No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

23 HIGH MOUNTAINS AND DIRT

I RETURNED TO WASHINGTON from London for only ten days before setting out for South and East Asia. Since becoming secretary I had been in Washington a total of seventeen days, long enough to testify on behalf of the State Department budget before Congress but with time to do little else. The proposed budget requested a 13 percent increase in funding for diplomatic activities. But my preparations to defend it convinced me that the department’s budget process was deeply flawed. “How much do we spend on democracy promotion?” I asked. No one could answer since the line items were arrayed by accounts that related to the offices they supported, not to policy priorities. “How much do we spend on foreign assistance for Nigeria?” Well, they would have to get back to me, because the budgets of USAID and the State Department for foreign assistance were not unified. When one of the very able briefers answered one of my questions about a $1 million item by saying (gently) that I didn’t need to know the details, I resolved to institute budget reform within the department. “I’m not satisfied turning to the staff for an answer if a member of Congress asks about this,” I replied. “One million dollars here, one million dollars there, pretty soon it’s serious money.” I had been a budget officer as provost of Stanford. The budget is the statement of priorities, not just a collection of numbers. Steve Krasner, the director of policy planning, led an effort to reform the process for allocating foreign assistance, and the staff prepared for far more detailed briefings the next time around.

Then, boarding my plane for the fifth time in two months, I had to remind myself that I’d signed up for “personal diplomacy” and couldn’t complain. Jim Wilkinson, my senior advisor, started tracking my miles, hoping that I’d become the most traveled secretary of state in U.S. history. It was a fun parlor game but a title I wasn’t sure I wanted to have.

My visit to India and Pakistan was principally to establish personal contact with the key players there: Pervez Musharraf and his generals, the Indian leadership and its opposition. But I also met Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Indian National Congress Party, for the second time. The Italian-born widow of the slain son of Indira Gandhi had come to the White House when I was national security advisor. At the time, the Indian National Congress Party was not in office and there was some question from regional experts about the appropriateness of meeting with her. We did meet, and she returned the favor on this trip. People remember whether you’re willing to see them when they’re out of power.

Now the challenge would be to push forward on the agenda for expanded U.S.-Indian relations that President Bush had begun despite the ascendance of the left-leaning coalition in New Delhi. Sonia Gandhi was a real political power in the country as the leader of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s party. Her opinion mattered, and it was unlikely that the prime minister would take controversial steps without her approval. Our cordial conversation in the sunlit living room of her modest home convinced me that she would be willing to provide the space that Prime Minister Singh and his government needed to stay the course with us.

After an abbreviated tour of Mughal emperor Humayun’s tomb outside New Delhi, I met with Singh and the opposition leader, L. K. Advani, then held a brief press conference with my counterpart and headed to Islamabad. That was the nature of those whirlwind trips. I wanted to pay appropriate respect to the culture of the countries I visited, maybe even take in historical sites that I’d always wanted to see, but there was so much to do that any attempt to enjoy the flavor of a place felt very rushed. Over my years as secretary the cultural events got shorter and shorter, until we eventually abandoned them altogether. I’ve seen a lot of the world from the vantage point of government buildings and meeting rooms, yet missed much of the color and wonder of the ancient lands I’ve visited. That was my loss, but there was little that I could do about it.

The whole picture of the post-9/11 world came into sharp relief as I looked out of the window of the C-17 military transport descending into Kabul. Flying over the Hindu Kush and then the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, it was easy to see why the territory had become the epicenter of Islamic terrorism and extremism: tall mountains with narrow passages and caves were everywhere. No wonder terrorists chose to hide there.

I landed in Kabul and met with our troops and diplomats, something I always loved to do. The secretary of state always addresses the embassy personnel in what is called a “meet and greet.” It’s a chance to thank the men and women of the Foreign Service for the hard work that they do abroad. The practice of expressing appreciation is particularly important with respect to the locally engaged staff, the citizens of countries around the world who do the bulk of the work in the embassies. In fact, of the 57,000 embassy personnel worldwide, more than 35,000 are foreigners, many of whom have worked a lifetime for the State Department. Kabul had one particularly extraordinary employee, a man who’d personally kept the key to the U.S. Embassy during the long civil war and reign of the Taliban. When Kabul was liberated, he proudly handed it to U.S. forces so that they could reopen the dilapidated building. I was delighted to thank him personally for his service.

