in Africa, and the revelation that their orchestrator, Osama bin Laden, had close ties to the Taliban, sealed the regime’s status as an international pariah. Pakistan, as the Taliban’s benefactor, shared in that reputation.
ROBIN RAPHEL WAS a lone voice of dissent. When Bill Clinton took office as president in 1993, he had tapped Raphel, his old friend from England, to become assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs. As relations between Washington and Islamabad chilled over the course of the 1990s, Raphel was a stalwart advocate for the country where she had formed so many relationships earlier in her career. When a senator named Hank Brown introduced legislation to ease restrictions on assistance to Pakistan, she worked with Pakistani diplomats for months lobbying for the bill. Its passage, in 1995, cleared the way for arms exports to Pakistan, despite the country’s growing nuclear arsenal. Raphel was also an ardent defender of Benazir Bhutto, who returned to power during Raphel’s first year as assistant secretary, and who was covertly authorizing assistance to the Taliban—while lying about it to the Americans. Raphel told me she went into the relationship with eyes open. “I didn’t believe Bhutto. I felt we needed to be talking to everyone.” Nevertheless, she argued against sanctions and helped secure assistance for Pakistan.
Raphel also campaigned for talks with Taliban leaders. A cable summarizing one of her visits to Kabul in 1996 conveyed a rosy view of the regime, quoting one leader who told Raphel, “We are not bad people,” and optimistically describing the Taliban’s “growing awareness, previously absent, of their own limitations.” Shortly after the Taliban took control of Kabul that year, Raphel called on other countries to embrace the regime at a closed-door session at the United Nations. “They are Afghan, they are indigenous, they have demonstrated staying power,” she said. “It is not in the interests of Afghanistan or any of us here that the Taliban be isolated.” As one veteran Pakistani diplomat who worked with Raphel for many years put it: “If Robin had lasted another year as assistant secretary, there would be a Taliban embassy in Washington, DC.”
Raphel, with her fringe embrace of the Pakistanis and the Taliban, aroused suspicion, both in Washington and in the region. This was the point at which the Indian press began tarring her as “Lady Taliban,” a moniker that would stick for decades. “It was silly,” she said. “Because I did go and talk to these people. That was my job. But, because I wasn’t horrified and didn’t want to treat them like pariahs … people found it absolutely shocking that I thought it was perfectly normal to talk to them.” She sighed. “It was a mistake to demonize the Taliban. That might well have contributed to how they got totally out of hand. Nobody would listen to them … we blew them off and thought they were complete Neanderthal ragheads.” It was, in her view, the worst kind of mistake: “emotionally driven.”
Many in the foreign policy establishment later embraced those same arguments for talking to the Taliban, including Richard Holbrooke. Did Raphel have any regrets about her more isolating and controversial positions, I asked? “No,” she told me, with a laugh. “I was ahead of my time!”
At the height of Raphel’s efforts to warm relations with Pakistan in 1995, an aide from then–Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott’s team knocked on her office door and told her about a troubling development. While surveilling Pakistani officials, intelligence agents had picked up what they took to be an illicit exchange. Raphel, they claimed, was leaking classified information to the Pakistanis, revealing the sensitive details of American intelligence on their nuclear program. Raphel was shaken. She met with the State Department’s internal police, the Diplomatic Security Service, whose agents grilled her. Their investigation came up empty. Raphel wasn’t cited for any infraction, and the matter was quickly forgotten—though, it would later come to pass, not for good.
RAPHEL ROTATED THROUGH several other roles, serving as ambassador in Tunisia, and vice president of the National Defense University, and coordinating assistance in the early days of the Iraq War. But her story always arced back to Pakistan. When she left Iraq, tired, in 2005, she joined Cassidy & Associates, the glossy K-Street lobbying firm whose client list included the Egyptian intelligence services, and, on occasion, Pakistan. During Raphel’s time there, the firm had two Pakistani contracts, prompting the press—especially the Indian press—to call her a “Pakistan lobbyist.” (“Lobbyist who tormented New Delhi in the 1990s,” screamed the Times of India. “Brazenly pro-Pakistan partisan in Washington.”) Raphel laughed at this, saying she only worked on one contract “for three weeks” before the deal was canceled when Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf suspended the country’s constitution in November 2007.
At a cocktail party in 2009, Raphel ran into fellow career Foreign Service officer and then-sitting US ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson. Patterson was a small, steely woman from Fort Smith, Arkansas, who spoke in a quiet Southern drawl and didn’t mince words. She was a diplomat in the classic tradition, with decades of service from Latin America to the Middle East. In Pakistan, she was confronting a new era in one of the world’s most difficult relationships—an era in which Pakistan had once again become essential to the United States. But Americans with deep contacts within Pakistani society were hard to come by. In the modern era, tough posts like Pakistan had become in-and-out assignments for junior officers looking to check a box and get a year or two of hazard pay (a 30 percent premium in Islamabad at the time). Someone with Raphel’s grasp of the Gordian knot of Pakistani politics could be indispensable. Patterson asked Raphel if she’d come back for one more assignment, helping to manage assistance in Islamabad.
Raphel had turned sixty-one by then. She’d been married three times—most recently to a British diplomat, a union that lasted just a few years and ended in 2004. She’d raised her two college-age daughters, Anna and Alexandra, mostly by herself. Lobbying had given her a chance to spend more time with them, and with her friends. But her mind, one sensed, was quick to turn back to public service.
She told Anne Patterson that she’d think about it.
THE DAY AFTER PRESIDENT CLINTON announced Robin Raphel’s nomination as assistant secretary of state in 1993, she’d boarded a flight to Sri Lanka, en route to the funeral of the country’s recently assassinated president. Seated near her were Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif and a thirty-six-year-old Pakistani diplomat named Husain Haqqani. In the years that followed, Haqqani would become a fixture of US-Pakistani relations. His critics would come to know him by some of the same labels ascribed later to Robin Raphel: turncoat, traitor, spy.
Haqqani was urbane and charming and a flatterer. “As you know well,” he often said with a feline smile. “As a man of your experience of course understands.” He grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Pakistan’s commercial
