The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (9 page)

His counterpart was intrigued. He asked Holbrooke, “How do you envision this happening?” Holbrooke replied, “It will have to be ‘variable geometry,’ some bilateral talks, sometimes three (including the U.S.), and at times a larger conference that would include Afghanistan
and even others.” “Diplomacy,” he was fond of saying, “is like jazz, improvisation on a theme.” He was improvising himself, all on the paramount theme of reconciliation.

At the end of the dinner his Indian counterpart said he would have to talk to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh directly and would have an answer for Holbrooke within a week. After dinner, I walked with him back to his apartment. He switched on the TV to see the Jets play the Patriots on
Monday Night Football
. He was pleased. The Indians seemed to be moving in the right direction. We talked through possible next steps. “Be ready to go to Delhi at the drop of a hat,” he said to me. “I may not be able to go, it draws too much attention. Then we go to Islamabad—I will have to work on Kayani—and then maybe back to Delhi. Tomorrow we will go see Hillary and brief her.” Clinton was pleasantly surprised with our account of the meeting and supportive of the hard-earned success. Holbrooke was worried that Christmas vacation could disrupt things. But he was energized and in his element. He intended to be involved every step of the way—in the room when possible, standing outside the door when not.

Holbrooke had created momentum out of thin air. Even Pakistanis and Indians were surprised at how far he had managed to bring them along. But the India-Pakistan conversation never happened. Holbrooke collapsed at the State Department on December 10, and a few days later he died. Holbrooke was still fighting for his life when Clinton called his counterpart in Delhi to tell him that she would be personally seeing through what he and Holbrooke had agreed on. Shortly thereafter, a message came from Delhi that Singh had given the green light. But progress would be superficial. Both the Indians and the Pakistanis already knew that Clinton was too highly placed to get into the details of their nascent diplomatic opening. She could champion talks, but with the administration’s most tenacious champion of diplomacy out of the picture, the slim opening would close, not just between them but everywhere else the Venn diagrams intersected.

The problem all along was that Holbrooke had been forced to freelance. He had never received the authority to do diplomacy. The White House failed to endorse his efforts. He pursued them anyway in the belief that diplomacy alone could save America from this war and its
aftermath. If he could lay the foundations and point the way, then perhaps the White House would warm to the idea, and when it did it would not have to start from scratch. But the White House—more so than the Indians and Pakistanis—remained resistant to diplomacy and blind to its potential in Afghanistan, and the region as a whole.

Holbrooke thought that Iran was singularly important to the endgame in Afghanistan. Iran had played a critical role at the Bonn Conference of 2001, which gave Afghanistan a new constitution and government. Iranian support also accounted for that government taking root. Iran had become a surprising force for stability in Afghanistan by investing in infrastructure and economic development and supporting the Afghan government in Kabul and in provinces with ties to Iran. It was a counterweight to Pakistan’s destabilizing influence. Holbrooke thought that America should bring both Iran and Pakistan on board to successfully end the war and leave behind a peace that would last. Ironically, he also thought that we would have an easier time winning Iran’s support than Pakistan’s.

Iran has deep cultural, historical, and economic ties with Afghanistan. Iranian influence was ubiquitous in Afghan politics. It was especially strong among the former Northern Alliance forces. Many Tajiks and Hazaras, absent Iranian prodding, might well balk at any deal with the Taliban and plunge Afghanistan back into civil war instead.

The Iranians were worried by the Taliban and what its return to prominence might mean for the regional balance of power. They had been happy to see the end of the Taliban regime in 2002 and had supported the Karzai government since. The Taliban pushed an extremist version of Sunni Islam that is brutally and even murderously hostile to Shiism. Pakistani Sunni extremists who are spiritual brothers to the Taliban like to send suicide bombers into that country’s Shia mosques during Friday prayer services when they know the largest number of Shia worshippers will be available for slaughter. And as the book and film versions of
The Kite Runner
dramatized for a global audience, the Taliban enjoyed persecuting their Hazara countrymen, partly on ethnic
grounds of Pashtun chauvinism, but also because Hazaras are mainly Shia. In 1997, Taliban forces had overrun the Afghan Shia cities of Bamyan and Mazar-e-Sharif, massacring thousands of Shias and killing eleven Iranian diplomats and journalists. Iran mobilized 200,000 troops on Afghanistan’s border but in the end decided going to war with a neighbor would prove costly. It is the only time since 1859 that Iran has contemplated attacking a neighbor.