In war zones such as Kabul and Baghdad, I started the practice of greeting both the civilians and our military personnel. Places such as Afghanistan and Iraq were truly a combined effort; there was no tidy division between the tasks of the warriors and those of the diplomats.

After the meet and greet we drove into downtown Kabul. I don’t know what I expected. I did know that Afghanistan was the fifth poorest country in the world and that it had been wracked by decades of civil war. As we drove along the one existing main street, I could see Afghan merchants sitting in the mud behind little stands selling food or clothes or occasionally homemade tchotchkes. They were clearly industrious and determined but desperately poor. I turned to Phil Zelikow. “The Afghan people have been given nothing but high mountains and dirt,” I said. That map on the table at Camp David after September 11 hadn’t done justice to the difficulty of our task.

And if our job was hard, Hamid Karzai’s was herculean. I’d met the Afghan leader several times in Washington, but seeing him in his own environment was instructive. This man, who’d put his life on the line at the time of Operation Enduring Freedom, was struggling to govern a country that had throughout its history largely lacked central authority. Karzai appeared genuinely proud of his achievements to that point. The first freely elected president in Afghanistan’s history, he talked of his people’s bravery and determination as we walked through the recently restored gardens of the Presidential Palace. “You should see them building little mud houses out of bricks that they find along the road,” he said. Yet the whole scene had an air of unreality about it. Karzai couldn’t go far from Kabul because so much of the country was still controlled by warlords, who’d been in loose alliance with him during the war but were now reasserting their authority. The Afghan national army barely existed, and the police were even more a force in name only. Prolific poppy production significantly hurt the Afghan economy by fostering corruption. I was incredulous as Karzai talked glowingly about Afghanistan’s excellent dates and pomegranates, as if a limited agricultural sector might form the basis of growth going forward. He noted too that his experts had found old maps that showed oil and gas deposits in the north. Now, with the liberation from the Taliban, they were free to explore them. I’d never been to a place where there was a greater distance between the aspirations of a leader and his people and the reality of their circumstances.

Yet the Afghans had made progress. I visited a women’s democracy center and thought how impossible that would have seemed a few short years before. There I met a woman police recruit, dressed proudly in a new uniform and wearing no head cover at all—this in a country that under the Taliban had punished women for showing even a little bit of ankle. I left Kabul feeling that the Afghans could succeed, but it was going to be a long struggle.

Landing in Islamabad again, I was reminded that Afghanistan’s fate was not its own to determine. Pakistan held more than a few keys to its neighbor’s stability. That was not a good thing.

My stop in Islamabad lasted about twenty-four hours. My security detail was always concerned about Pakistan and never wanted to chance more than one night there. The agenda with the Pakistanis was familiar to me from my time at the White House: fight terrorism and extremism; reform the army and the security services; turn your attention from India to al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Afghanistan. The interaction was familiar, too, with Musharraf, sitting in his living room at Army House in Rawalpindi, emphasizing all that he was doing to modernize his country and fight extremism. I found myself sympathetic to him, although I didn’t care much for people who lead military coups. But Pakistan was such a mess, and I couldn’t escape the fact that the United States was partially responsible for its radicalization. The point was underscored at the dinner given that night by my counterpart, Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri, who could appear somewhat puffed up. But as the evening went on, a different side of him started to emerge. The “off-script” conversation that night was among the Pakistanis, who talked about what their country had been like in the decades before the war in Afghanistan. They admitted that General Zia ul-Haq had sought legitimacy by supporting Muslim extremists in the early 1980s. That had been a consequential policy choice.

