sat between
the foreign minister and the top military brass, from the head of intelligence, Ahmad
Shuja Pasha, to the army chief, Ashfaq Kayani, and the head of the air force. They
were wearing civilian clothes, an unusual break from tradition, and it was a feat
just to have them all around the same table.

The civilians and the military in Pakistan rarely spoke to one another, and they had
barely acknowledged one another’s presence so far. Since Pervez Musharraf’s military
dictatorship ended in 2008, Washington had spent a lot of time managing the relationship
between the two sides. The military and the civilians distrusted each other deeply,
and each vied for the upper hand in a constant political struggle. Hillary kept the
conversation light, talking about her day, about how much she loved Pakistani mangoes.
Out of her earshot, two of the military men were discussing the current military operations
in the North West Frontier targeting the Taliban. Clamping down on militants in Pakistan
was essential to stem the flow of fighters and supplies for al-Qaeda and the Taliban
in Afghanistan, and Washington had been pushing Pakistan to act more forcefully. But
the military chiefs weren’t discussing how much of a blow the operations were to the
militants—rather, how training to maneuver helicopters over the region’s glaciers
in the winter was a skill transferrable to the country’s border with India. Members
of the American delegation listened, partly amused, partly annoyed.

Wearing glasses, his black hair slicked back, President Zardari got up for his speech,
and, standing under the white wooden lattice gazebo, he spoke about the “healing touch”
that the world and his country needed. Addressing Clinton, he added that together
they could make a difference. Zardari, in his midfifties, had been thrust into politics
after the assassination of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, in December 2007. He was known
as “Mr. 10%” for allegedly skimming 10 percent off lucrative contracts while his wife
was in power in the 1990s. Zardari spent several years in jail facing various accusations,
including money laundering, but always denied the charges. After a decade in self-imposed
exile because of corruption charges she herself faced, Bhutto had returned to Pakistan
to run in elections as Musharraf’s grip on power waned. When she was killed, her widower
stepped in and became president after their party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, won
the elections in February 2008. For years, Pakistan had slumbered in and out of military
dictatorships that couldn’t provide long-term stability because of the consistent
exclusion of civilians from the system. When civilians took over, weak and disorganized,
they blamed the army for all the country’s problems and lived with constant fear of
another military coup. In a country where the military and intelligence agencies had
become kings, the Americans wanted Zardari to succeed if only because he was a civilian.

It was Clinton’s turn to speak. Vali had gone over the speech with her earlier, emphasizing
the key points she had to make as part of the general message of engagement and support
she was bringing to Pakistan. But before the dinner, Zardari had taken out a picture
of Clinton and Bhutto from 1995, when, as First Lady, Hillary had visited Pakistan
with Chelsea. She had spent time with Bhutto and met her children and Zardari. The
picture and the memory of a woman killed so violently had brought tears to Hillary’s
eyes. She tossed the script and spoke from her gut.

“The reason why we do what we do, serve in public life, is to allow for our children
to reach their God-given potential.… Our message is simple. The U.S. is ready and
willing to work with you and support you.”

At the Gujranwala table, where I was seated, two ministers and three journalists smiled
politely as they helped themselves to prawn biryani and harees, a hearty meat stew
with wheat. Hillary was really wonderful, they told me, but they didn’t buy a word
she said. The minute the United States won or lost in Afghanistan, they said, Washington
would only talk to India.

“If the U.S. wins in Afghanistan, Pakistan will be left out of the game; we can’t
have that,” offered one as he explained why the Pakistani army was withholding help
on Afghanistan. Pakistan was playing a long-term game: it was in the country’s best
interest to maintain a foothold in Afghanistan thanks to militant groups. I thought
about how difficult it was for Americans to fully grasp the state of mind of people
living in constant fear of their neighbor. Americans left the United States, invaded
or liberated countries overseas, and then went home to their own country between two
oceans, with a northern and southern neighbor that would never invade them.

When we finally returned to the embassy, well past midnight, our day had lasted thirty-two
hours from the moment we had loaded into the vans outside the State Department in
Washington that Tuesday morning. When Hillary was here in 1995, she had stayed at
the Marriott Hotel in town. No American official delegations stayed outside the compound
anymore, and the Marriott itself had been bombed in 2008 in an explosion that killed
fifty-six people and wounded more than two hundred. The hotel was now protected by
concrete barriers, barbed wire, and checkpoints. So Hillary was spending the night
at the ambassador’s residence. Before retiring to her quarters, she went over the
day with Jake, Vali, Huma, and Richard. Jake was going through her statements of the
day, studying how to adjust the message for the rest of the visit.