Iran also worries about chaos in Afghanistan. There are as many as 3 million Afghan refugees in Iran already. If the Taliban were to conquer Kabul, Herat, and Mazar-e-Sharif again, that number could rise, with untold economic and social consequences for Iran. Chaos also means drug trafficking. Iran has one of the world’s largest populations of addicts, and its eight-hundred-mile-long border with Afghanistan makes policing drug trafficking next to impossible. Finally, the Iranians well know that Pakistan is the Taliban’s sponsor, and that Pakistan has always acted to extend the influence of Iran’s regional rival Saudi Arabia into Afghanistan.

Iran’s position in Afghanistan, opposing the Taliban, supporting Karzai, and favoring aggressive drug-eradication efforts, was far closer to America’s than was the posture of Pakistan. Holbrooke thought he saw enough common interest between Washington and Tehran to bring Iran on board with a diplomatic process to end the war—as had been the case in Bonn in 2001.

For my part, I advised Holbrooke in 2009 that it was important to engage Iran on Afghanistan because if Iran came to see America’s growing military presence there as a threat, then Tehran might start viewing the Taliban less as a foe than as a potential ally. That would strengthen the insurgency and put us in a difficult spot. We should not assume that Iranian hostility to the Taliban could never soften; nor, I said, should we assume that the Taliban’s dislike of Iran was so great that it would withstand any amount of increasing U.S. military pressure. Taliban cadres pressed hard enough might well reach out for Iranian help in their fight with America.

A year later, I learned from an Iranian diplomat that the big question being debated in Iranian ruling circles was: Who is the bigger threat, America or the Taliban? The answer was increasingly America. “The
Taliban we can handle, but American presence in the region is a long-run strategic headache.” Iran, he said, had started working with the Taliban and influencing Karzai to undermine America’s plans for Afghanistan.

In late May 2009, there was a conference on Afghanistan at The Hague. During one of the breaks, while all the delegates were milling around a coffee table, Holbrooke walked over to Iranian deputy foreign minister Mehdi Akhoundzadeh, extended his hand, and said hello. Then, without missing a beat, Holbrooke started talking about an Asia Society exhibition he had seen that featured artworks from the era of the Safavid Persian monarchy (or at least that is what he told me later). The startled Iranian envoy was too dumbstruck to say anything. He grinned and nodded, and was very happy when the fifteen-minute courtship was over. The next day the press went wild with the story. It was thought that, as promised, the Obama administration had started its engagement of Iran, and Afghanistan was the vehicle.

Little did anyone know that Holbrooke did this on his own, hoping to break the ice with Iran and to press both Washington and Tehran on Afghanistan issues by taking the first step for both. But neither side appreciated his guerrilla tactic; Washington in particular was resistant. The White House was allergic to the idea of talking to Iran about Afghanistan. Holbrooke was hopeful that the White House would give diplomacy a chance and believed that it would come around to backing his effort to explore all channels and avenues. But he was wrong. He tried time and again to persuade the administration otherwise, but with the exception of Secretary Clinton, who thought that America was big enough to “walk and chew gum” (that is, talk to Iran about Afghanistan while being tough on them on the nuclear issue), no one else was supportive.

On the other side, there were plenty of signals that Iran was willing to engage the United States on Afghanistan—approaches by diplomats and intermediaries. It was our routine that every time there was an opening, Holbrooke and I would write a memo on why it mattered to engage
Iran on Afghanistan. We would reiterate the point that Iran alone among Afghanistan’s neighbors could serve as a counterweight to Pakistan, and engaging Iran was at the very least an insurance policy to make it less likely that they would work actively to undermine us, and that there was an upside if Tehran decided to reinforce common objectives with Karzai. If there were side benefits to be reaped in terms of managing the nuclear issue, then so much the better, though that was not the main goal. We would brief Clinton on the memo’s contents and then with her approval would send it on to the White House. Holbrooke would then follow up the next time he went to the White House, usually by visiting his old friend Tom Donilon, who served as deputy to the national security adviser at the time before taking over that portfolio himself. Every time, Holbrooke would return dejected. I would ask him what had happened. “Tom says: ‘We have a different theory of the case,’ ” he would tell me. The White House did not want to talk to Iran on Afghanistan, and Holbrooke’s entreaties fell on deaf ears, and he never got to make his case to the full National Security Council or the president.