Nonetheless, they rightly pointed to the United States’ support for the mujahideen’s struggle against the Soviet Union as playing a large role in Pakistan becoming a transit point for jihadists. After the war, some had stayed in Afghanistan, forming the core of the ethnically Pashtun Taliban. Others, including a fair number of Saudis and Egyptians, had returned to Pakistan and now gathered in urban mosques and madrassas and in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, recruiting and training a new generation of radicals. Pakistanis knew that they were responsible for the deeply rooted extremism in their country, but the United States had contributed to it. And then, with the defeat of the Soviet Union, we’d lost interest in—and ultimately contact with—Islamabad, until al Qaeda’s rise had shoved us back together.

With all that would occur later, it’s hard to remember that in 2005 we thought that the Afghan project was in relatively good shape. We did not yet know that Musharraf was contemplating a new peace accord with tribal leaders in North Waziristan, cutting a deal to live and let live in exchange for stopping the passage of militants across the Afghan border. That policy would ultimately lead to a new safe haven for the Taliban and a downward spiral in Afghanistan, one that we were unable to halt before the end of our term.

Indeed, the news of the trip related instead to an easing of the tensions that had plagued South Asia. Pakistan and India informed us that they’d begun a quiet back-channel dialogue on the most vexing issue: Kashmir. My long conversation with both leaders convinced me that they were serious and that they might succeed. But the next day, as I began my visit to East Asia with a stop in Tokyo, we got a reminder of Pakistan’s troubles. Twenty-five people were killed when a bomb ripped through a crowd gathered at a shrine in Baluchistan. The glow from positive developments in Pakistan was always short-lived.

IN THE SAME WAY that I’d begun my trip to Europe with a visit to “one of our closest friends,” I landed first in Japan to underscore the centrality of our longest-standing alliance in Northeast Asia. Usually, the arrival ceremony for the secretary of state was a boring affair. The secretary descended the stairs to the waiting handshake of the chief of protocol, who looked the same in every country, no matter how exotic. Then there were a few photographs with the assembled government officials before boarding the motorcade.

My senior staff suggested that we make my arrivals different by establishing the practice of “greeters,” who would represent the culture of the country. Sometimes the participants were predictable, such as the little girls with bread and salt in Ukraine or the local pop stars who showed up from time to time.

But once in a while they were unique. That was certainly the case in Japan. I once mentioned that I liked sumo wrestling, an interest I’d developed while teaching at the National Defense Academy of Japan when I was a professor at Stanford. So, Jim reasoned, it made sense for me to be greeted by one of these revered athletes. At the bottom of the stairs of the plane, I found myself suddenly swept up in the embrace of Konishiki Yasokichi—professionally known as “the Dump Truck”—who lifted me off my feet and into his gigantic arms. I was startled but managed to keep my composure and laughed at the front-page newspaper coverage the next day. In any case, it was a far better greeting than one a few months later in Kyrgyzstan, where the local hero was a falconer. There I looked at the bird of prey, which was eyeing me suspiciously from his master’s shoulder, and decided that there would be no more greetings involving animals. I made quick work of the ceremony and fled into the safety of my car.

The goal of the trip to Japan was to affirm our relationship with Japan but also to put it in the context of a regional strategy for Asia. In my speech at Sophia University, I intended to make the case for a safer Asia built around the efforts of three great democracies: the United States, Japan, and South Korea. The difficulty of doing so had been underscored a week before, when South Korea had scrambled military jets in response to a Japanese plane that had flown over the disputed Liancourt Rocks (called Dokdo by the South Koreans and Takeshima by the Japanese). Yet over the years we’d make progress toward improved bilateral relations between our two allies—albeit in fits and starts.

Ironically, one source of conflict between them had the potential to induce cooperation—with China included in the equation. The North Korean nuclear program had engendered tension among the regional states, each of which, of course, was looking toward its own interests.

