The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat

Copyright © 2013 by Vali Nasr

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Jacket design by Emily Mahon

Jacket illustration © Stefano

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nasr, Seyyed Vali Reza

The dispensable nation : American foreign policy in retreat / Vali Nasr.

pages cm.

1. United States—Foreign relations—Middle East. 2. Middle East—Foreign relations—United States. 3. United States—Foreign relations—Islamic countries. 4. Islamic countries—Foreign relations—United States. I. Title.

JZ1670.N37 2013

327.73056—dc23 2012043100

eISBN: 978-0-385-53648-6

v3.1

To Richard C. Holbrooke, a tireless champion of American leadership in the world

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

—William Shakespeare,

Julius Caesar

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Asia in the New Global Order (Map)

Introduction

Prologue: “A Week in September”

1: Afghanistan: The Good War Gone Bad

2: Afghanistan: Reconciliation?

3: Who Lost Pakistan?

4: Iran: Between War and Containment

5: Iraq: The Signal Democracy

6: The Fading Promise of the Arab Spring

7: The Gathering Storm

8: The China Challenge

Conclusion: America, the Pivotal Nation

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Other books by This Author

INTRODUCTION

This book tells the story of my two years working in the Obama administration on the problems of the greater Middle East. I thought long and hard about writing it—I didn’t want it used as a political bludgeon. My goal instead is to shed light on the making of American foreign policy during the Obama years and explain what its consequences will be for the greater Middle East and for us.

The book tells three stories simultaneously.

The first is the story of an administration that made it extremely difficult for its own foreign policy experts to be heard. This book will describe how both Hillary Clinton and Richard Holbrooke, two incredibly dedicated and talented people, had to fight to have their voices count on major foreign policy initiatives. Holbrooke never succeeded; Hillary Clinton did—but it was often a battle, and usually happened only when it finally became clear, to a White House that had jealously guarded all foreign policy making and then relied heavily on the military and intelligence agencies to guide its decisions, that these agencies’ solutions were not, and could never be, a substitute for the type of patient, long-range, credible diplomacy that garners the respect of our allies and their support when we need it. In other words, when things seemed to be falling apart, the administration finally turned to Hillary because they knew she was the only person who could save the situation, and she did that time and again.

One could argue that in most administrations, there is an inevitable imbalance between the military intelligence complex, with its offerings of swift and dynamic, as well as media-attracting, action, and the foreign policy establishment, with its slow and seemingly plodding deliberative style. But this administration advertised itself as something different. On the campaign trail, candidate Obama repeatedly stressed that he wanted to get things right in the Middle East, reversing the damage that had been done by the previous administration’s reliance on faulty intelligence and its willingness to apply military solutions to problems it barely understood.

Candidate Obama said he would engage the Muslim world, not just threaten to attack it. He would work to change the standing of the United States in the region. He would show leadership by listening, not just by talking. While the American Right was belittling the benefits of his community-organizing background, I thought to myself that the Middle East could use a little community organizing. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I felt that American leadership in building and nurturing economic and political ties, rooted in regional and international institutions that would bring stability in a chaotic place, was just what was missing in the region. It is why I joined the administration.

The imbalance in influence between the military and the foreign policy establishment was cause enough for concern, but the president’s habit of funneling major foreign policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers whose turf was strictly politics was truly disturbing. The primary concern of these advisers was how any action in Afghanistan or the Middle East would play on the nightly news, or which talking point it would give the Republicans in the relentless war they were waging against the president. That the Obama administration has been praised during the 2012 election season for its successful handling of foreign policy has, I believe, less to do with its accomplishments in Afghanistan or the Middle East than with how American actions in that region of the world were reshaped to accommodate partisan political concerns in a way unimaginable a few decades ago.

By September 2012, when violent anti-American protests swept across the Muslim world, claiming the lives of four American diplomats and dozens of demonstrators, two things were clear: first, that we had got the Middle East badly wrong and the administration’s policies had been off the mark. And second, that retreating from the region given the direction it is moving in would be disastrous. This book will explain all this.

The second story this book will tell is what happened when those of us in the foreign policy establishment were told to go out and sell often stunningly obtuse proposals to our allies in the region. Many Americans hold a picture in their head of Middle East leaders as militaristic thugs, corrupt political operators, narrow-minded connivers, or American stooges. And there are no doubt people who fit those descriptions in positions of power there—and elsewhere. But over the years, especially the past eleven years, the leaders of the Middle East have developed exquisitely fine-tuned ears to the potential consequences of U.S. actions for their own nations. They greatly fear our military power because they feel we use it recklessly, and they know they have few defenses against it. And they are no longer willing to sit back and nod in agreement when we propose plans that require their cooperation, plans they know won’t work and put their nations at risk, plans they have good reason to believe we will abandon when push comes to shove, and sometimes even before that, leaving them to deal with the mess we have made.

I will describe in detail what it was like to sit through these kinds of negotiations, first with Richard Holbrooke at the head of our side of the table, and later with Hillary Clinton. I will also relate what world leaders and foreign policy professionals I have known for years have seen and heard in these settings. For many Americans this will be an eye-opening view of how their country presents itself in world councils. It will give voice to those who call the shots in the Middle East and ask whether their responses to our plans are worth hearing and perhaps heeding. For the American public has to understand that when your grand plans for a region persuade no one but yourself—not your friends, not your “frenemies,” not your collaborators, and certainly not your enemies—it’s time to start asking some hard questions back home.

But perhaps the most important story this book tells is this one: the story of the price the United States will pay for its failure to understand that the coming geopolitical competition with China will not be played out in the Pacific theater alone. Important parts of that competition will be played out in the Middle East, and we had better be prepared for the jousting and its global consequences.

The American people are tired of war, rightly so, and welcome talk of leaving the region—not just packing up the soldiers but closing up shop altogether. Indeed, the president has marketed our exit from the Middle East as a foreign policy coup, one that will not only unburden us from the weight of the region’s problems but also give us the freedom we need to pursue other, more pressing, initiatives to address significant national security concerns.

Ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the broader ill-defined “war on terror,” is, I agree, a very good idea, provided it is done properly without damage to our interests or the region’s stability. But we should not kid ourselves that the rhetoric of departure is anything more than rhetoric; we are bringing home our troops and winding down diplomatic and economic engagement, but leaving behind our drones and Special Forces. We should not expect that the region will look more kindly on drone attacks and secret raids than they did on broader U.S. military operations. But the more important point is that none of the issues that brought us to the Middle East in the first place have been resolved—not those that existed at the end of World War II, when Britain handed over to us the role of the great power in the region, not those that have kept us there for over sixty years, and certainly not those that attracted our attention after 9/11. If anything, the region is less stable and more vulnerable to crisis than ever before. And its importance to commerce and global order has not diminished.

Here is what America’s leaders and the American public cannot afford to miss. The near- and even long-term prospects for the Middle East are not difficult to predict. Either some outside power will have to step in and impose order on the region or it will collapse into chaos and instability, becoming the stage upon which untold numbers of nonstate actors, each with a different script, will attempt to wreak havoc upon us. China would love to play the role of great power in the region, and, one might argue, is preparing to do exactly that. Just as we pivot east, China is pivoting farther west. And it is doing so through its close and growing economic and diplomatic relationships with the Arab world, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey. Indeed, while we scratched our heads about how to turn Pakistan our way during my tenure in the Obama administration, Chinese leaders were serenading Pakistan with reassurances that Sino-Pakistani relations are “higher than the mountains, deeper than the oceans, stronger than steel, and sweeter than honey.”¹

Will we be comfortable having China pull the Middle East into its sphere of influence? Letting China manage al-Qaeda or Iran’s nuclear ambition? Or try to resolve Arab-Israeli conflicts? Of course not. The Middle East will once again become the region where a great rivalry is played out, with China now playing the role of the Soviet Union.

These past four years presented us with an unrecognized opportunity to build regional economic, political, and military institutions to help the region resolve its many crises and allow it to manage on its own without constant new infusions of American lives and dollars. We could have simultaneously reduced the threat of al-Qaeda and strengthened the push for democracy, and figured out a way to draw Iran into the fold and minimize China’s influence in the region, not to mention saving the lives and money spent on yet another surge whose ultimate benefits remain questionable. But there is no equivalent to NATO or ASEAN in the Middle East—no organization anchored in an economic and security alliance with the United States. Nor does the Obama administration, despite its own claim to engaging the region and building comity and community, show any indication of understanding the need for such institution building. This, of course, would be even truer of a Republican administration. And so instead, after China further strengthens its position in the Middle East, we will find ourselves on the back foot, having to play catch-up with money we don’t have or will have to borrow from China.

But it is not too late. It is still possible to look ahead and deal with the problems in the region before they become another major crisis. This is why I have written this book.

—Vali Nasr, November 1, 2012

PROLOGUE:

“A WEEK IN SEPTEMBER”

Once a year, in mid-September, dozens of heads of state and many more foreign ministers fly into New York City for the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. Generally speaking, it is not the speeches that draw these diplomats to New York. It is the chance to see and be seen, to exchange ideas and compare notes, to talk shop and even gossip. And it is an ideal place for a diplomat looking to drum up support for his country’s plans to get things done.

That’s what Richard Holbrooke intended to do in September 2009. Seven months earlier, he had been appointed by the president as his special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. During the campaign and once in office, the president had made clear that getting Afghanistan right would be a high priority for his administration. I knew how seriously Holbrooke took that charge. If we get Afghanistan right, he told me when he brought me on board as his senior adviser, it will be the end of America’s wars in the Muslim world, and if we get it wrong, the “forever war” will continue, well, forever.

By late summer of 2009, the final plan for Afghanistan—more troops and serious nation-building—was clear enough for Holbrooke to inform some of our most important allies where we were heading. He told me he intended to start by meeting with a half dozen of those allies in New York during the UNGA meetings and that he wanted me to go with him. It was a week I will never forget.

Our very first meeting was with Egypt’s foreign minister, Ahmad Abu Ghaith. He was Holbrooke’s longtime friend and could not have been more gracious in his greetings. Holbrooke launched into his presentation of our plans for Afghanistan—defeating the insurgency and building democracy, a vibrant economy, a large army, and a strong civil society. He spoke with enthusiasm and grace, and Abu Ghaith nodded gently throughout. But whenever there was the slightest pause on Holbrooke’s part, and sometimes even before Holbrooke had quite finished his thought, Abu Ghaith interjected in rather blunt, borderline-rude terms that everything Holbrooke was saying sounded a lot like our plans for Iraq, none of which worked out as we had hoped. When Holbrooke finished, the foreign minister immediately launched into his own presentation, certainly not one we were expecting.

“Richard,” he began, “of course we will support you, we always have. But why do you want to get mixed up in another war? This will only help the terrorists. All the talk among our youth now is of going to Afghanistan for jihad against the Americans.”

Abu Ghaith was not altogether correct; many of Egypt’s youth were then dreaming of democracy. But the correlation between U.S. attacks and Arab (but also Pakistani) youth packing up to fight America was surely correct. Still, it was not just the words he used that came through loud and clear to us. It was his dismissiveness and frustration at having to once again support a plan that made no sense to him and that was being presented as a near fait accompli.

Reactions only worsened after that. At our next meeting with an Arab foreign minister, we sipped tea and nibbled on dates as Holbrooke went through his talking points, this time giving a long, glowing description of what America hoped to accomplish in Afghanistan. By this time he had a good idea what the reaction would be, but Holbrooke was always a loyal soldier. It was his job to sell our plan. And he tried.

Once again the diplomats on the other side of the table made it painfully clear that they thought we were way off in la-la land with our talk of building democracy and a strong civil society and everything else we were offering.

And when it was their turn to talk, they said just that. “It is much better you buy local warlords to keep al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan,” our host responded. “I figure that will cost you $20 billion, which is what, one fifth of what you spend every year in Afghanistan? Spend that and then just go home!”

I had to repeat those last words to myself—just go home!—to have the meaning sink in. It was such a stunning rebuke that for a moment neither side said anything. It wasn’t as if the foreign minister was trying to put us down; you could tell from the way he spoke that he truly believed that we didn’t understand and that he was doing us a favor. Once again it was not the response we were looking for, but perhaps it was a response we should have listened to. About a year later, Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post reported that in the parts of Afghanistan that experienced the least violence, credit went to American-backed local warlords.¹

Between this meeting and the next, I asked Holbrooke about the responses we had encountered. I could see that he was deeply disturbed by how dismissive our interlocutors were about America’s ability to do good in the region. At first he said little, fumbling for an answer. Then he managed the rejoinder that the doubters did not understand our strategy. Our problem was communication—we had to exorcise the ghosts of Iraq before we could create new hopes for Afghanistan. And then, after a pause, he came clean. “They have a point,” he said.

Next on our list was another Arab foreign minister. I could have closed my eyes and thought I was in the previous meeting. In fact, had there been more time between the two meetings we could have concluded that the two foreign ministers had compared notes. As Holbrooke went through the same talking points—which, I have to admit, had lost a little oomph by now—our host fidgeted, as if he were impatient for Holbrooke to finish so he could bring the discussion back to reality. When his turn came, he jumped right in.

“You can pay to end this war,” he began. Then he moved to the edge of his seat and raised his index finger in the air and said, “One billion dollars. It will cost you one billion dollars, no fighting needed.” He put out the number as if he were giving us his best discount price!

Then, as if he were talking to someone who clearly had little to no understanding of the dynamics in the region, he told us we were fighting the wrong war. “You should talk to the Taliban, not fight them. That will help you with Iran.” Then he gave us a big, knowing smile. Since the Iraq war, Persian Gulf countries have been worried about the rise of Iran’s influence in the region, and are especially worried about its steady march toward nuclear capability. They wanted America to focus on Iran—even if it meant playing nice with the Taliban.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia couldn’t have agreed more. “You have to look to the root of the Taliban problem,” he told Holbrooke. And what did the king think was the source of our problems in Afghanistan? Iran, of course.

Holbrooke was correct when he referred to the ghosts of Iraq diminishing our credibility in the region. As far as the leaders of the Middle East were concerned, we didn’t understand the difference between defeating an opponent on the battlefield (which we did quickly enough) and psychologically breaking his will to resist. We’d been flummoxed by—and totally unprepared for—what came after military victory in Iraq, a long-simmering but predictable outbreak of Sunni-Shia violence. What our allies understood—even if we couldn’t admit it to ourselves—is that after ten years of war, Iraq was a country broken into dozens of pieces held together by a few pieces of Scotch tape. The tape started to come off the moment we left. Should it really have come as a surprise to us that there was no more confidence in our wisdom regarding Afghanistan than in the delusions that got us into Iraq?

When the week was over and we returned to Washington, Holbrooke dutifully reported what our allies thought of our plans for war. He did so carefully, in terms that would not make it seem as if he were scoring points. For his part, Holbrooke was concerned enough to caution against doubling down on war. But his counsel was dismissed as overblown and outdated. “When I talk about counterinsurgency and Vietnam at the White House,” he once said, “those guys roll their eyes as if I am from another planet.”

Six weeks later, on December 1, 2009, with no further discussion of the clear reservations on the part of the allies in the region whose cooperation we needed to make our plans work, President Obama announced his much-anticipated decision about the war in Afghanistan. It was reported that he spent hours and hours, indeed months, considering all the relevant information before sending another 33,000 American troops to continue the fighting there. The world held its breath for a new vision, one that would not be a mere reiteration of the familiar impulse to turn to the generals to fix a vexing foreign policy problem. But Obama did just that. There would be no attempt to restore diplomacy to primacy in foreign policy. To the American people it seemed that Obama had shown resolve, telling the world that America would fight the war to victory. But those whom America had to work hardest to convince of its wisdom were unimpressed. They did not think our strategy would work, and at any rate, they did not believe we would stick with it for long.