Clinton, too, made the case for engaging Iran on Afghanistan at the White House, and did speak directly to the president about the matter. She did not see talking to Iran on Afghanistan as a goodwill signal or a trust-building exercise—although it could have served that purpose. Instead, she simply maintained that it was reasonable to think that given Iran’s geostrategic location and ties to Afghanistan, it ought to be a part of the solution, if only so that it did not become part of the problem. The president seemed to agree,
⁹
but then he let White House staffers decide, and they scuttled the idea.

The White House argued that talking to Iran about anything other than their willingness to abandon their nuclear program would show weakness. The Iranians might try hard to be helpful in Afghanistan only as more cover for obduracy on the nuclear issue (Iranian nuclear obduracy, as we now well know, happened anyway). By the spring of 2012, U.S. policy on Iran had failed, and relations were on the edge of a cliff. Not talking to Iran on Afghanistan had made no difference. In fact, had there been progress in that arena things might not have gone quite as badly as they did—but we will never know. Engaging Iran on Afghanistan
would likely have been good for both Afghanistan policy and Iran policy. Failure to engage showed a lack of imagination in managing both those challenges.

The heart of the Afghanistan matter, of course, remained reconciliation talks between Karzai and the Taliban. This was where all the Venn diagrams had to intersect, the only agreement that could end the fighting. It was also the necessary cover for U.S.-Taliban talks. As the two military forces on the ground, they did all the fighting, and they had to find their way to a cease-fire.

In 2009, talking to the Taliban was taboo. The Bush administration had not even countenanced Karzai talking to them—no one should talk to the enemy. The Obama administration was more open-minded; it did not slap Karzai down when he hinted in public that he was talking to the Taliban. Karzai took advantage of this change in attitude and boldly touted reconciliation as a serious option for ending the war, which complicated his already difficult relations with the U.S. military. Karzai claimed that he was in regular contact with Taliban commanders and imagined a grand bargain that would bring true peace to Afghanistan. When, in August 2010, Pakistani intelligence arrested senior Taliban commander Mullah Baradar, Karzai was quick to claim that Baradar (a fellow tribesman of the president’s) was being punished by Pakistan for talking to Karzai.

Several American allies, too, were busy with Taliban engagement. By mid-2010, it looked as if everybody was talking to the Taliban except us. There was not a week when we did not hear about some contact or meeting with Taliban officials or front men, or receive scintillating messages offering help with release of captured U.S. personnel or proposing a trust-building exercise that expressed the Taliban’s readiness to talk. Britain, Germany, Norway, Saudi Arabia, and even Egypt all reported similar contacts with various Taliban emissaries. It was hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, especially since opposition to talks by the U.S. military and the CIA made it difficult to verify which claims were true.

Around this time, in fall 2009, Holbrooke and I had a meeting with
Egypt’s foreign minister. Egypt’s intelligence chief, General Abu Suleiman (who later became vice president when Mubarak fell), was also in the room. At one point he turned to Holbrooke and said, “The Taliban visited us in Cairo.” Holbrooke said, “Really, who came? Do you remember?” Abu Suleiman reached into his bag, pulled out a piece of paper, held it before his face, and read three names. The last one made us all pause. It was Tayeb Agha, a relative of the Taliban chief, Mulla Omar, as well as his secretary and spokesman, whom we knew to be actively probing talks with the United States on the Taliban’s behalf. We knew Tayeb Agha to be a player, but we did not know then that he would become America’s main Taliban interlocutor in first secret and later formal talks that began in 2011 (and were made public in February 2012).