Japan was concerned principally about resolving the abduction cases from the 1970s and 1980s. For Tokyo, positive movement toward Pyongyang was sometimes seen as evidence of insufficient concern about that humanitarian tragedy. Seoul wanted North Korea’s nuclear program halted but feared that any confrontational step might worsen tensions on the peninsula. Beijing worried that a nuclear North Korea would encourage Japan—or possibly South Korea—to go nuclear but worried more about the stability of the North Korean regime, fearing a crack-up that could produce floods of refugees into China. In other words, everyone wanted a denuclearized North Korea, but other priorities prevented concerted action to attain the goal.

The Six-Party Talks, which also included Russia, had thus made almost no progress since their establishment in 2003. I believed that there was promise in them, particularly if we could develop a longer-term framework that pointed the way toward denuclearization and a resolution of the underlying tensions in the region. We started at State to develop an approach that would do precisely that. It would be hard to get agreement among the six parties. But the first task was to get agreement in Washington, where the divided opinion on North Korea had been pronounced from the very beginning of the administration.

Before departing for Asia, I’d engaged the President and Steve Hadley in a “heart-to-heart” about the North Korean problem. The President needed to be comfortable with the idea that we might have to talk to the North Koreans to achieve what we wanted. It was surely a long shot, but maybe Kim Jong-il could be induced, step by step, to give up his nuclear ambitions in exchange for benefits, which would also be doled out step by step. For instance, Kim’s agreeing to let inspectors return might bring renewed fuel deliveries. If that succeeded, we might start down a political track: action for action. We wouldn’t give up very much until the North Koreans acted. My diplomats would need room to maneuver in negotiations, and Washington’s micromanagement, so evident in the first term, needed to end. The President could trust me to keep my own negotiators in line.

To make the strategy work, we’d have to do three things. First, we’d have to unite the other five powers so that the North couldn’t get benefits from any if it didn’t live up to its obligations. North Korea was one of the most sanctioned countries in the world, but we needed help enforcing the constraints. We couldn’t have China, South Korea, Japan, and Russia each going its own way. That was an easy sell with the President.

The second precondition for a workable strategy, it seemed to me, was making it clear to all the players that a change in regime policy, rather than the regime itself, would be sufficient to begin negotiations—for the time being. The North Korean leader was loathsome; could the President stomach an approach that might leave Kim in power if only the dictator changed direction?

And third, we needed to pursue the development of defensive measures, specifically: blocking the sale of North Korean nuclear material, denying overflight rights for suspicious cargo, and bolstering the missile defense systems of our allies in East Asia. The diplomatic and defensive tracks worked together, as we reinvigorated the Six-Party Talks.

The President thought long and hard about it, and then he delivered one of his strategic insights that always surprised me—even after years of experiencing it. “Well, maybe we’d have to put up with him for a while,” he said. “But that place can’t stand true sunshine.” He was referencing the discredited policy of cordial relations that South Korean President Kim Dae-jung had adopted toward the North. The President suggested that Kim Jong-il might try to reform, but he would do the same thing that most dictators do in such circumstances—bring about his own demise. Then he said something quite startling: “Maybe we could call his bluff and offer him a peace treaty if he gives up his weapons and opens up to the world.”

That was a little further than I was willing to go, but I asked my counselor, Philip Zelikow, and Bob Zoellick to start thinking about the idea. Was the answer to the North Korean nuclear program a diplomatic big bang to end the conflict? It was a question worth asking. We saw too that if progress were to occur, the Six-Party Talks might evolve into something even more significant: the basis of a security mechanism for Northeast Asia.

I called Henry Kissinger and asked to have dinner with him. We shared a background as academics, and he’d also been national security advisor and secretary of state. He’d opened China and was one of the greatest strategic thinkers ever to occupy the office. Like my friend George Shultz, Henry was always there to help me rise above the day’s preoccupations and explore the strategic changes that were unfolding. He immediately saw the big picture and the possibility for a grand design in Northeast Asia that might ultimately end the conflict and lead to the unification of the Koreas. All that, of course, was far into the future.

In the meantime, I’d go to Seoul and Beijing armed with the knowledge that the President was willing to think big. That allowed me room to suggest a restart to the Six-Party Talks in which the United States would be prepared to be flexible.