The drumbeat of skepticism continued. Almost a year later, in October 2010, during a visit to the White House, Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, gave President Obama a thirteen-page white paper he had written to explain his views on the outstanding strategic issues between Pakistan and the United States. Kayani 3.0, as the paper was dubbed (since it was the third paper Pakistanis gave the White House on the subject), could be summarized as follows: You are not going to win the war, and you are not going to transform Afghanistan. This place has devoured empires before you; it will defy you as well. Stop your grandiose plans and let’s get practical, sit down, and discuss how you will leave and what is an end state we can both live with.

Kayani expressed the same doubt time and again in meetings. We would try to convince him (as we did other regional leaders) that we were committed to the region and had a solution for Afghanistan’s problems: we would first beat the Taliban and then build a security force to hold the place together after we left. He, like many others, thought the idea of an Afghan military was foolish and that we were better off negotiating an exit with the Taliban.

In one small meeting around a narrow table, Kayani listened carefully and took notes as we went through our list of issues. I cannot forget Kayani’s reaction when we enthusiastically explained our plan to build up Afghan forces to 400,000 by 2014. His answer was swift and unequivocal: Please don’t try to build that Afghan army. “You will fail,” he said. “Then you will leave and that half-trained army will break into militias that will be a problem for Pakistan.” We tried to stand our ground, but he would have none of it. He continued, “I don’t believe that the Congress is going to pay nine billion dollars a year for this four-hundred-thousand-man force.” He was sure it would eventually collapse and the fragments of the broken army would resort to crime and terrorism to earn their keep. That after all was pretty much what happened when the Soviet Union stopped paying for the Afghan army it had built—sixty days after Soviet cash dried up the Afghan army melted away and Kabul fell to the insurgents. Memories in the region run long, much longer than ours.

Kayani’s counsel was basically “if you want to leave, just leave—we didn’t believe you were going to stay anyway—but don’t do any more damage on your way out.” This seemed to be a ubiquitous sentiment across the region. No one bought our argument for sending more troops into Afghanistan, and no one was buying our arguments for leaving. It seemed everyone was getting used to a directionless America. The best they could do was to protect themselves against our sudden shifts and turns.

Bill Clinton famously called America the “indispensable nation,” the world’s leader by default, destined to solve problems large or small the world over.² Americans like this image of themselves.³ That is why Obama harkened back to Clinton’s famous phrase, telling the American people in his January 2012 State of the Union address, “America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs—and as long as I am President, I intend to keep it that way.” America—dragged by Europeans into ending butchery in Libya, abandoning Afghanistan to an uncertain future, resisting a leadership role in ending the massacre of civilians in Syria, and then rolling back its commitments to the region to “pivot” to Asia—hardly looks indispensable.

In the cocoon of our public debate Obama gets high marks on foreign policy. That is because his policies’ principal aim is not to make strategic decisions but to satisfy public opinion—he has done more of the things that people want and fewer of the things we have to do that may be unpopular. To our allies, however, our constant tactical maneuvers don’t add up to a coherent strategy or a vision of global leadership. Gone is the exuberant American desire to lead in the world. In its place there is the image of a superpower tired of the world and in retreat, most visibly from the one area of the world where it has been most intensely engaged. That impression serves neither America’s long-run interests nor stability around the world.

In late 2011, fighting in Afghanistan and frozen relations with Pakistan were endangering the president’s plans to wrap up the Afghan war. The administration decided that it could use China’s help. After all, the Chinese should want a stable Afghanistan, and should be worried about Pakistan, too. Beijing had made fresh investments in Afghanistan’s mining sector, which appeared set for massive growth after the 2010 discovery of vast new mineral riches.¹ And China had long and deep economic ties with Pakistan. So the administration asked a veteran diplomat, an old China hand, to reach out to the Chinese leadership. The diplomat made the rounds in Beijing, meeting with the Chinese president, premier, foreign minister, and a host of other political players. Their answer was clear and unequivocal: “This is your problem. You made this mess. In Afghanistan more war has made things much worse, and in Pakistan things were not so bad before you started poking around. We have interests in this area, but they do not include pulling your chestnuts out of the fire. We will look after our own interests in our own way.” In short, “You made your own bed, now lie in it.” Once they were done pushing back, they invariably asked, “What is your strategy there, anyway?”

Afghanistan is the “good war.” That was what Barack Obama said on the campaign trail. It was a war of necessity that we had to wage in order to defeat al-Qaeda and ensure that Afghanistan never harbored terrorists again.² Obama took up promoting the Afghan war at least in part as an election-year tactic, to protect himself against perennial accusations that Democrats are soft on national security issues. Branding Afghanistan as a “war of necessity” gave him cover to denounce the Iraq war as a “war of choice” that must be brought to an end.

Obama’s stance was widely understood at home and abroad to mean that America would do all it could in Afghanistan—commit more money and send more troops—to finish off the Taliban and build a strong democratic state capable of standing up to terrorism.

Four years later, President Obama is no longer making the case for the “good war.” Instead, he is fast washing his hands of it. It is a popular position at home, where many Americans, including many who voted for Obama in 2008, want nothing more to do with war. They are disillusioned by the ongoing instability in Iraq and Afghanistan and tired of eleven years of fighting on two fronts. They do not believe that war was the right solution to terrorism and have stopped putting stock in the fear-mongering that the Bush administration used to fuel its foreign policy. There is a growing sense that America has no interests in Afghanistan vital enough to justify a major ground presence.

It was to court public opinion that Obama first embraced the war in Afghanistan. And when public opinion changed, he was quick to declare victory and call the troops back home. His actions from start to finish were guided by politics and they played well at home. But abroad, the stories we tell to justify our on-again, off-again approach to this war do not ring true to friend or foe. They know the truth: that we are leaving Afghanistan to its own fate. Leaving even as the demons of regional chaos that first beckoned us there are once again rising to threaten our security.

When President Obama took office, the Afghan war was already eight years old. America went to Afghanistan in October 2001, less than a month after 9/11, to eliminate al-Qaeda. A quick victory made it possible to imagine a hopeful future there after more than two decades of civil war.

With international help, Afghanistan got a new constitution, a new government, and a new president whom the West celebrated as an enlightened partner in the effort to rebuild the country. President Hamid Karzai cut a dashing figure, debonair and progressive, the avatar of America’s goal to free the Muslim world from the clutches of extremism. Even the designer Tom Ford had something to contribute, anointing Karzai “the chicest man on the planet today.”³

Meanwhile, the Taliban and al-Qaeda had retreated to Pakistan,⁴ seeking refuge in the country’s northwesternmost region: the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), an uncertainly governed and ruggedly mountainous region the size of Massachusetts that is home to about 4 million Pashtun tribespeople. Consequently, while Washington was looking to build a new democratic and forward-looking Afghanistan to act as a bulwark against terrorism, it also relied on a close relationship with Pakistan to hound al-Qaeda in its FATA lair. Billions of dollars went into Afghanistan and Pakistan during the Bush presidency, supporting not only counterterrorism efforts but also democracy promotion, schooling for women and girls, and rural development.

But the investment failed to pay the hoped-for dividends. Long before President Obama took office, things had begun to change. By 2006 the Afghan government’s stride had slowed, and there was little doubt that war and instability had returned. In that year the number of attacks by returning Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters rose 400 percent and the number of those killed in such attacks was up by 800 percent.⁵ In June 2006 more international troops died in Afghanistan than in the Iraq conflict, more than in any other month since the war started.⁶ The Taliban were making a ferocious comeback against what they saw as an American occupation and a vulnerable puppet government in Kabul.

By 2008 the fighting had morphed into a full-blown insurgency. The United Nations used to issue security maps for aid workers on which green marked safe areas and yellow those areas with some security problems, and red was used for dangerous areas under insurgent control. By 2008 large areas of the maps were in red. Many Afghans thought that the Taliban looked poised for victory, and when it comes to insurgencies, what the locals think often dictates the outcome. One Western observer back from Kabul in mid-2008 said every shopkeeper in the city (the most well-protected part of Afghanistan) thought that Taliban fighters would be in the capital by the year’s end. Afghanistan was fast slipping into chaos.

Everything about Afghanistan was a challenge—its rugged geography, its convoluted ethnic makeup, labyrinthine social structure, and jealous tribalisms, its byzantine politics, and the bitter legacy of decades consumed by war and occupation. But the biggest problem lay across the border: Pakistan.

The Taliban operated out of the FATA, but its leadership had set up shop farther south in Quetta. They used the Pakistani city’s relative safety to regroup and orchestrate the insurgency in Afghanistan. Taliban commanders recruited foot soldiers from seminaries across Pakistan’s Pashtun areas and ran training camps, hospitals, and bomb-making factories in towns and villages a stone’s throw from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Moreover, since the Taliban’s formation in 1994 the insurgent organization has maintained close ties with Pakistan’s intelligence agency and received financial and military support from Islamabad. Pakistani support sustained Taliban military offensives throughout the 1990s, and even after the U.S. offensive broke the Taliban’s hold on Afghanistan that relationship continued.

Pakistan has viewed the Taliban as a strategic asset that could keep India out of Afghanistan and under Pakistan’s control. That makes the Afghan insurgency a regional problem. It is hard enough to fight an insurgency, but one that has a safe haven to retreat to within a sympathetic population and can rely on the financial, intelligence, and military support of a neighboring country is a tougher challenge still, by orders of magnitude. The Taliban and al-Qaeda would fight in Afghanistan, and when things got too hot, they would hasten south across the border to tend their wounds, recruit and train fresh fighters, and plan for more war. Indeed, the collective leadership of the Taliban became popularly known as the Quetta Shura, after the city where it met. The Afghanistan fight was starting to eerily resemble Vietnam, with Pakistan acting roughly like Laos, Cambodia, and Maoist China all rolled into one. The war was taking on a new, expensive shape, one that needed urgent attention.

By the time President Obama moved into the Oval Office, the Taliban juggernaut looked unstoppable. They had adopted a flexible, decentralized structure that reported to the leadership in Pakistan, but organized locally. There was a national political infrastructure in place too, with shadow governors and district leaders for much of the country. In some cases, this Taliban presence was nominal—the Taliban are almost exclusively a Pashtun phenomenon and do not reach into every corner of multiethnic Afghanistan—but elsewhere the Taliban were in control.

The Taliban had a strength that belied their numbers. The U.S. government estimated that in 2009 the Taliban were no more than 35,000 strong. Of these, only a core of at most 2,000 were battle-hardened veterans of Afghanistan’s earlier wars. A larger number, maybe 5,000 to 10,000, were in the fight to avenge government abuse or the death of kith and kin in U.S. raids and aerial bombings. The largest number of fighters, 20,000 or more, were mercenaries, in it for a few dollars a day.

The Taliban had become politically more savvy and militarily more lethal.⁷ Gone was their objection to pictures and music, and in came the use of both in their recruiting videos. In their statements, the new Taliban claimed to be open to women going to school. Talk of chopping off hands and lopping off heads in public was put aside.

Other beliefs, more ominously, were put aside as well. Steve Coll, the journalist and longtime observer of Afghanistan, writes that in the 1980s, when Afghan warriors were battling Soviet occupation, the CIA was desperately seeking someone to set off a massive vehicle bomb inside the 1.6-mile-long Salang Tunnel. The tunnel is a crucial north-south link running beneath a difficult pass in the towering Hindu Kush mountain range, and blowing it up would have cut the main Soviet supply route. In order to be effective, the bomb would need to go off mid-tunnel, meaning certain death for its operator. In effect, the CIA was looking for an Afghan suicide bomber.⁸ No one volunteered. Suicide, said the Afghans, was a grievous sin, and quite against their religion. And yet, fast-forward to 2009, and there had been more than 180 suicide bomb attacks in Afghanistan.⁹ The Taliban had evolved to make Afghanistan an even more dangerous place.

Shortly after he took office, President Obama appointed Richard Holbrooke as his point man on Afghanistan—his special representative—to help him quickly gauge the situation in that country and come up with a strategy to deal with it. At the time the military was urgently lobbying the new president for more troops, needed to hold the line against the Taliban while Washington thought through the problem. Obama asked for a quick strategy review—a quick read of the situation—and tapped former CIA and Clinton White House Pakistan point man Bruce Riedel to lead the effort.¹⁰ The review took sixty days, and its findings (popularly known as the Riedel Report) argued for beefing up American troop presence in Afghanistan, “fully resourcing” counterinsurgency operations there, and getting tough with Pakistan. Holbrooke, who served on Riedel’s commission, disagreed. He did not favor committing America to fully resourced counterinsurgency and thought America would get more out of Pakistan through engagement.

Riedel met the president alone to brief him on his report’s findings. Holbrooke thought the president should have heard from more people. Absent a proper debate on the report’s findings and recommendations, thought Holbrooke, the president moved too quickly to deepen the war.

In February 2009, Obama announced that he was sending 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, buying enough time for the president and his advisers to determine their next steps. Soon after, he also asked his commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, to review the war strategy and outline what we needed to do to win.¹¹ As General McChrystal prepared his review, the National Security Council (NSC) pulled together facts, figures, opinion, and analysis from across the government (mostly from the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and U.S. Agency for International Development) in order to prepare the president to evaluate McChrystal’s recommendations. The goal was to place before President Obama a set of clear options from which he could choose.

The Obama administration was facing a bedeviling two-headed problem. Even as the Taliban were regrouping and growing more formidable, our local partner, the Karzai government, was proving to be weak and ill suited for the task of democracy building.¹² The shine had come off Hamid Karzai even before Obama took office. In the administration’s and Congress’s minds the smartly dressed, enlightened leader of a new Afghanistan had somewhere along the line been reduced to a venal, corrupt, and unreliable partner, and as such a chief reason why the Taliban were doing so well. Whatever the “new” Afghanistan was supposed to look like, in the real, existing Afghanistan, clans and extended families mattered. Karzai’s clan, unfortunately, looked a lot like the Sopranos. The president’s brother Ahmad Wali was actually the fixer in Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold. He worked notoriously with both the CIA and the Taliban and had his hand in every deal and all the political wrangling in that wayward city. Karzai also patronized an array of corrupt local grandees with ties to the drug trade. They bolstered his rule and he gave them the means to line their pockets while abusing the local population.¹³

Aid workers, members of Congress, ordinary Afghans, and ordinary Americans alike were angry and frustrated, but the situation regarding corruption tended to be misunderstood. Yes, there was waste and graft, and millions were embezzled. But it was also true that Afghanistan was still a tribal society in which tribal leaders and local bigwigs saw it as their duty to take from the state resources for their community. Karzai felt the need to satisfy that demand to survive at the top. That sort of corruption is not alien to politics, and certainly not in Afghanistan.¹⁴

Did Karzai’s corruption really matter to the ebb and flow of the insurgency? Yes, but not in the ways that we might think it does. There was never evidence that most who joined the Taliban did so in protest against the corruption of Karzai’s ministers. The problem was local. The corruption that really mattered, that angered the small peasant and drove him to pick up a gun and join the Taliban, was being shaken down by local police and government officials. We treated Karzai as if he was head of an independent sovereign government, but in reality his was no government at all. He was holed up in the capital, reliant even there on foreign protection for his physical security, and had a writ that could not run much of anything without U.S. help. Karzai was (as he remains) no more than a glorified “mayor of Kabul.”

His government was poorly designed, too. On paper it was overcentralized—the central government controlled the purse strings and made every decision on education, health care, or development. Yet in practice it was absent from large parts of the country, and where it was present people did not welcome it but wished that it would go away.¹⁵ The economy was a shambles, too. Infrastructure remained inadequate and industry nonexistent, and agriculture barely dented endemic poverty in the countryside. The country’s economy was a sum of the drug trade plus the money that international aid and military operations sloshed around.¹⁶

Afghans blamed the sorry state of the economy on Karzai’s failings and on America, his main backer. In growing numbers, they were lending the Taliban a hand to take back the country.¹⁷ The situation was particularly bad in the Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan, which had served as the Taliban’s power base in the 1990s. Southern Pashtuns felt excluded from Karzai’s government. They viewed the December 2001 Bonn Agreement—the result of an internationally sponsored conference to decide the shape of Afghanistan’s constitution and government—as having favored their enemies, the Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras of the Northern Alliance. They felt that Karzai, though a Pashtun of the Durrani tribe himself, had never done much to address their concerns. Feeling disenfranchised, many had thrown their lot in with the Taliban.

