his father, a lawyer, who arrived in Pakistan with few professional contacts and turned to representing the poor and needy. The Haqqanis lived in a barracks for families uprooted by Pakistan’s partition from India. Young Husain was fourteen before he lived in a real house. Like Holbrooke, he wasn’t born among elites—he clawed his way up.
He received both a traditional Islamic education and a secular modern one. A quintessentially Pakistani fault line ran through him: between church and state, old and new, East and West. When he enrolled at Karachi University, he became a student leader associated with the Jamaat-e-Islami party, joining a new generation of Muslims sparking change around the region. But he was torn. He spent hours at the American Center in Karachi’s US consulate, devouring the books in its library. He soaked in Western perspectives and grew disenchanted with his peers’ rising anti-Americanism. When an angry mob enflamed by anti-American sentiment burned down the US embassy in Islamabad in 1979, student leaders in nearby Karachi approached Haqqani and asked him to lead the charge. As he tells the story, he gave a dramatic speech, citing the Quran to dissuade them from further violence. One ulterior motive he didn’t tell the angry students about: he wanted to protect his beloved library inside the consulate, and the Western books on its shelves.
Like Holbrooke, Haqqani was drawn to journalism and diplomacy. He wrote for the Far Eastern Economic Review, and later worked with Pakistani state-run television, sometimes burnishing the legacy of Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime. By his early thirties, Haqqani had built a reputation as a silver-tongued communicator with a knack for moving between Western and Pakistani audiences.
AFTER BENAZIR BHUTTO became prime minister on a progressive, secular platform in 1988, the conservative opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, tapped Haqqani to develop his media strategy. By Haqqani’s own admission, Sharif was exploiting xenophobia and anti-Americanism, but Haqqani felt Sharif “might be able to bring some balance to the country, after almost a decade of military rule.”
It wasn’t long after Sharif took power (and after, in the conventional cycle of Pakistani politics, Bhutto was ousted on corruption charges) that Haqqani found himself at loggerheads with his boss. In 1992, as the Soviet war faded and the United States became more brazen in its misgivings about Pakistan, the State Department asked Haqqani to help deliver a message to Sharif: The United States knew that Pakistan was providing “material support to groups that have engaged in terrorism” and lying about it. It had to stop, or the US would add Pakistan to its official list of state sponsors of terrorism, triggering crushing sanctions. Sharif gathered his cabinet for a conversation that pitted Islamist generals against progressives like Haqqani. The ISI chief at the time, Lieutenant General Javed Nasir, reflected a traditional Pakistani outlook: the letter was the fault of an “Indo-Zionist” lobby and a Jewish ambassador (that the ambassador, Nicholas Platt, was, in fact, a Protestant was the least of Haqqani’s concerns).
As Haqqani told the story, he made the case that Pakistan should reconsider its use of proxy relationships in favor of a greater emphasis on diplomacy. When Sharif sided with the intelligence and military voices, Haqqani threatened to quit. Sharif made him take the ambassadorship to Sri Lanka instead—a way of neutralizing him without negative press. It was the Pakistani equivalent of exile to Siberia. A year later, he resigned.
BUT HAQQANI WAS NOTHING if not resilient. After new elections brought Bhutto back into power, he became her spokesperson. He stood by her after she was, like clockwork, ousted again on corruption charges, and grew more public in his criticism of Pakistan’s military and its vice grip on power as civilian leaders came and went.
It won him few fans. In 1999, Pakistani intelligence agents pulled him off a crowded street, threw a blanket over his head, and pushed him into a waiting car. On a cell phone secreted in his pocket, he dialed a friend, who alerted the media. He credits the call with saving his life, though he remained jailed for two and a half months on trumped-up corruption charges. When General Pervez Musharraf seized power, Haqqani realized he couldn’t live safely in his homeland during its frequent bouts of military rule. “He didn’t look very kindly on my writings at the time,” he said of Musharraf. “I felt very pressured, because it was military rule again. So I left. I came to the US.” Husain Haqqani Americanized. He took an associate professorship at Boston University, decrying Pakistan’s military leadership from a safe distance.
Haqqani and Benazir Bhutto, in the midst of her own exile in Dubai, often talked about the future of Pakistan. She had him draft a paper outlining a new vision for Pakistani foreign policy, should she return to power. He argued that the military-to-military relationship had reinforced Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism. Pakistan had become a “rentier state: it lived off payments from a superpower for its strategic location and intelligence cooperation” rather than its aligned interests. The flow of easy cash from the United States fueled the disproportionate power of Pakistan’s army and intelligence services and blunted the potential for reform. Bhutto liked the paper, and “the idea of a new relationship with the United States that would be strategic rather than tactical.”
FOR ONE MOMENT, it looked like she might get a chance to make that vision a reality. After years of diplomatic pressure from the Americans and the British, Musharraf allowed Bhutto to return to seek election. There were plenty of people who wanted her dead, and she asked for more security after narrowly escaping one bombing. Musharraf granted only some of the requested reinforcements. If anything were to happen, she emailed her lobbyist, Mark Siegel, “I wld hold Musharaf responsible.”
On December 27, 2007, as shadows lengthened in the late afternoon, Bhutto left Liaqat National Park in Rawalpindi, less than two miles from the headquarters of the Pakistan Army, after a stump speech calling for democracy. Supporters swarmed her white Toyota Land Cruiser. Bhutto, wearing her trademark white headscarf and a purple kameez over simple white cotton pants and black flats, climbed onto the backseat, poked her head out of the sunroof, and waved, like Eva Peron on the balcony. Gunfire cracked through the air, accompanied by the deafening explosion of a suicide bomber detonating his payload. A Getty photographer, John Moore, activated his camera’s high-speed motor drive, capturing the out-of-focus chaos: an orange fireball; frightened faces, surging through sparks and smoke; survivors staggering among bodies.
Bhutto was dead. Her will passed leadership of her political party to her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, known by critics as “Mr. Ten Percent” as a result of long-standing corruption allegations. Her grieving supporters swept him into the presidency.
During Bhutto’s exile, Haqqani had grown almost as close to Zardari as to her. When Zardari and his prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, were looking for a new ambassador to the United States after the election, they asked their old party spokesperson, Husain Haqqani.
He accepted. In June 2008, he headed to Washington and presented his credentials to George W. Bush.
Haqqani was back in power, but many Pakistanis regarded him with suspicion. His switching sides to work for Bhutto—a woman he once campaigned against—was a mark against his loyalty. And some viewed his flight to America as a Rubicon. Days
