The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (6 page)

Holbrooke held fast to American values. He was an idealist in the garb of a pragmatic operator. I never ceased to be astounded by his energy and drive; he was tireless in pursuit of his goals and relentless in standing up for American interests and values. In the words of his close friend and veteran diplomat Strobe Talbott, he was the “unquiet American,” who believed that America was a force for good in the world.
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Fixing America’s broken foreign policy and correcting its jaded view of the Muslim world were the most important foreign policy tasks before the new president. Holbrooke told me that government is the sum of its people. “If you want to change things, you have to get involved. If you want your voice to be heard, then get inside.” He was telling me to “put your money where your mouth is.” He knew I preferred to work on the Middle East, and in particular on Iran. But he had different ideas. “This [Afghanistan and Pakistan] matters more. This is what the president is focused on. This is where you want to be.”

Holbrooke was persuasive, and I knew deep down that we were at a fork in the road. Regardless of what promises candidate Obama made on his way to the White House, Afghanistan now held the future, his and America’s, in the balance. Holbrooke was seeing clearly into the future, well beyond where the rest of the administration was looking.

The first months in the office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP) were a period of creativity and hope. Holbrooke had carved out a little autonomous principality on the first floor of the State Department, filling it with young diplomats, civil servants, and outside experts. Daily, scholars, journalists, foreign ambassadors and dignitaries, members of Congress, and administration officials walked in to get their fill of how “AfPak” strategy was shaping up. Even Hollywood got in on SRAP. Angelina Jolie lent a hand to help refugees in Pakistan, and the usually low-key State Department cafeteria was abuzz when Holbrooke sat down for coffee with Natalie Portman to talk Afghanistan.

SRAP was an experiment in what Holbrooke called the “whole of
government approach to solving big problems,” by which he meant doing the job of the government inside the government but
despite
the government—an idea that for obvious reasons did not sit well with the bureaucracy.

But Secretary Clinton liked the idea and embraced SRAP. Had she become president she would have likely given Holbrooke the same kind of broad purview in the White House or as secretary of state. Rumor had it that she favored Holbrooke as her deputy secretary of state, but the White House said no. Creating a new office that cut across government agencies to formulate effective policy was the next-best option. The office worked very closely with her during my two years there. We met with her frequently, briefed her on the latest developments or what we were planning, got her input, and wrote memos and white papers that represented the State Department’s position in White House debates. She came to rely on SRAP, trust its judgment, and appreciate its work—SRAP came through for the State Department time and again at critical junctures. Clinton spent more time with SRAP than with any other bureau in the State Department, getting to know more of its people well.

The idea of coordinating AfPak policies across government was also popular around the world. At a meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Finland’s foreign minister teased Holbrooke, telling him, “Nowadays everywhere I go someone comes up to me and introduces himself as ‘some country’s Holbrooke.’ ” And soon there were many such Holbrooke equivalents, some three dozen by the time Holbrooke died. He started getting them together regularly, every six months, for consultations and to coordinate their activities—it was key to managing allies around the world. Hamid Karzai was impressed with the concept, and told Holbrooke that every Muslim country he could bring on board was worth ten NATO ones. And so soon there were Holbrooke counterparts in several Muslim countries. He did not live to attend a gathering of his counterparts in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in the spring of 2011, hosted by the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

SRAP was then full of energy and ideas. It had an entrepreneurial spirit, a bounce in its step. People started early and worked late into the night, making sure the trains ran on time, so to speak, but also to develop new ideas like how to cut corruption and absenteeism among
the Afghan police by using mobile banking and cell phones to pay salaries; or how to use text messaging to raise money to help refugees in Pakistan; or how to stop the Taliban from shutting down cellular phone networks (which they did every night) by putting cell towers on military bases. Many of these ideas were eventually used to address problems in other areas of the world. SRAP then felt more like an Internet start-up than the buttoned-up State Department.

