The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (10 page)

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
un
stable 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.