The Obama administration’s initial reading of the crisis in Afghanistan was to blame it on the spectacular failure of the Karzai government, paired with wrongheaded military strategy, inadequate troop numbers for defeating an insurgency, and the Taliban’s ability to find a safe haven and military and material support in Pakistan. Of these, Karzai’s failings and the need to straighten out the military strategy dominated the discussion. Above all, the Afghan conflict was seen in the context of Iraq. The Taliban were seen as insurgents similar to the ones whom the United States had just helped defeat in Iraq. And what had defeated the insurgency in Iraq was a military strategy known as COIN.

COIN, shorthand for counterinsurgency, was not new, and it had a checkered past. The British had adopted it while fighting rebellious Boers in South Africa at the dawn of the twentieth century, then used it again in Malaysia in the 1950s. The French had employed a version of it at around the same time with less success, in Algeria, and America had tried it, disastrously, in Vietnam. COIN strategy recognizes that a rebel group does not always organize into regular military units or hold on to territory. Insurgents avoid fixed positions and hide among the people, denying them to the adversary. An insurgency wins by controlling people. Its center of gravity is not a place on the map, but its support base among a sympathetic (or at least cowed) population.

To defeat an insurgency, therefore, you must secure the populace. They must be shielded from insurgent violence and their trust gained. Only then will they stand against the insurgency and help with its defeat. The keys to COIN are small, socially and politically aware units; local cultural and linguistic knowledge; and good relations with civilians, whose loyalties are the real prize.

In Iraq, American troops had fanned out into districts and villages, setting up small posts from which they could mount patrols, see to security and governance at the local level, and squeeze the insurgency out of villages, towns, and entire districts in restive Anbar Province.¹⁸ It worked. As more and more places were freed from insurgent control, community leaders asserted their authority and joined hands to form the so-called Sons of Iraq. They took over local politics and security, and, with American financial assistance, rebuilt the local economy. American troops protected these leaders, but eventually it fell to Iraq’s own American-trained security forces to provide that security and help local leaders finish off the insurgency.

Success in Iraq crowned COIN as America’s military strategy of choice for winning “asymmetric” wars against terrorists, tribes, and what used to be called guerrilla fighters in failed, or failing, states. The relevance of Iraq to Afghanistan seemed self-evident. COIN had won Iraq; it was the right choice for Afghanistan.

Still, COIN requires governance, and governance requires a government. The Afghan government did not have the means (or the will) to follow the marines into areas cleared of Taliban to provide governance, and thus COIN could go only so far and no more. President Karzai would prove singularly instrumental in dashing America’s hopes of anything good coming out of Afghanistan. But in early 2009, Washington was hopeful it could knock some sense into him. Failing that, Afghan presidential elections in the fall of 2009 might return a better partner.

The strategy review proved torturously long. The president sat with his national security team through ten meetings—twenty-five hours—over the course of three months, hearing analysis and debating facts. There were many more meetings of those advisers and their staffs without the president present to dig further into the relevant issues, and go through stacks of folders, each one the size of a phone book, answering every question that came down from on high. At SRAP (the office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan), we managed the State Department’s contribution to the paper deluge. We worked long hours preparing memos and white papers, maps and tables, and then summaries for each. The Pentagon and CIA had their own stacks. In fact there was a healthy competition between the agencies over who did a better job of producing more.

Early in the process, Holbrooke came back from a meeting at the White House, called us into his office to give us an update, and said, “You did a good job, the Secretary [Clinton] was pleased with her material but wants her folders to be as big as [those of Secretary of Defense Bob] Gates. She wants color maps, tables, and charts.” Clinton, continued Holbrooke, “did not want Gates to dominate the conversation by waving his colorful maps and charts in front of everybody. No one reads this stuff, but they all look at the maps and color charts.” Everyone in the office looked at him. “So who does read all this?” I asked him, pointing to a huge folder on his desk. “I’ll tell you who,” he said. “The president reads them. He reads every folder.”

The amount of time spent on the process seemed absurd. Every time Holbrooke came back from the White House, he would say, “The president has more questions,” and warn us that we should be ready to go to work the minute formal instruction came from the White House. Frustration was written all over Holbrooke’s and Clinton’s faces as the process dragged on. The White House attributed this to Obama’s meticulous probing and the degree of thought and analysis that went into this historic decision. But increasing numbers of observers and participants began to worry that the delay was not serving America’s interest. President Obama was dithering. He was busybodying the national security apparatus by asking for more answers to the same set of questions, each time posed differently.

Holbrooke thought that Obama was not deciding because he disliked the options before him, and that the NSC was failing the president by not giving him the right options. The job of the NSC, Holbrooke would say, is not to make policy for the president, but to give him choices. The NSC was not doing its job, and hence the president was not making his decision. The decision-making process was broken. To make his point, Holbrooke took to handing out copies of Clark Clifford’s description of how the NSC works from Clifford’s 1991 memoir (on which Holbrooke had collaborated), Counsel to the President.

What Holbrooke omitted from his assessment was that Obama was failing to press the NSC to give him other options. As a result the process had come down to a slow dance in which the president pushed back against the options before him but neglected to demand new ones, and his national security staff kept putting the same options back in front of him.

At the end of the day, President Obama had two distinct choices. The first was “fully resourced” COIN, which meant more troops and more money to reverse the Taliban’s gains and put in place the kind of local security and good government that would make it unlikely they would come back.¹⁹ It would be Iraq all over again. But the president was not sold. He did not think a long and expensive counterinsurgency campaign was the way to go, particularly as his domestic advisers were telling him that public support for the war was soft (and getting softer), and especially when the economic news at home was bad. So Obama kept kicking the tires on COIN and kept asking questions. The military’s answer every time was the same: Fully resourced COIN is the way to go.

The night before General McChrystal was to release the report outlining what he needed to fight the war, Holbrooke gathered his team in his office. We asked him what he thought McChrystal would request. He said, “Watch! The military will give the president three choices. There will be a ‘high-risk’ option”—Holbrooke held his hand high in the air—“that is what they always call it, which will call for maybe very few troops. Low troops, high risk. Then there will be a ‘low-risk’ option”—Holbrooke lowered his hand—“which will ask for double the number they are actually looking for. In the middle will be what they want,” which was between 30,000 and 40,000 more troops. And that is exactly what happened, along with the “high-risk” and “low-risk” vocabulary.

All along Vice President Biden had pushed for an altogether different approach. This was in effect option two. Biden noted that we had gone to Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda, but that al-Qaeda was no longer in Afghanistan; it was in Pakistan. The CIA’s estimate was that there were as few as a hundred al-Qaeda operatives left in Afghanistan.²⁰ Biden thought that over time there had been mission creep. Fighting terrorism (disrupting, dismantling, and destroying al-Qaeda and its affiliates, as the president defined the mission) had evolved into counterinsurgency and nation-building, and the Taliban had replaced al-Qaeda as the enemy we organized our strategic objectives against. We don’t need COIN, a functioning Afghan state, or the billions poured into rural development and local security, Biden argued, to allay America’s fear of al-Qaeda. In fact, for that we did not need Afghanistan at all. We could protect ourselves and advance our interests through a stepped-up counterterrorism effort—which was quickly dubbed “CT-Plus”—mostly directed at al-Qaeda’s sanctuary, the wild border region of Pakistan. We could use unmanned drones and Special Forces to check al-Qaeda activity from bases in Afghanistan, and achieve all the security we needed for a fraction of the money and manpower that COIN would require.

Biden’s argument favored using the resources of the CIA over those of the Pentagon, and was seen at first as an outlier, too far-fetched in assuming you could win without boots on the ground. But Biden’s view had its sincere supporters in Congress and pragmatic ones among White House domestic advisers who thought the American public was tired of the war. Holbrooke, too, thought COIN was pointless, but was not sold on CT-Plus. He thought you could not have a regional strategy built on “secret war.” Drones are no substitute for a political settlement.

There were other criticisms of COIN. In November 2009, America’s ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, who had once led American forces in Afghanistan as a three-star army general, wrote in a cable titled “COIN Strategy: Civilian Concerns” that Afghans would have no incentive to take responsibility for government and security in their country if we kept putting more troops in. Karzai was not an “adequate strategic partner,” wrote the ambassador, and “continues to shun responsibility for a sovereign burden.”²¹ A troop surge would only perpetuate that problem. Holbrooke thought Eikenberry had it right.

During the review, there was no discussion of diplomacy and a political settlement at all. A commitment to finding a political settlement to the war would have put diplomacy front and center and organized military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan to support it. Holbrooke wanted the president to consider this option, but the White House was not buying. The military wanted to stay in charge, and going against the military would make the president look weak.

CT-Plus, too, looked risky—too much like “cut and run”—and there was no guarantee that CT-Plus could work without COIN.²² In Iraq, Special Forces had taken “kill and capture” missions to industrial scale, decimating the ranks of al-Qaeda and the insurgency, and yet this did not turn the tide of that war. Counterterrorism, unlike COIN, did not win territory or win hearts and minds of the local population; CT merely amplified the impact of COIN on Iraq.

So President Obama chose the politically safe option that he did not like: he gave the military what they asked for. Months of White House hand-wringing ended up with the administration choosing the option that had been offered from day one: fully resourced COIN. But he added a deadline of July 2011 for the larger troop commitment to work; after that the surge would be rolled back. In effect, the president told both Karzai and the Taliban that our new strategy was good for a year.

Fully resourced COIN, however, failed to achieve its objective. There were ambitious pushes into Taliban territory, but gains were temporary. A much-ballyhooed counterinsurgency operation in the spring of 2010 failed to pacify Marjah.²³ In mid-2010, six months after 30,000 troops were sent, an internal intelligence review presented the White House with a dire account of the security situation in Afghanistan. COIN was not bringing safety and security to Afghans as promised; more of them were dying.

COIN’s success requires expensive nation-building. To win you have to provide good government and ample social services to wean the population away from the enemy. The Obama administration did much more in this area than its predecessor, but it was not enough. The State Department was put to work on civilian aid and assistance programs. Holbrooke the diplomat was turned into a development warrior, organizing development projects and deciding on budgets and personnel to support them. He was particularly keen on putting more agricultural workers on the ground, and became a veritable spokesman for Afghanistan’s pomegranate farmers. He would say that in a country where eight out of ten people depend on agriculture you are not going to get anywhere unless you revive the agricultural economy.

Unfortunately, economic logic would not drive American development assistance. Aid was used to serve COIN. The harder American troops had to fight to win territory, the more money they poured into development projects in the neighborhood—and not all of it wisely. Only 1 percent of Afghans live in the Helmand province, but in 2010 nearly all COIN efforts (both troops and aid money) went to Helmand.²⁴ Or consider that in 2011, although only 6 percent of all Afghans had electricity, the United States spent $1 billion to provide electricity to mere parts of Kandahar.²⁵

COIN was at best a game of whack-a-mole: when U.S. troops poured into a district, the Taliban packed up and went somewhere else. Security improved where Americans were posted, and deteriorated where the Taliban moved. There were not enough American soldiers to be everywhere at once, and the Afghan government did not have forces that could relieve them, so the insurgency stayed alive.

But the military told a different story. It focused on the favorable statistics for where American soldiers stood, and used that to tout COIN’s success. These claims of success gave Obama a basis for turning the tables on COIN. He was able to declare victory and ditch the policy that he did not like and that (more importantly) was not working. In June 2011, standing before the Corps of Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, the president declared that the situation in Afghanistan had improved enough to talk of troop withdrawals. By 2014, the Afghan war would be no more. COIN had won, so we did not need it anymore.

It was a stunning shift. COIN was over, not just in Afghanistan, but also as America’s strategy of choice. America no longer needed to win counterinsurgencies or put its shoulder to nation-building, Obama seemed to be saying; it just had to focus on decapitating terrorist organizations. CT-Plus was quietly supplanting COIN.

This was more than a shift in strategy. It announced a new set of American priorities. Fighting terrorists and fixing the failed states that they might use as bases were no longer an American priority. We had won not just in Afghanistan, but more broadly against terrorism. Now we could go back to addressing global issues. And our military strategy would reflect that.

Obama announced the new American stance in a January 5, 2012, speech on trimming the military budget. The president referred to “the end of long-term nation-building with large military footprints.” He announced that the U.S. military would be shifting gears and changing its focus to East Asia and the Pacific—a region where the higher-tech, lighter-manpower “blue” services (the navy and air force) will naturally take the lead as compared to the way boots-on-the-ground “green” services (the army and marines) bore the brunt of land combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a follow-up to that speech, the administration also announced an expansion of the Joint Special Operations Command (an endorsement of CT-Plus), and reiterated that America would not do any more nation-building of the kind that it had tried in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Switching strategies on the quick like this—announcing our imminent departure from Afghanistan—had a devastating impact within the region. Americans were not the president’s only audience. Power players all over the Middle East were watching carefully as America experimented with strategic plans and troop numbers, showed a will to fight, and then quickly tired of the whole affair. What they had seen had not impressed them. The dizzying pace of change in policy presented America as indecisive and unreliable. It also suggested that we really had no strategy or long-term goals. Our only goal seemed to be getting out, first of Afghanistan and then the whole region, under the cover of talk about a “strategic pivot” toward Asia.

The Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad writes that in the 1960s German leaders defended the Vietnam War before protesting German students because they thought America was doing the right thing by sticking with its strategy and its South Vietnamese ally. It sent the right message; when the time came, America would stick by them too. “It came down unavoidably to the question if one could generally trust America.”²⁶

From Obama’s arrival in power in 2009 through 2011, our only leverage with the Taliban, and also Pakistan, had been the sense that we would stand behind our strategy.²⁷ It is arguable that we should never have embraced COIN, but once we did, we should not have ditched it so quickly. After the president announced our withdrawal we lost our leverage and with it our influence over the final outcome in Afghanistan. What is more, who will now believe in our intentions or our commitment? Can CT-Plus alone work in the long run without our troops, or cooperation, trust, and support from our friends and fear from our foes? Not likely. The Taliban know that once our troops are gone they will not come back—the cost would be too high. If they press us then we would more likely fold our CT-Plus operations rather than deploy more troops to protect them.

President Obama did not have good options during the strategic review, and ultimately decided that it would be better to reverse course and end COIN before its failings became evident and its costs mounted. Better to cut one’s losses, especially if one can claim some sort of victory by quoting the military. Had he had better options before him—had he demanded those options, as should be expected from the chief executive—then perhaps America could have avoided the costly COIN shuffle to start with.

The option that the president did not consider, and which could have spelled a very different outcome for the war and how it reflected on the United States, was the diplomatic one.

It was close to midnight on January 20, 2009, and I was about to go to sleep when my iPhone beeped. There was a new text message. It was from Richard Holbrooke. It said, “Are you up, can you talk?” I called him. He told me the president had asked him to serve as his envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He would work out of the State Department and he wanted me to join his team. “No one knows this yet. Don’t tell anyone. Well, maybe your wife.” (It was on the Washington Post Web site the next day.) He continued, “Nothing is confirmed, but it is pretty much a done deal. If you get any other offers let me know right away.” Then he laughed and said, “If you work for anyone else, I will break your knees. This is going to be fun. We are going to do some good. Now get some sleep.” Before he hung up I thanked him for his offer, and said it would be a treat to work with him (which it was—the ride of a lifetime, as it turned out) and an honor to serve in government.

I met Richard Holbrooke for the first time in 2006 at a conference in Aspen. We sat together at one of the dinners and talked about Iran and Pakistan. Holbrooke ignored the keynote speech, the entertainment that followed, and the food that flowed in between to bombard me with questions. We had many more conversations over the course of the next three years. I met him for lunch or visited him at his office in New York; and after I joined him on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2007 we spoke frequently by phone.