The South Koreans were, of course, thrilled to hear that we wanted to restart the talks. But our condition was absolute unity in our approach to Pyongyang. When the North got nasty (which it would undoubtedly do), or if it failed to live up to its obligations, Seoul would have to take a tough line. My interlocutors nodded agreement, but it wouldn’t be that easy.

My meetings in Beijing were more difficult. Earlier in March, the Chinese had publicly questioned the reliability of our intelligence on the North Korean program and suggested that the United States take up the problem bilaterally with Pyongyang. My goal was to let the Chinese know that such an approach was a nonstarter; our participation in solving the problem required theirs too.

As my motorcade sped down the wide boulevard toward the Great Hall of the People, I thought about how much the country had changed since my first visit there in 1988. At that time, on any given day one might have seen on the streets of Beijing a few horse carts, a few cars, and a lot of bicycles. Now cars were everywhere, and my agenda with the Chinese leadership would focus as much on issues associated with Beijing’s economic rise as the security problems before us.

We arrived at the front door of the massive Stalinist structure. Ascending the steps, I was startled by the customary salute in which the Chinese guards yell and snap to attention. Even though I visited the Great Hall several times after that, I never quite got used to the guards’ bloodcurdling yell, which always made me jump involuntarily.

I was then ushered into an enormous room where at least twenty members of the Chinese delegation stood in front of their seats, awaiting Hu Jintao’s arrival. Finally the Chinese president appeared, and we posed for photographs. In China the press people didn’t yell out questions; they do that only in democracies. President Hu and I sat down and literally had to use microphones to carry on our stilted dialogue across the cavernous hall.

Hu delivered his welcoming remarks and then launched, as the Chinese always did, into a monologue about Taiwan. I’d already heard the script from the foreign minister, Premier Wen Jiabao, and State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan, who’d talked for forty-five minutes of our one-hour meeting.

More than twenty years after Mao Zedong’s Communist regime consolidated its power, Washington finally recognized the People’s Republic of China and established diplomatic relations with it. But the “one-China policy” carried a contradiction within it since the United States continued to arm and support Taiwan, which by 2005 was a vibrant democracy. That was a source of constant tension with Beijing, which saw the United States’ position as interference in China’s domestic affairs. Therefore every meeting with the Chinese started with a lecture about the “one-China policy”; the “three joint communiqués” (signed individually in the 1970s and 1980s); and the evils of arms sales to Taiwan. At that particular time, the harangue also included attacks on the hated president of Taiwan, Chen Shui-bian, who was seen as a particularly aggressive secessionist.

I listened patiently and then returned the favor with my own ritualistic statement of U.S. policy. Yes, we had a one-China policy based on the three communiqués. But we also had the Taiwan Relations Act, which required the United States to help Taiwan defend itself, and we would tolerate no unilateral changes to the status quo. The Chinese had just passed an “anti-secessionist” law, and we were worried that it would bait Chen into his own provocation. (The Taiwanese president didn’t act up immediately, but in time he would take dangerous steps that challenged Beijing, causing us to break with him—a step that greatly pleased China.)

After the “exchange of views” on Taiwan, I turned to the problem of intellectual property and China’s miserable record of protection. Hu answered woodenly, explaining all that Beijing was doing to stop piracy. We then turned to a cursory review of the situation in North Korea. I couldn’t say anything remotely consequential in that setting, and neither could he.

My mind wandered as Hu delivered his talking points. These set-piece “discussions” with the Chinese leadership in a space that felt the length of a football field wouldn’t work. I asked our ambassador, Sandy Randt, to see if he could condition the Chinese to smaller meetings with more give-and-take. On average, 70 percent of U.S. ambassadors are career diplomats, but the President reserves the right to appoint certain ambassadors from outside the ranks of the Foreign Service. Sandy, who’d been the President’s fraternity brother in college, was one of those noncareer political ambassadors who defied the stereotype: he spoke fluent Mandarin, having lived eighteen years in Hong Kong, and, according to none other than Hu Jintao, knew “more Chinese people than he did.” The estimable Ambassador Randt undertook to talk to the Chinese, and fortunately, on my next visit, Hu’s staff suggested a small meeting after the formal one. Well, small by Chinese standards: there were six on each side.