Holbrooke encouraged the creative chaos. Soon after I joined the office he told me, “I want you to learn nothing from government. This place is dead intellectually. It does not produce any ideas; it is all about turf battles and checking the box. Your job is to break through all this. Anyone gives you trouble, come to me.” His constant refrain was “Don’t get broken down by government routine, forget about hierarchy; this is a team. You are as good as the job SRAP does.” On his first visit to SRAP, General David Petraeus, then commander of CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command), mused, “This is the flattest organization I have ever seen. I guess it works for you.”

Holbrooke knew then that Afghanistan was not going to be easy. There were too many players and too many unknowns, and Obama had not given him enough authority (and would give him almost no support) to get the job done. It is an open secret that, oddly enough, after he took office, the president never met with Holbrooke outside large meetings, never gave him time and heard him out. The president’s advisers in the White House were dead set against Holbrooke. Some, like General Douglas Lute, were holdovers from the Bush era who thought they knew Afghanistan better and did not want to relinquish control to Holbrooke. Others (those closest to the president) wanted to settle scores for Holbrooke’s tenacious support for Hillary Clinton (who was herself eyed with suspicion by the Obama insiders) during the campaign; and still others begrudged Holbrooke’s storied past and wanted to end his run of successes then and there. There were times when it appeared that the White House was more interested in bringing Holbrooke down than getting the policy right. The sight of the White House undermining its own special representative hardly inspired confidence in Kabul or Islamabad.

But still Holbrooke kept attacking the problem the president had assigned him from all angles. It was as if he was trying to solve a Rubik’s
Cube; to get all its colored rows and columns into perfect order. In his mind he was constantly turning the cube, trying to bring into alignment what Congress, the military, the media, the Afghan government, and our allies wanted and how politicians, generals, and bureaucrats were likely to react. Just before he died, in December 2010, he told his wife, Kati Marton, that he thought he had finally got it; he had found a way out that might just work. But he wouldn’t say what he had come up with, “not until he told the president first”—the president who did not have time to listen.

The die had been cast earlier, and there was not going to be too much out-of-the-box thinking or debate over grand strategy. The generals wanted a military solution to Afghanistan, and the president’s advisers thought the political fallout of going against the military would be too great. Holbrooke thought the impulse to hand over foreign policy to the military was a mistake; there was going to be fighting in Afghanistan, but diplomacy alone could bring that war to a satisfactory end.

Holbrooke was no starry-eyed pacifist. He believed in the use of force: not as an end in itself, of course, but as a means to solving difficult problems. In the Balkans, he had wielded the threat of U.S. air power to compel the recalcitrant Serbian president Milosevic to agree to a deal. On one occasion he walked out of a frustrating meeting with Milosevic and told his military adviser to roll B-52 bombers out onto the tarmac in an airbase in England and make sure CNN showed the footage. Later, at a dinner during the Dayton peace talks that ended the Bosnia war, he asked President Clinton to sit across from Milosevic. Holbrooke said to Clinton, I want Milosevic to hear from you what I told him, that if there is no peace you will send in the bombers. Holbrooke was seasoned in the business of war and diplomacy.

In Afghanistan, too, Holbrooke believed that the U.S. military had a key role to play—
a
role. But what the president was considering in the fall of 2009 was something altogether different. He was being pushed to sign on to a military solution to the conflict. Holbrooke was convinced then that such an effort would fail, and that in trying to avoid that outcome, America would deepen its military commitment, doubling down on a failing strategy in what might turn into a dangerous repeat of the Vietnam debacle that Holbrooke had witnessed as a young Foreign Service
officer. Or we would end up abandoning Afghanistan in strategic defeat.

It is the job of diplomats to end conflicts like Afghanistan, to solve big strategic problems facing America. Military might is supposed to be an instrument in the diplomat’s tool kit. That is how it worked in the Balkans, and that is how it had eventually played out in Vietnam. That war was waged on the battlefield for decades, but it ended around a negotiating table in Paris. Total battlefield victory is rare, and when it has happened, for instance at the end of World War II, it has required a level of commitment that is above and beyond what America was willing to give in Afghanistan. Iraq stands out as a rare case of a quick battlefield victory, an end to a war that did not happen around a negotiating table. But was Iraq really won? That proposition is yet to be tested by the departure of American troops.