Holbrooke was a brilliant strategic thinker in the same league as such giants of American diplomacy as Averell Harriman and Henry Kissinger. He looked at a problem from every angle and then planned how best to tackle it. He knew what bureaucrats would say, how politicians would react, what headline would lead in the media, what the public reaction would be, and how history would render its judgment. He was a doer; that was his ambition—to do, not to be.

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.¹

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.”² 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.”³ 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.

While running for president Obama promised a new chapter in American foreign policy, especially when it came to managing thorny issues in the Muslim world. America would move away from Bush’s militarized foreign policy and take engagement and diplomacy seriously. Talking and extending a hand would be his priority. But when it came down to brass tacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Hillary Clinton was the lone voice making the case for diplomacy. The White House had decided early on to walk in lockstep with the military. Clinton elevated the State Department’s profile, but without the White House’s backing its influence was no match for that of the Pentagon and CIA.

During the 2009 strategic review Clinton held her cards close to her chest. In the many meetings I attended with her on various aspects of the war she asked a lot of questions, and on one occasion said she did not believe in cut and run. So it was not a surprise that in the end she supported sending more troops to Afghanistan. However, she was not on board with the deadline Obama imposed on the surge, nor was she for hasty troop withdrawals in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clinton thought those decisions looked a lot like cut and run and would damage America’s standing in the world. Add this to where she came out on a host of other national security issues, including pushing Obama to go ahead with the Abbottabad operation to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and breaking with the Pentagon to advocate using American air power in Libya, and it is safe to say she was, and remains, tough on national security issues.

But Clinton does not see American foreign policy as a zero-sum choice between hard power and diplomacy. She shared Holbrooke’s belief that the purpose of hard power is to facilitate diplomatic breakthroughs. America is not going to fight its way out of one crisis after another; it has to deftly use all elements of its national power, military might as well as diplomatic, to find its way out of vexing conflicts like Afghanistan.

During many meetings on Afghanistan and Pakistan (and separately on the Middle East) I attended with her, she would ask us to make the case for diplomacy and then quiz us on our assumptions and plan of action before evaluating how it might work. At the end of this drill she would ask us to put it all in writing for the benefit of the White House.

Holbrooke and Clinton had a tight partnership. They were friends. Clinton trusted Holbrooke’s judgment and valued his counsel, counsel that Holbrooke happily provided on a variety of issues, and not just on Afghanistan and Pakistan. They conferred often, and Clinton protected Holbrooke from an obdurate White House. The White House kept a dossier on Holbrooke’s misdeeds, and Clinton kept a folder on churlish attempts by the White House’s AfPak office to undermine Holbrooke, which she gave to the national security adviser, Tom Donilon. The White House tried to blame Holbrooke for leaks to the press. Clinton called out the White House on its own leaks. She sharply rebuked the White House after an article in The New Yorker mentioned a highly secret meeting with the Taliban that it was told about by a senior White House official.

Holbrooke went to battle first, getting battered and bruised. Then Clinton would take up the charge, lobbying with her counterparts in the Pentagon and CIA. And whenever possible she went to the president directly, around the so-called Berlin Wall of staffers who shielded Obama from any option or idea they did not want him to consider.

Clinton had regular weekly private meetings with the president (sometimes the two of them met alone, and at other times they were joined by a few of the president’s key staff). She had asked for the “one-on-ones” as a condition for accepting the job of secretary of state. This way she made sure that once she was on board, the White House would not conveniently marginalize her and the State Department. Clinton used this time to talk to Obama about ideas that his staffers would keep out.

But even then she had a tough time getting the administration to bite when it came to diplomacy. Obama was sympathetic in principle but not keen on showing daylight between the White House and the military. Talking to enemies was a good campaign sound bite, but once in power Obama was too skittish to try it.

On one occasion in the summer of 2010, after the White House had systematically blocked every attempt to include reconciliation talks with the Taliban and serious regional diplomacy (which had to include Iran) on the agenda for national security meetings with the president, Clinton took a paper SRAP had prepared on the subject to Obama. She gave him the paper, explained what it laid out, and said, “Mr. President, I would like to get your approval on this.” Obama nodded his approval but that was all. So his White House staff, caught off guard by Clinton, found ample room to kill the paper in Washington’s favorite way: condemning it to slow death in endless committee meetings. A few weeks after Clinton gave Obama the paper I had to go to an interagency meeting organized by the White House that to my surprise was going to revise the paper the president had given the nod to. I remember telling Clinton about the meeting. She shook her head and exclaimed, “Unbelievable!”

Clinton got along well with Obama, but that did not mean that the State Department had an easy time dealing with the White House. On Afghanistan and Pakistan at least, the State Department had to fight tooth and nail just to have a hearing there. Had it not been for Clinton’s tenacity and the respect she commanded, the State Department would have had no influence on policy making whatsoever. The White House had taken over most policy areas: Iran and the Arab-Israeli issue were for all practical purposes managed from the White House. AfPak was a rare exception, and that was owed to Holbrooke’s quick thinking in getting SRAP going in February 2009 before the White House was able to organize itself.

The White House resented losing AfPak to the State Department. It fought hard to close down SRAP and take AfPak policy back. That was one big reason why the White House was on a warpath with Holbrooke—he was in their way and kept the State Department in the mix on an important foreign policy area. Holbrooke would not back down. He would not cede ground to the White House, not when he thought those who wanted to wrest control of Afghanistan were out of their depth and not up to the job.

When Holbrooke died in December 2010, Clinton kept SRAP alive, but the White House managed to take over AfPak policy, in part by letting the Pentagon run the policy on Afghanistan and the CIA on Pakistan (which escalated tensions with Pakistan). Clinton wanted John Podesta, an influential Democratic Party stalwart who had served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, to succeed Holbrooke. But Podesta was too influential (including with the president) and too high profile, and that would have made it difficult for the White House to manage him and snatch AfPak policy back from the State Department. The White House vetoed the choice. Turf battles are a staple of every administration, but the Obama White House has been particularly ravenous.

Add to this the campaign hangover. Obama’s inner circle, veterans of his election campaign, were suspicious of Clinton. And even after Clinton proved she was a team player they remained concerned with her popularity and approval ratings, and feared that she could overshadow the president.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs until spring 2012, told me, “She [Clinton] did a great job pushing her agenda, but it is incredible how little support she got from the White House. They want to control everything.” Victories for the State Department were few and hard fought. It was little consolation that its recommendations on reconciliation with the Taliban or regional diplomacy to end the Afghan war eventually became official policy after the White House exhausted the alternatives.

The White House campaign against the State Department, and especially Holbrooke, was at times a theater of the absurd. Holbrooke was not included in Obama’s video conferences with Karzai and was cut out of the presidential retinue when Obama went to Afghanistan. According to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, on one occasion the White House’s AfPak team came up with the idea of excluding Holbrooke from the president’s Oval Office meeting with Karzai and then having Obama tell Karzai, “Everyone in this room represents me and has my trust” (i.e., not Holbrooke). Clinton foiled that ploy and would go on to foil others.⁴ Nonetheless, the message to Karzai was: ignore my special representative.⁵

At times it looked as if the White House was baiting Karzai to complain about Holbrooke so they could get him fired. After Holbrooke died, the White House quickly changed its attitude. It signaled to Karzai that it would no longer welcome criticism of the president’s special representative and that it expected Kabul to work with SRAP. Obama told Karzai in a video conference that Ambassador Marc Grossman (Holbrooke’s replacement) enjoyed his trust and spoke for him. That helped Grossman in his job, but it did little to change the perception that American policy was scattered and confused.

The White House worried that talking to the Taliban would give Holbrooke a greater role. For months the White House plotted to either block reconciliation with the Taliban or find an alternative to Holbrooke for managing the talks. General Lute, who ran AfPak at the White House, floated the idea of the distinguished UN diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi leading the talks. Clinton objected to outsourcing American diplomacy to the UN. Pakistan, too, was cool to the idea. The “stop Holbrooke” campaign was not only a distraction, it was influencing policy.

The president’s national security adviser, General Jim Jones, would travel to Pakistan for high-level meetings without Holbrooke and would not even inform the State Department of his travel plans until he was virtually in the air. Again the message was “ignore Holbrooke.” This sort of folly undermined American policy. It was no surprise that our AfPak policy took one step forward and two steps back.

During one trip General Jones went completely off script and promised General Kayani, Pakistan’s top military man, a civilian nuclear deal in exchange for Pakistan’s cooperation. Panic struck the White House. It took a good deal of diplomatic tap dancing to take that offer off the table. In the end one of Kayani’s advisers told me that the general did not take Jones seriously, anyway; he knew it was a slipup. The National Security Council wanted to do the State Department’s job, but was not up to the task.

Nor were Afghans and Pakistanis alone in being confused and occasionally amused by the White House’s maneuvers. They also baffled people in Washington. The White House encouraged U.S. ambassadors in Kabul and Islamabad to go around the State Department and work with the White House directly, undermining their own agency. Those ambassadors quickly learned how easy it was to manipulate the White House’s animus for Holbrooke to their own advantage. In particular, Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, became a handful for the State Department. In November 2010 Obama and Clinton went to Lisbon for a NATO summit and planned to meet with Karzai there. Eikenberry asked to go as well. Clinton turned down his request and instructed him to stay in Kabul, but, backed by the White House, he ignored the secretary of state and showed up in Lisbon.

Even at the State Department reconciliation was not without its critics, some on Holbrooke’s team. Rina Amiri, Holbrooke’s other senior Afghanistan adviser, thought the whole idea of negotiating with the Taliban was a betrayal of the hopes and aspirations of the Afghan people—it would condemn them to relive their horrible Taliban past. She reminded Holbrooke at every turn that the Taliban could not be trusted. They had not abandoned their narrow view of Islam and draconian attitude toward women, they were relentless in visiting violence on the population, and only wanted America out of the way to take Afghanistan back where they left it in 2001. She insisted that most Afghans were wary of reconciliation—we should at least allay their fears by talking to them about the idea before moving ahead. Otherwise, women, civil society groups, and non-Pashtun minorities (Hazaras, Tajiks, and Uzbeks) who had fought against the Taliban in the Northern Alliance would never back a deal with the Taliban, and in a worst case, that could mean civil war. It was foolish to think Karzai could sell reconciliation to Afghans—he was not even consulting them on the idea. She thought America should convince him to make the case.

Others echoed Amiri’s concerns and added that Pakistan had already tried reconciliation with its Pakistani Taliban and the outcome was hardly reassuring. The Taliban there had used truces to establish brutal theocracies and then resume fighting when they were ready. The Taliban were crafty interlocutors with an agenda. They too knew how to realize their goals by fighting and talking.

Holbrooke listened to all these views, probed them, and debated their merits. But he concluded that we were not going to win the war, and we were not going to fight forever. We were going to leave at some point. Without a deal, we would still leave, only later, and with Afghanistan even worse off for years of fighting. In a deal we could address some of the issues the critics raised; without a deal, their worst predictions would come true. He thought we had to push ahead with reconciliation, but we had to design the process and structure a final deal accounting for some, if not all, of the dangers Amiri and others had alerted him to.

Pursuing reconciliation was difficult against the combined resistance of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the White House. It took a massive toll on Holbrooke. He knew it had to be done delicately and against strong resistance. Rubin provided the intellectual capital, arguing in ever greater detail that evidence showed the Taliban would come to the table; Karzai and many Afghans favored talking to them. A deal that would sever ties between the Taliban and al-Qaeda and bring peace in Afghanistan was within reach. Holbrooke asked Rubin to put his ideas into a series of memos that Holbrooke then fanned out across the government. After Holbrooke died Rubin put all those memos into one folder for the White House. Then, in early spring of 2012 in a meeting at the White House, Clinton pushed the White House one more time to consider the idea. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon countered that he had yet to see the State Department make a case for reconciliation. So Clinton asked Rubin for every memo he had written on reconciliation going back to his first day on the job. The three-inch-thick folder spoke for itself. It took over a year of lobbying inside the administration to get the White House to take seriously the idea of reconciliation. It was close to eighteen months after Rubin wrote his first memo that Clinton could finally, and publicly, endorse diplomacy on behalf of the administration, in a speech at the Asia Society in February 2011.

Reconciliation involved more than Karzai and the Taliban, however. Holbrooke thought that a political settlement between them was possible if Afghanistan’s key neighbors (Iran and Pakistan) and other important regional actors (India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia) could be induced to support it. Iran had backed the last political settlement in Afghanistan, the Bonn Conference of 2001. Pakistan had not been a part of that deal, but its acquiescence was bought afterward with generous American aid. This time Iran was not part of the equation, but Holbrooke hoped that Pakistan would go along much as Iran had done at Bonn if Washington actively engaged Islamabad. You needed at least one of the two—Iran or Pakistan—for a settlement to have a chance.

It was important to tackle the problem from the outside in because all these countries had vital interests in Afghanistan, and unless they endorsed the process and its outcome, it would fail. In addition, America would eventually leave, and then it would be up to those neighbors and regional actors to keep the final deal in place. They would do that only if they had been included in the process all along and saw their interests protected in the final political settlement. America’s job was to get the region on board with a peace process and commit to protecting its outcome. That perspective never grew roots in Washington. Even when the White House warmed up to the concept of talking to the Taliban it saw diplomacy as hardly more than a cease-fire agreement with the Taliban.

But there were deep divisions between Pakistan and India, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and less visible but equally important disagreements separating Iran and Russia, on the one hand, from Pakistan on the other. During the Taliban period in the 1990s, these countries had supported different warring factions, and they would do so again, scuttling any final settlement unless they were on board with what Karzai and the Taliban agreed on.

Holbrooke thought that, as varied as the interests of these regional actors were, it should nonetheless be possible to bring them into alignment. He imagined a Venn diagram in which all the circles would intersect; the small area where they all overlapped would be where the agreement would have to happen. His approach was reminiscent of how Nixon thought of diplomacy with China. Before he got to Beijing in February 1972, Nixon took a pad of paper and jotted on it: “What do they want, what do we want, what do we both want?” Whatever he thought the answer was to that last question was where he anchored his China diplomacy.⁶

The most obvious area of overlap regarding Afghanistan was that no one (not even Pakistan), regardless of what other interests they wanted to protect there, wanted to see chaos and extremism reigning in the country. The logical thing to do was to get everyone to agree on the principle of an Afghanistan at peace with itself and its neighbors. You could build on the consensus that Afghanistan should never constitute a threat to any of its neighbors, and that its neighbors in return should not use Afghanistan to wage proxy wars against one another. These were broad principles that could serve as the basis for concrete agreements. For instance, Pakistan might well demand formal recognition of the Durand Line as its border with Afghanistan—a recognition that the Afghans have never agreed to accord this ill-marked international frontier.⁷ The positive security implications of such recognition would give Islamabad a reason to agree to a lesser role in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s meddling in Afghanistan (supporting the insurgency and interfering with U.S. COIN strategy) has been in plain sight for all to see, but not so Afghanistan’s refusal to abandon claims to Pakistani territory, claims that form one motivation for Pakistan’s desire to meddle in Afghanistan.

Holbrooke pursued this idea of bringing the Afghans and Pakistanis to see mutual benefit with a vengeance, which is one reason why Kabul looked at him with suspicion and accused him of favoring Pakistan. On one occasion, he pressed Pakistan’s top military man, General Kayani, on what it would take for his country to give up on the Taliban. The general did not want to acknowledge that Pakistan was supporting the Taliban but nevertheless took the bait. He put it hypothetically and listed a few conditions. Right after “Afghanistan should not be an Indian base for operations against Pakistan” came “Pashtuns in Afghanistan should look to Kabul, and Pashtuns in Pakistan to Islamabad,” by which he meant that Karzai (or any future Afghan leader) should stop posing as the “King of all Pashtuns” and Afghanistan should abandon its irredentist claims to Pakistan’s Pashtun region.