I finished my trip in Beijing thinking that I’d failed to deliver the message that I’d intended. But the Chinese, it turned out, had heard me loud and clear. They let Sandy know that they were anxious to resume the Six-Party Talks and would “explore” the North’s willingness to do so as well.

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS later, I headed for the President’s ranch and a meeting of the grandly titled but modestly ambitious Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. The Mexicans and Canadians dutifully showed up with huge delegations, including commerce and homeland security ministers. Don’t get me wrong: an effort to “implement improvements in aviation and maritime security” and “improve productivity through regulatory cooperation … while maintaining high standards for health and safety” was certainly worthwhile. It just seemed as if there wasn’t really an agenda for the secretary of state to pursue. It was another one of those “home owner’s meetings.”

Yet the trip to Crawford was an opportunity to spend time with the President in a relaxed setting and to catch my breath. I’d been on the road six of the eight weeks that I’d been secretary of state. When we returned to Washington, I intended to stay home for a while to complete congressional hearings on the budget; work on plans to coordinate the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza; and spend some time helping the Iraqis form a government. But then the news came that Pope John Paul II had died. I’d be back on a plane the next week, accompanying President and Mrs. Bush, President Clinton, and President George H. W. Bush to the Vatican for the funeral.

We arrived in Rome two nights before the funeral and were immediately escorted to St. Peter’s Basilica to view the late Holy Father in repose. The car ride was a bit uncomfortable because, for security reasons, all five of us had to ride in the presidential limousine, which comfortably seats four. On long rides I was wedged for the entire trip between President Clinton, who talks a lot, and President George H. W. Bush, who talks very little.

In the darkened space of the basilica, I tried to concentrate on my prayers rather than the eeriness of the scene as we knelt a few yards from where the Holy Father lay. Frankly, it was spooky, and I didn’t sleep very well that night with the images of the funeral bier fresh in my mind.

The events on the morning of the funeral were, however, glorious. I was seated five rows from the front with the former presidents and several foreign ministers. The President and First Lady were in the second row, the first having been reserved for royalty, including the king of Lesotho in a huge leopard hat.

As the three-hour High Mass drew to a close, I got up to move toward the front. The Vatican had told us to leave first, given the length of our motorcade. I was assigned the difficult task of getting the two ex-presidents out of the crowd and staged for departure. Just as I reached Laura and the President, the pallbearers came down to carry the pope’s coffin back into the basilica. The bells of St. Peter’s began to peal, the choir blending with them in an ethereal and mournful anthem, and in the square were hundreds of thousands of people, many of them waving the flags of Poland and Solidarity. It was quite a send-off for this man, who had symbolized the moral force that had brought communism to its knees.

Then the pallbearers lifted the coffin and turned it toward the crowd. The day had been cold and windy and gray. At that very moment, the sun burst through the clouds as if to acknowledge John Paul’s ascendance to his father’s throne. “Did you see that?” Laura Bush asked me. I nodded but I was struck dumb and couldn’t speak. As we reentered the basilica and passed the Pietà, I thanked God for the gift of eternal life.

Flying back on Air Force One, we talked about that moment and what it had meant. I asked people who’d watched on television if the press had mentioned it and learned that no one had. Months later in Argentina, the foreign minister would recall the same sequence of events. Perhaps only believers saw this powerful affirmation of the truth of the resurrection. I was grateful to have been there.

A week later the College of Cardinals would select Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. In 2004 I’d accompanied President Bush to the sixtieth-anniversary commemoration of the Normandy landing in France, and my luncheon partner had been none other than Cardinal Ratzinger. The conversation had been mostly about our shared love of Mozart. He, too, played the piano. We exchanged a few words about the future of religion but nothing profound enough to recall. Oh, how I wished I’d listened more closely.