The Secretary (46 page)

*   *   *

Back in Washington, Jake was keeping an eye on events in Libya. His BlackBerry rang.

“Hi, Jake! What’s going on in the world?” asked the voice on the other line. It was
the secretary. He was always ready for that question. In his pocket he kept a scribbled
list of the top issues and developments of the day, just for these phone calls. Hillary
checked in every evening during the week, no matter how often they spoke during the
day or in the office. Jake kept a low profile, he was a behind-the-scenes operator,
but Hillary’s longtime aides remarked that she had rarely relied on someone as much
as she relied on Jake. His debate skills helped her refine tactical points, his knowledge
of policy nuances allowed her to hone her arguments, and his pocket list of hot spots
assisted her in visualizing the big picture, the trends that were shaping the world—her
specialty. Hillary excelled with details, but she was even better at long-term plotting,
strategic patience.

Hillary had been criticized by U.S. pundits for spreading herself too thin at the
start of her tenure. Why was she talking about women and not getting down in the weeds
on the Middle East peace process? Why was she touring Africa and not shuttling between
Pakistan and Afghanistan herself to close the deal? Why was she revamping the way
the Building operated when nuclear talks with North Korea were stalled? Hillary believed
that it was no longer possible to devote all your attention to one hot spot or one
issue, ignoring the others. All the issues and all the countries were increasingly
connected, and if she wanted to help solve any of the problems, she had to connect
all the dots. She also didn’t want to invest all her energy in a losing venture, like
Middle East peace. Besides, Hillary just didn’t know how to focus on one task. It
was a quality and a flaw. She always wanted to do it all, and then she wanted to do
some more. But her overarching concern was that America had to change the way it did
business around the world if it wanted to remain a relevant leader in the twenty-first
century, not only tackling traditional diplomatic concerns but empowering people to
solve their own problems. Hillary deployed an army of special envoys, from human rights
to women’s rights to climate change to youth issues, to help the United States reach
out to civil society around the world, harness the power of new technology, and modernize
the way the United States handled diplomacy. The State Department had become the world’s
leading foreign ministry in using social media, with 150 full-time social media employees
working across twenty-five different offices and nine hundred diplomats at U.S. missions
around the world using it in their day-to-day diplomacy, from Twitter to YouTube and
Facebook. Victoria Nuland, the department’s new spokesperson, didn’t just brief from
the podium but also on Twitter, taking questions from around the world. Jake didn’t
just discuss the administration’s foreign policy priorities at think tanks in Washington
but also on live Internet broadcasts where journalists from the four corners of the
world could send in their questions. The State Department also set up programs for
mobile banking in Africa, tip lines in Mexico to fight drug cartels, text message
donation programs to raise money for Haiti. America was expanding its reach and redefining
its role, though no one could guarantee that this new approach would deliver in the
longer term. Smart power on the part of America seemed too avant-garde for a world
that still judged power in a very traditional way, and still expected the United States
to be a bully.

*   *   *

The economic crisis continued to grow in Europe: Greece had cheated in its national
accounting books and was now heavily in debt. Italy, Spain, and Portugal were all
on the verge of a crisis as well. Europe was facing its own decline. I traveled around
the continent asking various officials what they thought of the theory of American
decline.

“American decline?” asked one senior French official with a laugh. “There is no such
thing. It’s a joke.” Italians were adamant that America wasn’t in decline. Italy was,
but America? No.

Decline, apparently, was highly relative. The Old Continent had often looked at America
with condescension, a legacy of anti-Americanism that predated George W. Bush, the
Iraq War, and freedom fries. In 1947, just two years after the end of World War II,
the French writer Simone de Beauvoir traveled across the United States and recorded
her impressions of the world’s new superpower. Her writings contained much disdain.
A very proud, patriotic French friend of mine had often scoffed at Uncle Sam’s arrogance
and dismissed Americans as incompetent bullies who had no understanding of how the
rest of the world worked. Now he was telling me how worried he was about American
decline. It would be a terrible thing for Europe, the world, the Middle East, where
he now lived. I reminded him of his previous statements about America, and he confessed
that his words were partly driven by envy—America was bigger, better. It was the world
power that France had once been, and he was loathe to admit that France now played
only a cameo role on the world stage.

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
Erdo
ğ
an 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
.