That all sounded reasonable. Pakistan was waging a preemptive war of sorts in Afghanistan. Islamabad wanted Kabul on the defensive and Pashtuns under the thumb of its friend the Taliban lest Afghanistan start causing problems in Pakistan.

The next stop was Kabul. In several meetings with Afghan ministers, Holbrooke went off script to talk about the Durand Line. He got no takers. In one meeting, after Afghanistan’s interior and defense ministers and intelligence chief were done complaining about Pakistan, Holbrooke told them General Kayani had said that if Afghanistan recognized the Durand Line, then Pakistan would have no reason to invest in the Taliban (he embellished Kayani’s promise, but it was close enough). The three Afghans were caught off guard. They were accustomed to complaining about terrorist-sheltering Pakistan, but not being on the receiving end of a Pakistani complaint. Amrallah Saleh—Afghanistan’s seasoned spymaster and most lucid strategic thinker—leaned forward, looked Holbrooke straight in the eye, and said, “That is not politically feasible, no Afghan government would do that.” But to Holbrooke, that was an opening.

Saleh had just confirmed to Holbrooke that the core issue between the two governments—and hence a major driver of the insurgency that we were spending billions to contain—was a diplomatic matter. There was a diplomatic solution to this war. Of course a resolution would not be easy or immediate, but there was a path to a diplomatic resolution of what motivated Pakistan’s destructive game in Afghanistan. Diplomacy could create an overlap in the Afghanistan-Pakistan portion of the Venn diagram.

Of course, Holbrooke could not start with the border issue. That was not on Washington’s radar, and there had to be a few smaller agreements between Kabul and Islamabad before you got to the border issue. Kabul thought that America would control the Afghan border as a part of COIN, and Pakistan resisted COIN precisely because it would eliminate Islamabad’s trump card without resolving one important issue that got Pakistan into the Taliban business in the first place. Where he could start talks, however, was with a discussion on trade and commerce.

During a three-way meeting between the United States, Afghanistan, and Pakistan in Washington in 2009, Holbrooke sat through a discussion on trade. He learned that there was a market for Afghan goods in India, but Afghan trucks and produce could not cross Pakistani territory because there was no transit-and-trade agreement between the two countries (in fact there were hardly any treaties between the two countries). The two had started negotiating a trade-and-transit agreement in the 1960s but had let the matter drop and never resumed it. Finishing that deal became something of an obsession for Holbrooke. He spent hours going over every detail in it and tapped his chief economic adviser, a tireless and talented young diplomat named Mary Beth Goodman, to work on the issue.

Over the next year, he talked trade with the Afghan and Pakistani foreign ministers every chance he got. They were tired of hearing him make the case for a treaty that they thought had no chance of being signed. They were happy to use the idea as happy talk about the future or to point to each other’s malfeasance, but neither foreign minister was really eager to roll up his sleeves and negotiate a deal. But then, they had no idea how persuasive and tenacious Holbrooke could be.

The two foreign ministers by turn brought excuses or came up with myriad reasons it would not work, and would then make outlandish demands. The Afghan foreign minister brought India into the discussion hoping that Pakistan would back out, but Holbrooke found a way around that by asking the Indians to reject the Afghan request. Holbrooke lobbied Karzai and Kayani, and then got Clinton to lean on them as well. Eventually both sides, to their own surprise, said yes. That he got the Pakistan military to give its okay (given that the deal would connect Afghanistan and India economically and would require Pakistan to open its border to India) was a mighty achievement.

But it was not a treaty until both sides showed up for a signing ceremony. Holbrooke used Clinton’s visit to Islamabad in July 2010 to corner both sides into signing the treaty. Ambassador Eikenberry flew the Afghan finance minister to Islamabad and waited there until after the signing to fly him back (so there would be no excuses citing the alleged difficulty of travel). Holbrooke told Goodman to get the two ministers in the same room: “Don’t let them out before they are done; don’t go in, but stay right outside in case they need technical help.” It worked. Afghanistan and Pakistan signed the first treaty between the two countries in decades (in fact, no one could remember when they had last inked one together). It was a giant step in creating trust and momentum to tackle the bigger border issues.

Now, on any day of the week, you can go to the Wagah, the border crossing between Pakistan and India that sits a short distance from the center of the Pakistani city of Lahore, and you will see a mile-long line of trucks loaded with fruit and other produce, both fresh and dried. Much of this cargo waiting to cross into India comes from Afghanistan. It is legitimate, productive trade, and Holbrooke made it possible.

After Holbrooke died the State Department promoted the idea of a New Silk Road to give Afghanistan an economic anchor after American troops left. It conceives of Afghanistan as a trading hub for the region.⁸ The Transit Trade Agreement made this idea possible, and if it ever comes to fruition it will have to be based on what Holbrooke and Goodman negotiated.

A little over a year after Holbrooke died, in April 2012 India and Pakistan opened their border to trade. The Transit Trade Agreement had given both India and Pakistan reason to expand beyond the Afghan trade connecting the two countries. Pakistan now saw it was possible to trade with antagonistic neighbors. Pakistan would grant India most favored nation (MFN) trade status; Pakistan and India literally lifted entire clauses and passages out of the Transit Trade Agreement to craft their own trade agreement. If all goes well they will get to a transit-and-trade agreement of their own. The Transit Trade Agreement had done good for the region; America had built the foundation for something positive that impacted daily lives.

Holbrooke was elated when the trade deal was signed. Clinton congratulated him for once again pulling a rabbit out of the hat. But the White House was silent. This kind of diplomacy was not part of their game plan. They did not know what had happened, or why it would matter to the war. In those days, achievements such as this did not endear Holbrooke to the White House. Instead, the president’s staff treated the accord as a nuisance. Or at least they did until a few weeks later when, hard-pressed to show any progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they suddenly discovered the Transit Trade Agreement. But they still remained oblivious to the potential of diplomacy.

Holbrooke was undeterred, however. He thought that, in time, the White House would come around and then would be glad to find that all the pieces were already in place. So he started talking to all the countries that mattered, and made repeated requests to be allowed to talk to Iran as well. He crisscrossed the region, and in every capital asked his hosts to lay out their interests in Afghanistan, explain how they saw the region’s future, and let him know what they thought of reconciliation. Then he focused on how to create the overlap of interests. He talked about all this with Clinton and had her support, though the rest of Washington either didn’t know or didn’t care.

The thorniest issue was India. India and Pakistan had distinct interests in Afghanistan and were deeply suspicious of each other’s intentions. They had backed opposite sides during the Taliban’s war on the Northern Alliance in the 1990s and continued to see Afghanistan’s future as a zero-sum game that could change the balance of power between them. India had invested more than a billion dollars in the development of Afghanistan and was keen to keep its foothold there. Pakistan thought that any Indian presence in Afghanistan would inevitably give India a base in its strategic rear. Indians complained about Pakistan’s support for terrorism and the Taliban; every conversation with Pakistanis on India’s role in Afghanistan seemed to end with charges that India supported Baluch separatists operating out of Kabul.

Still, Holbrooke thought that it was possible to get past mutual recriminations and focus the two on an Afghan settlement that both could live with. He did not want to solve everything between India and Pakistan—he knew that he would never get a visa to Delhi if he touched the third rail of Kashmir. Concessions on that territorial dispute, over which India and Pakistan in 1999 fought what so far is mercifully the world’s only ground war between two nuclear-armed states, were definitely not on the table. But he thought there must be a sliver of mutual interest in Afghanistan, extremely narrow though it may be, enough to keep both India and Pakistan on board with a diplomatic outcome. So every chance he got, Holbrooke pushed his Indian and Pakistani counterparts to explain their red lines, revise them, and explore the potential for engaging one another on Afghanistan.

After a lot of back and forth, Holbrooke persuaded General Kayani to agree in principle to talks with India over Afghanistan and Afghanistan only. Holbrooke took that concession—which was not much but enough to work with—to Delhi. The Indians had said all along that they would talk to Pakistan if talks remained focused on Afghanistan and did not include other issues. I remember Holbrooke talking through how India and Pakistan could arrive at their sliver of Venn-diagram overlap during dinner with his Indian counterpart at La Chaumière, his favorite French restaurant in Georgetown. It was December 6, 2010, less than a week before he died of a ruptured aorta. He looked haggard and not in his usual form, but he was about to pull another rabbit out of the hat, a diplomatic coup of serious consequence.

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).

Holbrooke took note of all these reports, gauged which ones were serious, and assessed what could be gleaned from them in order to move us closer to the talks. Some in SRAP were frustrated that everyone was talking to the Taliban except America—we were being marginalized, losing out, they would argue. But Holbrooke would say calmly, “Don’t worry, nothing matters until we are at the table. It is good that others socialize the idea and clear the underbrush; our time will come.” As part of his routine reporting, he would tell the White House of every account of talks with the Taliban to get them used to the idea.

One report in particular proved game changing.¹⁰ In February 2010 at the Munich Security Conference, Holbrooke’s German counterpart, Bernd Mutzelberg, told Holbrooke that he had met with Tayeb Agha twice in Dubai, and that the channel to Mulla Omar and the Quetta Shura was real. In their last meeting Tayeb Agha had told Mutzelberg he wanted to talk directly to America. Holbrooke lost no time in taking Mutzelberg to National Security Adviser Jim Jones and his Afghan affairs deputy, General Doug Lute, who were also in Munich. The White House team listened but was not ready to grab at the opportunity.

Back home, Holbrooke went into overdrive, lobbying hard with the White House to bite on the offer, test Tayeb Agha, and see whether there was anything to what the Germans had stumbled on. Despite Pentagon and CIA objections and White House reservations—but with Secretary Clinton’s aggressive backing—Holbrooke got his way. Secret meetings with Tayeb Agha started, first in Munich, then every so often in Doha.¹¹ Holbrooke never participated and did not live to see them gain momentum, culminating in the Taliban establishing an office in Qatar and formally declaring their readiness for talks with America in February 2012—two years after the Munich meeting. Getting the White House to the table with the Taliban, finally getting diplomacy into the mix in AfPak strategy, had been Holbrooke’s greatest challenge, and he had finally succeeded. It will be his great legacy.

However, the Obama administration’s approach to reconciliation is not exactly what Holbrooke had in mind for a diplomatic end to the war. Holbrooke thought that we had the best chance of getting what we wanted, and what would be good for Afghanistan and the region, if we negotiated with the Taliban while our leverage was at its strongest—when we had the maximum number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan, and when it was believed that we were going to stay in full force. He had not favored the Afghan surge, but he believed that once the troops were there, the president should have used the show of force to get to a diplomatic solution.

But that did not happen. The president failed to launch diplomacy and then announced the troop withdrawal, in effect snatching away the leverage that would be needed if diplomacy was to have a chance of success. “If you are leaving, why would the Taliban make a deal with you? How would you make the deal stick? The Taliban will talk to you, but just to get you out faster.” That comment from an Arab diplomat was repeated across the region.

But it was exactly after announcing its departure that the administration warmed up to the idea of reconciliation. The idea was not that success in talking to the Taliban would clear the way for a noncatastrophic departure from Afghanistan. It was that since we were leaving anyway, we might as well try our hand at a political settlement on our way out the door. The outcome of talks with the Taliban had no bearing on the course of the war. The war would wind down with or without a peace deal. Reconciliation was an afterthought, a piece of cover to make our sudden withdrawal look more promising than it was.

Facts on the ground punched a hole in the perception of victory. As we went from “fight and talk” to “talk while leaving” the prospect of a good outcome began to grow dimmer. The Taliban did not think that we were winning, they thought that they were winning. Talks were not about arranging their surrender, but about hastening our departure.¹² They could sit at the table and drag out talks. They did not have to compromise on governance when they could just promise to pave the way for our departure. There would be a sense of progress, with the Taliban agreeing to consider a particular offer and then making a minor concession, but all along our forces on the ground would be shrinking—and as they shrank, the balance of power would be shifting in the Taliban’s direction. All they had to do was show some patience, keep their powder dry and their numbers intact, and they would inherit Afghanistan. In the end, there will be talks and small agreements, but not the kind of settlement that would anchor broader regional peace and stability.

Concerns about human rights, women’s rights, and education were all shelved. None was seen as a matter of vital American interest, and now they had turned into noble causes that were too costly and difficult to support—and definitely not worth fighting an insurgency over. I remember the day in August 2010 when Time magazine put on its cover a gruesome picture of a young Afghan woman named Aisha, a bride in a marriage arranged when she was twelve, whose nose had been cut off as punishment for fleeing her abusive in-laws. The caption under it read: “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan.”¹³

We in SRAP thought the sky would fall. There would be indignation and protest at the highest level in the State Department and White House, and a reiteration of our duty to protect fundamental rights in Afghanistan. But there was nothing—deafening silence. We had shed the moral obligation that we assumed as our mantle in Afghanistan. Now in private meetings you could hear whispers of “Even if Afghanistan returns to civil war after we leave, we don’t care, it will not be our business.” Washington’s mantra was no longer “Afghan good war” but “Afghan good enough.”

The White House seemed to see an actual benefit in not doing too much. It was happy with its narrative of modest success in Afghanistan and gradual withdrawal—building Afghan security forces to take over from departing American troops. Pursuing a potentially durable final settlement was politically risky, and even if it worked it would yield no greater domestic dividends than would muddling through until the departure date arrived. The goal was to spare the president the risks that necessarily come with playing the leadership role that America claims to play in this region.

The problem is that what might appear sensible in the context of domestic politics (and that proposition may yet be tested if a broken Afghanistan begins to export horrors again) does not make for sensible foreign policy; definitely not if the goal is to be taken seriously around the world. The region was looking for sage strategy and follow-through. It got neither. The confusion over the rise and fall of COIN was compounded by vacillation over reconciliation.

In addition to its poor timing, the White House’s vision of reconciliation was so narrowly conceived that it was virtually guaranteed to fail. Unlike what Holbrooke had had in mind, this reconciliation would be a limited, so-called Afghan-led process, but in effect involve negotiations between America and the Taliban.¹⁴ If it ever got off the ground it could have only the narrow purview of producing an agreement over the terms of American departure.

There would be no effort to include other regional actors in the talks—America promised to keep everyone informed of what happened in the talks and, of course, expected that they would accept the outcome. So Pakistan was asked to deliver the Taliban to the talks (i.e., allow them to travel outside Pakistan to meet American and Afghan negotiators) but not to expect a role in shaping them, nor a seat at the table.

Afghanistan’s two most important neighbors were shut out of talks about the Afghan endgame. Since the Taliban’s fall in the wake of 9/11, one or the other of these two pivotal neighbors had been at America’s side. In Bonn in 2001, Iran had been a key player in the talks and backed America’s Afghanistan strategy. In 2009 and 2010, America kept Pakistan positively engaged. Now America was trying to go it alone. Worse, America was trying to fix Afghanistan while actually escalating tensions with both Iran and Pakistan, as if peace could somehow be made to take hold in Afghanistan when the country’s immediate neighborhood was roiled by acute instability. A chaotic Afghanistan in a stable region was hard enough to handle; a chaotic Afghanistan in an unstable region, and with its two most important neighbors in conflict with America, seems nearly impossible.

Against this backdrop President Obama decided to write his own narrative of the war’s end. He used the grand occasion of the NATO summit in his hometown of Chicago to say, come hell or high water, American troops will leave Afghanistan by 2014. They will do so because the (wobbly) Afghan security force of around 230,000 (down from the original 400,000 number) that we are training is taking over the security of the country (which will cost us about $4 billion a year), and also because a partnership treaty we have signed with Karzai will ensure stability and continuity in that country after we leave.

But if we leave Afghanistan to a shaky security force and an erratic president, how will we ensure that the state we built will not buckle before the Taliban break up and disintegrate? Afghanistan has none of what Iraq had when we left in December 2011. Iraq had close to a million men in its security forces. It also has oil revenue as well as the requisite education system and social infrastructure to build and maintain a force of that size—and even so Iraq is still teetering on the verge of chaos.