But diplomacy was conspicuous by its absence in the 2009 White House strategy review. Diplomacy was then seen narrowly as a useful tool for getting governments around the world to contribute soldiers and money to the Afghan war. It was not a solution to war, but its facilitator.

This, Holbrooke thought, was a fundamental problem. The military was by its nature simply not the institution to define and run America’s foreign policy. I remember his reaction when General David Petraeus affectionately referred to him in an interview as his “wingman.”
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Holbrooke chuckled and said, “Since when have diplomats become generals’ wingmen?” In the same interview Petraeus had dismissed a role for diplomacy in ending the war, saying, “This [the Afghan war] will not end like the Balkans.”
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This imbalance at the heart of American foreign policy was Obama’s to fix, and the strategic review would have been the place to do it.

From the outset, Holbrooke had argued for reconciliation as the path out of Afghanistan. But the military thought talk of reconciliation undermined America’s commitment to fully resourced COIN. On his last trip to Afghanistan, in October 2010, Holbrooke pulled General Petraeus aside and said, “David, I want to talk to you about reconciliation.” Petraeus replied, “That is a fifteen-second conversation. No, not now.” The commanders’ standard response was that they needed two more fighting seasons (two years) to soften up the Taliban. They were
hoping to change the president’s mind on his July deadline, and after that convince him to accept a “slow and shallow” (long and gradual) departure schedule. The military feared that Holbrooke’s talk of talking to the Taliban would undermine that strategy. Their line was that we should fight first and talk later. Much later. Holbrooke thought we could talk and fight, and in fact that you should fight in order to make your foe find talking more appealing (not the other way around). Reconciliation should be the ultimate goal, and fighting the means to facilitate it.

The Taliban had been ready for talks as early as April 2009. At that time, Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin, shortly before he joined Holbrooke’s team as his senior Afghan affairs adviser, traveled to Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. In Kabul he met with the former Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who told Rubin the Taliban were ready to break with al-Qaeda and talk to America. He laid out in detail a strategy for talks: where to start, what to discuss, and the shape of the settlement that the United States and the Taliban could agree on. Zaeef said the Taliban needed concessions on prisoners America held in Guantánamo and wanted the removal of some Taliban names from so-called black lists developed by the U.S. government and the United Nations sanctioning terrorists. Rubin went to Riyadh from Kabul, and there he met with Prince Muqrin, the Saudi intelligence minister, whose account of conversations with Taliban go-betweens lined up with what Zaeef had told Rubin.

Back in Washington—on the day he was sworn into government service—Rubin wrote a memo regarding this trip for Holbrooke. That afternoon the two sat next to each other on the US Air shuttle back to New York. Holbrooke read the memo, then turned to Rubin and said: “If this thing works, it may be the only way we will get out.” That was the beginning of a two-year campaign to sell the idea of talking to the Taliban to Washington: first to Secretary Clinton, then to the White House and President Obama.

Reconciliation meant a peace deal between Karzai and the Taliban that would end the insurgency and allow American troops to go home. The military had opposed the idea from the outset. The Pentagon thought that talking to the Taliban—and even talking about talking to the Taliban—was a form of capitulation to terrorism. The CIA, too, was
not enthusiastic, believing that the Taliban were not ready to talk. Reconciliation, for them, was a Pakistani ploy to slow down the American offensive in Afghanistan and reduce American pressure on Pakistan.

Those attitudes scared the White House, ever afraid that the young Democratic president would be seen as “soft.” The White House did not want to try anything new, nothing as audacious as diplomacy. It was an art lost on America’s top decision makers in the White House. They had no experience with it and were daunted by the idea of it.