In a nearby brown-brick building, Paul, the line officer, was getting the secretary’s
daily briefing book ready. He had been flying solo to free a seat for someone in the
large pack of journalists who wanted to accompany Clinton on this trip. His plane
teammate would hop ahead on a commercial flight to each stop on our yet-to-be-determined
itinerary. The daily briefing folder was a smaller version of the trip Book—a cordovan
leather binder stamped in gold letters with “Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton”
that was delivered by Huma to the secretary every evening while on the road. The book
contained Clinton’s speeches for the following day; briefing checklists with talking
points for her meetings, both on paper and on cards she could refer to during meetings;
truncated briefing checklists, detailed instructions for how events or meetings would
unfold. There were ten events on the next day’s schedule in Lahore.

The traveling press headed over to the “pods,” the spartan rooms for two housed in
two-level prefabricated visitors quarters by the football field at the bottom of the
hilly compound. On the plane, Caroline Adler had distributed earplugs in blue transparent
plastic containers, apologizing for making us bunk “à deux.”

SAM was sleeping across the border in Kyrgyzstan, at the Manas U.S. military base.
The Ravens were better able to protect him there. In the morning, he would come back
and pick us up for the one-hour flight north to the capital of Punjab.

*   *   *

A vibrant cultural city of eleven million people, Lahore looked depopulated on Thursday
morning. In the front seat of the armored limousine carrying Clinton, Fred listened
to his agents chatter in his left ear, watching for the security assets dotting the
road, visible only to his expert eyes. We had been briefed by a DS agent before leaving
Washington about what to do if our convoy got hit. It wasn’t going to happen, they
insisted, but they wanted us to be prepared just in case. The priority would be to
get the secretary safe, but we shouldn’t panic if we were separated from the main
motorcade. Other cars and agents placed along the road would come to our rescue.

At every cross street, huge black curtains hung between buildings, blocking the view.
The Pakistani population at large seemed to have been pushed back several blocks from
the route of the motorcade. There was not a car in sight. Pakistani soldiers stood
along the way, their backs to the road.

In 1995, Hillary had visited a village near Lahore and walked into people’s homes.
The closest she could get to real people now was an auditorium packed full of students
at the Government College University of Lahore. She stood on stage behind a lectern
and delivered her opening remarks with a gentle smile and a soft tone to several hundred
Pakistani students.

“As someone with a deep respect for Islam, visiting Pakistan is a special honor. And
I have several members of my staff, Muslim Americans, who accompanied me on this trip,
and I know I can speak for them and say that we are all very pleased to be here,”
she said. She told them about her visit to the Badshahi mosque in the morning, a stunning
reminder of the grandeur of the Mughal Empire and the fifth-largest mosque in the
world.

“One cannot stand in the midst of the mosque without appreciating the contributions
to human thought and cultural expression that emanate from Pakistan.”

She worked hard to mollify her audience, show respect for their culture and their
religion, and promised them that the United States stood by their side. Mostly, she
was trying to impress on them that the battle against militants wasn’t a war for America;
it was a battle for Pakistani democracy.

When she was finished speaking, Clinton took questions from the audience and, as usual,
picked at random.

“What can the Americans give Pakistan that we can now trust you and believe this time
in your sincerity and that the Obama administration is not going to use us like the
Americans did in the past when they wanted to destabilize the Russians in Afghanistan?”

The audience erupted in wild applause. Thinking back to my own disappointments in
Beirut, I couldn’t help but relate.

Hillary had learned the art of saying, “I’ve learned from my mistakes.” It was how
she transformed what had been a weakness during her days as First Lady into a strong
point during her campaign for the presidency. It was a magic, disarming utterance,
and she put it to work on a bigger scale. America, she told the Pakistanis, had made
a mistake when it shifted its attention away from the region after the Soviets withdrew
from Afghanistan. She then tried to explain why this time it really was different,
that America was there for the long term.

The world had rarely heard an American official apologize for past mistakes. This
approach didn’t go down well with Republicans back in the United States; but around
the globe, it went a long way to buy goodwill. And yet, Clinton could not hide that
all the issues high on America’s agenda—finding bin Laden, fighting the Taliban, al-Qaeda,
making it possible for American soldiers to eventually leave Afghanistan—were short-term
concerns. Vali knew that the only way the Pakistanis would be convinced this was really
a long-term relationship was if it indeed became a long-term relationship. But if
America could create a small opening, perhaps Pakistan would walk through it.

The questions continued. If Clinton thought the Pakistani journalists had been a feisty
bunch, she found the students—those who had rarely or perhaps never had a chance to
speak to a politician, let alone a high-ranking American official—even more passionate.

“I wanted to say that why American government always support Indians as compared with
Pakistan, although Pakistan always standing with Americans in every battle?”

Rapturous clapping.

The U.S. Agency for International Development attracted the students’ wrath as well.

“USAID did betray us, and this is a fact. Even back when you were just an intern in
Ford Administration back in the seventies, and later on when you became First Lady,
even in the eighties, they did that. My main question is: What is the difference that
we will see between Obama administration and Bush administration toward Pakistan?”

It was relentless. Even I was starting to feel under attack.

“I can’t believe we’re putting her through this,” Jake thought, standing at the very
top of the auditorium, looking down at the rows of students.