Can we be sure that Karzai will not toss aside the Afghan constitution to stay in power beyond 2014? Will resulting protests and civil conflict add to the still-raging insurgency to make real the Afghanistan of our worst nightmares? Most important, if we leave will we have any influence? Not likely.

We have not won this war on the battlefield nor have we ended it at the negotiating table. We are just washing our hands of it, hoping there will be a decent interval of calm—a reasonable distance between our departure and the catastrophe to follow so we will not be blamed for it. We may hope that the Afghan army we are building will hold out longer than the one the Soviet Union built, but even that may not come to pass. Very likely, the Taliban will win Afghanistan again, and this long and costly war will have been for naught. Our standing will suffer and our security will again be at risk.

And then there is Pakistan to consider.

President Asif Ali Zardari is an enigmatic figure. He inherited the leadership of Pakistan’s largest political party after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was killed in a vicious bomb attack blamed on Pakistan’s homegrown branch of the Taliban. Pakistanis don’t like Zardari much. They think he is a hustler, and the memory of his corruption in the 1990s when his wife was prime minister has forever been chiseled into the country’s collective memory. But he should not be dismissed so easily. He is a survivor and a shrewd operator. General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military ruler between 1999 and 2008, jailed Zardari on corruption charges and sent his wife into exile. The two made a comeback in 2007 after Musharraf’s rule started to unravel. The years in jail were a trial by fire that turned Zardari into a formidable politician, cunning and ambitious enough to climb his way up to the presidency.

One evening in June 2009, soon after I joined Holbrooke’s team, we called on Zardari at the presidential palace in Islamabad. Holbrooke had brought along journalists on the trip to show them firsthand how important Pakistan was to the Afghan war. Zardari was eager to play his part. As if he had read Holbrooke’s mind, he lost no time in subjecting the note-taking reporters to a long and meandering rigmarole liberally seasoned with an idea that could be paraphrased as “Pakistan deserves more of Uncle Sam’s cash—a lot more!”

“Pakistan is like AIG,” he said to drive his point home. “Too big to fail.” What he meant was that his country was “too strategic,” “too dangerous,” or, as Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann would later put it, “too nuclear,” to fail. “You gave AIG one hundred billion dollars; you should give Pakistan the same,” said Zardari. Then he waxed lyrical about all the dangers that Pakistan faced and in turn would pose for the West were it to fail. Surely, he indicated, all this was self-evident to Washington.

Holbrooke smiled through these conversations. He agreed that Pakistan was too important to ignore and that, whether we liked it or not, the United States had an abiding interest in its stability. But he thought Zardari’s attitude betrayed a disturbing dependence on America, and even worse, a sense of entitlement in spite of failure. Holbrooke didn’t like the image of Pakistan holding a gun to its own head as it shook down America for aid. We should help Pakistan, but Pakistan too should pull itself up by its bootstraps, getting its political house in order and attending to development.

That said, Holbrooke agreed with Zardari that Pakistan was more important than Washington seemed to realize at that moment. Not only in the long run because it was a nuclear-armed country of 180 million, infested with extremists and teetering on the verge of collapse, but more immediately because it mattered to the outcome in Afghanistan. We could not afford for Pakistan to fail, and that meant we could not leave Pakistan to its own fate. We had to improve ties with Pakistan—however difficult that might turn out to be.

Over the next two years, Holbrooke pressed for a strategy of engaging Pakistan. He thought engagement would get the most out of not only Zardari but also the generals who wielded real power in the country, and help promote stability there, too, which also matters (or should matter) to America. The White House tolerated Holbrooke’s approach for a while, but in the end decided that a policy of coercion and confrontation would better achieve our goals in Pakistan. That approach failed. The more America and Pakistan drifted apart, the less America got from Pakistan, and the less influence we now have in shaping the future of a dangerous and troublesome country that is only growing more so.¹

When it comes to Pakistan, the country where the SEALs found and killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the mood in America has turned dark. High officials and average Americans alike are understandably wary of the place. But perhaps more important still, they are tired of trying to change its perverse ways. Political scientist Stephen Krasner captured this mood well when he wrote in the January/February 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs that after decades of efforts to buy Pakistan’s cooperation with generous U.S. aid, plenty of public praise, and outsized amounts of face time for its leaders, the country still supports extremist organizations. These groups, as then–Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on September 22, 2011, “serving as proxies for the government of Pakistan are attacking Afghan troops and civilians as well as U.S. soldiers.” Mullen called the Haqqani network—a particularly vicious and brutish outfit that is an autonomous part of the Taliban—“in many ways, a strategic arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.” When he first became America’s top military officer, Admiral Mullen had called Pakistan “a steadfast and historic ally.”² Now he was expressing a different sentiment, the one that the Atlantic magazine captured in a cover story titled “The Ally from Hell.”³

Such observations, Krasner argued, should lead us to treat Pakistan much the same way we treat Iran and North Korea—as a hostile power. Rather than assist, praise, and coddle Pakistan, we should think of how to contain it.⁴ We can fight terrorism without Pakistan’s help, the argument goes, since stepped-up drone attacks will do the job. And indeed, there is a growing sense that we are well on our way to confrontation with Pakistan.

However, what these critics don’t say is how drones can get the job done if we lose access to the timely, ground-level intelligence that currently provides drones with their targets, or what happens if Pakistan decides to start shooting down these low- and slow-flying pilotless planes. Drones are labor-intensive. They don’t need pilots, true, but they do require small armies of analysts and spies, including locals who are willing and able to attach homing chips to the people, vehicles, and buildings that drones are supposed to hit. For every one person on the ground that a jet-fighter mission needs, a drone mission needs ten. Pakistani authorities may not be able to stop U.S. drones from overflying their territory (though they can shoot them down), but they can cut the chain of intelligence gathering, analysis, and chip planting that makes drones effective. They can blind the drones and render them useless.

For decades, America bought Pakistan’s cooperation through aid sweetened with public shows of friendship and support. In the ten years after 9/11, America poured $20 billion in civilian and military aid into the relationship. During its first two years in office, the Obama administration increased the flow of support and raised Pakistan’s profile as a vital ally even further. In return, we got intelligence cooperation—more agents, listening posts, and even visas for the deep-cover CIA operatives who found bin Laden. We got improved relations between Kabul and Islamabad, which, although not as warm as we would have liked, were nonetheless warm enough to help our counterinsurgency efforts. We got more distance between Pakistan and Iran. And we finally persuaded Islamabad to go to war (however reluctantly) against the Taliban on Pakistan’s own soil. Had the Pakistani military not taken on those Taliban forces, the fighting in Afghanistan certainly would have been worse. At least a measure of the battlefield success that the U.S. military has achieved in the Afghan theater—the success that has allowed President Obama to order troops home—can be ascribed to Pakistani cooperation.

There is plenty in Pakistani behavior to anger America too. Many observers think that Pakistan’s regional interests are so far removed from those of the United States that no degree of aid and friendship can bridge the gap, making a collapse in the relationship inevitable all along. American ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson captured this sentiment best in a September 23, 2009, cable: “Money alone will not solve the problem of al-Qaeda or the Taliban operating in Pakistan. A grand bargain that promises development or military assistance in exchange for severing ties will be insufficient to wean Pakistan from policies that reflect accurately its most deep-seated fears. The Pakistani establishment, as we saw in 1998, with the nuclear test, does not view assistance—even sizable assistance to their own entities—as a trade-off for national security.”⁵

Indeed, Pakistan has long been a “frenemy.” But in dealing with frenemies, the question is always whether it makes more sense—in view of one’s own interests and circumstances—to stress the friend part or the enemy part. And one should also be ready to ask whether a frenemy relationship can be moved—ever so slowly—toward the “friend” column.

The critical turning point in America’s relations with Pakistan was the annus horribilis of 2011. That was the year in which a series of unfortunate events, mishandled by both sides, put relations in a deep freeze. It was also the moment when America decided to experiment with a whole new way of managing Pakistan, as an adversary rather than a friend, substituting pressure for engagement.

The twisted course of the year of horrors began with lethal gunplay on a traffic-packed Lahore thoroughfare. On January 27, 2011, an alleged undercover CIA agent named Raymond A. Davis shot and killed two Pakistani men on a motorbike, men he thought were going to rob him or, worse, abduct him. Pakistan put him in jail until the United States paid $2.4 million in compensation to the men’s families and the CIA agreed to revise the rules by which it was operating in Pakistan.⁶ By the time Davis was released on March 16, ties between Islamabad and Washington were severely strained, and it did not help that the very next day a massive drone strike hit a tribal gathering at Datta Khel in North Waziristan. Taliban commanders and fighters were killed, but also dozens of civilians. Then, at the beginning of May, helicopter-borne U.S. commandos flew from Afghanistan into Pakistan under conditions of utmost secrecy on a mission, launched and executed with no warning to Pakistan, to capture or kill bin Laden. They found him at a compound in the city of Abbottabad located in shockingly close proximity to the Pakistan Military Academy and the homes of numerous retired officers. The coup de grace came in November when American forces chasing Taliban fighters killed twenty-four Pakistani border guards in a botched firefight. Relations between the two countries went into deep freeze, and a real rupture, for the first time since Pakistan’s creation in 1947, became a distinct possibility.

Mistrust was thus already profound when Admiral Mullen spoke to the Senate in September, accusing Pakistan outright of involvement in attacks on U.S. targets in Afghanistan.

Ever since Pakistan was created out of portions of British India in 1947, America’s relations with the country have traveled a winding and rocky road. There have been periods of intense friendship followed by long bouts of neglect and even alienation.⁷ Over time, the two sides have developed an unhealthy distrust of each other. Americans fear and resent Pakistan, and Pakistanis think American friendship is fickle and transient. Americans think Pakistan promised not to build nuclear weapons, and then went ahead and built them. Then it promised not to test more warheads, and broke that promise, too. That Pakistan deliberately cultivates Islamic extremism as the cornerstone of its regional policy has done little to assuage concerns over its nuclear arsenal. Nowadays it is quite clear that America’s favor lies with Pakistan’s neighbor and nemesis, India, and at times it seems as if Pakistan is reacting to that uncomfortable fact by embodying all the anti-American anger and angst that have washed over the Muslim world in the past few decades.

The relationship has been in a new and critical phase since 9/11. Experts well knew that Pakistan had been complicit in the creation of the Taliban and turned a blind eye to its support for al-Qaeda. But the Bush administration decided that conflict with Pakistan was not a good choice, and that buying Pakistan’s cooperation would be the better option. Pakistan’s military ruler quickly embraced the idea and aligned his country—for public consumption, at least—with the United States.

A cozy relationship soon took shape. Bush liked General Musharraf, who loved to talk a “moderate Muslim” game, and frequently complimented him as a staunch ally in the battle against terror as well as a reformer who would bring “enlightened and liberal Islam” to Pakistan. Evidence of Pakistani double-dealing was ignored as the emphasis was placed on the positive: the periodic nabbing of a terrorist (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, was captured with Pakistani help in Karachi in March 2003), Musharraf’s tough antiterror rhetoric, and his promise of changing Pakistan into a forward-looking democracy. Posing as a hero of counterterrorism required a degree of chutzpah bordering on performance art, and Musharraf proved a master at it.

Somewhere along the line, to my shock, it became clear that the Bush administration had started to believe the act. One day in 2006 I was giving a talk on the latest developments in Pakistan to a group of U.S. government analysts whose job was to keep up with, and make sense of, what was happening on the ground so they could inform their higher-ups and provide options for possible action. As we were walking out, a young Pakistan watcher asked me what I thought of “Jinnah’s Islam.” General Musharraf had coined the phrase—a reference to Pakistan’s founding father, the Shia-with-a-secular-spin Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876–1948)—as a way of advertising his promise to reform Islam in Pakistan and imbue it with liberal values. Taking Islam back from extremists and making it something more like what the country’s liberal founder, a London-trained lawyer, would have liked seemed an attractive idea for a country in the grip of extremism.

The answer was easy. I said I thought the whole thing was a shameless autocrat’s cynical and transparent manipulation. The analyst, barely able to hide a smile, said, “Well, our customers [government lingo for members of Congress and senior administration officials] are very interested to know how we can support it.” I said, “Surely you’re kidding.” How could we possibly put any stock in the idea of a whiskey-chugging general posing as an Islamic Martin Luther? “The Pakistanis already hate us because they think we’re sinister,” I went on. “Now they’re going to think we’re stupid, too.” The analyst laughed and said, “You have no idea how much of this [our customers] lap up. We have to write a report.”

No, Musharraf was not the ally that Bush and his lieutenants made him out to be.⁸ The relationship was a magician’s act. It all rested on misdirection, with more than a dash of suspended disbelief. While the general was cozying up to the Bush administration, extremists were thrusting their roots deeper into Pakistani soil—Osama bin Laden in particular (who could have waved at General Musharraf as he jogged right by bin Laden’s house on a visit to Abbottabad) was getting comfortable in his new hideout in an army garrison town, protected by five military checkpoints. Also on Musharraf’s watch, the Taliban started rebuilding their forces in Pakistan in preparation for an all-out war against American troops and the Afghan government.

Musharraf helped Washington pretend—and even believe—that what was happening in Pakistan was not happening. The country we touted as a determined wayfarer on the shining path to moderation and democracy was sinking deeper into the morass of extremism and had put its shoulder to wrecking what we were building in Afghanistan. Cynics called the two-faced strategy Pakistan’s “double game.” But the delusion of the Taliban being crushed with the aid of their straight-shooting partner Pakistan served a purpose, letting the Bush administration turn its gaze from Afghanistan and Pakistan and focus instead on the war in Iraq.

General Musharraf would later explain his motivation in cozying up to the United States by claiming that after 9/11 America had threatened to send Pakistan back to the Stone Age if it did not change course.⁹ Several U.S. policy makers had supposedly impressed that point on Musharraf’s intelligence chief, General Ahmad Mahmoud, who had by chance been in Washington on September 11. When Mahmoud, the godfather of the Taliban and the mastermind behind the 1999 coup that put Musharraf in power, reported back to his boss, he minced no words. So Musharraf summoned the army’s nine corps commanders—in effect his cabinet—and told them that Pakistan was in trouble. Pakistan was no Syria, he said, part of a larger Arab world that would defend it from America’s wrath. Pakistan was alone, facing a hostile India as always, and now inviting the enmity of the international community. To protect strategic assets such as its nuclear weapons program and its influence in Kashmir and Afghanistan, Pakistan would need to go along—or at least it would need to act like it was going along—with American demands. It would have to execute a kind of temporary tactical stand-down by helping America in Afghanistan, by dialing down the jihad against India in Kashmir, and by agreeing to fight al-Qaeda. The rewards would include not just billions of dollars in international aid, but also American support for military rule and an end to the international isolation that Musharraf’s coup had triggered. And, of course, America would eventually leave Afghanistan, after which there would be ample time and opportunity to rebuild what would have to be temporarily given up. There were dissenters, but by and large the top brass accepted Musharraf’s game plan.

Average Pakistanis were not impressed with the “Bush-Mush” love affair. The relationship had no roots in the two countries, and not only did it not benefit average Pakistanis, it actually hurt them by sustaining the military dictatorship and funding its jihadi auxiliaries.

The feel-good image of Musharraf’s Pakistan—fighting extremism, blossoming culturally, and growing economically—was a mirage. Musharraf was neither a reformer nor an ardent counterterrorism warrior. The economic boom that came on the heels of U.S. aid and the post-9/11 flight of Muslim capital from the West had turned to bust by the time his rule ended. By contrast, the extremism that he was ostensibly uprooting was instead blooming in dangerous parts of Pakistan, and was in full flower by the time he fell from power.

The Bush administration was oblivious to all this until near its own end. For much of Bush’s time in office, from 2002 to 2008, Afghanistan had been stable, and American troops there saw their mission as keeping order and cleaning up the remnants of the insurgency while the new Afghan state took form. Washington was certainly concerned with what al-Qaeda was doing in Pakistan, but it did not see the Taliban through the lens of Pakistan, and hence did not treat Islamabad as integral to the solution in Afghanistan. It is arguable that for much of its time in office, the Bush administration did not even think that it had to come up with a solution to Afghanistan. The mission had been accomplished. The Taliban had been chased out of Kabul and out of the country altogether while Afghanistan’s George Washington, Hamid Karzai, was building a city on a hill. Any evidence that Pakistan was not on board with America’s plans for Afghanistan Washington either dismissed as coming from Afghans looking for convenient excuses for their own failings,¹⁰ or blamed on so-called rogue elements of the ISI, which, with our support, Musharraf would eventually bring to heel. Then a particularly gruesome bombing attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul in July 2008 was traced back to the ISI. That, and undeniable evidence of a Taliban surge in southern Afghanistan, blew a big hole in Washington’s happy Pakistan narrative.

What the Bush administration had failed to fully appreciate was that Musharraf was far more willing to help with the fight against al-Qaeda than he was to raise a hand against the Taliban (and, to be fair, Washington was not really asking him to target the Taliban). Under Musharraf, Pakistan had made a merely tactical withdrawal from Afghanistan and was only waiting for the right time to go back. Afghanistan was simply too important to Pakistan’s sense of its own security and to its strategic ambitions for it to stop meddling in its neighbor’s affairs on America’s say-so.

By 2009, Pakistani complicity in the Taliban resurgence was undeniable. Now Pakistan was the staple of every explanation given to President Obama for why violence in Afghanistan was on the rise and American troops were facing an energized insurgency. Many on the right, in Congress and in the media, still thought that all this was happening only because Musharraf had been forced out of office in 2008. As one high-level Bush administration official who had worked on Pakistan put it to me: “The only problem with Pakistan is that Musharraf is no longer there.” In reality, Musharraf had been the architect of the Taliban revival. The Taliban surge of 2008 and 2009 would never have been possible without preparations, recruiting, training, and capability-building activities that the Taliban undertook in Pakistan or with Pakistani help and that went back several years—to the time when Musharraf was in charge.

The problem did not have much to do with Musharraf as an individual. It was structural. The fact was that Pakistan had strategic objectives in Afghanistan, and it was pursuing them with us there and despite its own budding partnership with us.

When the Iraq war began to wind down following the 2007 troop surge, drones and Special Forces were moved east, and American intelligence turned its attention to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The closer we looked, the less we liked what we saw. The CIA got a proper gauge of its leaky partnership with Pakistan’s ISI, seeing firsthand that its targets were adapting with uncanny speed to the agency’s tracking methods. The most likely explanation was that the very ISI agents who were working alongside CIA operatives to hunt down terrorists and insurgents were also teaching these enemies how to avoid being killed or captured. Once, shortly after the CIA shared information with the ISI regarding an insurgent explosives factory, satellite images captured trucks pulling up to the factory to ferry its contents somewhere else.

There was ample evidence that Pakistan provided critical support to the Taliban, and worse yet, to its most vicious and lethal branch, the Haqqani network (which the United States formally designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in September 2012).¹¹ The New York Times reporter David Rohde, who was kidnapped and held hostage by the Haqqanis for seven months between 2008 and 2009, told Holbrooke’s team at the State Department soon after his release from captivity that the clan operated out in the open and in view of Pakistani troops in the border town of Miramshah. On one occasion, a member of the Haqqani clan drove Rohde to a location for a video shoot. When they came across Pakistani troops on the way, the driver would simply pull down the scarf covering his face and they would be waved through. Rohde spent much of his captivity within walking distance of a Pakistan military garrison.¹² Indeed, and perhaps to underline the double nature of so much that goes on in Pakistan, the Pakistan Army also played a critical role in Rohde’s liberation: after he and a companion escaped from the compound where they were being held, they managed to find an army scout who took them to the Frontier Corps base where they were airlifted to freedom.

As further evidence of Pakistan’s less than good intentions, in 2010 the number of roadside bombs in Afghanistan grew to a shocking 14,661.¹³ The nitrate used to build these devices came from Pakistan’s fertilizer factories. America has pushed to get Pakistan to curb the trade in nitrates, but with scant success. Its conclusion was that there was plenty of double-dealing afoot in Pakistan.¹⁴ But the problem was not to prove what Pakistan was up to—that was easy—but how to get Pakistan to transform its ways.

There is one constant in Pakistan: fear and envy of India. The rivalry with its larger neighbor has so consumed Pakistan that the country pretty much defines itself as the Muslim “anti-India.” Thus it should come as no surprise that Pakistan would see Afghanistan only through the prism of the Indian challenge.

Except for the dozen years between the Soviet retreat and 9/11—a stretch of time when, for the most part, the Taliban were ruling in Kabul—Pakistan has had a rocky relationship with Afghanistan.¹⁵ Afghans have never recognized their border with Pakistan—the famous Durand Line. The real border, think many leading Afghans as well as ordinary ones, should be the Indus River, far to the south and east of Sir Mortimer Durand’s line, which divides the Pashtun northwest from the fertile plains of the Punjab. Pashtun nationalists have always claimed Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (the NWFP, or, as it is now officially styled, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) and the FATA, the notorious “agencies” along the Durand Line where al-Qaeda set up shop after 9/11, for Afghanistan. Some 40 percent of Afghans and 15 percent of Pakistanis are Pashtun. Given Pakistan’s much larger population, this means that there are more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan. Pakistan lives in constant fear of a secession-minded, India-backed “Pashtundesh” (rhyming with Bangladesh, which in 1971 separated from Pakistan with India’s help and humiliated Pakistan militarily in the bargain). Aggressive Pashtun nationalism to the north is a danger to Pakistan, especially when New Delhi is lending the irredentists a hand.

It is clearly better for Pakistan to have Pashtuns thinking of Islam and fighting to the north against Tajiks and Uzbeks in Afghanistan and Central Asia than to have Pashtuns dreaming of nationalism and looking south and east with visions of a homeland crafted in no small part out of Pakistani territory. Pakistan has thus forged deep ties to the Taliban since these “students” first appeared in Afghanistan in 1994 and proved effective in radicalizing young men and imposing local rule. With Pakistani help, they soon controlled large swaths of Afghanistan. The official story was that the peace they imposed on Afghanistan, which had been caught up in civil war since the Soviet departure, would help secure the building of roads and gas and oil pipelines that Pakistan needed in order to make itself a key conduit for trade between Central Asia and the Indian Ocean basin. The crucial reality was that the Taliban helped Pakistan face down India in the contest over Afghanistan.

It did not worry Pakistan that the Taliban were laying waste to Afghanistan, destroying the priceless giant Buddhas of Bamayan, closing schools, brutally punishing people for owning TV sets or having insufficiently long beards, nurturing a drug economy, and sheltering al-Qaeda. These “Islamic students” were serving a larger purpose by keeping Pashtuns busy and India out. At the height of the Taliban’s power, Pakistani generals spoke confidently of the “strategic depth” that proxy control over Afghanistan gave Pakistan in the great game against India.

It is little wonder, then, that the generals seem to have so little real enthusiasm for shutting down the Taliban. Nor is it a mystery why Islamabad remains so suspicious of the independent Afghan state that America stood up after toppling the Taliban in late 2001 and early 2002. In the Indian-educated and pro-Delhi president Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun of the southern Durrani clan, the Pakistanis see the specter of Pashtun nationalism.

Countries can do dangerous things in pursuit of national interest, and in Pakistan’s case, unsupervised generals were allowed to decide what the national interest was. By 9/11, Pakistan was deeply tied to the Taliban and jihadi fighters even as they and their al-Qaeda allies were about to bring down untold wrath from America. And, worse, backing the Taliban in Afghanistan inevitably meant more tolerance for extremism at home.¹⁶ Pakistan could sustain its jihad in Afghanistan only by nurturing the infrastructure required for recruiting, indoctrinating, training, and managing jihadi fighters.¹⁷ That meant cultivating radical madrassas and extremist parties, creating financial networks and training camps, carving out plenty of space to gather and swarm fighters on its borders, and maintaining close ties among jihadis and their ISI handlers. Years after 9/11, that infrastructure remains and is the bedrock of a persistent extremist menace in Pakistan.

Indeed, Pakistan was the first among Afghanistan’s neighbors to suffer blowback from the fires that it had stoked in Afghanistan. By 2008, Pakistani versions of the Taliban had coalesced around Baitullah Mehsud’s militia, Tehrik-I-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and established emirates of terror in mountainous pockets of northwestern Pakistan. In 2009, the TTP led its confederation of Taliban look-alikes to take over territory in Pakistan proper, establishing draconian control amid the alpine scenery of the Swat Valley.¹⁸ The government’s effort to dislodge them from this perch sparked a brutal terror campaign against the government and people of Pakistan that in 2009 alone claimed the lives of 3,318 Pakistanis (up from 164 in 2003). On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the tally of Pakistanis killed by terrorists and in suicide bombings over that decade stood at about 35,000.¹⁹

Was it not time for Pakistan to abandon its carelessness regarding extremism, understand the cost that the country was paying by playing with fire, and once and for all renounce extremism as a tool of foreign policy? We could now argue to Islamabad that the chickens had come home to roost; our problems in Afghanistan—extremism, the Taliban, suicide bombings, and instability—were now their problems, too. But in fact the explosion of extremist violence, though it made Pakistan’s leaders more vulnerable, also made them more impervious to pressure. In the peculiar calculus of Pakistan, the more the military was threatened by a Frankenstein’s monster that it had helped create, the less leverage we seemed to have to argue for serious change—especially since the Pakistani people appeared intent on blaming America rather than their own government for the violence and instability.

Pakistanis did not blame their terrible predicament on their own reckless investment in extremism, but rather on American counterterrorism efforts stirring the hornets’ nest of terrorism in their backyard.²⁰ Musharraf was willing to go along with this. But the more Pakistanis came to blame America for the terror in their streets, the less impressed they were with the rewards that Musharraf had negotiated as recompense for their cooperation. Pakistan got $20.7 billion in assistance from the United States in the decade after 9/11. Pakistanis did the math and decided America was in the red. Zardari’s AIG analogy reflects the deep sense of injustice that Pakistanis felt over what they regarded as their disproportionate sacrifices in the war on terror. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress and the U.S. media complained about all the “free” money “given away” to Pakistanis who did little in return. Together, those perspectives reveal the gulf of misunderstanding dividing the two countries.

The Obama administration came to office with eyes wide open. America had finally fully understood that controlling Afghanistan was a fundamental Pakistani strategic objective, and that the Taliban were Pakistan’s weapon of choice for realizing that goal. To solve the Afghan perplex, America had to first deal with the Pakistani complex. The question now was how.

The Bush administration had treated Afghanistan and Pakistan as if they were on two different continents. At the White House, Afghanistan and Iraq were managed out of the same office while Pakistan was bundled with India and the rest of South Asia. The Obama administration changed that. Afghanistan and Pakistan belonged together: they were in fact one policy area—AfPak—managed first by SRAP at the State Department and, after Holbrooke died, by General Lute at the White House.

Pakistanis and Afghans did not like the shorthand, mostly because they don’t like each other. But seeing Afghanistan and Pakistan through a single policy lens made sense. Richard Holbrooke had coined the AfPak term even before he was tapped to run the policy area. This was not just an effort to save five syllables. It was an attempt to drive home awareness of the reality that there is a single theater of war straddling an ill-defined border.²¹

Holbrooke became more convinced of this imperative after he started working on the problem. The problem with Afghanistan was Pakistan, and without a solution to Afghanistan, Pakistan would explode into an even bigger problem than al-Qaeda and the Taliban combined. If the Pakistani state was brought to its knees—which in 2009 was a serious worry in Washington, especially after TTP extremists in the Swat Valley started pushing toward Islamabad—then Afghanistan would be unsalvageable; and if Afghanistan collapsed into chaos and extremism, then Pakistan would be imperiled. America would have to pour in ten times more resources to protect that much bigger—and nuclear—country. That was how Holbrooke explained “AfPak” to anybody who asked.

The wisdom of the argument was clear, but the war was being fought in Afghanistan; that was where our troops were risking life and limb, so that is where our focus remained and where we spent our money. We proceeded to look for victory on the battlefield. Obama was convinced that is where we would find it when he sent 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan shortly after taking office.

But he was putting the cart before the horse. The key to ending the war was to change Pakistan. Pakistan was the sanctuary the Taliban insurgency used as a launching pad and as a place to escape American retaliation. We knew by then that Pakistan allowed it and we knew why. It was Pakistan’s strategic calculus that we had to change, not troop numbers in Afghanistan.

That was Holbrooke’s argument. More troops in Afghanistan would be useful if they could put pressure on Pakistan, sending Islamabad a signal that we were determined, and that it would be futile to persist in supporting an insurgency in an effort to control Afghanistan. Conversely, Holbrooke felt that it would not be wise to dispatch more soldiers simply to duke it out toe to toe with the Taliban. But to convince Pakistan that we meant business, we had to first prove that we were going to stay. The Pakistanis never believed that American intervention was more than just a bump in the road, and they did not have to wait long to be proven right. Holbrooke thought that we had a shot at changing Pakistan’s strategic calculus, or at least at convincing them that they did not need the Taliban to realize some of their strategic objectives. They could work with us and the Karzai government. It was a long shot, and it had to begin with putting much more effort into fixing our relations with Pakistan. Even if we did not convince Pakistan of the wisdom of change, keeping them engaged around this discussion might pay us the dividend of more time and space to change things in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, not keeping them engaged is what they had come to expect.

Pakistan’s double-dealing was in part a symptom of its bitterness over having been abandoned and then treated as a rogue state after a previous Afghan war, against the Soviets, had been won and the Soviets driven out in 1989. Pakistan was also deeply insecure about India’s meteoric rise and growing strategic value to the West. Pakistanis were playing things very close to the vest. We had to get them to open up. Could we convince them that our plans for Afghanistan would address their strategic interests in the country? If we could, perhaps in time they might reassess their strategic interests in a way that was more favorable to ours.

Holbrooke argued that we had important interests in Afghanistan but vital interests in Pakistan, and that we had far more opportunity to realize our strategic goals in Pakistan than in Afghanistan. If we did that, it would be better for us and for the world. We will live to regret our insouciance, he warned, and the consequent loss of an opportunity to set things on the right track. If we don’t set Pakistan on a different course, he would say, in twenty years the place will be a vast 300-million-person Gaza: out of energy, out of water, radical, and nuclear-armed to boot. It reminded me of what a senior CIA official once told me: “We will be concerned with Pakistan for a long time … my grandchildren will be waking up in the middle of the night worried about Pakistan.” It was easy to convince people in Washington that Pakistan was a looming disaster. It was harder to convince them we should do something about it.

Holbrooke understood that the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA wanted Pakistan to cut ties with the Taliban and do more to fight terrorism. But that would never happen without at least some semblance of a normal relationship between the two countries. Holbrooke favored an iceberg metaphor: “There is an above-water part to the relationship,” he would say, “and a below-water part.” The part below the water was the intelligence and security cooperation that we craved, while the part above water was the aid and assistance that we gave Pakistan. This is where the iceberg metaphor broke down. With countries, unlike floating chunks of ice, making the above-water part bigger will make the whole situation more stable—at least that is what Holbrooke was arguing. In 2011, after he was gone, it simply sank to the bottom.

Already in 2009, half the American diplomatic mission in Pakistan worked on intelligence and counterterrorism rather than diplomacy or development. Our consulate in Peshawar was basically bricks shielding antennas. And it paid big dividends. The CIA collected critical intelligence in Pakistan that made possible drone strikes on al-Qaeda targets and on more than one occasion prevented a terror strike in the West. The Obama administration began carrying out drone strikes in Pakistan on an industrial scale, decimating al-Qaeda’s command-and-control structure and crippling the organization.²² Even with all the Pakistani double-dealing and foot dragging going on, there was still cooperation between the CIA and the ISI on al-Qaeda, and everything the administration claimed by way of success against al-Qaeda depended on it.²³

But hunting terrorists was not popular in Pakistan, and drone strikes in particular angered Pakistanis. In public the authorities denied making any deal with the United States, but it was obvious to citizens that the drones flew with their knowledge and even cooperation. Pakistanis thought the drones were daily violating their country’s sovereignty, showing it to be feeble and defenseless. There were wild rumors about collateral damage, civilians dying unnecessarily as drones targeted suspected terrorists. It did not matter that drones killed many terrorists, including TTP chieftain Baitullah Mehsud, the notorious jihadi who had claimed responsibility for scores of bombing attacks on civilians and was believed to have killed the popular former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. The anger would only get worse as the number of drone attacks grew through 2009 and beyond.

The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy around drones suited Pakistani leaders but had a corrosive effect on U.S.-Pakistan relations. We knew that the drone issue was a problem on TV talk shows and in Pakistan’s big cities, but our hands were tied. There was a case to be made for the program—in the places where the drone strikes were actually happening, up in the FATA, they were less of a provocation. There the locals knew exactly where the missiles were landing and on whom, and the locals had no love for many of those being targeted. But drones were a deeply classified topic in the U.S. government. You could not talk about them in public, much less discuss who they were hitting and with what results. Embassy staffers took to calling drones “Voldemorts” after the villain in the Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort, “he who must not be named.”

By 2012, drones had become a potent political issue in Pakistan. The populist politician and former cricket star Imran Khan built a powerful political movement in part around protesting drone strikes, which he argued were responsible for growing extremist violence inside Pakistan. Drones then had two sets of targets: “high-value” ones, meaning known al-Qaeda leaders, and “signature targets,” which meant concentrations of suspected bad guys—or what some in the Pentagon called MAMs (for “military-aged males”). Most of the controversy revolved around whether drone strikes on MAMs were really eliminating terrorists or killing civilians and producing anti-American fervor. Pakistani intelligence was able to exploit the controversy—when drones started targeting Taliban fighters in 2011, the ISI started fueling anti-drone opposition in a bid to force the United States to agree to a more limited target list.

At this time Pakistan asked repeatedly for joint ownership of the drone program, which meant we would work together on gathering intelligence (previously intelligence was gathered by the CIA and then selectively shared with Pakistan) and operating the drones. They also asked if we would sell them drones; Pakistanis would not object if drones killing terrorists had Pakistani markings on them. They also suggested we let them hit the targets given to drones with their F-16 fighter jets. The CIA’s answer every time was no. We will not sell Pakistan drones, jointly operate them, or let them use their planes to hit the same targets. The program would remain “American.” And as such it would invite anti-Americanism.

We knew from early 2009 that the drone problem meant the intelligence relationship with Pakistan was headed for trouble. During my early days working with Holbrooke, when we were crafting a new Pakistan policy, one of Holbrooke’s deputies asked him, “If we are going to seriously engage shouldn’t we make some changes to the drone policy, perhaps back off a bit?” Holbrooke replied, “Don’t even go there. Nothing is going to change.” We had to build ties despite the drag the drone program had on building normal relations with Pakistan.

Holbrooke believed all along that by showing Pakistan a road map to a deeper relationship with America you could distract attention from the intelligence relationship. The key to winning over Pakistan was simply giving Pakistan more (much more) aid for longer (far longer), in order to change the dynamic of the relationship through economic engagement. If Pakistani leaders had a good story to tell their people, the CIA’s job would become easier, and in time Pakistan would become vested in a different relationship with America. Average Pakistanis had to see a benefit in having a relationship with America, and in 2009 they didn’t. It is easy to be angry at America if you think you don’t get anything from the relationship other than drone strikes and retaliations for them in the form of devastating suicide bombings.

To counter that narrative, Holbrooke started by calling together the newly created Friends of Democratic Pakistan in an international gathering in Tokyo to help Pakistan rebuild its economy. He got $5 billion in pledges to assist Pakistan. “That is a respectable IPO,” Holbrooke would brag, hoping that the opening would garner even more by way of capital investment in Pakistan’s future.

Holbrooke thought that we should give Pakistan much more aid, and not just the military kind. We should do our best to be seen giving it, and to make sure that it improved the lives of everyday Pakistanis in meaningful ways. Holbrooke had gleaned these insights from talking to Pakistanis high and low. Pakistan’s finance minister (and later foreign minister) Hina Rabbani Khar gave Holbrooke a tutorial on U.S. aid to Pakistan. They met on the veranda of the magnificent Chiragan Palace Hotel in Istanbul, a former home to Ottoman sultans that was the venue for an international conference on Pakistan. Khar said to Holbrooke:

Richard, let me tell you a few things about your aid: First, no one in Pakistan sees what you spend it on. People can point to the Chinese bridge; they cannot identify a single thing your aid has done. Second, most of the money never gets to Pakistan; it is spent in Washington. Of every dollar you say you give to Pakistan, maybe ten cents makes it to Pakistan. Finally, you never ask us what we need and what you should give aid to. So your aid does nothing for your image and does not serve your goals with Pakistan. If you want to have an impact, you have to fix that.

And that became Holbrooke’s objective. American aid could make a difference if it was visible and effective. Only then would Pakistanis think that there was value to a relationship with America.

If we wanted to change Pakistan, Holbrooke thought, we had to think in terms of a Marshall Plan. After a journalist asked him whether the $5 billion in aid was not too much for Pakistan, Holbrooke answered, “Pakistan needs $50 billion, not $5 billion.” The White House did not want to hear that—it meant a fight with Congress and spending political capital to convince the American people. Above all else, it required an audacious foreign policy gambit for which the Obama administration was simply not ready.

Yet in reality we were spending much more than that on Afghanistan. For every dollar we gave Pakistan in aid, we spent twenty on Afghanistan. That money did not go very far; it was like pouring water into sand. We would have been doing ourselves a big favor if we had reversed that ratio. It seems we had no problem spending money, just not on things that would actually bring about change and serve our interests. Even General Petraeus understood this. I recall him saying at a Pakistan meeting: “You get what you pay for. We have not paid much for much of anything in Pakistan.”

In the end, we settled for far more modest assistance to Pakistan. The Kerry-Lugar-Berman legislation of 2009 earmarked $7.5 billion in aid to Pakistan over a five-year period—the first long-term all-civilian aid package. It was no Marshall Plan, and Congress could still refuse to fund the authorization, but it made a dent in suspicious Pakistani attitudes.

Holbrooke also believed we needed more aggressive diplomacy: America had to talk to Pakistan, frequently and not just about security issues that concern us, but also about a host of economic and social issues that they cared about. The more often American leaders met their Pakistani counterparts and the more diverse the set of issues they addressed, the more broad-based the relationship would become. And if Pakistanis saw something tangible coming out of these meetings they would warm up to closer ties with the United States. Holbrooke knew from the many hours he had spent with Pakistani leaders, academics, and journalists that they wanted to see a long-term relationship with the United States—a commitment to friendship that was not limited to the duration of our engagement in Afghanistan. It was critical for us not to peddle a so-called transactional relationship but to show interest in something more strategic.

Holbrooke convinced Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that America had to offer a strategic partnership to Pakistan, built around a Strategic Dialogue—a type of bilateral forum that America holds with a number of countries, including China and India. America would talk to Pakistan about security issues but also discuss water, energy, and social and economic issues. Holbrooke thought that Clinton was the perfect American leader to lead this effort—she had a history with Pakistan (she had traveled there as both First Lady and senator) and was well liked by Pakistanis. Clinton was also America’s chief diplomat, and who better to engage in diplomacy with Pakistan than the chief?

Clinton was not ready to cut Pakistan any slack on their support for the Taliban or terrorism, but she was serious about engaging Pakistan’s leaders and showing them a path out of their foreign policy quandary. She believed pressure should be combined with engagement and assistance.

In one of her first meetings with Pakistan’s military and intelligence chiefs she asked them point blank to tell her what their vision was for Pakistan: “Would Pakistan become like North Korea? I am just curious, I would like to hear where you see your country going.” The generals were at a loss for words. So were a group of senior journalists when, during a 2009 interview in Lahore, she pushed back against their incessant criticism of U.S. policy, saying: “I can’t believe that there isn’t anybody in the Pakistani government who knows where bin Laden is.” She was tough. But she was just as serious about engaging Pakistanis on issues that mattered to them.

Clinton was hugely successful in capturing the attention of Pakistanis high and low. Her willingness to invest time in the relationship and engage the country’s media, civil society, youth, and businessmen provided a palpable new dynamism in the troubled relationship. But the White House was not all that taken by the diplomatic effort, and would not shore it up when the actions of the military and CIA undermined it.

America’s relations with Pakistan between 2009 and 2011 ran on two tracks. On the first track, the CIA and the Pentagon were leaning hard on Pakistan to give us more help that we could use against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The CIA had one goal: protect America from another al-Qaeda attack. Pakistan remained a big worry in that regard, especially after the failed May 1, 2010, SUV-bomb plot to attack New York City’s Times Square was traced back to the country. The bomber, Faisal Shahzad, was a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen who had received terror training in the FATA and had been arrested at JFK Airport while sitting on a flight bound for Islamabad. The Pentagon, for its part, had a war to win and wanted Pakistan’s help to finish off the Taliban. On the other track, the State Department was slowly repairing America’s damaged relations with Pakistan.

But the two tracks were not complementary. The CIA and the Pentagon decided on America’s goals vis-à-vis Pakistan. These were predictably narrow in scope and all terrorism focused. The CIA and the Pentagon benefited from the positive climate that the State Department was fostering, but their constant pressure on Islamabad always threatened to break up the relationship. Whether meeting Pakistanis face-to-face or debating policy in Washington, they set a pugilistic tone for America’s talks with Pakistan, but then bore no responsibility for the outcome. I remember Holbrooke shaking his head and saying, “Watch them [the CIA] ruin this relationship. And when it is ruined, they are going to say ‘We told you, you can’t work with Pakistan!’ We never learn.”

Holbrooke knew that in these circumstances, anyone advocating diplomacy would have to fight to be heard inside the White House. He tried to reach out to Obama, but his efforts were to no avail. Obama remained above the fray. The president seemed to sense that no one would fault him for taking a “tough guy” approach to Pakistan. If the approach failed (as indeed it did), the nefarious, double-dealing Pakistanis would get the blame (as indeed they did).

After Abbottabad, Washington was in no mood to soft-pedal what it saw as Pakistani duplicity. Pressure started to build on Pakistan. Gone were promises of aid and assistance, strategic partnership, and deep and long-lasting ties. The Pentagon and the CIA now came clean to say they did not want relations with Pakistan, just Pakistan’s cooperation. The administration threatened to cut aid and shamed and embarrassed Pakistan through public criticisms and media leaks. Some of the leaks retold familiar tales of Pakistan being reluctant to cooperate in fighting terrorism or undermining the American pursuit of al-Qaeda outright; others revealed dark truths about how Pakistani intelligence had manipulated public opinion and even gone so far as to silence journalists permanently.

Pakistan’s top brass understood this line of attack to be directed at weakening them and driving a wedge between the military and the Pakistani public. Perhaps, the generals thought, it was even meant to rally the media and pro-democracy forces that had brought down Musharraf to the idea of challenging the military’s grip on power once again—essentially promoting regime change. Kayani and his fellow corps commanders thought that, having sensed weakness in the wake of the humiliating bin Laden raid, America was going for the military’s jugular. Once close, the Pakistani and U.S. militaries were now in a clearly adversarial relationship.

The charges that Admiral Mullen made in his September 2011 Senate testimony sent a clear message: We’re taking off the kid gloves when dealing with Pakistan.²⁴ It is time to treat it like any enemy and find ways to contain its most dangerous forms of waywardness.²⁵ It was common for White House meetings on Pakistan to turn into litanies of complaints as senior officials competed for colorful adjectives to capture how back-stabbing and distrustful they thought Pakistani leaders to be. The most frequently stated sentiment was “We have had it with these guys.”

But a policy of containment has a high price. It means that U.S. troops will have to stay in Afghanistan less to fight the Taliban than to keep an eye on Pakistan. That would be nothing short of failure in our regional strategy. In the end, all we will have achieved is to entrench American military presence in the region.

After Holbrooke died, the White House kept Clinton and the State Department at bay over AfPak policy. But their attention to Pakistan was intermittent; the country bobbed onto the White House radar screen every time there was a crisis, but otherwise the relationship was left to founder.

The public campaign against Pakistan proved self-defeating. Openly shamed, the generals turned defensive. Accustomed to thinking of themselves as both the shield and cement of the nation, they feared that America had made it a matter of settled purpose to undo them, so they banished any thought of cooperation and curled up like khaki-clad hedgehogs.

As I have noted, Osama bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad in circumstances that make it difficult not to accuse Pakistan’s military of sheltering him;²⁶ but we would not have found him and many other militants who were targets of drone attacks in Pakistan were it not for stepped-up Pakistani cooperation on intelligence collection and for their letting CIA operatives into Pakistan.²⁷ Pakistanis did not want to issue as many visas to potential CIA operatives as they did, but given the upward trajectory of U.S.-Pakistan relations in 2009 and 2010, they felt compelled to do it.

I lost count of how many times Holbrooke told Pakistani officials, “How could you deny our people visas when we are doing so well in our Strategic Dialogue?” It worked every time. I am sure the Pakistani military later rued the degree of cooperation it extended, but Holbrooke was right: You get more out of Pakistan if there is a positive trajectory to the relationship. Pakistan wasn’t giving us all we wanted, but we were getting something, and even if it was not optimal, it was not trivial either. When we replaced promises of partnership and assistance with raw pressure, we found that the little bit of cooperation we were taking for granted soon went away.

After the relationship fell apart in 2011, many in the administration and the media put the blame on Pakistan. They said it was Pakistan that decided to blow up the relationship, beginning with the way it reacted to the Raymond Davis affair. But the reason Pakistan acted as it did was because our policy of complementing pressure with engagement and aid had been successful in getting out of them more than they had been willing to give. It was a mistake on the part of the administration to respond to Pakistan’s reaction by abandoning a policy that was working. We should have doubled down on what had worked.

In July 2011, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon asked Senator Kerry to talk to General Kayani and see if he would put U.S.-Pakistan relations back on track. The senator and the army chief agreed to a secret meeting in Abu Dhabi, and the two men met for nineteen hours over two days. It was the most substantive and thoroughgoing conversation America had had with Pakistan in some time. Kayani and Kerry worked together to put Kayani’s thoughts into a white paper for Obama, which Kerry brought back with him to Washington.

Kayani thought the two-day exercise would get the White House engaged in a meaningful strategic discussion that could clear the air, repair the relationship, and chart a course forward. It was an effort on both sides to dial back the relationship to its more productive phase in 2009–2011. Kerry was carrying on where Holbrooke had left off.

The nineteen-hour meeting and the white paper did not elicit an immediate response from Washington. But three months later, in October, Tom Donilon, Marc Grossman, and the White House’s AfPak point man, General Lute, went back to Abu Dhabi to meet Kayani. Relations had not improved, and Donilon wanted to smooth things over with Pakistan. Kayani in turn was hoping to hear a response to his paper and more on America’s vision for the region—what was the strategy?

The follow-up meeting was much shorter, and soon it became clear Donilon had one agenda: reading Pakistan the riot act for its support of the Haqqani network. Donilon made no reference to Kayani’s paper or the road map he and Kerry had explored. Instead he presented Kayani with a laundry list of Pakistani misdeeds, backed with intelligence evidence. Pakistan was advised to close up shop in Afghanistan, abandon its strategic goals, and liquidate the Taliban or else. All we cared about was mop-up operations in Afghanistan, and we expected Pakistan to cooperate.